We are for free trade and against protectionism. Yet we think that Donald Trump is right about the dangers of TPP.

What is TPP? What are the dangers it presents?

Dr. Ileana Johnson Pugh provides answers at Canada Free Press:

Presidential candidate Donald Trump talked about China and the bad trade deals that Congress has made with foreign countries to the detriment of our nation. It flew by the ears of most people unless they were directly involved or victims of such bad trade deals like NAFTA.

On November 5, 2015, our government released the full 6,000-page document of Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP, a proposed 12-nation trade deal which is skimpy on trade and large on giving away our manufacturing sector to the third world.

Seeking to establish one huge market, similar to the failed EU, TPP proposes to eliminate tariffs and other barriers to goods and services, trade, and investment, production and supply chains among TPP members, creating jobs in places other than U.S., raising the third world’s living standards by transfer of wealth, and increase welfare in third world nations. The tariff schedule includes “all goods”,  about “11,000 tariff lines” and “all service sectors”.

Investments will be made via TPP in digital economy, green technology, commercial relations, and capacity building assistance in needy countries (more wealth transfer from the U.S.). Little or no customs control will release goods immediately. Cross-border services will be supplied electronically. Digital E-commerce, environment, and custom duties are also addressed.

Under environment heading, marine fisheries, conservation issues, biodiversity, invasive alien species, climate change, and environmental goods and services are discussed. This document seems more about every facet of the economy and much less about trade.

Financial services, government procurement, intellectual property, investment, labor, legal issues, rules of origin, technical barriers to trade, telecommunications, temporary entry, textiles and apparel, and trade remedies are included in this huge document.

If Congress has not read the 2,700-page Affordable Care Act before passing it in secret, in the dead of night, they certainly will not read this monstrous 6,000-page TPP proposed trade bill. …

She quotes a commentator we don’t know, who, she thinks, gets it right:

According to A. J. Cameron, “free trade is euphemism for moving jobs out of the U.S. with the intention of destroying the U.S. economy, in order to bring us into the One World Government fold. NAFTA and GATT were just warm-ups for TPP.” The concept of free trade is just a ruse to facilitate the redistribution of jobs to other countries. The U.S. loses because “free trade stifles employment and wage growth,” forcing more Americans to depend on government for daily subsistence. Cameron believes that “the corporate tax rate is artificially high to provide cover for globalists to offshore operations and jobs. They have created a problem and designed a solution that only profits them.”

Corporatist globalists win all around, because of lower wages and job redistribution overseas …

China is not part of this “treaty” they call “partnership”. But there is a provision for a non-member nation to request membership into this “slush fund” for the corporatist elites.

Whether this profound crisis across the globe will motivate citizens to save the comatose patient called USA remains to be seen.

The experimental global change to de-nationalize, to devolve us into multi-nation “partnerships” in the name of free trade, and the fundamental transformation of western societies will have deep and long-lasting consequences for generations to come.

If TPP is a step by the international Left and anti-nation-state crony capitalists towards establishing World Government, it needs to be strenuously resisted.

And that it seems is something Donald Trump might be relied on to do.

The Pope has said something that has been interpreted as a probable reference to the on-going persecution of Christians in the Islamic world. He did it in the context of a speech recalling the genocide of Christian Armenians* by the Muslim state of Turkey a hundred years ago.

He said:

Today too, in fact, these conflicts at times degenerate into unjustifiable violence, stirred up by exploiting ethnic and religious differences.

That was it. That’s all. He added a suggestion that the heads of states and “International Organizations” might do something about it:

All who are Heads of State and of International Organizations are called to oppose such crimes with a firm sense of duty, without ceding to ambiguity or compromise.**

Uncountable numbers of Christians have been killed in this century by Muslims. In Nigeria, the Muslim organization Boko Haram shoots, hacks, burns its victims to death, buries them alive, enslaves them, and scatters them, destitute, from their homes. The Muslims cut off the limbs of living babies or throw them on fires. (See our post with pictures here.)

In Iraq and Syria, Christians are victimized in just such savage ways by the Islamic State (IS/ISIS/ISIL).

In Pakistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, and in Judea under the government of the Palestinian Authority – notably in Bethlehem, the putative birthplace of the Christian God – Christians are mercilessly oppressed. The numbers of Christians in Muslim lands continually dwindle as those survivors escape who can.

What is the Christian world doing about it? Nothing.

Are Christian leaders speaking out in angry protest? No, except for the remark made in passing by Pope Francis a few days ago. Maybe another Pope will talk about it more fully in another hundred years.

So what is the good of Christianity? If ever in its history it has been put to the test, it is now.

