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North American 'Trusted Traders' Begin Rolling on the NAFTA Super-Corridor
humaneventsonline ^
| Posted Jul 19, 2006
| Jerome R. Corsi
Posted on 07/19/2006 10:46:12 AM PDT by dennisw

North American 'Trusted Traders' Begin Rolling on the NAFTA Super-Corridor
by Jerome R. Corsi
Posted Jul 19, 2006 Through a series of acquisitions including Mexican railroads, Kansas City Southern (KCS, NYSE: KSE) has declared itself the nations first NAFTA Railroad.
On April 1, 2005, KCS completed the acquisition of Mexican Railroad TFM, S.A. de C.V., an acquisition which gained for KCS all the common stock of Groupo Transportacion Ferrovaria Mexicana, S.A. de C.V., the holding company that owned TFM. In December 2005, KCS changed the name of TFM to Kansas City Southern de Mexico (KCSM). The acquisition of KCSM was a key piece in putting together the NAFTA railroad, the marketing brand that KCS uses to market its North American service for both KCSM in Mexico and Kansas City Southern Railroad (KCSR) in the United States.
The KCS website makes clear the importance of Kansas City Southern de Mexico in the KCS NAFTA-focused marketing plan linking into network developing to use Mexican ports for the deliver to North America of goods manufactured in China and shipped across the Pacific Ocean in container ships:
The 2,661-mile KCSM operates the primary rail route in northern and central Mexico, linking Mexico City and Monterrey with Laredo, Texas, where more than 50 percent of the U.S.-Mexico trade crosses the border. The line also connects the major population centers of Mexico City and Monterrey with the heartland of the U.S. and serves the ports of Veracruz, Tampico and Lazaro Cardenas, a primary alternative to West Coast ports for shippers in the route between Asia and North America.
As the map demonstrates, KCS has put together a North American railroad network consisting of three wholly owned operating subsidiaries: the Kansas City Southern Railroad (which operates Texas to Kansas City, along the eastern borders of the states of Oklahoma and Kansas), the Texas Mexican Railway Company (operating from Port Arthur to Laredo, Texas on the Mexcian Border), and the former TFM in Mexico (operating now as KCS de Mexico, extending from Laredo and Brownsville, Texas, through Monterrey, Mexico, down to Mexico City and the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas on the Pacific Ocean).
Kansas City SmartPort acknowledges the importance of the NAFTA Railroad in the Kansas City inland port concept. A brochure on the Kansas City SmartPort website outlines the marketing plan:
Kansas City offers the opportunity for sealed cargo containers to travel to Mexican port cities such as Lazaro Cardenas with virtually no border delays. It will streamline shipments from Asia and cut the time and labor costs associated with shipping through the congested ports on the West Coast.
In April 2005, Kansas City Southern completed purchase of a controlling interest in Transprotacion Ferroviaria Mexicana (TFM), enabling TFM, The Kansas City Southern Railroad and The Texas Mexican Railway Company to operate under common leadership, creating a seamless transportation system spanning the heart of North America known as The NAFTA Railway.
The same brochure emphasizes how extensively KCS is preparing for this cross-border traffic:
Kansas City Southern is installing Spanish language versions of its computer operating system (MCS) in an effort to increase train speeds, reduce waiting times at terminals and enable the free flow of locomotives and rail cars between the United States and Mexico via Kansas City Southerns railroad bridge at Laredo, Texas.
Tasha Hammes of the Kansas City Area Development Council verified in a June 29, 2006 email to the author that, The containers that come in through the port of Lazaro Cardenas will enter the U.S. on a U.S. railroad (Kansas City Southern). Yet, in a July 6, 2006 email to the author, Doniele Kane, an AVP for Corporate Communications & Community Affairs for KCS acknowledges that TFM will remain a Mexican corporation with Mexican leadership, even though TFM is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of KCS, an U.S. corporation. Moreover, Ms. Kane acknowledges that KCS de Mexico (KCSM) will retain Mexican management and Mexican railroad workers.
Railroad lines are a major design component of the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC), what we have argued is the prototype NAFTA Super-Highway to be replicated in north-south corridors throughout the country.
As specified according to the 4,000-page Environmental Impact Statement on the Trans-Texas Corridor website maintained by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), the 4 football fields-wide TTC-35 is planned to have separate lines for railroad cargo lines. Nowhere does the TxDOT website specify that railroads like the KCS NAFTA Railroad will have to pay for the new and improved rail beds being laid by the TxDOT, with funds provided by the Spanish Cintra capital consortium. Even though the TTC rail lines will be available on a toll basis, the plan to parallel I-35 should provide minimum disruption to KCS, whose rail route north roughly parallels the current I-35 route.
KCSM employees are then not represented by the various U.S. rail unions such as the United Transportation Union and the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. Ms. Kane also made clear that KCSM employees unionized employees in Mexico who are represented by Sindicato de Trabajadores Ferrocarrileros de la Republica Mexicana, the Mexican railroad workers union. This union is a member of the Confederacion de Trahajadores de Mexico (CTM), a traditionally government-dominated union confederation that has a history of opposing worker efforts to establish independent unions along the U.S. model.
