Flushed with his NAFTA victory in Congress, President Clinton left Washington, D.C. on November 18 for Washington State for round two of the great trade charade. In Seattle and on Blake Island in the Puget Sound, Mr. Clinton joined leaders from the Pacific rim nations at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit. “Make no mistake about it,” Mr. Clinton said when he arrived in Seattle, “ultimately, this meeting is about the jobs, the incomes, and the future of the American people.” In that much, at least, he spoke the truth: The APEC meeting was about destroying the jobs, the incomes, and the future of the American people — and all the peoples of the world for that matter — as the weapon of “free trade” is used as a mighty battering ram to smash down the ramparts of national sovereignty and to merge America into a new world order under the hegemony of the United Nations. *
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Jump Start
It was no secret that Mr. Clinton intended to use both NAFTA and APEC to advance the stalled General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) before his “fast track” authority expired on December 15. What has been kept secret from the American people is the fact that the whole NAFTA-APEC-GATT trade waltz has been expertly planned and choreographed by the same globalist insiders of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Trilateral Commission (TC) who are also using concerns over supposed “crises” involving the environment, security, population, poverty, refugees, debt, and nuclear proliferation to empower the United Nations.
While the CFR media pundits praised the blatant bribery, extortion, and arm-wrenching Mr. Clinton used to win NAFTA votes, far more important to its passage was the all-out lobbying assault from CFR-TC leaders and mouthpieces such as David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Thomas Foley, Robert Matsui, Dwayne O. Andreas, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Business Roundtable, et al. — ably assisted by Lee Iaccoca, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and a host of other sellouts. After NAFTA’s passage, these same forces coalesced behind APEC and GATT.
The goal was spelled out clearly in the Trilateral Commission’s report on its annual meeting held last March 27-29 in Washington, D.C. Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Thomas S. Foley (CFR, TC) reported to his Trilateral colleagues on NAFTA’s progress and explained, “We’ll have to extend the fast track legislation for the [GATT] Uruguay Round. On this perhaps more than anything else, the future of our trade relations will depend.” Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen declared, “A good Uruguay Round and a NAFTA agreement will make a major contribution to the world economy.” President Clinton (CFR, TC) sent Trade Representative Mickey Kantor to the meeting to assure his CFR-TC superiors he understood the game plan. Kantor stressed the importance of NAFTA and APEC, but noted that “completion of the Uruguay Round … remains our top priority.”
Warren Christopher also addressed the meeting, and undoubtedly championed the NAFTA-APEC-GATT agenda there as he has done in his official capacity as Secretary of State. His address was not published in the TC report, however.
In the “Chairmen’s Report,” the Trilateral Commission’s three chairmen, Paul Volcker, Otto Lambsdorff, and Akio Morita (representing, respectively, North America, Europe, and Japan), declare, “Increased interdependence is driving our countries toward convergence in areas once considered fully within the domestic purview. Some of these areas involve government regulatory policy, such as environmental standards, the fair treatment of workers, and taxation.” Translation from Trilateralese: “Keep up the good work, boys, and soon we will have internationalized and merged these powers into our hands.”
The chairmen said that while they welcome “the economic unification of the European Community and creating the North American Free Trade Area, those arrangements are in no way a substitute for a stronger and more comprehensive GATT.” They called for Congress to give a 9 to 12 month “clean” extension of “fast track” authority “allowing the President maximum bargaining flexibility … not burdened with conditions by Congress.”
Toward “Interdependence”
APEC was established as a vehicle through which the CFR-TC internationalists could keep a tight rein on the Asian “tigers,” whose booming economies serve the Trilateral interdependence drive by sucking capital, technology, industrial productivity, and jobs out of the United States, but who could potentially spoil the one-world plan if they became an independent force. Two of the insiders’ key operatives assigned to help the Pacific dynamos “cooperate” in the global grand design are C. Fred Bergsten (CFR,TC), director of the Institute for International Economics and an assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Jimmy Carter; and Winston Lord (CFR, TC), Mr. Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, and formerly a special assistant to Henry Kissinger, ambassador to Communist China, and president of the CFR.
At the September 1992 APEC ministerial meeting in Bangkok, APEC was formally established as an international organization with a permanent secretariat in Singapore. The Bangkok meeting also established a non-governmental “Eminent Persons Group” to enunciate a “vision” for APEC. Chairing that group of “eminent” personages is C. Fred Bergsten.
