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HATONN: NAFTA: NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT - PART 2

CREATOR GOD ATON/HATONN

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6-21-18

6/6/91 #2   HATONN

Thank you for returning.  Hatonn present and ready to resume.

Before we go further on the subject of the Free Trade Agreement, I am asked to respond to a few points in the news and also in the "rumor" mill.  One is just about the same as the other.

MONEY EXCHANGE

We received a phone inquiry from a most special friend this noon who had heard from a good, reliable resource that there is a planned exchange of currency (100 to 1) set for September. The ears are good but the facts are a bit off.  The "leak" is for September to cover the fact that the money call is planned prior to the end of August and, hopefully, before the end of July--depending on Free Trade Agreement going into law.  You must have "surprise" to pull off such a devastating overall sweep and the Cartel must also already have their banking system in operation for the handling of the massive undercover funds which have been flowing via cash.

The plan will be to have Mexico serve as a very large Banking service.  The infrastructure is already in place but at present the laws are not such as to allow open functioning without cash.  The point is to get all massive cash transactions converted to cashless exchanges and then the major exchange can take place.  The drug lords will simply have credit and debit accounts which will function without money transactions. The ones who serve as competitive under-lords will be caught with the cash.

The "100 to one" is correct and follows the system already handled and operable in the Soviet Union.  The timing goes with the propaganda of the recession being ended by mid-year (which is now) and the stock market doing fairly well.  All is to suck you in.  The big clue is the rise in the price of gold and silver this day.  The big switch is ready to come down and the big players are getting situated.  There is no point in collapsing the market unless the public has moved back into the market in a massive way.  By the way, for you ones who don't think a 100 to one switch is bad--we are not talking about a stock split here; this means pulling in ten dollars and receiving one "unit" in return.  You will also be asked to account for all cash over a minimal amount and the remainder will be confiscated on the assumption of tax withholding.  It will probably come in conjunction with enforced bank "holidays" which will allow for limited exchange time.  This also allows the banks to change over the computer tabulation system to the new amounts.

If the system stumbles in the Free Trade Agreement, the whole idea may have to be stalled.

Do not be naive, the currency has been printed and ready for over 1-1/2 years.  The trial was the Soviet Union.  Further, Mexico has been in default on its debt of over $100 billion since 1982, and they have just been servicing the debt here and there by more loans by the same major Cartel banks.

You must realize, too, that it is through the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the regional development banks around the world, the U.S. taxpayers (YOU) have put up the money to build steel mills, electronics plants and automobile factories so that people abroad can make the products with your money.  You have not been informed about this chain of events except in two-speak so that you can't understand it.  It is simply, however, that you are paying for the execution of your own jobs and industry and you continue to do so.  Now you add another $15 billion in foreign aid this year, and a great part of that is going to this kind of development from which the major Cartel corporations and Banking network will be the winners.

HOW CAN YOU DISCERN FACTS?

Look at what "they" say and "who" reaps the rewards.  There are pressures of all kinds coming on Congress.  The Bush administration controls all of the patronage, so the Republican Party is under the gun.  The big banks are crying poverty and telling Congress that they will completely fail and go under if they don't go along with the trade pact. Who is on board?  Carla Hills is head of the White House trade representative's office and Julius Katz is the No. 2 official selling out the United States at the trade talks in Geneva.  Then you have ones like Orrin Hatch, Dodd, Lugar, Soarz; let's just say, the same ones who pushed and pushed for active aggression in Iraq because the intent is to pull the One World Government Police State on you-the-people--while you pay for it.

You will find that, in every major industry that had import restraints on foreign goods, the prices on the domestic goods went down.

You see, when you have import restraints or quotas, you give the American manufacturer the opportunity to operate at capacity.  He can then take full advantage of the economics of scale, and that is what reduces prices--not imports. Imports are bound to raise prices, and they have certainly done so for the past two decades.

What has happened?  Tariffs alone are not enough to deter imports any longer.  The reason is that most other countries of the world are on socialist economies.  They can subsidize their exports to the U.S. When you raise the tariffs it does not actually deter imports.

