Corsi, Tancredo on Liddy to Challenge WH unauthorized work on 'North American Union'

World Net Daily ^ | June 14, 2006 | WND

[Kenny Bunk]

Author Jerome Corsi and Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., will be guests tomorrow on G. Gordon Liddy's radio show to discuss the White House's effort to implement a trilateral agreement with Mexico and Canada that could lead to a North American union, despite having no authorization from Congress.

Corsi and Tancredo will join Liddy for the entire 11 a.m. hour, Eastern time, and take calls from listeners.

Corsi reported this week that Bush administration working groups have not disclosed the results of their work despite two years of massive effort within the executive branches of the U.S., Mexico and Canada.

The groups, working under the North American Free Trade Agreement office in the Department of Commerce, are to implement the Security and Prosperity Partnership, or SPP, signed by President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Texas, March 23, 2005.

The trilateral agreement, signed as a joint declaration not submitted to Congress for review, led to the creation of the SPP office within the Department of Commerce.

Geri Word, who heads the SPP office, told WND the work had not been disclosed because, "We did not want to get the contact people of the working groups distracted by calls from the public."

WND can find no specific congressional legislation authorizing the SPP working groups nor any congressional committees taking charge of oversight.

Many SPP working groups appear to be working toward achieving specific objectives as defined by a May 2005 Council on Foreign Relations task force report, which presented a blueprint for expanding the SPP agreement into a North American union that would merge the U.S., Canada and Mexico into a new governmental form.

[jer33 3]

The Political Economy of a Single North American Currency-- Note: 98 pages

From the Centre of International Studies

• 2.2. The History of Economic Integration in North America: Bilateralism
• 2.2.1. US-Canada Economic Integration
• 2.2.2. Mexico-US Economic Integration
• 2.2.3. Canada-Mexico Economic Integration
• 2.3. North American Monetary Arrangements: Mixed Experiences
• 2.3.1. The Loonie: Independence
• 2.3.2. The Peso: Instability
• 2.3.3. The Greenback: Dominance
• 3.1. Introduction: What Has Changed?
• 3.2. Toward a North American Community
• 3.3. NAFTA at Ten: Successes and Shortcomings
• 3.4. Why Monetary Integration?
• 3.5. What is Monetary Integration?
• 3.5.1. What are the Options?
• 3.5.2. The Real Option: A Single Currency
• 4. The Economics of a Single North American Currency...……………………………..47
• 4.1. Introduction
• 4.2. The Potential Economic Benefits of a Single North American Currency
• 4.4. Convergence Issues: Are the North American Economies Ready?
• 5. The Politics of a Single North American Currency…………………...………………71
• 5.1. Introduction
• 5.2. Mexican Politics
• 5.3. Canadian Politics
• 5.4. US Politics
• 6. Conclusion……………………………………………...……………………………..83
• 6.1. Questions Answered
• 6.2. What Might Spark Negotiations?
• 6.3. NAFTA in 2013
• 7. References……………………………………………………………………....……..87

[Smartass]

Have a good one!

 

[AmishDude]

Thank you very much. Everybody here at the CFR wishes you a good night.

[MikefromOhio]

Thank you :)

LOL

Now that it's out of the way.....

[AmishDude]

OMG! You are posting the table of contents from a Master's Thesis. This isn't even coherent.

[AmishDude]

I think Bush's fault was implied.

[EternalVigilance]

Here's a run of the mill opinion that reflects what these people believe. National sovereignty, the consent of the governed, and the guarantee of a republican form of government never occurs to them. It is important to note that, like the plethora of UN and internationalist documents that refer to human beings solely as "human resources", this person considers them to be simply "labor", not sovereign citizens of the United States of America. To them, that is an outdated and quaint concept.

