Posted on 06/13/2006 6:08:39 AM PDT by conservativecorner
Despite having no authorization from Congress, the Bush administration has launched extensive working-group activity to implement a trilateral agreement with Mexico and Canada.
The membership of the working groups has not been published, nor has their work product been disclosed, 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 Association 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, on March 23, 2005.
This 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.
The SPP report to the heads of state of the U.S., Mexico and Canada, -- released June 27, 2005, -- lists some 20 different working groups spanning a wide variety of issues ranging from e-commerce, to aviation policy, to borders and immigration, involving the activity of multiple U.S. government agencies.
The working groups have produced a number of memorandums of understanding and trilateral declarations of agreement.
The Canadian government and the Mexican government each have SPP offices comparable to the U.S. office.
Geri Word, who heads the SPP office within the NAFTA office of the U.S. Department of Commerce affirmed to WND last Friday in a telephone interview that the membership of the working groups, as well as their work products, have not been published anywhere, including on the Internet.
Why the secrecy?
"We did not want to get the contact people of the working groups distracted by calls from the public," said Word.
She suggested to WND that the work products of the working groups was described on the SPP website, so publishing the actual documents did not seem required.
WND can find no specific congressional legislation authorizing the SPP working groups. The closest to enabling legislation was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., on April 20, 2005. Listed as S. 853, the bill was titled "North American Cooperative Security Act: A bill to direct the Secretary of State to establish a program to bolster the mutual security and safety of the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and for other purposes." The bill never emerged from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
In the House of Representatives, the same bill was introduced by Rep. Katherine Harris, R-Fla., on May 26, 2005. Again, the bill languished in the House Subcommittee on Intelligence, Information Sharing, and Terrorism Risk Assessment.
WND cannot find any congressional committees taking charge for specific oversight of SPP activity.
WND has requested from Word in the U.S. Department of Commerce a complete listing of the contact persons and the participating membership for the working groups listed in the June 2005 SPP report to the trilateral leaders. In addition, WND asked to see all work products, such as memorandums of understanding, letters of intent, and trilateral agreements that are referenced in the report.
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.
Referring to the SPP joint declaration, the report, entitled "Building a North American Community," stated:
The Task Force is pleased to provide specific advice on how the partnership can be pursued and realized.
To that end, the Task Force proposes the creation by 2010 of a North American community to enhance security, prosperity, and opportunity. We propose a community based on the principle affirmed in the March 2005 Joint Statement of the three leaders that "our security and prosperity are mutually dependent and complementary." Its boundaries will be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter within which the movement of people, products, and capital will be legal, orderly, and safe. Its goal will be to guarantee a free, secure, just, and prosperous North America.
The CFR task force report called for establishment of a common security border perimeter around North America by 2010, along with free movement of people, commerce and capital within North America, facilitated by the development of a North American Border Pass that would replace a U.S. passport for travel between the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
Also envisioned by the CFR task force report were a North American court, a North American inter-parliamentary group, a North American executive commission, a North American military defense command, a North American customs office and a North American development bank.
There is very little substance to what Corsi is trying to imply. He is looking at the sun rising in the east and setting in the west and deducing that the sun revolves around the earth. What he is looking at are a bunch of projects pretty much independent but with some attempts at coordination to better handle increased trade and attract more of the jobs related to trade. It isn't a sinister Buildaburger plot, but various trade groups, shippers, developers, warehousers, retailers, construction companies, truckers, railroads, local gov't's, states, etc. all trying to get more pieces of the pie. Many of the proposals are in competetion with each other, KC is fighting Houston, San Antonio, DFW, LA, Phoenix, St. Louis, Memphis, on and on and on.
The shift to more imports from China isn't perfect and for some is painful, but it is hard to stop the market from seeking its own course. I can understand arguments for more protectionism, even if I disagree and think that in the long run that would hurt our economy more than help. And there are some risks associated with streamlining the border crossings, though nowhere near what has been portrayed. My main point is that all these efforts are not part of a grand sinister secret plot, but simply a bunch of different efforts at econ. development and capturing some of that business, with some coordination but no single group driving it.
