North American Union

by Kerby Anderson

            If you haven’t heard much about the North American Union and the building of the NAFTA Superhighway, you will soon. These issues are going to be given a great deal more prominence in the news in the next few weeks. For example, there will be a press conference next week at the National Press Club. Attending will be such people as Howard Phillips, Jerome Corsi, Phyllis Schlafly, as well as members of the House of Representatives who have introduced a resolution (H. CON. RES. 487) calling for an investigation into the North American Union and the NAFTA Superhighway System. The sponsors of the bill are Virgil Goode, Jr. (R-VA), Walter Jones (R-NC), Tom Tancredo (R-CO), and Ron Paul (R-TX).

            It all started with a meeting in Waco, TX on March 23, 2005 with President George Bush, Mexican President Vincente Fox, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin. At the end of the meeting they announced the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. Some people in the press reported it, but no one thought much of it until people began to read the details of the agreement.

Essentially, the Security and Prosperity Partnership (or SPP as most people call it) created a new administrative infrastructure that could transfer these three countries into a North American Union similar to the European Union. And this was done without a treaty and without a vote in Congress.

The Department of Commerce has developed a website: www.spp.gov. If you go to that website and read some of the material, you will find that the SPP has created “20 different working groups spanning a wide variety of issues ranging from e-commerce, to aviation policy, to borders and immigration.”[1] They have produced a number of memorandums of understanding as well as trilateral declarations of agreement. These new trilateral agreements essentially rewrite our administrative law so that it can be harmonized and integrated with these two other countries. And these working groups report to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, and Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez.

This plan was spelled out in detail in a Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) 59-page document called “Building a North American Community.” It describes a five-year plan for the “establishment by 2010 of a North American economic and security community” with a common “outer security perimeter.”[2] The entire task force report of 175-pages is available at www.cfr.org from the Council on Foreign Relations.[3]

What does this mean to the United States? Here are two examples that Jerome Corsi uses to explain what this would mean to our country. The first is the issue of open skies. The Department of Transportation has agreed to give our GPS system and our wide area navigation system to Canada and Mexico. That means that Mexican and Canadian air traffic controllers will be able to direct airplanes into our air space and land them in our airports as if they are landing them in their own countries. Now in order to do that safely, they also need to know how to identify U.S. military aircraft. So you can see, we will be giving away quite a bit of technology and information.

The second example is the idea known as “trusted trader—trusted traveler.” The SPP working groups I just mentioned have announced that they will give biometric cards to all Americans, Mexicans, and Canadians to identify them as trusted North American travelers. Remember the goal here is to erase the borders between Mexico, Canada, and the United States. The North American Union will supposedly protect the perimeter of North America but will essentially remove the borders between these three countries. If you think about this, it will change the nature of the immigration debate. Mexicans who have these biometric cards and come to the United States by definition won’t be illegal immigrants.

These working groups provide for the designation of a trusted trader. There is talk about putting a Sentri electronic devices in their trucks so that it would only take a few seconds to cross the US-Mexican border in Laredo, Texas. In a sense, it would be like using an EasyPass on one of our toll roads in America.

That brings us to the other issue: the NAFTA superhighway. The Texas segment (known as the Trans-Texas Corridor) will begin construction next year. You can read about this at a Texas Department of Transportation website: www.keeptexasmoving.com.

            In April 2006, TxDOT released a 4000-page Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) that describes a corridor that will be 1200 feet wide (the size of four football fields). It will parallel Interstate 35, and be five lanes north and five lanes south (3 cars, 2 trucks). In the middle will be pipelines and rail lines. It will also have a 200-foot wide utility corridor.[4]

            The corridor will start in Laredo, Texas run past Austin to the Texas-Oklahoma border. However the plans ultimately call for building some 4,000 miles of highway-railway-utility super-corridors throughout Texas over the next 50 years, using some 584,000 acres of what is now Texas farm and ranchland, at an estimated cost of $184 billion.

