Proponents & antagonists of so-called free trade agreements – in their own words:

 

NAFTA was merely the first draft of an economic constitution for North America. .  .  .The European experience with integration has much to teach North American policymakers. - Professor Robert A. Pastor

 

The ultimate goal of any White House policy ought to be a North American economic and political alliance similar in scope and ambition to the European Union. –  Editorial from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 7, 2001

 

Hemispheric institutions, including the OAS (Organization of American States) and Inter-American Development Bank and now the NAFTA institutions, can be forged into the vital mechanisms of hemispheric government. –  memo to Bill Clinton, from then-National Security Advisor Anthony Lake, November 29, 1993

 

I have never before seen such manipulated, obscure and faked policies as in relation to Swedish relations to the EU (European Union). Information has been evasive and unclear, giving the impression that membership of the EU would mean much less radical change than what has been the case.  –  Villy Bergstrom, former deputy of Swedish Central Bank

 

Eventually our long range objective is to establish with the United States, but also with Canada, our other regional partner, an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union. –  then-Mexican President Vincente Fox, speech to Club XXI, in Madrid Spain, May 16, 2002

 

Twenty years ago, when the process began, there was no question of losing our sovereignty .  . .

That was a lie, or at any rate, dishonest obfuscation.  –  Sir Peregine Worsthorne, from a 1991 op-ed article in the Sunday Telegraph.

 

[SPP/North American Union] is to strengthen regulatory cooperation [and to] have our central regulatory complete a trilateral regulatory framework by 2007.  .  . [this] adds up to not only more and bigger government, but to the establishment of an unelected mega-government.  –  Ron Paul

 

The entire document (International Trade Organization or ITO, forerunner of the WTO) reflects an excessive acceptance of economic planning .  .  .  –  U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 1948

 

.  .  . if the United States subscribes to the charter (ITO) it will be abandoning traditional American principles and espousing, instead, planned economy and full-scale political control of

production, trade and monetary exchange. The charter does not reflect faith in the principles of free, private, competitive enterprise.  –  The National Foreign Trade Council, 1948.

 

The results of its agreement (ITO) would have been socialism on a global scale.  – U.S. Senator George W. Malone (NV-R), 1948

 

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Proponents & antagonists of so-called free trade agreements – in their own words:

 

[The ITO] is part and parcel of international socialism, one-worldism, and the slow surrender of American sovereignty.  –  Congressman Samuel B. Pettingill (Ind.-D)

 

This (WTO) is not just another trade agreement .  . . This is adopting something which twice, once in the 1940s and once in the 1950s, the U.S. Congress rejected. I am not even saying that we should reject it; I, in fact, lean toward it. But I think we have to be careful, because it is a very big transfer of power.  –  Newt Gingrich, 1994

 

When NAFTA was first proposed, critics in all three countries claimed that its hidden agenda was the development of a  European-style common market. Didn't Europe also start out with a  limited free trade area? And, given the Brussels precedent, wouldn't this mean ceding some measure of sovereignty to unelected  bureaucrats? Even worse, wouldn't this lead to liberalization and collaborative policy making in many other sensitive areas, from monetary policy and immigration to labor and environmental law?  NAFTA's defenders said no. They argued that the agreement is designed to dismantle tariff barriers, not build a new regulatory bureaucracy....

Yet the critics were essentially right. NAFTA lays the foundation for a continental common market, as many of its architects privately acknowledge. Part of this foundation, inevitably, is bureaucratic: The agreement creates a variety of continental institutions--ranging from trade dispute panels to labor and environmental commissions--that are, in aggregate, an embryonic NAFTA government.  –  William A. Orme, Jr., November 29, 1993

 

NAFTA means jobs, American jobs and good-paying American jobs. If I didn’t believe it, I wouldn’t support this agreement. . . . I believe that NAFTA will create 200,000 American jobs in the first two years of its effect. . . . I believe that NAFTA will create a million jobs in the first five years of its impact.–  Bill Clinton, September 14, 1993 (Ross Perot was right – that giant sucking sound was jobs moving to Mexico.)

It [NAFTA} will represent the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War, and the first step toward an even larger vision of a free-trade zone for the entire western hemisphere. . . . [NAFTA] is not a conventional trade agreement, but the architecture of a new international system. –  Henry Kissinger, op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1993

The Council (Council on Foreign Relations-CFR) has launched an independent task force on the future of North America to examine regional integration since the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement ten years ago. –  CFR member Richard N. Haass, October 15, 2004

The Bush administration's open-borders policy and its decision to ignore the enforcement of this country's immigration laws is part of a broader agenda. President Bush signed a formal agreement (Security and Prosperity Partnership or SPP) that will end the United States as we know it, and he took the step without approval from either the U.S. Congress or the people of the United States." – Lou Dobbs, from CNN

[Canada’s involvement in NAFTA has] significantly weakened the Canadian economy, has harmed the interests and the standard of living of 80 percent of Canadians relative to their position pre-free trade, and has allowed productivity to decline rather than increase relative to the United States. None of this was supposed to happen.   –  from a Canadian study, Zip Locking North America                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         

