All lame duck sessions of Congress are bad.  The upcoming one being called for to start on November 17th could be one of the worst, since the WTO was snuck through with the bipartisan leadership of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in 1994.

With the world's financial crisis as prologue, world leaders will be conducting a summit meeting in Washington, DC on December 15th - the weekend immediately prior to the target start date of the upcoming lame duck session of Congress.  As weekend after weekend of crisis meetings in September demonstrated, there is every indication that what gets decided upon in the November 15th Summit will be significant and immediate.

The stated purpose of the November 15th summit is, "to discuss the current financial crisis, its causes and efforts to resolve it through more effective regulation and reform." 

As the agents of coercion in society, be on guard when you hear apparatchiks of the state talking about becoming "more effective."

This impromptu summit is being billed as a first step to a Bretton Woods II.  The agreement near the close of WWII that effectively established the US dollar as the world's reserve currency - a hard gold-backed currency that the world could faithfully rely on for conducting international trade and banking. 

Bretton Woods II also established the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).  While the use of the US dollar as a reserve currency for most of the world's central banks occurred almost immediately, the GATT did not become fully functional until the United States joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) through an act of Congress, which as mentioned above was passed in the 1994 lame duck session. 

In the era before email and virtual meetings, the first Bretton Woods conference took 22 days to hammer out key decisions.  While the November 15 meeting is supposed to be just a starting point for launching various "working groups," expect some immediate actions to be called for. 

Word is also out today that lame duck president Bush is looking to leave a legacy and that legacy may just be to use the world economic crisis as an excuse to ram through a deal on the stalled Doha Round of trade negotiations.  The purpose of the Doha Round is to put real teeth into the World Trade Organization so that it can become what its founders always intended it to be: the enforcement arm of a global cartel that seeks to control all economic activity on the planet.

Over the next few weeks, our representatives in Congress are going to be given several ultimatums.  With Bretton Woods I as the guide, we can expect that two of these will involve historic changes in international trade and banking rules.  Neither of these changes as they will be presented are going to be pleasant for citizens of the United States.

If it were easy for We the People to pull off successfully, the short demand we should make known to our Congressmen would be this:  "No lame ducks! Haven't you done enough damage to our country already?  Please stay home! "

However, with the recent utter collapse of resistance in Congress to the $700 billion (and counting) FED bailout bill, it would be foolish of us to harbor any expectations that a "Contact your Congressman" campaign alone is going to be successful.  Sprays of buckshot are not going to work on these lame ducks.  It's much harder work, but we have to pool the strength of existing activist networks, local business people and community leaders to prepare to deliver sustained volleys of mortar rounds.  Those Congressman who decided they had the body armor to ignore the scattered pleas of their individual constituents need to discover that incoming for round II is going to be much harder to dodge with impunity. 

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