And it fails.

But it does not recognize its failure.

Recently we had a Christian visitor to this site who called himself/herself “LilySmith”. (I’ll use the pronouns “she” and “her” since it is a woman’s name.) She commented in defense of Christianity under our post A perfect match. She wrote this about what her Christian group is doing about the victimization of Christians by the Islamic State:

Governments, not individuals, are responsible for law enforcement and going to war. Christianity isn’t a government. Instead we are taught as individuals to overcome evil with good. In that vein, we support the work of Christian friends living in Iraq serving the people there in any way needed. We also support those helping Christians in the ME who are under stress right now.

What form does that “help” for the victims of “stress” take which she and her friends “support”? Food, clothing, shelter, a secure refuge? Or just sympathy? She did not say.

Nor did she say anything about wanting to see justice done. Nothing about stopping and punishing the perpetrators. That sort of thing is the concern of governments not Christians, she says.

Thinking like that is as true to Christianity as savage cruelty is true to Islam. Both are true to their holy texts.

Christianity does not speak of justice. It orders Christians to love and forgive the evil-doer. “Resist not evil,” it commands.

Christian websites which report the sufferings of Christians at the hands of Muslims, dwell on the brave endurance of the victims.

Here again we quote from the Pope’s speech from the Vatican, April 12, 2015, on the centenary anniversary of the Armenian genocide:

As Saint John Paul II said to you, “Your history of suffering and martyrdom is a precious pearl, of which the universal Church is proud …” .

… Saint Gregory of Narek, an extraordinary interpreter of the human soul, offers words which are prophetic for us: “I willingly blame myself with myriad accounts of all the incurable sins, from our first forefather through the end of his generations in all eternity, I charge myself with all these voluntarily.”  …

The Church thrives on suffering, on bloodshed, on agony. It invites persecution, and is thus a promoter of evil. And that makes it co-responsible for the atrocities Islam inflicts on Christians.

The Christians who are having their throats slit, their heads sawn off, their babies burnt alive, are martyrs, potential saints, and that is what matters; because Christianity is not a religion for the betterment of the life we live on this earth. Its concern is with an imaginary afterlife in an eternal heaven or hell.

So Christianity has not failed by its own lights.

But –

By every measure of reason, by the yardstick of accustomed morality and the norms of civilization, by the judgment of common-sense, by the test of whether it serves good and opposes evil, Christianity has failed utterly.  

 

* On the Armenian genocide, Dr. Ileana Johnson Pugh, writing at Canada Free Press, quotes Ambassador Henry Morgenthau, who “published in 1918 his personal account of the Armenian genocide”. ( A Personal Account of the Armenian Genocide, Henry Morgenthau, Cosimo Classics, New York, 2010). We extract a small part of the passages she quotes which describe the atrocities committed by the Turks.

Throughout the Turkish Empire a systematic attempt was made to kill all able-bodied men, not only for the purpose of removing all males who might propagate a new generation of Armenians, but for the purpose of rendering the weaker part of the population an easy prey.

When thousands failed to turn in weapons, the Turks ransacked churches, desecrated altars, marched the naked men and women through the streets, letting them be whipped by angry Turkish mobs. Those imprisoned who did not manage to flee into the woods and caves were subjected to the “bastinado” torture, the beating of the soles of the feet until they burst and had to be amputated.

Crucifixion, pulling of fingernails, of hairs, of eyebrows, tearing of flesh with red-hot pincers, and then pouring hot oil into the wounds were some of the barbaric methods of torture drawn from the records of the Spanish Inquisition.

Torture was just the beginning of the Armenian atrocities. What was to come was the actual destruction of “an entire Armenian race” by deporting it to the south and southeastern part of the Ottoman Empire, the Syrian desert and the Mesopotamian valley. …

The deportations took place through the spring and summer of 1915. The entire Armenian population of villages were ordered to appear in the main square, sometimes with little time to prepare, their homes and possessions confiscated for “safekeeping” and then divided among Turks. Once the deported Armenians had traveled several hours, they were attacked and killed in secluded valleys by Turkish peasants with clubs, hammers, axes, scythes, spades, and saws.

Out of a population of two million Armenians, only about 500,000 Armenians survived the genocide.

(Later in the twentieth century, Turkey was admitted as a member of NATO.)

** When the Inquisition condemned a heretic to be burnt at the stake, the Catholic Church handed the victim over to the secular authorities whom it compelled to carry out the atrocious deed, so the Church might keep itself clean of the sin of killing. The term used by the Church for the handing-over was that he or she was “relaxed”.