Do I think one system is far better than the other?  Neither is worth the paper upon which it is established.  Furthermore, you are already so controlled as a nation that it will matter very little for the cards are set to collapse the house from any or all foundation corners.  THEY PLAN TO RULE THE WORLD, BROTHERS--HOOK, LINE AND SINKER.  They also plan to have all your assets and control every aspect of your existence.  They do not even bother to have proper lies--look at Saddam Hussein who is better entrenched than ever in Iraq.  You in the U.S. are simply coming back under the Rule of the King of Great Britain and the Queen was just here to survey her properties.

What can you do about the mess?  I'm not sure that you will be able to avoid it--I think it will probably play itself out.  The intent has been to so arrange the economy that the Government has no way in which to reclaim control of money according to the Constitution.  Since the stuff you call money is only Federal Reserve NOTES (bills, loans, credit paper and debit paper) they have the current "laugh" for you have only footed the cost of their system--not controlled it.  The probabilities are that you will have the currency switch for they surely don't plan to have all that paper and not change it out at your expense.  The only thing up for discussion is "when" and by their own projections it "must be a surprise or it won't work according to their plans."  It is over a year "later" than originally set and it IS set for no later than mid-August for it is planned to move into the new fiscal year with new currency!

What can our group get accomplished in those interim weeks?  A lot if given the opportunity, but it is as questionable as the winds for so few of you listen until it is past the hour to act.  I don't speculate on that which we will have under way--except for the WORD of Truth.  Getting people to listen and act is the point in discussion and that is free-will choice over which I can have no control.

I can assure of one thing and that is, if you are going to turn this around it is going to take an outpouring of millions of calls, cards and letters to Congress.  The Congress is, at the present, behaving like a buffalo herd running through the china shop headed for the cliff so they all tumble off into the void, in favor of this Mexican trade deal.  The moral fiber of your leaders is at an all time base low as is with you-the-people.  People have to stop this stupid stampede.

A lot of these congressmen are on the fence and don't really want to vote for this, but if they get an outpouring of any kind--letters and phone calls--they can change their minds.  However, now that Bush has gotten permission to act in the interim, it becomes harder for the structure is already in place and to move it will be a mammoth task.  You only have mere days left to act.

Dharma, find the number again, please.

Call: (202) 224-3121 for your congressman and senator.  Write your representatives in care of the U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C. 20515 and your senator in care of the U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C. 20510.

The next step is the disarming of the citizens and then it's basically over.  The Bankster Cartel Elite are already celebrating victory, chelas.

WHAT ABOUT MEXICO IN ALL THIS FREEDOM?

The last three years of relatively free trade between the U.S. and Mexico have been a disaster--for both countries.

Mexico today is in a deep depression, with soaring unemployment and real wage levels less than 50% of their 1982 levels, with more than a million new workers each and every year entering the labor market, most of who will not find jobs.  The effect of lowered tariff barriers has been to undercut Mexican farmers, increase agricultural unemployment, and to bankrupt tens of thousands of smaller manufacturing producers, while a small number of larger, often multinational-owned firms, have exported to the U.S. the output that used to be consumed by Mexicans.

The results are shocking: Per capita consumption of corn, beans, rice, and wheat--the staples in the Mexican diet--is today about 20% lower than the already miserable levels in 1980.  The minimum has dropped from the equivalent of U.S. $1.26 per hour in 1980, to $0.59 per hour in 1990--a 53% decline.  In the last three years alone--the model years for NAFTA--wages are estimated to have plummeted by 29%.  This collapse has occurred during the big "boom" years for the maquiladoras, the very model NAFTA intends to spread throughout Mexico.

An indication of the collapse of Mexico's agriculture sector, which will be completely opened to takeover by the international grain cartels, is at its lowest production.  There is simply no basis in any projections for Mexican growth to assert that the poorer 85% of the Mexican population will become consumers of U.S. exports, or that Mexican "prosperity" will permit wages to rise significantly.

