In what amounts to a good sign for U.S. sovereignty, Japan may not be ready to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
In an article posted on a Japanese news site and translated using Google Translate, Japanese negotiators are pumping the brakes on the so-called free trade agreement that currently includes 11 countries along the Pacific Rim.
In April 2013, President Obama notified Congress of his plan to bring Japan into the TPP area and include it in all upcoming negotiations. This notification followed an announcement earlier that month that the United States and Japan had completed bilateral TPP consultations, as well as an announcement by TPP countries on April 21, 2013 that they welcome Japan as a new participant in the TPP negotiations, pending the successful completion of domestic procedures by each TPP country.
{modulepos inner_text_ad}
On July 24 of last year, the 90-day consultation period with Congress and the public on U.S. negotiating objectives with respect to Japan expired. Although thousands of Americans from across the political spectrum contacted their congressmen and senators demanding that U.S. control of trade not be surrendered to an unelected body of globalist bureaucrats, the Obama administration and its congressional allies (Republican and Democrat) continue careering along the TPP path.
As The New American reported just after the start of President Obama’s second term:
In an article published by World Politics Review, for example, Edward Alden writes that the Obama administration’s acceptance and acceleration of the TPP is the “biggest swerve” away from a global Great Depression.
Alden writes:
The global financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that followed produced the first steep decline in world trade since the Great Depression. Yet rather than falling down, the United States and other countries have managed to swerve and keep going.
The biggest swerve was the embrace of regional trade liberalization, starting with Asia.
Identifying the TPP as the president’s “top trade priority,” Alden suggests that the “embrace of regional trade liberalization” will keep the United States from falling down the steep decline toward economic devastation.
Next, the Flush the TPP website informs readers, “The TPP affects many issues, including worker’s rights and wages, environmental collapse and climate change, sovereignty of nations and democratic rule of law, Internet freedom and online creativity, food safety and agriculture, healthcare and financial regulation (including controls over the flow of capital), and much more.”
With the exception of some overt socialist and green gobbledygook, the group’s take on the tragic toll the TPP would exact from American sovereignty and individual liberty is accurate, as well.
The ultimate aim of the TPP is the creation of a 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, the United States, and Vietnam. The regional trading partnership is intended to establish “a comprehensive free trade agreement across the region.”
An article 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, former U.S. Trade Representative (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 an 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, former USTR Kirk announced that Mexico would soon join the TPP. At a press conference after that announcement, former 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.
This is an actionable betrayal of our leaders’ oaths of office as existing U.S. law would be supplanted by the TPP if the agreement is adopted.
For example, all “partners” to the pact, including foreign corporations, would be exempted from abiding by American laws governing trade disputes. Moreover, the sovereignty of the United States and the Constitution’s enumeration of powers would once again be sacrificed on the altar of global government by subordinating U.S. laws passed by duly elected representatives of the people to a code of regulations created by a team of trans-national bureaucrats.
It’s apparently the portion of the agreement dealing with tariffs that is convincing Japanese trade representatives to put their toe in the TPP pool rather than cannonballing in with wild abandon.
According to Google’s translation of the Japanese article on the subject, the failure of U.S. and Japanese negotiators to hammer out a mutually agreeable tariff scheme is the source of the latter’s hesitancy.
It seems unlikely given the insistence by the White House and Capitol Hill that the TPP be fast tracked, that the president and his congressional co-conspirators would accept an agreement with “a doughnut with a Japan-shaped hole in the middle.”
They need the Japanese GDP inside the TPP tent in order to accelerate the economic (and eventual political) integration that is the ultimate aim of this and every other regional trade agreement. Besides, without Japan, one observer reports it would be impossible to achieve “political payback by Obama for services rendered. Chief amongst those are the services supplied by the multinationals: significant campaign donations.”
Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels frequently nationwide speaking on topics of nullification, the NDAA, the Second Amendment, and the surveillance state. He is the co-founder of Liberty Rising, an educational endeavor aimed at promoting and preserving the Constitution. Follow him on Twitter @TNAJoeWolverton and he can be reached at [email protected].
