U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry was in Brussels, Belgium, on April 22 to meet with European Union officials, including European Commission President Manuel Barroso, and to promote the administration’s new push for congressional approval of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). President Obama is calling upon Congress to provide him with Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), also known as “fast-track” to push the TTIP and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact through Congress with little debate and no amendments.
The New American has been following and reporting on the efforts to conclude a TTIP and TPP for many years, throughout the Clinton and Bush administrations. One of the most important objections — though not the only one — regarding both of these efforts is that throughout the various iterations and proposal it is very apparent that the architects and proponents of the agreements are being thoroughly dishonest. They are publicly packaging and promoting the agreements as “trade agreements” when, in fact, they have been designed as evolving projects that will progressively “integrate” the economies and political systems of the signatory nations into a supranational regime modeled along the lines of the European Union.
Dennis Behreandt’s article “Transatlantic Two-Step” of May 10, 2008, during President George W. Bush’s administration, is one of the many articles we have published that details the efforts of globalist elites in organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Transatlantic Policy Network, the Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and others, to use the battering ram of trade agreements to smuggle political and economic integration schemes that are aimed at destroying national sovereignty.
Recently, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) held a panel discussion at Princeton University entitled “The G20: Prospects and Challenges for Global Governance.” (See video below.) There are many interesting and revealing comments made by the panel participants, but an admission by Eurasia Group President Ian Bremmer is especially noteworthy, in that it publicly confirms what critics of the European Union have been saying for decades, but which CFR globalists like Bremmer have usually denied. Bremmer admits that “there’s real subversion of sovereignty by the EU.”
The CFR panel included:
• Nicolas Berggruen, chairman of the Berggruen Institute on Governance and coauthor of Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way between West and East;
• Ian Bremmer, president, Eurasia Group;
• Stewart M. Patrick, senior fellow and director of the International Institutions and Global Governance Program at the Council on Foreign Relations; and
• Anne-Marie Slaughter, Bert G. Kerstetter Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University
Professor Slaughter served as the presider of the CFR panel discussion. The context of the Bremmer quote was a venting of frustration by the panelists over the “ineffectiveness” of the G20 process. Professor Slaughter and Mr. Berggruen particularly argued that the G20 needed to be given actual powers that would enable it to do more to effect global governance. Unfortunately, from the panelists’ viewpoints, national sovereignty and national interests get in the way of this objective. This is where Mr. Bremmer commented (see the video at 18:30 minutes): “The EU is much more significant. There’s real subversion of sovereignty by the EU that works.”
It would appear that the panelists all favored this type of EU-style of sovereignty-subverting “governance.”
Secretary Kerry, of course, is also a member of the CFR, as is our top trade negotiator Michael Froman, a former Citigroup exec (and bailout beneficiary) who is now assistant to the president of the United States and deputy national security advisor for International Economic Affairs.
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and Trans-Pacific Partnership would effect the same kind of “real subversion of sovereignty.”