Many groups, such as the AFL-CIO, other labor, church, social welfare, and environmental organizations, have documented that the maquiladora phenomenon represents nothing but U.S. runaway shops, possibly the most massive "runaway shop" slave-labor operation in history.  These groups have also compiled massive and irrefutable evidence as to the subhuman conditions of work in the maquiladoras, and the colonials (shantytowns) surrounding them.

We do not need, here, to repeat this information in detail, since it is in the public record in numerous congressional hearings and in widely circulated published form.  But the outlines bear reiteration.

*    Wage levels are abominably low.  Contrary to some claims, the average wages paid by the maquiladoras are far below even the already abysmally low wages paid in the non-maquiladora manufacturing sector of Mexico.  According to ALF-CIO figures, average maquiladora wages are $0.98/hour, compared to $1.56/hour for manufacturing in the rest of Mexico.  But many maquiladora workers receive substantially less even that $.98. In 1980, the wage differential was about 5:1; it is now worse than 11:1.  And even these figures understate the comparison, as some U.S. workers still receive fringe benefits up to 50% the value of their wages; the maquiladora workers receive none.

*    The profile of the maquiladora labor force reads like something out of Charles Dickens or New York City's tenement factories before the first child labor laws at the turn of the [20th] century.  Two-thirds of the 500,000 workers in them are females, and most of these are young girls, either trying to supplement the income of desperately poor families, or earning their first living away from home any way they can.  Turnover rates in the maquiladoras reach 120% per year.

*    Working conditions are also 19th-century, with widespread violation of worker safety laws, blatantly unsafe working conditions, failure to inform the workers of hazards, failure to use proper protective devices on machinery, and other abuses amply documented by others.

*    Living conditions are crushingly poor, with the vast majority of the 500,000, plus dependents, living in the so-called colonials, urban slums reminiscent of Brazil's notorious favelas.  Almost none of these residents have indoor running water; many do not even have access to running water at all, and drink from water collected in huge barrels formerly used by local companies that contain toxic substances.  Sewage facilities are almost unknown in the colonials, and open sewage runs through the camps.  Conditions are as squalid and hideous as anywhere in the world today. It is scarcely an exaggeration to call them concentration camps.  Needless to say, health care and treatment are all but non-existent as well, making these camps ripe ground for cholera and other epidemics, which, once unleashed, will not respect national borders.

Situated Journey, where fully one-third of all the maquiladora workers live, illustrates the situation. Three hundred fifteen maquiladoras employ 135,000 workers, 65% of them women, 10% under 16 years of age.  Wages are $3.60 a day, and turnover is so high there is a constant need for more workers.  The city has been destroyed by the maquiladora plague.  Teachers there earn one-third of their real wage in 1980 figures and now spend more time earning income in the informal economy than they do teaching--the schools have become public markets for their wares.  Housing rents are double the levels across the Rio Grande in El Paso; incomes are less than one-tenth the U.S. levels.

*    Most of the maquiladoras also practice no pollution control.  Toxic wastes are released untreated into both the atmosphere and surface and groundwater.  Canals carrying heavily polluted water often run right through the attached colonials.  Air pollution is so bad in some of the leading maquiladora cities that it carries over the border and affects U.S. border cities.

One final point bears noting: Maquiladora workers are today paid less than the wages received in such desperately poor countries as Jamaica and the Dominican Republic.  Mexico, the once-proud neighbor that tried to industrialize, and tried to improve the standard of living of its population, now shamelessly permits its workers to receive a Fourth World-level wage standard, and is actively seeking more of the same.

NO EXPORT BOOM

But perhaps the mass exodus of U.S. manufacturing plants south of the border will be offset by skyrocketing U.S. exports to Mexico, creating thousands of new jobs here at home?  That is what the Bush administration claims.  But this, too, is a lie.

It is a fact that Mexico's imports (three-quarters of which come from the U.S.) have risen sharply over the last three to four years, as a result of former President Miquel de la Madrid's and Salinas' trade liberalization measures.  But a closer look at the composition of those imports shows that consumer goods are the ones growing most rapidly.  U.S. consumer goods have been replacing Mexican goods at supermarkets and department stores, but that process has largely run its course. It would be illusory to think that this is a market that can continue to rapidly expand.

