In a statement made to the Peruvian news agency Andina, Peru’s Ministry of Trade and Tourism (Mincetur) announced that it will send a delegation to the Inter-sectoral Meeting of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) scheduled to take place November 12-17 in Los Cabos, Mexico. The story published by Andina contains a very important revelation that is usually left out of similar statements made by the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) regarding the TPP.
“The TPP is a negotiation process that includes countries from three continents (America, Asia and Oceania). It seeks to become the basis and the means to establish the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP), and therefore it is open to other countries that have formally expressed their interest in the process,” the story reports.
Creation of a Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific is the ultimate goal of the secretive negotiations carried out among the 11 nations now comprising the TPP. 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.”
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, USTR Ron Kirk is quoted as calling for the TPP to be “more than a broad concept.”
Additional evidence of the “ambitious” goal of the TPP discussions is found in a press release issued by representatives of the member nations attending an APEC meeting in Honolulu in 2011:
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....
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.
At the G20 Leading Economies Summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, USTR Kirk announced that Mexico would soon join the TPP. At a press conference after that announcement, Mexican President Felipe Calderón described the 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.
The reelection of Barack Obama as president has convinced some of our Asian TPP partners that the establishment of the FTAAP through the completion of the TPP negotiations now will be fast tracked.
On Wednesday, ChannelNewsAsia exulted:
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."
In a story published on Election Day, Reuters India reports that China, the largest economy in Asia, is not willing to sit back and watch the United States lock up exclusive trade agreements with its regional neighbors.
China will later this month enter talks to create an Asian free-trade bloc covering 28 percent of world GDP, a reaction to U.S. progress in forming a Trans-Pacific Partnership that excludes China, South Korean Trade Minister Taeho Bark said on Monday.
The RCEP, or Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, will be comprised of the 10-nation ASEAN club plus six others: China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.
Its launch is to be formally announced at the ASEAN summit in Phnom Penh later this month, with a goal of reaching a deal to lower trade barriers across the region by the end of 2015.
Regionalism as an incremental step toward global government is moving along at a terrifying pace. Once the RCEP and the FTAAP come into existence, they will be nearly equal in economic size to the European Union.
"Those are the three big blocks in the future," South Korean Trade Minister Taeho Bark said as quoted in the Reuters India piece.
For their part, Europe is anxious to move forward in the creation of a “free trade bloc” with the nations of the Asia Pacific.
Bloomberg reports that in a phone interview, Fredrik Erixon, head of the European Centre for International Political Economy in Brussels, lamented the slow pace of the EU’s formation of an FTAAP-style trade bloc. “Europe needs to improve its policy toward the entire Asian region in order to take up a greater part of Asia’s economic expansion, but we’re not really seeing it,” Erixon said in the Bloomberg article. “The train is about to leave the station and Europe certainly isn’t on it.”
Later in that same article, Changyong Rhee, the Asian Development Bank’s chief economist, is quoted saying:
The U.S., Canada and Australia are more aggressive in Asia than Europe. The EU may be slow because you have to harmonize all countries together to have a free trade agreement, but once you have one FTA between the EU and another country it’s actually 27 FTAs.
Free trade is never free; sovereignty is the cost paid by those pushing the United States toward integration with other nations. It was thus in NAFTA and the EU and it will be thus under the TPP and the FTAAP. John Birch Society CEO Art Thompson recently explained the role of regional trade blocs in the globalist agenda:
For several decades, The John Birch Society has been warning Americans about the loss of our national sovereignty brought about by so- called free trade agreements, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Mexico, and Canada. We point out that political integration follows economic integration.
We also point out how the European Union has followed this pattern by progressing from a free trade area of independent European nations in the 1950s all the way to a new political entity, the European Union, that is now absorbing the last vestiges of sovereignty from its member states.
We are now warning Americans about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a new free trade agreement that is currently being negotiated by a dozen or so Pacific Rim nations, including the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Canada. Since the United States Trade Representative’s website describes the TPP as “a vehicle for Asia-Pacific-wide economic integration,” we believe that eventual congressional approval of the TPP would lead to Asia-Pacific-wide political integration with the attendant loss of American sovereignty.