Actually it is more groups trying to jump onto and profit from changes and trends. For the states, instead of having traffic overwhelm already clogged highways why not go ahead and build capacity, and let private companies build these toll roads instead of taxpayers, and funnel trucks onto these toll roads and off of the free interstates. So Texas started planning for this, and other states such as OK, IN, and FL saw it and studied it to see if it might work there, too. Meanwhile the feds are saying that they aren't going to have money to build all the proposals like I-69 (remember that many earlier projects were built with as much as 80-90% fed funding), so there is a natural desire on both the state and fed level to turn to tolling, and private firms are more efficient at building, operating, and maintaining than gov't. Plus a lot of these road proposals were cooked up to direct traffic (and the resulting jobs) to their area, whether it be KC, OKC, Memphis, or Indiana. So when a group with a marketable concept like NAFTA corridor (or NASCA, or whatever) comes along and it looks like they can use it to push for their area, they jump on it.
Then you have a railroad (KCS) that bought a Mexican railroad and spent a lot of money fixing it up. But they need help building their own tracks between their Mexican franchise and their existing lines in Beaumont (they use other railroad's tracks in between, which slows them down and costs them rent.) The more traffic they can gin up, the more profit they can make, so they are pushing KC, just like they're pushing Ohio, Houston, and the Southeast. They went to the state, and proposed the state give them a low-interest loan to build the line and in turn they'd build an intermodal terminal (just like KC's) in Houston, which would add more jobs and lower freight rates by adding competition. So the state and the railroad cooperate. Nothing sinister, not really coordinated with all the other groups, but there is overlap so someone just quickly looking superficially could jump to the conclusion that it is a grand conspiracy. It isn't, it is bottom up ideas, with some gathering enough support to tie together various supporters.
"Fixed" is prophetic. Whatever happens in congress, it is apparent that employee verification is going to be extended to every employer in the country and eventually every employee.
If fedgov doesn't get this verification problem "fixed", it is going to be a big mess.
I unlike most posters here, have actually attended CFR meetings, and know the "truth." What is the truth? That is for me to know, and you to find out. But electricity thing strikes me as a magic act, and the results of plugging in, is one factlet, more than any other, that I think is the most persuasive for the God believers to adduce to the God-less, e.g., moi.
Wow, I'm just so totally, insanely jealous of you!!! Not.
Even if I were invited to go to one of these things, which I never would be, I'd have no interest in going whatsoever. Listening to this conglomeration of dippy academic utopians, trust fund babies, and greedy SOBs would almost certainly make me want to throw up.
Granted, most of them go to the Ivy League schools and are connected to the moon, but they really aren't half as smart or special as they think they are. I'd take advice from the average guy in the south or the midwest any day.
Well, let me give you a hint, as a lagniappe, for your culinary pleasure. They invite speakers to speak, some Americans, some not. One such speaker was Reagan's attorney general, William French Smith, who spoke about immigration. He thought the law would incentivize employers not to hire illegals, because if they did, the courts would issue injunctions, which if violated, would send the employers to jail for contempt of court. Lawyers don't always get it right. I know, you might find that shocking.
Huh? I posted material from The State Department, not a think tank.
So after all, still just a pundit. One we admire. Same with long-time Reaganite commentator, Lawrence Auster who commands tremendous respect among true conservatives everywhere.
Except you.
But I guess you have outed yourself, eh?
the big thing is that roads that lead to mexico are a bad deal. if you were a globalist you might even swing a deal glombing together the usa and canada but mixing in mexico is a 100% bad deal for the USA.
what makes any country worth anything is the middle class.
the billionaires have become nomads.
Reagan clearly understood that. The RINOs don't apparently.
Trouble, trouble, run and shout,
wring your hands and run about.
Let's see if we can get Farah to
fund air raid shelters. Which air force am
I more frightened of, the Mexicans
or the Canadians?