Athens Eco Latino

OPINION
Are we a nation of immigrants or emigrants?
by Mario Delgado

The Nation is running in the opposite direction to where it needs to be heading. It must immediately revise its limits on the number of employment visas it issues annually and expedite their processing so as to effectively expand the size of its labor pool. The economy needs to embrace immigrants (skilled and un-skilled) from anywhere in the world willing and able to be combined with its existing stock of productive resources. It must promote and support full fluidity if it is to survive in the global economy it has helped create and is now in.

The issue is not that there is no job that Americans (natives) will not do; the real issue is that there will be no jobs that Americans will not have to do after our economy loses the desirable ones from being unable to compete globally. We need all the low cost and productive labor we can get. We need them to compete against foreign industries that are fully modernized, extremely productive, with access to competitively priced financial capital and paying average wages of less than $1/hour. Modern communication and transportation to markets are cheap enough not to erase productivity/cost gains from such labor advantages.

Does anyone believe for an instant that any business or industry facing unfavorable cost conditions will not outsource their operations to a country with a more profitable mix and fit of resources to include labor? Ours already are and will continue doing so until we, as a nation, objectively and purposefully correct our immigration-labor policies. With the insurmountable labor cost disadvantage we face and remarkable production modernization achieved by many of our global competitors, it may already be too late to preserve the domestic location of many of our industries.

The problem the economy faces is a structural problem engendered by short sighted political decisions. The allocation of visas changed for the first time since colonial days, from primarily industrial/sector (economic) needs, to family re-unification (social) priorities in 1965. No amount of amnesties will resolve the fundamental supply/demand-for-labor imbalances across markets being created by the inadequacy of the above change in policy. As always, politicians create and ignore the problems they foster until they explode, and then place the blame somewhere else. In this case, they are placing the blame on the entities that saved the day, the businesses and labor that followed the economic and not the political accommodations of the time.

In a global economy like the one we are facing and encouraging, the solution will be found in pushing the envelope in the other direction. We need as a nation to make labor as abundant and fluid as capital, technology and products by facilitating its flow worldwide. We also need to offset the impact on domestic labor by making its job placement/relocation and education/skills retraining more agile. Anything less than this degree of adaptability is illogical and will pit mobile labor against the immobile variety across borders worldwide. Unfortunately, most people dislike forced relocation and retraining, especially the inhabitants from settled, modernized economies accustomed to having an economic upper-hand.

No doubt, if we allow labor to become perfectly mobile across our borders, the average wage level in many of our industries will decline, but so will the prices of many products leaving the purchasing power and real wages of labor intact if not better. On the other hand, if politicians decide to protect, even partially, the wage levels, some industries will continue departing our territory and/or outsourcing while others will develop labor-saving-productivityÐenhancing technology in an attempt to maintain their cost per unit of output globally competitive.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the technological answer, as historically has been the case, will give added momentum for industry to automate even more rapidly and worldwide. This survival response will impact labor again by increasing its available supply even faster, and pushing the need for more drastic labor relocation and retraining than otherwise.

Like it or not, and barring closing our doors to globalization, we must respond economically and not politically to the growing competitive menace from Asia, including China, India and, perhaps, Russia. A full economic integration between all of the Americas should be an appropriate starting point, while designing a national relocation and retraining program, a logical companion.

After all is said and done the real choice we face as a nation is the following: "Do we want to remain a nation of immigrants or are we ready to become one of emigrants?"

Mario E. Delago
P.O. Box 907953
Gainesville, GA 30501

[Smartass]

CFR Member

[MikefromOhio]

LOL

yeah but no one had quite said it yet....

[Smartass]

Thanks for the info. I'll save it for reference.

 

[Smartass]

Have you seen this one yet?

Property frenzy in Baja California

        

As megaport is planned 50 miles south of Ensenada, secrecy surrounds land sales in impoverished area

By Diane Lindquist
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

April 24, 2006

CHARLIE NEUMAN / Union-Tribune

Punta Colonet is likely to be transformed over the next decade into a megaport that will help to handle the increasing amount of cargo coming from eastern Asia.

