In George Orwell’s nightmarish novel, “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” Winston Smith lives in a world divided into but three competing countries, which span the globe, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, the former being dominated by the ever-intrusive Big Brother.

The story was written, said Orwell, out of fear that a centralization of power over all economic activity in the name of socialism meant, in time, all freedoms would be lost.

Was his a far-fetched idea? Orwell was schooled as a socialist. His proposal was far from fantastic. He knew socialism’s potential to employ economic regionalism as a powerful tool to subvert liberty everywhere.

Granted, proponents of the FTAA won’t quote Orwell, nor brag about economic regionalism equaling control or super-government. They do speak of "free trade," and "spreading the blessings of liberty to the less fortunate." But talk is cheap; regional regulatory bodies, with their endless pages of lawerese, real. And then, there are those rare outbursts of candor from those who know the score.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, was one who knew the score and provided such outbursts. At the Gorbachev State of the World Forum in 1995, he stated:

“We cannot leap into world government in one quick step . . . [T]he precondition for eventual globalization - genuine globalization - is progressive regionalization, because thereby we move toward larger, more stable, more cooperative union.”

Similarly, in his 1970 book "Between Two Ages," he called for the forging of a "community of the developed nations that would embrace the Atlantic states, the more advanced European communist states, and Japan" as a stepping stone to world government - namely, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. Three years later, David Rockefeller, then Council of Foreign Relations chairman, formally launched the Trilateral Commission and made Brzezinski - this man who praised Marxism as "the best available insight into contemporary reality" - as its first director.

Thirty-two years later, stage one, the European Union (EU) is an accomplished fact.

And mind you, the European Union is not about free trade. Drenched in socialism, the EU boasts heavy regulation, wealth redistribution, planned economies, trade wars, suicidal immigration laws, plans for an army, antagonism toward Christianity, and lately, warrant-less communist-like raids in the night upon businessmen. Christopher Story, the respected publisher of the London-based Soviet Analyst, warned in a recent interview that the EU is “purely a Communist Program." Michael Gorbachev, visiting London in March 2000, described the EU as “the new European Soviet.”

Eurasia is here. It began with economic union; it ended in political union. It’s future, unless its members wise up and breakup will be troublesome.

The starting point for Orwellian nation number two, Oceania, was NAFTA. Trilateralist, CFR member, and former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, confessed in 1993:

"[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, but the architecture of a new international system."

If NAFTA was the most creative step toward a new world order, the sequel that unites all of North and South America under the FTAA is one of the most aggressive steps toward that order.

Aggressive is no exaggeration.

Setting the stage for a tyranny of executive power under the FTAA, the Bush Administration yearns for the unlimited power to negotiate "trade" treaties which will create a new super-government over the United States and plunge our Constitution and our country into a new world order. To do so, the President has made it clear that his efforts to create the FTAA (by 2005) "depend on one thing: Congress must pass Trade Promotion Authority," H.R. 3005.

Indeed.

H.R. 3005 specifically gives the President power to negotiate treaties without the constitutional requirement for the advice and consent of the Senate, leaving the Senate the minimal power to vote up or down on done deals.

Or to put it another way, the President is saying, ’No more democratic resistance; no more intractable Congresses putting parochial interests in front of national interests; from now on, a benevolent "trust me" dictatorship under the leadership of an "enlightened" President is better for America.’

Can you hear it? Can you see it? Can you sense it? This is power politics 101.

The FTAA, like NAFTA, like the EU, cries ’free trade!’ and ’progress!" But reality cries ’socialist new world order!’

Action Corner:

Stop the FTAA! Oppose H.R. 3005, Trade Promotion Authority for the President, and continue to voice your support for H.R. 1146, Ron Paul’s, American Sovereignty Restoration Act. E-mail your Senators and Representatives.