The argument that "Mexico is a booming market" is nothing but a cruel joke.  One might as well trumpet the tremendous market for U.S. exporters represented by Bangladesh today.  Desperately poor people, as most Mexicans have become under De la Madric and Salinas' policies, are not a market for anybody's exports.  The entire Mexican economy, encompassing a population one-third the size of the United States, disposes of an economy barely 4% as large.  And the share of GNP represented by popular incomes in Mexico is much lower in Mexico than in the United States.  Real incomes have plummeted for the average Mexican by more than one-half since 1982.  It is estimated that more than two-thirds of the population are poor, and at least half of them desperately poor.

As for capital goods imports, the amount of these actually invested into the Mexican economy has been dropping significantly since 1980.  It is today at only 60% the level it was at in 1980.  And of those imported capital goods that are invested, the fact is that the lion's share of these have gone into building up industries for exports--in particular the maquiladoras--rather than contributing to the growth of the Mexican national economy.  Mexico's imports of machine tools have collapsed to near zero.  There has been a gross collapse in the employment of Mexican workers in the manufacturing jobs upon which any country's prosperity depend--with the exception of an increase in slave-labor-wage employment in the maquiladoras.

There is no future of growth in such trends.

One of the central objectives of NAFTA is to create an environment propitious for significant flows of foreign investment into Mexico.  Bankers and others confessed to being uneasy about all the "free market" reforms that have been implemented in Mexico over recent years, unless they are "locked in" through NAFTA.  They openly worry about the economic nationalism of the Echeverria and Lopez Portillo years and fear that all of Salinas' good work might be reversible if there is a strong enough backlash to throw him out, and return to policies of protectionism, and possibly even to expropriations or prohibitions against removing profits of foreign firms, or even debt moratoria.  It is believed that under a NAFTA, the "charges" implemented by Salinas that favor foreign investment can be "cemented" in such a way that even an anti-"free market" government could not undo them. The firms planning to take advantage of NAFTA have made clear, in fact, that once investment regulations are fully liberalized and cemented in the form of an international agreement that guarantees that their holdings can not be nationalized, or their profit remittances be jeopardized, or their loans go unpaid, they plan a massive shifting of investment resources to Mexico.

But what sort of investment will actually occur?  Maquiladora investment will certainly take off under NAFTA, for the reasons indicated.  But this will not constitute the prime form of investment.  The major thrust of U.S. foreign investment will be in buying out core sectors of the existing Mexican economy--not in the construction of new plant and equipment. In other words, it will consist of a mere exchange of property titles, from Mexicans (including the state), to foreigners.  This is proven by the fact that, despite balance of payments figures showing about $2-3 billion of foreign investment in each of the last couple of years, there has been no corresponding flow of actual physical imports of capital goods, as we documented above.  So the only thing coming "into" Mexico has been financial capital that is buying out existing physical capital stock.  This is what explains the fact that fully 89% of all foreign investment coming into Mexico in the first quarter of 1991, went into "services".

This process is already well under way, as Mexico has "privatized" the bulk of its formerly public sector companies--70% have reportedly already been sold off.  The strategic aim of NAFTA is to force Mexico to liberalize its foreign investment laws, and to make the changes permanent.  The U.S. has targeted all remaining statutory and constitutional restrictions on full 100% foreign ownership of Mexican companies, even in formerly "strategic" industries, and will demand these reforms as the price of NAFTA.  The goal is to buy up or control the core sectors of the Mexican economy. Insofar as there will be any significant investment in modernized plant and equipment, it will, like the maquiladora "investment", be strictly for export.

[H: Now, please don't act surprised at all this and wonder what happened; this is the way the Banks foreclose on nations; the collateral is all the resources of a country to get the original loans; THIS IS FORECLOSURE OF A WORLD, CHELAS!!!  THE U.S. CANNOT PAY ITS DEBTS; YOU WILL ALSO BE FORECLOSED UPON; IT IS AS INEVITABLE AS THE WINDS OF WINTER.  AND, FURTHER, TO PREVENT OBJECTION AND TROUBLE, YOU WILL BE DISARMED SO THAT YOU CANNOT MAKE A FUSS AS EVERYTHING YOU HAVE, INCLUDING YOUR NATION, GOES TO THE ELITE BANKSTERS.]