Mexican labor union historian and analyst Dan La Botz has argued that Mexican railroads were privatized as part of a World Bank- imposed settlement in the 1990s. La Botz wrote the following in 1998:
The first big privatization came on December 5, 1996, when the Mexican government sold the Northeast Railway to Mexican Railway Transportation (TFM), a consortium which included Kansas City Southern Industries (KSCI), for $1.4 billion.
With the approval of the Mexican labor authorities, the old state-company and the new TFM railroad management laid off the workers and nullified the old collective bargaining agreement. To keep a job, workers had to accept termination and their severance pay and be re-contracted without their previous seniority, pay or benefits. Many hundreds of the Northeast Railway workers lost their jobs altogether.
Ms. Kane of KCS points out that No Mexican crews operate in the U.S. and no U.S. crews operate in Mexico.
Frank N. Wilner, Public Relations Director of the United Transportation Union (UTU) agrees that at present KCS trains switch to UTU crews for all U.S. operations. The UTU strongly objects to any suggestion that Mexican crews would ever be permitted to operate trains in the United States. Mr. Wilner in a June 30, 2006 email to the author still that, It is criminal that the rail industry, enjoying the highest profitability in its history, would roll the dice on public safety and national security by booting experienced American citizens from the locomotive cabs and replacing them with foreign nationals with limited skills in English and American railroad practices.
The working groups organized in the U.S. Department of Commerce under the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP). The 2005 Report to Leaders found at the first tap to the left on SPP.gov makes clear that a North American trusted trader program will be run mostly on electronics to substantially reduce transit times and border congestion. NAFTA Railroad trains should be easily identified for immediate border passage, especially with the containers with appropriate SENTRI type systems that mark the containers to have originated from trusted trader shippers, even if the point of origin is China or the Far East.
We should also note that KCS and the companys Chairman & Chief Executive Michael R. Haverty have been very prominent in SPP activities.
The 2004 Summit held in Kansas City, Missouri, by the North American International Trade Corridor Partnership (NAITCP), an affiliate organization of the North Americas Super Corridor Coalition, Inc. (NASCO) produced a brochure with a front page photograph of Mr. Haverty, documenting his attendance. Mr. Haverty is photographed at the right of the first row in the photo, with Dr. Robert Pastor of American University at the left of the row.
Dr. Pastor, who spoke at the summit, was the vice chair of the Council on Foreign Relations task force report Building a North American Community, which we have argued serves as the blueprint for SPP.gov. Dr. Pastor is the author of five books, including "Toward a North American Community," published in 1991. Dr. Pastor has consistently argued that NAFTA should be transformed by a process of tri-lateral administrative regulations and executive branch negotiated trilateral agreements into a North American Union regional government on the model of the European Union.
According to the Council of the Americas, Warren Erdman, senior vice president of Kansas City Southern Industries (KCSI) attended as one of the 10 business representative council members representing the United States at the first SPP Ministerial Meeting held with the newly formed North American Competitiveness Council (NCAA) on June 15, 2006, held at the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C. We have previously questioned the Congressional authorization for NACC which has been organized under the auspices of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, a treaty like status that the Bush administration executive branch has declared to be a second-stage NAFTA arrangement to be in existence currently between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada.
As KCS evidences, the concept of a NAFTA Railroad is at the heart of the corridor transportation system being designed right now by international corporations and capital managers to bring goods from Asia into the emerging North American Union (NAU) via Mexican ports, to be delivered ultimately throughout North America by cheap transportation labor in which Mexican trucks and Mexican trains will play a key role.
As SPP develops into the NAU, the government executive branch agencies and the cabinet-level ministers in Canada, the United States, and Mexico will work very hard behind the scenes to erase our borders with Canada and Mexico. Border crossings for trusted travelers and trusted traders are intended to involve nothing more under SPP than a speed bump, an inconvenience not dissimilar from using an EZ-pass to go through a toll booth on a limited access highway. Whether moving by car, truck, or rail, government-issued electronics including biometric North American Union border passes will be all that is necessary to allow free passage, provided a toll is charged and collected.
TOPICS: Conspiracy
KEYWORDS: corsi; corsiisnownuts; cuespookymusic; texas; tinfoil; trade; transtexascorridor; ttc; ttc35; tx; txdot
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To: catholicfreeper; Toddsterpatriot; expat_panama; Mase; nopardons
If anyone has further insights as to what is generating this recent buzz about a North American Union I would be quite curious to know its origins. That gave me a chuckle. I now have a vision of a couple international law professors sitting in the faculty lounge at Pepperdine with befuddled looks on their faces. Personally, I think it's equal parts (a great) marketing campaign on the part of Corsi, Human Events, and World Net Daily; true "believers" who are easily misled by the above (or just easily misled, period); and a combination of third-party types or other Bush-haters (including Dem operatives) that are seeking to siphon off some votes.
I should add that I place Prof. Corsi in the first group, and I think that he did his market research on FR (although he hasn't posted since 2004, I think).
41
posted on
07/19/2006 8:50:42 PM PDT
by
1rudeboy
To: hedgetrimmer
What's the future in 'buggy whip' manufacturing today?.... Any stock tips on whip manufacturers?
