Coming Through! The NAFTA Super
Highway
by Kelly
Taylor
August 7,
2006
The
planned NAFTA Super Highway would radically reconfigure not only the physical
landscape of these United States, but our political and economic landscapes as
well.
Kelly Taylor
is an Austin-based writer and filmmaker, and the producer of a politically
based TV talk show.
All across America, mammoth construction projects are
preparing to launch. The NAFTA Super Highway is on a fast track and it's headed
your way. If you don't help derail it, you may soon be run over by it - both
figuratively and literally.
The NAFTA Super Highway is a venture unlike any previous
highway construction project. It is actually a daisy chain of dozens of
corridors and coordinated projects that are expected to stretch out for several
decades, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and end up radically
reconfiguring not only the physical landscape of these United States, but our
political and economic landscapes as well.
In Texas, the NAFTA Super Highway is being sold as the
Trans Texas Corridor. In simplest terms, the TTC is a superhighway system
including tollways for passenger vehicles and trucks; lanes for commercial and
freight trucks; tracks for commuter rail and high-speed freight rail; depots
for all rail lines; pipelines for oil, water, and natural gas; and electrical
towers and cabling for communication and telephone lines. One of the proposed
corridor routes, TTC-35, is parallel to the present Interstate Highway 35
(I-35), slightly to the east, running north from Mexico to Canada. Its present
scope is 4,000 miles long, 1,200 feet wide, with an estimated cost of $183
billion of taxpayer funds. It runs through Kansas City.
Integration vs. Independence
How would all of this affect you, your family, and your
community? Let us count the ways. One of the most striking features of the
proposed Super Highway is the plan to do away with our borders, as evidenced by
the joint U.S.-Mexico Customs facility already under construction in Kansas
City, Missouri. A U.S. Customs checkpoint in Kansas City? But that's a thousand
miles inside America's heartland; isn't the purpose of U.S. Customs to check
people and cargo at our borders?
Ah, but the mere asking of that question shows that you're
still operating under the old paradigm that sees the United States as an
independent, sovereign nation. However, that paradigm began to change following
passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. NAFTA,
which was sold to the American public as a simple trade agreement, was actually
far more than that, setting in motion a process for the gradual social,
economic, and political "integration," or merger, of the three NAFTA countries
- Canada, the United States, and Mexico - into a North American Union.
In 2005, this merger process became more explicit and
aggressive when President Bush, Mexico's President Vicente Fox, and Canada's
Prime Minister Martin launched what they call the Security and Prosperity
Partnership of North America (SPP). Any serious study of the SPP will clearly
reveal that its ultimate aim is the dissolution of the United States into a
North American Union patterned after the increasingly dictatorial regional
government now running the European Union. Henceforth, under this plan, the
borders between our nations will be incrementally erased in favor of a joint
"perimeter" around all three countries.
One part of this plan calls for streamlining the flow of
traffic from Mexico, including a massive increase in containers from China and
the Far East offloading at Mexican seaports and then being transported by truck
and rail into the United States via the new NAFTA Super Highway. These new
cargo streams would cross the border in supposedly secure FAST lanes, checked
only electronically until the first Customs stop in Kansas City!
What about all the repeated promises by the White House
and Congress to make border security America's "top priority"? Moving Customs
inspections hundreds of miles inland obviously contradicts those promises and
incalculably increases the opportunities for smugglers (of drugs, illegal
aliens, terrorists, weapons of mass destruction, and other contraband) to enter
the country. Our borders are already incredibly porous and undermanned;
securing the entire route from the Mexico-Texas border to Kansas City would
require thousands more Border Patrol and Customs officers. Would these
agents be provided? Could this route be made any more secure than our southern
border? Does it make sense to effectively extend the border via this route when
we are now doing such a poor job securing our existing border?
Under the Radar
Moreover, we can expect that similar inland joint Customs
facilities, like the one in Kansas City, will be included in the other
Mexico-to-Canada superhighway corridors. Of course, these corridors will not be
secured, and the result - as intended - would be the de facto merger of
immigration and Customs enforcement and the obliteration of the current
national borders within the planned North American Union. That is precisely
what one of the main architects of the SPP plan, Professor Robert Pastor of
American University and the Council on Foreign Relations, has repeatedly
advocated in his writings, speeches, and congressional testimony. (See sidebar
on page 14)
How is it possible that something this radical has gone so
far virtually unnoticed when illegal immigration and border security are among
the hottest political topics of the day? The politicians and the private
contractors who have been pushing this merger scheme intended it that way,
knowing full well that adoption and successful implementation of the plan would
depend on keeping it under the public radar.
