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.
(Click here to tell
your representative and senators to "Stop the NAFTA Super Highway
Steppingstone to a North American Union.")
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 http://capwiz.com/jbs/home/ for contact information and
a sample letter. 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." http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/article_4114.shtml
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