42
posted on
07/19/2006 8:52:01 PM PDT
by
deport
To: deport
I've posted Reagan's Announcement for the Candidacy a number of times on threads such as these, and never gotten a response. I don't think the message that Reagan is also one of "them" makes it through the tinfoil headgear.
43
posted on
07/19/2006 8:52:42 PM PDT
by
1rudeboy
To: deport
Corsi takes several items, departments, laws, countries, agreements, etc and takes a snippet from one and then the other with internal links and combines them into a rambling montage. I forgot to mention that World Net Daily posted an article (tbh, it was a press-release) today that the Commerce Dept. is "dragging its feet" on Prof. Corsi's FOIA request. He placed it a month ago.
Some folks think it's evidence of the conspiracy.
44
posted on
07/19/2006 8:55:53 PM PDT
by
1rudeboy
To: deport
If buggy whips were manufactured in China, you "free traders" would be yelling for a goods movement system paid for by taxpayers to bring them in. LOL. You don't care what is shipped in, as long as taxpayers pay for the transport and you make money off of it. Come to think of it, Ben Bernanke said when fuel prices get high, American will have to start manufacturing stuff again. Looting the taxpayers to build a transportation system that only benefits foreigners is just a scam to help the Chinese keep the market so graciously sold out to them by corrupt American politicians. If fuel prices keep going up, the system will be moot, but taxpayers will still be paying for it, generations into the future. I can't think of a more abhorrent group of people than you "free traders" right now, unless its the communist slavers you serve.
45
posted on
07/19/2006 9:01:48 PM PDT
by
hedgetrimmer
("I'm a millionaire thanks to the WTO and "free trade" system--Hu Jintao top 10 worst dictators)
To: blackie
I think the headline is wrong. They mean North America's Busted Traitors, don't they?
46
posted on
07/19/2006 9:07:15 PM PDT
by
hedgetrimmer
("I'm a millionaire thanks to the WTO and "free trade" system--Hu Jintao top 10 worst dictators)
To: hedgetrimmer
You still travel in a Studebaker?.....
47
posted on
07/19/2006 9:08:57 PM PDT
by
deport
To: hedgetrimmer
Say, did you ever find out what a "working group" is? I found an image of one that might help you visualize their function.
48
posted on
07/19/2006 9:09:44 PM PDT
by
1rudeboy
To: deport
Last week folks were arguing that we shouldn't have foreigners building the road. Now, we taxpayers are building it. I wonder what the story will be next week.
49
posted on
07/19/2006 9:12:26 PM PDT
by
1rudeboy
To: 1rudeboy
Some folks think it's evidence of the conspiracy.
That would be you, since you're the only one to say so.
This thread really is more
your speed.
50
posted on
07/19/2006 9:14:53 PM PDT
by
hedgetrimmer
("I'm a millionaire thanks to the WTO and "free trade" system--Hu Jintao top 10 worst dictators)
To: 1rudeboy
Well it'll change to whatever Corsi thinks necessary.
I hope they enjoy their travels in either a Studebaker or maybe a Conestoga. Maybe a six hitch to pull it along.
51
posted on
07/19/2006 9:15:47 PM PDT
by
deport
To: hedgetrimmer
You haven't implied that it's a conspiracy for all of 30 minutes. LOL
52
posted on
07/19/2006 9:16:59 PM PDT
by
1rudeboy
To: deport
53
posted on
07/19/2006 9:17:16 PM PDT
by
sinkspur
(Today, we settled all family business.)
To: deport
I dunno. Those horses look foreign to me.
54
posted on
07/19/2006 9:17:54 PM PDT
by
1rudeboy
To: 1rudeboy
You really do offend to imply that a 'working group' is the same as the Continental Congress. You shame your father and mother, if they are American.
55
posted on
07/19/2006 9:19:41 PM PDT
by
hedgetrimmer
("I'm a millionaire thanks to the WTO and "free trade" system--Hu Jintao top 10 worst dictators)
To: sinkspur
Had to keep those locals happy when they got off work.
56
posted on
07/19/2006 9:20:34 PM PDT
by
deport
To: hedgetrimmer
Actually, it's the Declaration of Independence working-group.
57
posted on
07/19/2006 9:21:40 PM PDT
by
1rudeboy
To: 1rudeboy
Those horses look foreign to me.
Shhhhhh. don't tell anyone or they may not want to continue to use their Studebakers/Conestogas. But most of the draft horse were either Belgian, Scottdales from Scottlan, Shires originated back in the middle ages and the Percheron which came from France with some Arabian in it.
58
posted on
07/19/2006 9:26:17 PM PDT
by
deport
To: deport
I had the "opportunity" to purchase a rescued Belgian Draft at auction last summer. She went for around 3 grand, if I recall. Alas, no room in the garage.
59
posted on
07/19/2006 9:29:01 PM PDT
by
1rudeboy
To: 1rudeboy
Take care..... It's been fun but off to get a couple hours shut eye. Don't take no wooden nickles, get only good ol' coin of the realm.
60
posted on
07/19/2006 9:32:13 PM PDT
by
deport
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