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Proponents & antagonists of so-called free trade agreements – in their own words:

If you believe the United States is the most unique nation on Earth with a government designed to protect your natural liberties, an economic system unlike any other, and a judicial system unknown to any other nation, then the North American Union (NAU) is a threat to all you hold dear.  –  Tom DeWeese, April, 2007, founding member of the Coalition to Block the North American Union

Congress was shut out from the beginning of this [SPP - Security and Prosperity Partnership] process. In the last couple of years we’ve seen increasing concern on Capitol Hill about what’s going on in these negotiations, requests for information, discussion of having hearings, bringing people forward just to know more about what’s going on. –  Chris Sands, August 11, 2007

Now I don’t believe that we will ever have a, in name anyways, a common union like the Europeans have . . . but I believe that, incrementally, we will continue to integrate our economies . . . I think . . . 10 years from now, or maybe 15 years from now we’re gonna look back and we’re going to have a union in everything but name. –  Paul Cellucci, former U.S. Ambassador to Canada, October 30, 2006

Our skilled wages are higher than anywhere in the world. If we open up a significant window for skilled workers (H-1B visa program) that would suppress the skilled-wage level and end the concentration of income.  –  Alan Greenspan, March 13 2007

For people who can grow huge scale for export, NAFTA has been good. For people like us, it’s been a bloodbath. –  Ruben Rivera, small-scale Mexican farmer

The NAFTA agreements were setting in motion an ongoing process that would incrementally shift powers and jurisdiction from our national, state and local governments to new regional institutions. NAFTA we warned, would take policies concerning tariffs, transportation, the environment, labor and other matters out of the hands of Congress and state legislatures and hand them to regional bureaucracies and tribunals. NAFTA threatened not only our jobs and manufacturing base, but our Constitution, our sovereignty, and our freedom. – The New American, April 16, 2007, p. 29

This is not a trade summit, it is an overall summit. It will focus on economic and political integration. –  Mack McLarty, Clinton’s chief of staff, talking about NAFTA (1993)

I estimate that somewhere between 22 and 29 percent of all U.S. jobs are or will be potentially offshorable with a decade or two. –  Dr. Alan S. Blinder, former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve, 2007

In 2004 Levi Strauss closed the last two of its U.S. plants, offshoring all production. Just over two decades ago,  the company had 63 U.S. plants.

If it were true that NAFTA was good for Mexico, we wouldn’t be here. – quoting an illegal immigrant, Los Angeles Times, October 2007

 

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Proponents & antagonists of so-called free trade agreements – in their own words:

It is just because we are really attacking the principle of local sovereignty that we keep protesting our loyalty to it so loudly.  .  .  . I will merely repeat that we are at present working, discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands.  -  British historian, Arnold J. Toynbee, November 1931

The CFR saw the Common Market from the first as a regional government to which more and more nations would be added until the world government which [the] UN had failed to bring about, would be realized. At a favorable point in the Common Market’s  development, America would be brought in. But the American public had to be softened first and leaders groomed for the change-over.  –  Hilaire du Berrier, January, 1973

There are some in this country who fear that in going into Europe we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty. These fears, I need hardly say, are completely unfounded. –  British Prime Minister Edward Heath, from a television broadcast, January 1973

The sovereignty lost at a national level does not pass to any new subject. It is entrusted to a faceless entity: NATO, the UN and eventually the EU. The union is the vanguard of a changing world: it indicates a future of Princes without sovereignty. The new entity is faceless and those who are in command can neither be pinned down nor elected.  –  Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, from La Stampa, July 13. 2000

It is a European Union of economic failure, of mass unemployment, of low growth; but worst of all, it’s an EU with the economic prison of the euro.  .  .  . This now poses huge dangers to the continent. We face the prospect of mass civil unrest, possibly even revolution in some countries that have been driven to total and utter desperation.  –  Nigel Farage, member of European Parliament, 2012

I have heard the argument that transparency would undermine the administration’s policy to complete the trade agreement (Trans-Pacific Partnership) because public opposition would be significant. This argument is exactly backwards. If transparency would lead to widespread opposition to a trade agreement, then that trade agreement should not be the policy of the United States. –  from U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass), letter to U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman, June 13, 2013

The TPP documents are not available to the average American citizen, only to “cleared trade advisors.” And who are “cleared trade advisors?” According to the USTR (United States Trade Representative) these are “representatives from industry, agriculture, services, labor, state and local governments, and public interest groups.” But, apparently, that does not include representatives of the American people, since members of Congress have been forced to plead, and threaten in order to get a peep at secret TPP texts. (but their staff members were not allowed to look at the papers)  –  from The New American,  September 2, 2013

In a speech in London in 2000 [Mikhail] Gorbachev referred to the evolving EU as “the new European Soviet.”

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Please contact your state legislators and let them know this is not something we should be getting into.