Friday, November 24, 2006

Coming Through! The NAFTA Super Highway (by Kelly Taylor)
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...

Excerpt continued

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.


http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/article_4114.shtml

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