As Congress and the president prepare to hand over American sovereignty to a board of international bureaucrats as mandated by a super-secret trade agreement, one of the partners in that pact might have a problem that could prove troublesome.
As reported by several major media outlets this week, the U.S.’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) partner Malaysia has a substantial problem with human trafficking that may force President Obama and his congressional co-conspirators to pump the brakes on the fast track to passage of the agreement.
On May 25, CBS News reported that Malaysian officials uncovered “139 suspected graves in abandoned camps used by human traffickers.”
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Although senators of both parties were all too willing to strip themselves of constitutional power and endow the president with extra-constitutional power, there is an applicable provision of the fast track bill that specifically prohibits doing business with countries seen as soft on human trafficking. Here is a description of the statutory situation reported by Huffington Post:
But a key crackdown on human trafficking survived the legislative jujitsu. The White House considers the provision a deal-breaker, as it would force one of the nations involved in the TPP talks — Malaysia — out of the agreement.
The danger of derailment was reported by HuffPo, as well:
The slavery provision’s survival means that the House will either need to amend the bill and send it back to the Senate, which would cause a delay and complicate the House debate, or pass a bill and go to conference with the Senate, also causing a delay. It also potentially could be fixed in separate legislation otherwise moving through Congress.
Malaysia’s softness on slavery hasn’t completely scuppered the surrender of sovereignty, however. HuffPo reports:
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) authored the provision that would effectively bar Malaysia from the agreement, but settled with GOP leaders over modified language that would allow Malaysia to stay in the deal as long as it made progress toward reducing its dependence on slave labor. The modification, however, never made it into the bill.
All of this human rights posturing may turn out to be nothing more than sound and fury signifying nothing. The president and Congress have shown that they have no qualms about disregarding provisions of the Constitution that would prevent them from making such agreements in the first place, so why would they suddenly become sticklers for prohibitions in “laws?”
In fairness, though, even the staunchest supporters of transferring trade policy to a board of unelected, unaccountable corporate giants and UN-appointed bureaucrats will have to hold their nose to get over the gross disregard for human life displayed in Malaysia.
In addition to the latest grisly discovery, a New York Times report revealed the scope of the horror:
Local media outlets said the graves were found in two locations in the northern state of Perlis. The state borders southern Thailand’s Songkhla province, where at least 33 bodies were found earlier this month.
According to the Malay-language Utusan Malaysia newspaper, police found 30 large graves containing hundreds of corpses in mid-May in forests around the Perlis towns of Padang Besar and Wang Kelian.
And:
Since May 10 alone, more than 3,600 people — about half of them from Bangladesh and half Rohingya from Myanmar — have landed ashore in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Thousands more are believed to be trapped at sea in boats abandoned by their captains.
This is the type of vice with whom federal elected officials in the White House and the Capitol have chosen to confederate. Although the TPP remains secret (prompting the question: If the agreement was so good for the United States, wouldn’t supporters be screaming its virtues from the rooftops?), there have been enough leaks to shine a little light on the impending bypass of the Constitution.
Republicans, Democrats, and Americans of all political persuasions need to understand particulars of the TPP that threaten not only the economic vitality of the United States (contrary to the claims of senatorial advocates), but the fundamental principles of elective government, as well.
In November 2013, portions of the TPP draft agreement published by WikiLeaks contained sketches of President Obama’s plans to surrender American sovereignty to international tribunals.
Another WikiLeaks disclosure in January 2014 revealed that the president was attempting to surrender sovereignty over U.S. environmental policy to international bureaucrats interested in lowering those standards to mirror those of our TPP partner nations. Naturally, the green lobby criticized this concession, organizing demonstrations opposing the agreement.
U.S. copyright laws, Internet freedom, and web-based publishing would also be obliterated by the TPP, and, although it hasn’t been widely reported, the TPP would give the global government sweeping surveillance powers, as well.
Although the American people (and the people of all nations involved in the pact) are prevented from seeing or commenting on the treaty being ostensibly negotiated on their behalf, multinational corporations have seats at the trading table.
While the TPP grants corporate giants such as Walmart and Monsanto the power to bypass Congress and the courts, the elected representatives of the American people are kept from even seeing the draft version of the agreement.
As with the multitude of similar trade pacts the United States has formed, the ultimate aim of the TPP is the creation of a regional super government, thus the stonewalling of federal lawmakers who dare seek to assert some sort of oversight.
In the case of the TPP, the zone would be called the Free Trade Area of the Asia Pacific (FTAAP). Members of the proposed “free trade” bloc include all the current TPP participants: Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Vietnam, Brunei, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Mexico, Chile, Canada, and the United States. The regional trading partnership is intended to establish “a comprehensive free trade agreement across the region.”
The ultimate goal of the TPP isn’t just the creation of an FTAAP, though. Supporters of the deal insist that the TPP is a “trade agreement designed to achieve broad liberalization and a high degree of economic integration among the parties.”
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 country and our states into no more than subordinate outposts of a one-world government.
Equally significant is that 600 industry lobbyists and “advisors,” as well as unelected trade representatives, are at the table, while representatives from the public at large and businesses other than huge monopolies are conspicuously absent.
Each of the “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 unelected transnational globalists.
Americans who study the subject realize that the redrawing of national boundaries and domestic legal processes being carried out in secret by the “trade representatives” sitting around the TPP negotiating table is an attack on American laws, American courts, American freedom of expression, American sovereignty, and the American Constitution. Any person seeking the presidency must realize that executing many of the mandates of the TPP would require that person to violate the presidential oath of office.
And, in the case of Malaysia, we are tying ourselves to a regime that turns a blind eye to the brutality of human trafficking.
Algernon Sidney warned, “Liberty cannot be preserved if the people are corrupted.”
In the case of the TPP, that goes for the people’s partners, as well.
Photo of girl saved from human traffickers: AP Images