PUNTA COLONET, Mexico – After Mexico picked this uninhabited inlet as the site for a new west coast megaport two years ago, beachfront land that held value only to surfers and a handful of fishermen suddenly became hot property.

Since then, global and domestic business executives, Mexico City lawyers, consultants, engineers and even a former Baja California governor have been beating a path along a pot-holed dirt road from the town of Colonet on the trans-peninsular highway to the water's edge five miles away.

Federal officials have yet to announce a bidding competition, but the project has set off a land grab in this impoverished area 50 miles south of Ensenada.

Buyers have snatched up 132 prime acres along a strip of tideland likely to be transformed over the next decade into docks for container ships arriving from Asia with goods destined for America's heartland.

Former Baja California Gov. Ernesto Ruffo Appel and a partner have bought one such parcel, and also a nearby mountaintop and rights of way to move rock that might be used for the massive project.

“We have purchased 2,500 hectares (more than 600 acres),” Ruffo said. “We've spent about $3 million so far. That shows how serious we are.”

Graphic:

Punta Colonet land grab

Additional groups are said to be maneuvering for other choice sites. Secrecy obscures much of the wheeling and dealing.

The Punta Colonet property frenzy is changing life in a rural region populated in part by families who have held the unproductive land for a half century in collective ejido arrangements. The influx of cash has split apart communal groups, pitting family against family, brother against brother.

José Luis González learned he was being cut out of a windfall coming to Ejido Villa Morelos last August, a day before 18 other members of the group gathered at a bank to receive checks for selling several parcels of oceanfront property.

González, his brother Rubén and two uncles have since taken their fellow ejido members to what is known as an agrarian resolution court, seeking a slice of the proceeds.

“I don't know exactly how much they got. They aren't letting us know,” González said recently while taking a break from preparing a cornfield for planting. “But now they're driving fancy cars and wearing nice clothes.”

Several sources with knowledge of the transaction estimate that $10 million to $15 million was paid for the land.

“No one is against the development,” González said. “We're glad the port's being built because it's needed. We're against how we're being treated.”

Numerous individuals refused to be quoted for publication because of the sensitivity of the subject or fear of financial repercussions. Others didn't return phone calls and e-mails. Baja California Economic Development Secretary Sergio Tagliapietra declined to comment through a spokeswoman because he “doesn't want to contribute to the speculation.”

A federal official said the government plans to encourage investors from across the United States and Asia to take part in the competitive bidding process that is expected to start in the next month or two.

U-shaped port project

The port project is being driven by the inability of other ports, especially those at Long Beach and Los Angeles, to handle increases of cargo coming from eastern Asia. Shipments from there are growing 15 percent annually and are expected to double by 2020.

CHARLIE NEUMAN / Union-Tribune

In Colonet, a bus crossed over the San Rafael River, which empties into the ocean at Punta Colonet when the river is flowing.

Punta Colonet will serve only container ships, said Ensenada port director Carlos Jáuregui González, who will be involved with the government's marketing and bidding process. The port will be configured in a U-shape, with each leg having several berths and cranes to handle cargo. One leg will also comprise the project's breakwater.

Nearly 7,000 acres, 97 percent of them water and 3 percent tidelands, will be devoted to the project. A harbor must be dredged deep enough to accommodate several megaships at once.

Within seven years, Punta Colonet could be processing the equivalent of a million 20-foot-long containers annually, 6 million by 2025.

“It's actually going to be bigger than Los Angeles and Long Beach together,” said Albert Fierstine, a consultant who was the Port of Los Angeles' business development director.

Together, those ports handled 13 million TEUs in 2004, or $200 billion worth of cargo. TEU, or 20-foot equivalent units, is the standard measurement in the shipping industry to quantify container traffic.

The port and rail projects are expected to require an investment of $4 billion to $5 billion. But the development of the region, including a city with thousands of inhabitants that would spread farther east into ejido lands and support the cargo operations, is expected to attract as much as $22.2 billion in investment.

