Regarding President Obama’s November 17-20 junket to southeast Asia, Investors Business Daily (IBD) wrote:
So amid all the colorful and flirty photos from President Obama’s first tour of Southeast Asia, what did he actually accomplish? As usual, he served himself politically in what was largely a Potemkin mission abroad.
While IBD’s assessment was of the more-sizzle-than-steak aspect of the trip, the president did manage to finesse the next huge trade agreement onto the fast track.
At a meeting last week in Cambodia chaired by President Obama, leaders from all the countries participating in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) approved a motion to set the end of 2013 as an informal deadline for the completion of the TPP in preparation for the creation of the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP).
Prime Minister of New Zealand John Key, representing his nation at the conference, commented to the New Zealand Herald that he believed only a full summit would be sufficient to achieving the goal set by the president.
In addition to President Obama and Prime Minister Key, leaders from five other countries met at the East Asia Summit in Phnom Penh that are parties to the TPP talks: Singapore, Brunei, Australia, Vietnam, and Malaysia.
Chile, Peru, Mexico, and Canada — members of the TPP — did not send representatives to the Cambodia event as they are not members of the East Asia Summit.
In his statement to the New Zealand Herald, Key said that President Obama was “totally committed” to getting the deal done by the arbitrary deadline. “That’s the ambition if we want to see this deal completed,” he added.
Ambitious and audacious even in his second term, President Obama adamantly insisted at the meeting in Cambodia that the TPP (and the FTAAP that would eventually be created by it) should be comprehensive — meaning, as the New Zealand Herald reports, that “no area is off limits and that all tariffs on all goods and services would need to be eliminated.”
Such a scope is certainly an ambitious and audacious attack on the sovereignty of the United States (as well as that of all member nations), in addition to being an assault on the right of Americans to have a say through their elected representatives in the laws that govern them.
Comprehensive was the word used by President Obama at the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) Summit in Honolulu in 2011, as well.
A press release issued by representatives of the member nations attending the 2011 APEC meeting in Honolulu clearly proclaims the ultimate purpose of the newest free-trade boondoggle:
We are delighted to have achieved this milestone in our common vision to establish a comprehensive, next-generation regional agreement that liberalizes trade and investment and addresses new and traditional trade issues and 21st-century challenges. We are confident that this agreement will be a model for ambition for other free trade agreements in the future….
Again, the true aim of the TPP is the establishment of the next generation of regional trade blocs, the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP).
Members of the proposed “free trade” bloc include Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States. The regional trading partnership is intended to establish “a comprehensive free trade agreement across the region.” There’s that word “comprehensive” again. Can anyone doubt the intended scope of this so-called “free trade agreement?”
An article written in the Georgetown Journal of International Law says that the TPP negotiations “are designed to culminate in a “gold standard” free trade agreement (FTA). The article continues:
The TPP negotiations are among the more recent of a large number of FTAs and Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) that have been or are being negotiated between the member economies of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum. Since the APEC Leaders’ Bogor Declaration in November 1994, the member economies have been committed on some level to the objective of achieving an environment for “free and open” trade and investment in the Asia-Pacific region.
In the argot of globalism, “free and open trade” translates as “economic and political integration.” Later in the Georgetown piece, U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Ron Kirk is quoted as calling for the TPP to be “more than a broad concept.”
In fact, the authors of the Georgetown review state that the ultimate goal of the TPP isn’t just the creation of a FTAAP. They insist that the TPP is a “trade agreement designed to achieve broad liberalization and a high degree of economic integration among the parties.” There’s that word “integration” again.
As The New American has reported earlier, at the G20 Leading Economies Summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, in June, 2012, USTR Kirk announced that Mexico would soon join the TPP. At a press conference after that announcement, Mexican President Felipe Calderón described the TPP as “one of the free trade initiatives that’s most ambitious in the world” and one that would “foster integration of the Asia Pacific region, one of the regions with the greatest dynamism in the world.”
Integration is a word that is painful to the ears of constitutionalists and those unwilling to surrender U.S. sovereignty to a committee of globalists who are unelected by the American people and unaccountable to them. Integration is an internationalist tool for subordinating American law to the globalist bureaucracy at the United Nations.
Economic and political integration will push the once independent United States of America into yet another collectivist bloc that will facilitate the complete dissolution of our nation and our states into no more than impotent members of a one-world government.
All of this talk of fast-tracking, comprehensiveness, and economic integration is music to the ears of the developing nations whose economic fortunes will soon be tied to that of the United States.
Speaking of things to come as if they’d already happened, an article published by the ChannelNewsAsia the day after the presidential election telegraphed the tack President Obama would take regarding the priority he would give passage of the trade agreement during his second term:
With US President Barack Obama winning a second term, expectations are that this will speed up negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Prime Minister [of Malaysia] Najib Razak said: “We hope that during his (President Obama’s) second term, we can find a successful conclusion to the negotiations leading to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. That will certainly open up a new era of burgeoning trade and investment between the two countries.”
Paul Jones, the US ambassador to Malaysia, said: “Malaysia, Singapore and nine countries are members now and a couple of others are coming in. There has been a great deal of interest, there has been whole series of negotiations; we are looking to drive that to conclusion as quickly as possible.”
Prime Minister Key believes the achievement of that lofty goal is now much more likely given the personal attention being paid to the issue by President Obama.
“Just looking at the President this morning and his determination, I am much more confident than when I walked into that meeting,” Key said.
When asked when a meeting of the leaders of the TPP nations would be held, Key replied,
We have confidence in our negotiating teams and confidence that they can pull together a deal that can be concluded. But there is a recognition that in the end these deals are always political and it may require the intervention of leaders.
He added that sometimes “it takes one final shove to get these things over the line.”
The goal of the United Nations and President Obama to subordinate the sovereignty of the United States to an unelected body of internationalist bureaucrats might be that powerful push that finally shoves the Constitution over the line and onto the scrap heap of history.
Photo of President Barack Obama: AP Images