            The project will be financed by Cintra Concesiones de Infraestrusturas in Spain and a San Antonio construction company Zachary Construction Corp. Cintra is an investment consortium owned by the Juan Carlos family in Spain that will collect the tolls. That’s right the money for this project will go to Spain. Eventually, this NAFTA superhighway will ultimately connect through Kansas City into Canada.

            This NAFTA superhighway will connect with ports in Mexico (specifically Manzanillo and Lazaro Cardenas) for NAFTA trade. “The plan is to ship containers of cheap goods produced by under-market labor in China and the Far East into North America via Mexican ports. From the Mexican ports, Mexican truck drivers and railroad workers will transport the goods across the Mexican border with Texas. Once in the U.S., the routes will proceed north to Kansas City along the NAFTA Super-Highway, ready to be expanded by the Trans-Texas Corridor, and NAFTA railroad routes being put in place by Kansas City Southern.”[5]

            The advantage to retail companies like Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and Home Depot (to mention a few) is enormous. Currently the cost of shipping and ground transportation can nearly double the cost of cheap labor and slave labor from China and the Far East. China will be able to unload these huge cargo ships in these deep water ports in Mexico and bypass much of those costs. Mexican workers undercut the Longshoreman Union port employees on the docks of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Mexican truck drivers undercut the Teamsters. And U.S. truckers and railways will no longer be needed to move goods across the Rocky Mountains.[6]

            By the way, these Mexican ports will be controlled by the Chinese communists through a company known as Hutchison-Whampoa. This name should sound familiar. Hutchison Ports Holding owns Panama Ports Company which controls both ends of the Panama Canal.

The Chinese are also working to deepen and widen the Panama Canal so they can sail their enormous container ships to Florida and travel north through another corridor. Ultimately, the plan is to have seven of these corridors in the United States.

While I am talking about the Panama Canal, I might mention that the man who is considered the father of the North American Union is Robert Pastor. And if that name sounds familiar it should. He is the man who proposed that the United States give away the Panama Canal during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. He was the co-chair of the May 2005 CFR report, “Building a North American Community.”[7]

            So how will the North American Union be put in place? There is good evidence to show that this plan will implemented the same way it was done in Europe: incrementally. There will be various bureaucratic regulations to eventually transform the United States, Canada, and Mexico the way Europe was transformed into the European Union from the Common Market. In fact, Robert Pastor has proposed that we get rid of the U.S. dollar, the Canadian dollar, and the Mexico peso. Instead we will have what he calls the amero (just like Europeans have the euro).

            Just recently (September 12-14, 2006) there was a secret meeting in Banff , Alberta. Apparently its goal was to bring representatives from the three countries to advance the cause of the North American Union. You can read about these proceedings in a recent article that provides both the agenda and the attendee list.[8]

            Those who have been investigating this have also been filing Freedom of Information Act requests. Much of this information is posted on www.judicialwatch.com,  and additional materials will soon be posted at www.minutemanproject.com. They show memos of governmental officials discussing how our laws can be changed or how the laws of Canada or Mexico can be changed so that we would have North American laws.

            So what should we do? First, we need to educate ourselves and pass this information on to others who would also be concerned about the loss of American sovereignty. The success in defeating the Dubai Ports issue (as well as other initiatives) demonstrates that once the American people know what is going on, they call and write their legislators. Get a copy of this commentary from our website and distribute it. Go to the references and endnotes that I provide to get additional information.

            Second, find out where your elected representatives stand. Do they support a North American Union or do they support American sovereignty? It is better to find out before the elections.

Those in Texas should also ask the candidates for governor and other elected officials where they stand on the NAFTA superhighway. Eventually there will be 4,000 miles of highway. The state will use eminent domain to take this land. Under the Supreme Court Kelo decision, they can take that land even though the superhighway will be built for private benefit. Some have estimated that up to one million people in Texas may lose their land or their business under this eminent domain action. Where do these Texas candidates stand on this issue?

Third, express your support for the resolution (H. CON. RES. 487) introduced by Representatives Goode, Jones, Tancredo, and Paul. Its says that the United States should not enter into a North American Union with Mexico and Canada. And it says that the United States should not engage in the construction of a NAFTA Superhighway System.

By Kerby Anderson Click here for bio and archived articles