Big names

According to area residents, including Ruffo, Hutchison Port Holdings, the parent of Ensenada's cargo and cruise ship operator, is behind the purchase of the Ejido Villa Morelos parcel. The name on land transfer records, however, is Ernesto Roberto Tatay.

González said that when the judge in the Ejido Morelos case asked who Tatay is and where he lives, Tatay's attorney said he didn't know. The lawyer has been ordered to produce the information.

Officials of Hutchison Ports Mexico, a subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa Ltd., the world's largest port operator and developer, did not return phone calls and an e-mail seeking comment on Punta Colonet land purchases.

“They are not buying anything now,” said Isaura Puppo, secretary for Hutchison executive Mike Power. She declined to confirm whether the company is behind the Ejido Villa Morelos acquisition.

CHARLIE NEUMAN / Union-Tribune

Jesús Lara, who owns more than 900 acres atop a cliff overlooking Punta Colonet, displayed a map last month showing the parcels that will be affected by the port project.

Punta Colonet landowners and residents of Colonet, a town of about 5,000 populated mostly by area ejido members and farmworkers transplanted from southern Mexico, said they have been given no official information about plans for the region.

However, Jesús Lara, who owns more than 900 acres atop a cliff overlooking the proposed site, has been waging an one-man effort to learn about the project, the land purchases and the companies and people involved.

After buying the cliff-top property about five years ago, he was in the process of clearing land to develop a golf course, a hotel and restaurant when he got wind of the port project about eight months ago.

“I was just starting a lot of work there, and these guys came and bought (the parcels below his).” he said. “And I said, 'What am I doing?' Then I stopped.”

Lara grew up as a member of a nearby ejido, farmed in the area and operates a cross-border trucking firm from Chula Vista. Bilingual and bicultural, he has sought out officials to discuss the project and has become an important contact for many of the parties interested in the port development.

“Everybody is thinking now is the time to buy the land cheap. If you're down there every day, you'll see helicopters, planes and four-wheel drive vehicles coming in,” he said.

CHARLIE NEUMAN / Union-Tribune

José Luis González was cut out of a windfall coming to other Ejido Villa Morelos members who sold parcels of property.

According to Lara and Ruffo, Hutchison paid about $5 per square meter compared to the average $7 per square meter Ruffo and Ensenada businessman Roberto Curiel Amaya paid Ejido Heroes de Chapultepec for their tideland property.

Initially, Ruffo said, he was acting as a consultant for interested parties but as the project appeared more feasible, he decided to pair with Curiel, a builder with extensive interests in sand, gravel and rock, to play a larger role under a company they formed called Puerto Colonet Infrastructura.

“I will certainly be a bidder,” he said. “Now we are trying to put together a consortium.”

Besides the two communal groups that have sold land, three others – Ejido Veinte Siete de Enero, Ejido Diaz Ordáz and Ejido Mexico, which is also known as Ejido Colonet – hold property in the area where the port, railroad and new city are to be built.

It's up to developers to secure land for the port project, said port director Jáuregui.

Property for a 180-mile rail line from the port to Mexicali is likely to be obtained through eminent domain by the state of Baja California, he said. From the port, it is expected to run along the San Rafael River valley north to the border near Mexicali.

'Now money's involved'

The Ejido Morelos judicial dispute, Jáuregui said, “could interfere with the project if it is not properly solved.”

Once forbidden from selling their land, the collective groups are permitted to do so under a 1992 change in Mexican federal law.

After that change, José Luis and Rubén González and two of their uncles bought a few parcels to farm on their own from the other members of Ejido Villa Morelos, which was formed in 1958.

“Those of us who were cut out of the cake are the pioneers of the ejido,” Rubén González said.

“The coastal property that was sold is common area belonging to all (22 members). Nobody complained before, but now money's involved.”

Interest in Punta Colonet continues to grow among visitors and locals alike, Lara said. Representatives of four of the ejidos and a group of business leaders from San Quintin, the coastal town to the south, met with him recently to learn what he knows about the project and the land transfers.