In the run-up to the APEC Seattle summit there were many behind-the-scenes meetings. One of the most important of those was the September 22-24, 1993 gathering of APEC senior officials in Honolulu. Chaired by Winston Lord, the meeting received the report of Bergsten’s Eminent Persons Group (EPG) and produced an APEC Trade and Investment Framework declaration that called for establishing a Trade and Investment Committee (TIC), certain to be just the first of many such institutions that will soon resemble the European Community (now the European Union) bureaucracy in Brussels.
To that end, and with the Bergsten-EPG guidance, APEC has established 10 “working groups” taking it far afield from mere trade issues into trade and investment data, trade promotion, investment and industrial science and technology, human resource development, regional energy cooperation, marine resource conservation, telecommunications, transportation, tourism, and fisheries.
Apparently, however, some of the APEC leaders were unwilling to jettison their national sovereignty for an EC-EU regional “arrangement” and nixed the EPG proposal to announce the creation of an Asia-Pacific Free Trade Area. In an attempt to allay these fears, Mr. Clinton, Bergsten, and other CFR-TC operatives insisted they were trying to create an “Asia Pacific Community with a small ‘c'” — not a centralized leviathan like the European Community.
Building Blocks for Globalism
But perhaps some of the APEC leaders had read the Trilateral Commission’s revealing Triangle Paper 42. Entitled Regionalism in a Converging World, this 1992 paper was authored by Toyoo Gyohten, chairman of the board of the Bank of Tokyo, with the aid, it says, of Fred Bergsten. In the introduction Gyohten states: “The writings of the Trilateral Commission have long acknowledged one source of tension — that between economic nationalism and economic interdependence. The alternative to globalism was principally assumed to be nationalism. More recently a new spectre has arisen — a world economy in which global economic arrangements are overshadowed by regional economic blocs.”
However, says Gyohten, “regionalism need not be opposed to globalism.” He declares: “Regional arrangements benefit global welfare: … When regional arrangements provide models or building blocks for increased or strengthened globalism.”
Gyohten leaves little doubt as to the regional model preferred by the Trilateralists. “Western Europe [the EC-EU] represents regionalism in its truest form,” he writes. Like other CFR-TC one-worlders, Gyohten endorses the EU “deepening” (increasing the political-social-economic merger) and “widening” (adding new member nations) processes. And of the Maastricht Treaty of Union, he correctly notes: “The first steps toward deepening are dramatic and designed to be irreversible.” After the Maastricht summit the Economist editorialized: “Call it what you will: by any other name it is federal government.” Gyohten agrees. “In sum,” he says, “the regional integration process in Europe can be seen as akin to an exercise in nation-building.” Rather, we should say nation-destroying and supra-nation-building.
According to Triangle Paper 42, “Except where there is a clear intention to create a single federal unit [as in the EC-EU], regional trade arrangements should not be regarded as ends in themselves, but as supplements to global liberalization.” (In Trilateral-speak liberalization, harmonization, integration, and cooperation mean socialization, internationalization, expansion, centralization, and concentration of the powers of government.)
Winston Lord, in an August 31 press briefing, was even more emphatic: “The global approach is still our highest priority; namely the Uruguay Round and the GATT. We are not interested in regional trade blocs; we want to head them off.” The Trilateralists were letting it be known that they would not tolerate any independent blocs (the all-Asian bloc proposed by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed, for example, or other potential rivals such as the Pacific Basin Economic Committee, the Pacific Trade and Development Conference, the Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference, etc.) upsetting their one-world apple cart.
The U.S. State Department’s September 17, 1993 bulletin, Focus on Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation, lets us know that APEC is politically correct. “Since the first meeting of APEC in 1989,” the bulletin reports, “the first priority of the member economies has been the successful conclusion of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.”
None of this is at all surprising to those who have been observing CFR-TC machinations for decades. They will recall that GATT, “free trade,” and “regional arrangements” have been announced as prime globalist instruments for years in leading Insider publications. Perhaps most notable of these is “The Hard Road to World Order,” penned by globalist theoretician Richard N. Gardner (CFR, TC) for the CFR journal Foreign Affairs in April 1974. These instruments would enable him and his fellow one-worlders to build “world government” — or the “house of world order” — Gardner said, “from the ground up, rather than from the top down.” They would build “the central institutions of the U.N. system” through “an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece.” And that is what NAFTA, APEC, and GATT are really all about.