Let us take the central issue of "oil".  Here the policy is to gradually whittle down Mexican opposition to resuming foreign control and eventually ownership over Mexico's oil resources and oil industry.

The long-term goal here is to deny Mexico the full use of its oil revenues for national development and to ensure the U.S. a large and continuing supply of oil close to home.  In fact, the intent of NAFTA, and of Bush's broader New World Order, is to achieve control of all strategic minerals, including oil, in Mexico, Ibero-America and the entire Third World.

NAFTA has one last principal goal: to permit the full opening up of Mexico's banking and financial system to takeover by the international banks.  Once permitted full rights to operate in Mexico, the major Wall Street, London, European and Japanese banks will quickly take over Mexico's financial system. This means not only buying the major Mexican banks.  It means acquiring the ability to suck capital out of Mexico, the same way these same banks are presently acquiring regional U.S. banks and sucking capital out of the local regions in which these banks are located.  It means the ability to borrow money within Mexico that ought to go for national development, and lend it back to U.S. firms seeking to buy out Mexican companies--a totally parasitic misuse of the money.  It means the ability to use Mexican funds deposited in the banks for speculation in offshore enterprises, as now occurs with U.S. funds as well.

The goal is, as with the maquiladoras, to turn Mexico City into another version of Panama's now destroyed "banking center", an onshore/"offshore" banking haven, which transmogrifies Mexico's national savings into the means for international speculative activities earning profits for the banks, emphatically including the laundering of hundreds of billions of dollars in drug revenues every year.

With the financial takeover completed, and trade and foreign investment fully liberalized, NAFTA's ultimate objective is to turn the entirety of the Americas into a dollar zone.  What this means is the supplanting of each of the local currencies by the dollar, as legal tender, for all external and internal economic transactions.

Such steps go far beyond the current state of affairs, where the IMF, the creditor banks, and the U.S. government directly dictate policy to the governments of Ibero-America as to what their economic and monetary policies should be.  They will no longer have economic and monetary processes that they can even call their own.  They will all be run by the dollar, i.e., by the U.S. Government.

The kind of loss of economic sovereignty is tantamount to erasing all national borders, and goes hand in hand with the NAFTA plan of turning the whole continent into one giant maquiladora foreign enclave.

SO--NOW THE U.S.

It is not possible to exactly forecast with any precision, only probabilities, what havoc the agreement to be negotiated with Mexico will wreak within the U.S., if the "fast-track" procedures are extended, as per Bush's demands.  It is possible to identify the general process which will be set off, because it is already in the works.

Overall, U.S. capital investment is in the range of $200 billion per annum.  Of this it can be assumed that about half is actually for investment in plant and equipment.  The proponents of the Free Trade Agreement start the first year of an agreement going into effect, 10%, or up to $10 billion could be pulled out of the U.S.A., and in the name of investing in Mexico, be diverted to the account of bankrupt U.S. banks.  One such advocate put it this way: "Let's say we now make about $600 billion in real capital investment in the U.S., in plant and equipment annually.  Mexico, under NAFTA, could easily get 10% of that.  That's $10 billion the first year, if it looks successful, say even $15 billion the second year.  The who knows, the third year...."

The areas which would be affected by such runaway shops are known.  Top on the list is the automobile industry, second is the textile and apparel industry, and third, what comes under the heading of electronics and household appliances.

Then, fourth, in a slightly different way, the domestic U.S. construction industry.

Dharma, allow us a break, please.  I must, however, finish this evening for I desire that George have it for his meetings in Florida.  Thank you.

 

 


Source:  PHOENIX JOURNAL EXPRESS, July 1991, Volume 13, Number 11, Pages 7-12 .

http://www.phoenixarchives.com/express/1991/0691/13-11.pdf