The New American – by William F. Jasper
President Barack Obama and leaders of the European Union (EU) issued a Joint Statement at their March 26 meeting in Brussels declaring, among other things, their coordinated position on assistance to the Ukraine, as well as their continued flogging of the discredited “climate change” alarmism, and commitment to conclude the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) agreement between the EU and the United States.
The Joint Statement also reiterated support for the World Trade Organization and the United Nations, as well as support for UN/NATO military intervention in Africa, and implementation of various disarmament treaties, including the UN Arms Trade Treaty that targets the Second Amendment and the rights of individual U.S. citizens to keep and bear firearms.
President Obama, meeting with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President José Manuel Barroso, emphasized that “Europe, including the European Union, is the cornerstone of our engagement around the world. We are more secure and we are more prosperous, the world is safer and more just, when Europe and America stand as one.”
“We, the leaders of the European Union and the United States, met today in Brussels to reaffirm our strong partnership,” the trio declared in opening paragraph of their Joint Statement. They continued: “We seek a landmark Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership to build our common prosperity. We undertake joint efforts to build security and stability around the globe and to tackle pressing global challenges like climate change.”
Concerning Ukraine, the Joint Statement says:
Today in Ukraine, the basic principles of international law and security in the 21st century are being challenged. The EU and the US support the Ukrainian people and their right to choose their own future and remain committed to uphold the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine…. The EU and the US stand by the Ukrainian government in its efforts to stabilise Ukraine and undertake reforms, including through assistance.
In Section 5 of the Joint Statement, the U.S.-EU leaders returned to the TTIP agenda. “Today we reaffirmed our commitment to conclude expeditiously a comprehensive and ambitious Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP),” they proclaimed, asserting further that, “We commit ourselves to conducting these negotiations with clarity and in a manner that builds support among our publics.”
However, if President Obama and his EU colleagues were truly interested in “conducting these negotiations with clarity” and building genuine public support for the TTIP, they would end the secrecy that has enveloped the TTIP process from the beginning. As we have reported (“Secretly Trading Away Our Independence” and “EU/U.S. — Transatlantic Convergence”), the TTIP process has been kept secret not only from the press and the American public, but even from our elected representatives in the U.S. Congress, while privileged corporate and activist NGO representatives have been allowed not only to see the text, but to provide input to the negotiation process.
The TTIP proposes to extend the political-economic “integration” process, by which the central EU authority in Brussels is swallowing up the sovereignty of its member states, across the Atlantic, to entangle the United States in the same independence-crushing process.
Several days before President Obama headed to Brussels, his point man on the TTIP, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman (shown above), said that he wants a trans-Atlantic trade deal to be as strong as the longstanding NATO alliance between the United States and Europe, “We want for TTIP [Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership] to help build an economic and a trade relationship that is as strong as the strongest military alliance in the world, but fundamentally it has to be driven by the underlying economics,” Froman said at The Atlantic’s annual Economy Summit in Washington.
White House/Pratt House Merger Campaign
In announcing his desire to craft a TTIP that would be the equivalent of an economic NATO, Froman was not speaking only (or even primarily) for the Obama White House, but also for Pratt House, the headquarters of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the globalist brain trust that has been the guiding subversive force behind U.S. administrations (both Democrat and Republican) for much of the past century. Froman is a CFR member, as is his boss, Secretary of State John Kerry, Under Secretary of State Robert D. Hormats, and many of the other top officials at State and other Cabinet departments. (See: “CFR Applauds European Union’s ‘Real Subversion of Sovereignty.’”)
In a previous article we provided more background on Froman:
The man leading Team Obama’s trade offensive is Michael Froman, assistant to the president of the United States and deputy national security advisor for international economic affairs. A Wall Street insider, Froman was a managing director at Citigroup, and also served as president and chief executive officer of CitiInsurance before joining the Obama administration. No doubt his previous service in Brussels with the Forward Studies Unit of the European Commission also figured in his appointment, though to Americans in the know this entry on his résumé would be recognized as at least cause for concern, if not an outright negative.
Although virtually an unknown to the vast majority of Americans, Froman is definitely known in the higher circles of power that determine the economic and political fates of nations. Froman is not only a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the more exclusive Trilateral Commission, but also a member of that super-secret, super-elite annual gathering known as the Bilderberg Group. He is thus qualified to serve as the lead “Sherpa” guiding U.S. policy at the G7, G8, and G20 summits. And Froman’s fellow globalists in the CFR-dominated “mainstream” media could be counted on to ignore, cover up, or minimize his egregious corruption and conflicts of interest in the massive bailout of his employer (Citigroup) — which netted him $7.4 million, including a $2.25 million year-end bonus for 2008. In addition, Froman reportedly played the central role in hiring New York Fed chief Timothy Geithner (CFR, TC) as Obama’s treasury secretary, even while Geithner was engineering the massive taxpayer bailout of Citigroup. And to make matters even more incestuously corrupt, Froman hired Jamie Rubin, the son of Citigroup CEO Robert Rubin (CFR, former Clinton treasury secretary, former co-chairman of Goldman Sachs), as a headhunter for the Obama transition team. Instead of spending time in prison for fraudulent mortgaged-backed “collateralized debt obligations” that enriched Citigroup and helped bring on the economic crisis, Rubin, Geithner, Froman, and company made off like bandits. Remember this when Froman and Obama talk about “transparency” and the supposed benefits of TTIP.
Arthur Thompson, CEO of The John Birch Society, warns that the Joint Statement by President Obama and the EU leaders should sound very loud alarm bells for the American people. “It should be very apparent to all who take the time to read the Joint Statement that President Obama, Barroso and Van Rompuy are exposing their real, hidden intentions,” he told The New American. “They are holding out the carrot of ‘trade’ with all its false promises of prosperity and jobs, but they are also tying it together with global-warming regulations, Ukraine aid, the EU banking union, NATO military intervention around the globe, and UN disarmament treaties, including the very dangerous Arms Trade Treaty. They are trying to tie our hands down in all of these areas, so that we will not be able to act independently in our own interests, as a free, sovereign, independent nation.”
The U.S.-EU Brussels Summit confirms, says Thompson, the wisdom of America’s Founding Fathers in opposing entangling alliances with European powers and other foreign nations. “The Founders disagreed among themselves on many things,” he noted, “but they all agreed that, while our people should be free to trade and carry on a wide array of relations with the peoples of other nations, our government must not be allowed to entangle our political and economic system with those of other nations. That is why we must oppose the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and alert more Americans to the very real threats that the TTIP poses on multiple fronts.”