The trouble is that no one quite sees that the very best thing we could do for Mexico is to send their now well trained citizens home.
Suddenly Mexico would have a skilled workforce who knew something about how a world class country worked.
Think these folk would propel a great leap forward for Mexico?
I do.
Basically the ruling class in Mexico will not change of its own volition. But it can be forced to change.
The Mexicans in the USA have had the picture of what a well run country looks like tatooed on the back of their eyeballs. And they'll have an idea of how to get there. Send them back to Mexico and they'll get a revolution in Mexico that'll do that country some good.
The shock troops for that would be the 12 million repatriated Mexican citizens. Having seen what a well run country looks like they would not want to be stuffed back in the old wineskin.
There's something more.
I follow water desalination research pretty closely. While water desalination costs have dropped to about a third of what they were 15 years ago--the rate at which prices will drop over the next seven years will accelerate considerably. imo in even the next five years we will see desalination costs drop to 1/10th of today's costs.
Basically, the foundations are being laid today to make it economically feasable to to turn all the world's deserts green. (The proper way to look at this is to recall that cars, tv's and computers were at first rich men's toys but when prices came down they changed the world. Desalinised water is still relatively speaking -- a rich man's toy. But when the price drops sufficiently--desalinised water will change the world--because most deserts are right beside the ocean.)
imho cheap desalinised water will do for the republicans (if they can get this on their agenda) what the great dam building projects & the tva of the 1930's &40's did for democrats because 1/3 of the US is deserts. We would increase the habitable size of the USA by 1/3.
Dirt cheap desalinised water will also do things like make it possible to double the habitable size of Mexico.
And desalinated water in tandem with repatriation of now skilled Mexican citizens would propel Mexico into being a world class country.
Generating yet-more oxygen and sucking up CO2. If there were any basis to the man-caused 'threat' of Global Warming, then this process of greening would easily reverse that.
Of course, I believe that the bigger risk is of a Snap Ice-Age...
Ah, the same state department that is notorious for doing Bush's bidding, eh?
But at least Steyn does a little more with his time than merely live in New Hampshire.
Not much other than pen a few words. But good words. And so does Auster.
And I am sick of your comparisons to Steyn. Steyn is a genius. His wordsmithing skills are unparalleled. Auster is a second-rate hack who publishes in web-only mags, most recently FrontPage, which is a fine magazine, but Auster isn't exactly in demand.
I have to admit, I have some admiration for Auster. He's a man with impeccable paleocon credentials: He spoke at the 1994 American Renaissance conference. According to David Frum (neocon extraordinaire), "[Samuel] Francis's speech at the 1994 conference of the white-supremacist American Renaissance organization, for example, ultimately cost him his job as a staff columnist at the Washington Times."
A quote from that speech:
"The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people." — SAMUEL FRANCIS, SPEECH AT THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCEAuster didn't deserve mention in Frum's paleocon article.
But he's been willing to engage the Muslim world and has been ashamed of paleo anti-Semitism.
He does, however, have a penchant for paranoia and a disturbing love of racialist language. From Larry's own blog on this very subject:
They don’t like America, it is still too particular, still too different from the rest of the world, still too white. They want America to be cast down and defeated, so that it can no longer stand in the path of true moral and human progress. What is true moral and human progress? The browning of the Western world, leading to the cultural homogenization and economic unification of the human race.
And this is not unusual for Larry's writing. For him, cultural differences are literally black and white (or to be current, brown and white). with a penchant for paranoia and a disturbing flirtation with racism:
It made Richard Cohen suddenly realize that if Gore and his minions keep pushing ahead with their audacious attempt to steal the nation's highest office, it could lead to the unthinkable: an uncontrollable uprising by white America against the left-liberal consensus that has ruled our country for the last several decades. 11/27/2000.Just white America, Larry?
Sorry, the guy just leaves a bad taste in my mouth and I don't really care about what he says about anything.
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