Thanks largely to the investigative work of Joyce Mucci,
who heads the Kansas City-based Mid-America Immigration Reform Coalition, and
author/economist Jerome Corsi, the NAFTA Super Highway has begun to be a very
hot topic. Using Missouri's Sunshine Law, Mrs. Mucci's group has pried loose a
number of documents that are causing the public and private champions of the
NAFTA Super Highway to squirm and stonewall. "They were going along great guns
with this whole plan, with all of their high-powered politicians, law firms, PR
firms, and corporate contractors - and virtually no opposition, until now,"
Mrs. Mucci told The New American. "We're just volunteers, so we don't have the
money and influence they have, but we are digging out the truth." And she is
hopeful that if enough taxpayers, voters, and property owners learn about all
the horrendous ramifications of the Super Highway plan, they will shut it down
before it can do the damage envisioned.
Super Highway Robbery
Aside from erasing our borders - which is no small matter
in and of itself - the NAFTA Super Highway would profoundly impact Americans in
many other ways. The ones who will be most immediately affected are those whose
homes, farms, ranches, businesses, and communities lay in the paths of any of
the planned routes. Millions of acres are scheduled to be paved over and that
means using eminent domain to condemn lots of private property for the Super
Highway corridors and rights-of-way.
But every American, ultimately, would be
dramatically impacted by this onrushing scheme. How? First of all, in the
pocketbook - with increased taxes and tolls. With an aggregate price tag of
hundreds of billions of dollars - for projects in the U.S. and Mexico -
enormous increases in federal, state, and local taxes are a certainty. To
assist in financing the mammoth Super Highway, plans call for converting many
current roads, which taxpayers have already paid for, to tollways for all motor
vehicles.
If the NAFTA Super Highway goes through as planned,
millions of Americans can expect to pay with their jobs as well. Just as the
NAFTA trade policies have driven millions of jobs out of the United States, the
NAFTA Super Highway will accelerate the job exodus. Although the Super Highway
corridors are being sold locally as projects to ease congestion and facilitate
U.S. economic competitiveness, their main purpose, very clearly, is to create
an arterial network for speeding the delivery of manufactured products into
the United States through Canada and Mexico.
Thus, U.S. taxpayers would have to pay for reduced
transportation costs for foreign producers. In addition, the "continental" plan
calls for U.S. taxpayers to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to extend this
"infrastructure development" (highways, railways, bridges, power plants,
telecommunications, seaports) through Mexico and Central America.
How will it do that? Under the Coordinated Border
Infrastructure Program of the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient
Transportation Equity Act of 2005 - A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU) (whew!),
U.S. funds apportioned to a border state may be used to construct a highway
project in Canada or Mexico, if that project directly facilitates cross-border
vehicle and cargo movement! Just think - your tax dollars may now be sent to
Canada or Mexico to aid the entry of illegal aliens into the United States,
like it or not.
Additionally, SAFETEA-LU allows U.S. states to use tolling
on a pilot basis to finance Interstate construction and reconstruction, and to
establish tolls for existing Interstate highways to fund the new Super
Highway corridors. Austin, Texas, is already experiencing fierce struggles over
converting its already-paid-for Interstate and state highways to toll
roads, but few Texans understand that this new tolling is to be the mechanism
for funding the leviathan Trans Texas Corridor. Since Austin has been
identified as the pilot city in the nation for testing the new toll
policies, you can assume that what passes here is coming your way.
This planned wedding of Mexico's cheap labor force with
brand new infrastructure would make Mexico an irresistible magnet for all
manufacturers now remaining in the United States. Even those companies who
wanted to keep their operations here would likely be forced by cheaper
competitors to join the exodus. The United States, until very recently the
manufacturing capital of the world, will continue its downward spiral into
increasingly dangerous dependence on foreign manufacturers for almost
everything, even as burgeoning inflation makes everything more expensive,
devastating much of our middle class.
Scores of Corridors
An additional Super Highway route known as the Interstate
69 corridor (TTC-69) would enter Texas from Mexico as three spur lines at
Laredo, McAllen, and Brownsville, which then will join together to head north
through Houston, to Memphis, Tennessee, to Port Huron, Michigan, to Toronto,
Canada.
Wait, there's more. To the west of the proposed TTC lies
the proposed route of the Ports-to-Plains Corridor, running north from Laredo
through West Texas, the Oklahoma Panhandle, to Denver and ultimately Canada.
What? Another one? Yes, and plans are very advanced. Its website identifies
this corridor as a NAFTA corridor alternative to TTC-35, the one paralleling
I-35.
What does the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT)
have to say about this? Once again, stonewalling rules. In telephone interviews
with congenial TxDOT employees, the expected mantra repeated to this writer is
how necessary the corridor is to accommodate projected population and trade
growth, and how beneficial it would be to the economies of Texas, the U.S., and
Mexico. TxDOT's Public Information officer denied that the TTC was part of any
bigger scheme of nationwide corridor building, and claimed that notion was
simply misinformation. Yet in a June 30, 2001 article in the Austin American
Statesman, the same spokesperson claimed the aforementioned Ports-to-Plains
Corridor would be linked to existing Interstate highways in Denver as part of a
NAFTA super corridor.