Lara has no plans to sell his cliff-top property, which extends to the tidelands below that will make up the bottom of the U-shaped facility.

“I won't sell,” he said, “because I can't get now what it's going to be worth eventually.”

---

Diane Lindquist: (619) 293-1812; diane.lindquist@uniontrib.com

---

[EternalVigilance]

Interesting. Hadn't heard about that.

[Rex Anderson]

Your Post #441 is a thesis by a Canadian PhD student studying in Cambridge.

http://www.intstudies.cam.ac.uk/students/pommen.html

[hedgetrimmer]

Here YOUR representative speaking in Congress Why don't you sk her what she means by this? No wonder you don't want the truth posted here, you probably work for her.

This week something very important happened. In the city of Ottawa, Canada, the capital city of our sister state up north, a major meeting was held between parliamentarians of the United States, Canada, and Mexico to begin to push back a continental effort to reform NAFTA. Both legislators, like myself, and representatives of those two governments, along with civil society groups met in Ottawa to halt NAFTA-plus, the expansion of NAFTA, something being called the Security and Prosperity Partnership .

Instead, at a press conference in Ottawa on Monday, we announced that networks from across Canada, the United States, and Mexico are going to unveil a plan to bring an end to the kind of deep damage that NAFTA is causing in all three countries and replace it with a people-centered trade model. As I said in my remarks in Canada, trade agreements in North America must ensure rising standards of living and increase jobs in all of our countries.

We met this week in Ottawa, and that meeting followed one we held last year in this city of Washington, D.C. This was our second forum. We will have a third in Ottawa a year from now, and likely a meeting in Mexico City in August.

As one of our parliamentarians said, NAFTA has aggravated poverty across our continent. And the new Democratic Party Parliamentarian, Peter Julian of Canada said, ``There is no doubt that under NAFTA, most Canadians are poorer. We have been fighting to make adjustments,'' he said, ``and now it is clear that NAFTA has to be replaced.'' It is not working for the vast majority of the inhabitants of North America. It has failed on the bottom line.

In anticipation of a summit that will be held in Ottawa in March 2007, called the ``Three Amigos Summit,'' our group will create a North American secretariat to prepare for counter information and counterproposals and introduce simultaneous legislation in this chamber in Ottawa and in Mexico City to replace NAFTA. We will build opportunities for public engagement in civil society across this continent on the issue of proper continental integration.

Mr. Speaker, a new charter for the people of the Americas is being drafted, one that will result in more democracy, more cooperation, more development for rising standards of living, not more loss of jobs and greater trade deficits.

[MikefromOhio]

It isn't going to happen for a couple of reasons, chief among them as there ISN'T anything there, except in your head.

Just repeat that:

It's all in my head. It's all in my head.

[MikefromOhio]

BTW, that isn't my representative, so again, you are misleading and absolutely INCORRECT.

HAHA.

[MikefromOhio]

Any reason why you would think that Marcy Kaptur of ALL people is my representative?

You probably don't even know where she is a representative of, except that it's "ohio"...

LOL

YDR check this schiza out.....

[Smartass]

Yep, that's part of NAFTA that hasn't had to much press. The idea is, to eventually close down, or minimize the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, to be moved to Vancouver, BC, and Punta Colonet, Baja California. There'll have to an infrastructure similar to the Trans-Texas, NASCO Corridors built for the traffic.

 

[MikefromOhio]

Now hedge here has gone from being a bit out there to being an outright liar.

First he says Marcy Kaptur is my rep, she isn't, it's David Hobson.

Secondly, he says I don't want "the truth posted here, you probably work for her."

I don't know whether to laugh or cry, but he's doing the very thing he was accusing me of yesterday. That is, making a personal attack that is simply not TRUE.

[jer33 3]

Yep, I know. I'm researching this topic until I form my own opinion. Sometimes following the sources cited is helpful in finding government, NGO, or task force documents and press releases.