Free trade does not simply include cars, appliances, electronics and other durable goods. It also includes food. And the seeds have been planted to lure farmers into this trap through a massive trade bill known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

Most Republicans favor this pact, although they know little about it in terms of the big picture. They just hear the promises of greener pastures of prosperity from big business, the Commerce Department and the U.S. Trade Representative office.

The problem is, TTIP negotiations, like those for the more expansive Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), are highly confidential.

TTIP, if snuck past the populace on both sides of “the pond” and signed into law, would become the first-ever formal trade and investment pact between the U.S. and the 28-nation European Union (EU).

As this reporter has revealed, the Delegation of the European Union to the United States has been in high gear for months wooing state governors, academics and members of Congress. The lobbying group has a Washington office not far from where the European Union’s “taproot”—the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC)—set up an office back in the early 1950s.

Back then, the ECSC touted the “common market” concept, which history shows laid the foundation for the EU.

The ECSC was formed by “Europhile” elites for the express purpose of morphing it into an economic and political union known for a time as the European Economic Community, also as the European Community, among other names, before becoming the EU. Britain joined the EU but kept the pound sterling and stayed out of the Eurozone.

Given the trap that the EU has become—as Europeans witness virtually nonstop centralization of banking, regulation and other tyrannical tentacles—the unique national cultures of Europe are fading in favor of an unwieldy “superstate.”

Therefore, any new talk of a larger “common market” should set off warning sirens all over the place. If a continental common market can form something like the EU, imagine what a transatlantic common market could do.

 

 

 

 

That’s why American farmers and their brethren in the United Kingdom (UK) and in Europe had better pay close attention to this.

The American Farm Bureau (AFBF), itself a large lobbying outfit with state chapters across the U.S., has long romanticized about tearing down trade barriers. But perhaps the AFBF and its affiliates don’t realize that national sovereignty also is seen as a “trade barrier.”

Deluded Montana and Wyoming Farm Bureau leaders early last fall took part in a farmer-rancher delegation to Europe to discuss trade. “The American Farm Bureau’s Trade Advisory Committee met with World Trade Organization Director General Roberto Azevedo and with trade ambassadors from Canada, Japan, Brazil, China, India and Australia,” a press release noted.

“The [September] meetings first took place in Geneva, followed by a meeting with the European Union in Brussels,” the AFBF also noted, while adding that TTIP—surprise—was a key topic.

TPP—a 12-nation behemoth that straddles the Pacific Ocean while TTIP straddles the Atlantic—is waiting in the wings, as well.

Generally, the American farm delegation discussed trade policies that “reduce and eliminate government-imposed barriers” to agri-trade, as they put it. Usually such “barriers” consist of import taxes, or tariffs. But in this case, “non-tariff barriers” were discussed, which often take the form of “standards” to manage trade. Notably, the AFBF and its fellow travelers believe regulatory barriers are a “significant impediment to growth.”

Yet the dirty little secret is that TTIP is designed to merge the regulatory systems of the EU and the U.S. and create a new and larger “common market,” which strongly suggests that a new Trans-Atlantic Union (TAU) is on track via TTIP.

Last year in Washington, at a meeting covered by AMERICAN FREE PRESS, Belgian “Eurocrat” Monique Goyens of the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue spelled it out: “TTIP is much more than a trade agreement. It lays the foundation of a trans-Atlantic common market.”

With considerable gravity, she added: “This concept of regulatory cooperation is totally new. It doesn’t exist in any other trade agreements. . . . We’re laying the foundations for a single market.”

And with that, she added, “the regulatory sovereignty” of each nation has to decline.

That means that the EU likely is not the final stage of transformation. Rather, it’s just a rest stop on the way to a huge world-government building block we could call the TAU.

Logically then the TPP would undergird an enlarged Pacific Union. The fingerprints of the Bilderberg group, the Trilateral Commission and other world-planning, policy-manipulation outfits won’t exactly be difficult to find amid this mess.

The danger of this is that everyday people and their representatives would lose their influence over decision-making by the elevation of such policy-making to a global level. Across the UK, Europe and the U.S., down to South America and over the Pacific to various nations, the parallel governing structure cemented by free trade agreements is undermining the sovereignty of the nation state.

AFP Roving Editor Mark Anderson is a veteran reporter who covers the annual Bilderberg meetings and is chairman of AFP’s new America First Action Committee, designed to involve AFP readers in focusing intensely on Congress to enact key changes, including monetary reform and a pullback of the warfare state. He and his wife Angie often work together on news projects. Write to Mark at truthhound2@yahoo.com.

- See more at: http://americanfreepress.net/?p=22700#sthash.LYGhV7dE.dpuf

 

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