Praise be to Rep. Bill Orton, the only member of Congress from Utah with the courage to vote against the North American Free Trade Agreement.
In their nationally televised debate on the subject, Vice President Al Gore "defeated" H. Ross Perot in an exchange of cliches on the free trade/-pro-tec-tion-ism debate that barely touched upon the trade agreement itself. The real issue of sovereignty was not discussed.For all of the conflicting claims in television ads about jobs potentially gained or lost, the real importance of NAFTA was frequently disregarded in a fracas that came to resemble a professional wrestling performance.
The principle involved is whether the United States is to stand resolute as a sovereign nation or become a cog in the machinery of the new world order.
Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, a member of the executive committee of the Trilateral Commission and a long-time power in the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), was fairly open this last summer in the Los Angeles Times.
He said passage of NAFTA "will represent the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War . . . " NAFTA "is not a conventional trade agreement," he noted, "but the architecture of a new international system."
James F. Rinehart
Price