Washington Globalists Undermine America's National Interests

By Brenda Walker
Published in The Social Contract
Volume 16, Number 4 (Summer 2006)
Issue theme: "Immigration and economics: an interview with Cornell University Labor Economist Vernon M. Briggs, Jr."
https://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc1604/article_1414.shtml



Many Americans today are wondering whatever happened to their representative government, as they watch Washington ignore the public will on the most pressing domestic issue, that of controlling immigration. The people have reasonably demanded that America's borders be defended and immigration anarchy end, yet the Senate and President have instead turned Washington into an employment agency for the global economy.

Polls have consistently shown that Americans across the political spectrum want immigration to be legal, controlled and reduced. In most areas of public policy, there is a healthy degree of accord between the powerful and average citizens, but when the subject is the confluence of immigration, borders and national sovereignty, the disagreement could not be more severe.

The majority of Americans remain attached to the idea of one nation under sovereignty and within borders, where citizens are protected by the Bill of Rights. Most would agree with Czech President Vaclav Klaus' statement "You cannot have democratic accountability in anything bigger than a nation state."

The others, the group which Prof. Samuel Huntington calls the transnational elites, feel no such nation-based loyalty, and share instead the one-world values of their class. They imagine that they know better how to run the planet, and believe democracy and sovereignty are tiresome inefficiencies on the global economy. As Huntington has remarked, the global elite 'have little need for national loyalty, view national boundaries as obstacles that thankfully are vanishing, and see national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite's global operations.'

Prof. Huntington, you may remember, coined the phrase 'clash of civilizations' as well as 'Davos man,' the latter referring to the new species who runs the global economy for the benefit of the corporations governing the brave new post-national world. While Americans still celebrate patriotic holidays and fight enemies based on the presumed national interest, the ruling elite have moved to a different script without mentioning the change to the citizenry.

A telling vignette of the Davos creature was described in Jeff Faux's book 'The Global Class War' in which a corporate lobbyist approached him in Washington during the NAFTA debate saying, 'We have to help (then Mexican president) Salinas; he went to Harvard. He's one of us.' The lobbyist was not a loyal alum, but was appealing to class solidarity among well educated, elitist partisans of globalism, who have relegated the nation-state to a tired piece of history.

A 2002 poll done by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations found that while 60 percent of the general public regarded the present level of immigration to be a 'critical threat to the vital interests of the United States,' a mere 14 percent of the nation's leadership felt the same. The divergence of views has huge consequences in terms of policy.

The corporate elites, in collusion with many Washington politicians, are quietly creating a less sovereign America to become a border-free member of a North American union. Part of the business elites' game plan is unfettered access to the cheap labor south of the Rio Grande, creating a kind of slavery-lite for the 21st century. It's all in the name of competitiveness of course, with outsourcing a part of the same strategy.

This is no conspiracy theory, but was openly explained in the Council on Foreign Relations paper, 'Building a North American Community,' published in March 2005 (available for downloading at the CFR.org website). The plan has made the rounds in Washington, though without much media attention, receiving the approval of well known political leaders, such as former Massachusetts Governor William Weld and Senator Richard Lugar.

The Washington friends of globalism fill the political spectrum from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush in supporting multiculturalism, open borders and so-called free trade. They are bolstered on the left by universities promoting diversity as the highest good and on the right by business pursuing near-free labor.

Globalist economic policies have already swept away the blue-collar American middle class, as factories have gone overseas and exploitable immigrants and illegal aliens have taken jobs that couldn't be moved. Millions of working class citizens have a lowered standard of living because they had no representation both unions and the Democratic Party have long since gone over to the dark side and embraced globalism against the well being of honest, hard-working Americans.

The only widely heard alarm to the dismantling of the middle class was the 1992 publication of "America, What Went Wrong" by Donald Bartlett and James Steele. The best-selling book started out as a newspaper series in the Philadelphia Inquirer, where it received the paper's largest-ever reader response. It was read by thousands of grateful Americans who had thought their community's economic misery was unique. Instead they learned that the destruction of their middle-class jobs was an investment strategy for post-national businessmen.

Today the mighty manufacturing engine that made America a world power has been broken down and shipped to countries where slavery-like conditions prevail. So intense is the competition for the cheapest labor that there is now job outsourcing from Red China to Vietnam, since labor costs of $72/month are too high for some businessmen in the PRC. In this contest of wage shrinkage, American workers simply can't compete, nor should they have to.

George Bush claims to be spreading democracy around the planet, but is reducing self-rule at home as a result of his globalist economic agenda. Years of sober demands from citizens that immigration and borders be brought under control â€" a basic component of normal sovereignty and security â€" have been ignored and demagogued by both parties.

Conservative writer David Frum stated during a Fox News interview in May that 'Bush believes in a continental labor market,' as if that were the most natural thing in the world. Frum made the remark in passing, as he was defending the President. But millions of Americans who voted for George Bush might not have done so had they known he planned to offer U.S. jobs to Mexicans as he dissolved the United States into the North American Union.

What the elite Davos men and women envision is a 21st century feudalism, with the few controlling the destinies of the many. The core belief is that business knows best and can run the planet far better than the democracies of the unlettered rabble who still imagine themselves to be citizens. The economic effect will be a continued worldwide flattening of incomes, with the losers being the middle class of the first world. A tiny middle class will remain to provide services and intermediary management, much as occurs in Latin America today. But even professionally trained people will suffer economically, as they compete with similarly educated persons in India and China, even in situations thought free from outsourcing, e.g. medicine.

Few Americans know the extent of this latest escalation of globalization. Many would find it incomprehensible that the borders and sovereignty which millions in uniform fought and died to preserve are now being given away by our elected representatives behind closed doors. Such activities would have been called treason in an earlier time, but now the ruin of a great nation for the profit of a few is what passes for business.

The struggle to return immigration to a lawful endeavor is far more than a battle between competing economic philosophies. The outcome of immigration 'reform' and related issues will determine whether America remains a nation at all. At this juncture, very few Americans know how threatened the nation is.

About the author

Brenda Walker, a frequent contributor to The Social Contract, is the publisher of LimitsToGrowth.org and ImmigrationsHumanCost.org.

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