Free Trade: The Trojan Horse

"There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore. We have to compete for jobs." Carly Fiorina

The trigger for the Gold Fever of Enron and the Reagan-Bush criminal network was the Reagan Revolution.  Little did we know that it truly was a revolution that would fundamentally change the nature of government and it would set us on a path of national suicide.  In hindsight, Reagan’s vision was for corporate freedom - unleashing the giants to wreck havoc on the Lilliputans - the regular people of the world. 

From the History of Money,

Author Gary Allen gives his explanation:

"If one understands that socialism is not a share-the-wealth programme, but is in reality a method to consolidate and control the wealth, then the seeming paradox of super-rich men promoting socialism becomes no paradox at all. Instead, it becomes logical, even the perfect tool of power-seeking megalomaniacs.

Communism or more accurately, socialism, is not a movement of the downtrodden masses, but of the economic elite."

 

Tax reform reduced corporate taxes - leaving regular people with the burden to make up the difference.  Deregulation of corporations, supply-side economics and public/private partnerships are Reagan’s Legacy - a legacy of socialism.   Government Of, By and For The People cannot co-exist with socialism.  It is the antithesis of socialism.  

Reagan’s partner in crime for the ‘creative destruction’ of the free world was Margaret Thatcher.  She did the same for Great Britain that Reagan did for us.  In fact, British ports are on the market and it’s looking like an investment banking consortium led by Goldman Sachs is trying to buy the rights to operate them.

'Free Trade' is the Trojan horse that was used to gut our economy.  It was a weapon of war that was far more effective than a military operation - because we didn't expect to be sold out by our own leaders. 

The trade agreements were written to put domestic businesses out of business by giving advantage to foreign 'competitors'.  The advantages for foreign businesses were great enough to cause U.S. business to leave our country to become the advantaged foreign 'competitors.'   That allowed them to produce at third world prices - reimporting their goods to sell at first world prices still under totally domestic businesses. 

They worked it just like a con game.  They selected a few winners in the deal that were used to show how 'free trade' was benefiting the U.S.   The selected 'losers' were scorned as whiners even and their protests of unfair trade falls on deaf ears.  It is in that way that industry after industry has fallen in the U.S. 

"We can hardly expect the nation-state to make itself superfluous, at least not overnight. Rather what we must aim for is really nothing more than caretakers of a bankrupt international machine which will have to be transformed slowly into a new one. The transition will not be dramatic, but a gradual one. People will still cling to national symbols."

-- Henry Morgenthau, CFR, Secretary of the Treasury under FDR, 1945

1974

(TPA has been evolutionary. 1974 seems to be the date of the ‘modern’ variation

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Fast Track Trade Promotion Authority

Succinctly, fast track TPA gives the president the virtually unlimited power of attorney to negotiate trade agreements.  In simple terms, this is like giving your neighbor the power of attorney over all of your assets without a clause saying who gets the proceeds from the sale of your assets. DOH! Theoretically, after the president negotiates the agreements, the Congress reads them and then votes - but we know they don’t read anything - they just vote.  After all, it’s not their businesses and property that’s being sold.

“Background: Fast track is the traditional trade negotiating authority granted by Congress that allows the President to negotiate international trade agreements. Under fast track procedures, the President submits the legislation to Congress for approval or rejection. No amendments are allowed. Congress has ninety legislative days to approve or reject. While congressional and private sector leaders are consulted throughout the negotiations, the final agreement presented as a package assures our trading partners that any solutions they strike with U.S. trade negotiators will not be renegotiated by Congress.”

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“OWEN ULLMANN: Not quite with a Fed Chairman, but if you go back to 1987, the stock market crash then, it was triggered by comments that then Treasury Secretary James Baker made about the value of the dollar versus the mark. And a lot of people thought that that statement--“

“In the stock market, the top fifteen sellers on October 19 accounted for 20 percent of the total sales, or $25 billion. Index arbitrage involved about $1.7 billion worth of stock. In the futures market, the concentration of trading among big players was even more significant. Portfolio insurers sold $4 billion worth of stock index futures contracts, which was about 40 percent of the public volume. The top ten sellers accounted for 50 percent of the volume.

“Following the 1987 stock market crash, President Reagan called on Mr. [Nicholas] Brady to serve as chairman of the Presidential Task Force on Market Mechanisms. The Brady Commission recommended reforms that were subsequently adopted.

The commission recommended the Federal Reserve Board become a ''supercop" overseeing financial market regulation and coordinating ''circuit breakers" such as trading halts on stock and price limits on futures.

This set us up for the dot.con tech boom

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Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) was authorized to review sales of U.S. assets to foreign entities

HISTORY
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an interagency committee chaired by the Department of Treasury, was authorized through the Exon-Florio Amendment to the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act (1988) to review and potentially block foreign acquisitions of U.S. companies that threaten to impair U.S. national security. Exon-Florio was not adopted to halt or slow foreign investment; rather, the Amendment solely focused on those transactions that implicate U.S. national security interests. "National security" was deliberately left undefined as to allow for the greatest presidential control and discretion when determining whether to block a transaction.

CFIUS includes the following 12 members: the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, the Assistant to the President for Economic Policy, Secretaries of Treasury (Chair), State, Defense, Homeland Security and Commerce, the Attorney General, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Trade Representative, and the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

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The Brady Plan

“The Brady Plan, the principles of which were first articulated by U.S. Treasury Secretary Nicholas F. Brady in March 1989, was designed to address the so-called LDC debt crisis of the 1980's. The debt crisis began in 1982, when a number of countries, primarily in Latin America, confronted by high interest rates and low commodities prices, admitted their inability to service hundreds of billions of dollars of their commercial bank loans. Because many of these countries' economies were then dependent on commercial bank financing, continued debt reschedulings and the resulting perception of uncreditworthiness led to a "lost decade" of economic stagnation, during which voluntary international credit and capital flows to these nations and their private sectors all but halted.

The Brady Plan was very successful in several important respects. First, it allowed the participating countries to negotiate substantial reductions in their overall levels of debt and debt service. Second, it succeeded in diversifying sovereign risk away from commercial bank portfolios more widely throughout the financial and investment communities. Third, it encouraged many Emerging Markets countries to adopt and pursue ambitious economic reform programs. Finally, the Brady Plan has enabled many Emerging Market countries to regain access to the international capital markets for their financing needs.”

“Structural adjustment was the centerpiece of the Baker Plan, which the Reagan administration proclaimed during the IMF-World Bank meeting in Seoul in 1985. World Bank and IMF funds to assist the indebted countries make their interest payments were promised on condition that they adopted 'economic policies along Reaganomic lines - privatization of state enterprises, an end to subsidies, opening the economies to foreign investment.' In the debtors' view, notes Lissakers, 'the proposed reforms ... went much further than the standard IMF nostrums on devaluation, reductions in public-sector borrowing requirement and control over the money supply, and decontrol of wages and prices, ' and were tantamount to 'putting the national patrimony on the block.' They realized that structural adjustment was, as Sheahan describes it, a program that 'was more extreme than anything that could have been seriously considered at the beginning of the 1960s.'”  [1]

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FINAL DAYS:  EVERYTHING MUST GO!

Vicky Davis
June 2006