With the collapse of talks in Geneva, Switzerland this Tuesday, the Doha round of trade liberalization launched seven years ago under the WTO arm of the United Nations is now officially on indefinite hold.

The heavy hitters in the negotiations, the United States and the European Union found that they did not quite have the power to push their agenda past economic upstarts like China and India.

The Wall Street Journal, referencing unnamed "trade diplomats and experts", reported with grave concern: "The setback could also signal an end to some 60 years of continuous expansion of global free-trade deals."

What this really means is that China and India took a pass on allowing further access to their markets by U.S. and European multinational corporations and their attendant banking network. That network is currently experiencing a slight correction in how it does business, but give the Federal Reserve and its central bank affiliates some time to promote a vast expansion of their power in order to alleviate the crisis they created and you will see a renewed effort to bring laggard countries into the WTO framework.

While the banking and financial services sector reconfigures and empowers itself, look for calls in the U.S. Congress to "keep free-trade alive" by passing the currently stalled Columbia, Panama and South Korea Free Trade Agreements (FTAs). It is premature to imagine that the effort to create political merger through economic merger has ground to a halt. We should also be on guard for the fall back option of expanding political control through the historically most popular route: war.

Going forward, the best way to preserve freedom is to work for truly free trade and open markets. A good first step would be to ignore those working for global cartels at places like the Wall Street Journal and repeal most of the trade agreements of the last 60 years. These pacts were mainly designed to determine who the winners and losers would be in a convoluted system of trade cartels. The failure of talks in Geneva this week demonstrated that the contorsions necessary to keep the system together are simply becoming too unmanageble for globalist planners. The unseen hand of the free market can't be duplicated by thousands of pages of "free-trade" rules. 

Endnote: It is not insignificant that the debt-based money system of the western-led world is currently facing a day of reckonning. To keep the edifice from tipping over, the system's bureaucrats seek to bring more subjects into their debt pyramid through trade or war. For those who wish to avoid war, the objective should be to abolish our system of debt-based fiat money created by the Federal Reserve. Catch up on The John Birch Society's efforst to "Abolish the FED."