And that's not all. There's also CANAMEX, another super
corridor like the TTC, which spans the West from Mexico to Canada going through
Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Montana. And we learn from the CANAMEX
Corridor Coalition website that the number of congressionally designated
high priority corridors in the United States has been expanded from 43 to 80!
Yes, 80 corridor routes have been designated across the United States in an
effort to speed the construction of infrastructure necessary for what the SPP
calls "the streamlined movement of legitimate travelers and cargo across our
shared borders."
Research on any High Priority Corridor will lead the
reader into a hairball of studies, alliances, pricing programs, transportation
acts, administration agencies, reports, committees, partnerships, and on and
on, all designed, we believe, to obscure the real agenda. The idea for these 80
super corridors was not conceived to promote trade and better the economic
development of all participating communities. When viewed in the aggregate,
they can only be seen as a means to so thoroughly restructure and integrate the
three countries so as to permanently blur the distinctions, and to make their
merger into a regional government seamless and even appealing.
The NAFTA Super Highway is such an integral part of the
continental merger plan that the entire scheme could be at least temporarily
road-blocked if it does not proceed. If it does proceed, American government
will no longer provide its time-tested protections against tyranny and
socialism, as huge chunks of American law will be rendered void, and replaced
by an incomprehensible mess of "trade" law. All rowers are needed at the oars,
and immediately. If you've asked yourself why you did not know about a project
of this magnitude, or where Congress got the authority to designate High
Priority Corridors in the first place, your first job is to contact your
representative and howl. Wake the town and tell the people, or the town will be
paved over.
Tell your representative and senators to "Stop the
NAFTA Super Highway Steppingstone to a North American Union" by phone, fax, or
e-mail. Go to www.capwiz.com/jbs/home/ for contact information and a sample
letter.
On the
Road to EU-style Governance
by William F. Jasper
Perhaps you're shaking your head in disbelief, wondering
how anything as massive and costly as the NAFTA Super Highway could have
progressed so far without your notice? Well, it may be that you don't belong to
the right clubs - such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the
Trilateral Commission (TC).
As reported in previous articles in these pages, one of
the principal authors of the Security and Prosperity Partnership merger is Dr.
Robert Pastor, a vice-chairman of the CFR's Task Force on the Future of North
America and author of Toward a North American Community. Pastor's
writings and speeches provided the blueprint for the Bush-Fox-Martin SPP merger
plan.
In November 2002, Professor Pastor addressed a meeting of
David Rockefeller's super-elite Trilateral Commission in Toronto, Canada. He
opened his speech, entitled "A North American Community," with the following
sentence: "The entry into force of the North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) in 1994 represented a breath-taking continental opportunity."
Among the many things Pastor proposed was "establishing a
single 'North American Customs and Immigration Service,'" to be composed of
"officials from the three governments, trained together." He also called on the
NAFTA governments (Mexico, Canada, and the United States) to create a North
American Commission of "distinguished individuals" (like himself) whose "task
would be to help the leaders think continentally." One of the new commission's
duties would be to "develop an integrated continental plan for transportation
and infrastructure." This should include, he said, "new highway corridors on
the Pacific Coast and into Mexico," as well as "a plan that would permit
mergers of the railroads and development of high-speed rail corridors."
Pastor cited a World Bank study that had concluded that
"Mexico needs $20 billion a year for ten years, just for infrastructure."
That's $200 billion, for starters. Where will such sizable sums come from?
Pastor proposed the creation of a "North American Development Fund, whose
priority would be to connect the U.S.-Mexico border region to central and
southern Mexico." This new multi-billion dollar fund, Pastor suggested, could
be administered by the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. That
would be very convenient, since both of these institutions are run by Pastor's
fellow CFR members.
In 2004, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a leading proponent
of open borders and amnesty for illegal aliens, introduced S. 2941, the North
American Investment Fund Act. The legislation's official title says it is "a
bill to authorize the President to negotiate the creation of a North American
Investment Fund to promote economic and infrastructure integration among
Canada, Mexico, and the United States." Section four says: "The Fund shall make
grants for projects … to construct roads in Mexico to facilitate trade
between Mexico and Canada, and Mexico and the United States." Cornyn's bill was
introduced on June 29 of this year as S. 2622.
Pastor and other NAFTA/SPP architects have repeatedly
cited the European Union (EU) as the model for us to follow. The EU countries
have given up control over their borders for a common perimeter; we are
expected to follow suit. "Are North Americans prepared to give up their
sovereignty?" Pastor asked rhetorically, in his Trilateral speech. "The term
'sovereignty' is one of the most widely used, abused, and least understood in
the diplomatic lexicon.... Sovereignty, in brief, is not the issue." Leaders
must throw off "aging conceptions of sovereignty," he avers, in favor of
continental "integration" and "convergence."
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