I-69: Yet Another NAFTA Super-Highway

Another NAFTA Super-Highway is moving state-by-state from the planning stage to the funding and construction process. As listed on the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration’s website, the “I-69 Corridor” is planned to connect Mexico and Canada through Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois and Michigan.

Still, skeptics -- even congressmen and senators in the nine states where the I-69 corridor will be built -- continue to charge that any idea that NAFTA Super-Highways are being built are nothing more than “internet conspiracy theories.”

Even NASCO (North America’s SuperCorridor Coalition, Inc.) continues to be in denial, refusing to acknowledge that any NAFTA Super-Highways are being built. A second NASCO homepage makeover reflecting a new public relations attempt by NASCO to defuse criticism now lists a “NASCO FAQs” section, which opens to a .pdf file letter on NASCO stationary. In response to the question, “Will the NAFTA Superhighway be four football fields wide?” NASCO answers: “There is no new, proposed 'NAFTA Superhighway.'” Next, NASCO attempts to redefine the “SuperCorridor” in its name as a reference not to a “super-highway,” but intermodal integration along the “existing ‘NASCO Corridor.’”

We have previously argued that as a trade association NASCO itself will never build any highway of any type, but we continue to argue that NASCO’s members, such as the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), are very actively involved in creating substantial NAFTA corridor infrastructure, including super-highways. Moreover, NASCO not yet responded to our challenge that NASCO repudiate the plans of TxDOT to build the planned Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC-35), the first leg of the NAFTA Super-Highway planned to stretch into Canada parallel to I-35. Otherwise, NASCO is just dealing in semantics, trying to distinguish “Super-Corridors” from “Super-Highways,” or defeating their own straw argument on the basis that we somehow presumed that a trade organization like NASCO would be required to build a NAFTA Super-Highway in order to support a NAFTA Super-Highway one of their members was building.

We need turn no further than the TxDOT’s TTC-35 website to find evidence linking the I-69 NAFTA Super-Highway project to the I-35 NAFTA Super-Highway project. There the TxDOT openly admits the reality:

Further, the TTC-35 website indicates that TxDOT anticipates completing the I-69/TTC environmental impact statement in fall 2007 and receiving federal approval in winter 2007. The TTC-35 website includes a proposed I-69/TTC map and a schedule of the locations where 37 public hearings were held during July and August 2006 in Texas to review I-69/TTC “recommended corridor alternatives.”

The Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development (LaDOT) acknowledges conducting a I-69 environmental and location study in conjunction with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to study a proposed route through Bossier, Cado and DeSoto Parishes. As described on the LaDOT website: “The proposed highway is part of the I-69 Corridor, which will link Indianapolis, Indiana to the lower Rio Grande Valley in Texas.” The description of the I-69 Corridor on the LaDOT website echoes the description on the TxDOT website:

Interstate 69 is a 1,600 mile-long national highway that will ultimately connect Canada to Mexico. I-69 traverses nine states from the Gulf of Mexico and Texas’s Golden Triangle, through the Mississippi Delta, the Midewst, to the industrial north and, finally, to Canada.

Again, LaDOT has obtained federal highway funds to begin construction and a series of final public hearings were announced for July 2006.

We find similar I-69 Corridor discussions on the state department of transportation websites in Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana and Michigan. The only state department of transportation website that does not have a specific discussion of the I-69 Corridor is Illinois. The FHWA specifies that the involvement of Illinois in the I-69 corridor is limited and that the current plan is that the I-69 Corridor in Illinois will utilize the existing roads, particularly I-94 from Chicago to Detroit. The I-69 Corridor will cross the U.S. border with Canada in Port Huron, Mich., continuing in Canada as Highway 402 in Ontario.

The FHWA has defined the I-69 corridor as a “Megaproject,” defined as “a major transportation project that costs at least $1 billion and attracts a high level of public attention or political interest because of their impact on the community, environment, and State budgets.” We realize how the FHWA considers Texas and the TTC to be an essential component of the coming system of planed NAFTA Super-Highways, including I-69, when we consult a FHWA map that portrays Texas as the critical NAFTA/CAFTA gateway into the United States.

Get a clue:

BEN BERNANKE & THE NEW INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ORDER

By Steven Yates
September 11, 2006
NewsWithViews.com

When we read some of Ben S. Bernanke’s recent writings, it becomes clear why he was picked to succeed Alan Greenspan as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Corporation.

First, unlike Greenspan, Bernanke is a good writer who expresses himself clearly. An academic by inclination, his essays are sprinkled with citations and endnotes. There are bibliographies at the end. Greenspan’s remarks (except, perhaps, for “irrational exuberance”) often elicited, “Huh?” Bernanke leaves few doubts where he is coming from.

On August 25, Bernanke made a presentation to the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s 30th Annual Economic Symposium at Jackson Hole, Wyoming—one of this country’s prime hideaways for the elite, with tracts of real estate priced out of the reach of lesser mortals. The title of Bernanke’s presentation: “Global Economic Integration: What’s New and What’s Not.” (It’s on the Federal Reserve website). In this lecture—which appears tailored as much for outsiders who follow such things as for the Insiders likely to be seen at Jackson Hole—Bernanke adopts a familiar ploy: to depict global economic integration as an exclusively technology-driven process. Thus the section entitled “A Short History of Global Economic Integration” which traces the process to the Romans who “unified their far-flung empire through an extensive transportation network and a common language, legal system, and currency.” (The Roman Empire grew increasingly barbaric and decadent and finally collapsed from within—a little detail of history Bernanke neglects to note—but never mind that for now.)

There are three possible implications of this one remark. One, the current wave of the New International Economic Order is at base an exercise in building an empire owing more to the Romans than its purveyors care to admit. Two, when America’s borders with Mexico and Canada are effectively eroded and the North American Community comes into being, do not be surprised if NAFTA Chapter 11 tribunals so far limited to judging trade disputes evolve into a full-fledged North American legal system that can override our courts and render our Constitution null and void—very possibly with the full cooperation of globalist-leaning Justices such as Stephen Breyer. Three, despite the belligerent denials that anything of the sort is on the drawing board, do not be shocked when, a few years down the road, the Council on Foreign Relation’s (CFR’s) Building a North American Community lead author Robert Pastor’s proposal for a North American currency, the Amero, becomes a live option somewhere down the pike.

A collapse of the dollar would definitely hasten this last. The Federal Reserve, by arranging for the printing of unbacked currency (fiat money) at an unprecedented rate, is hastening the collapse of the dollar. Since the unheralded end of M3 reporting in March of this year, no one knows for sure how much fiat money is in circulation generating real inflation (as opposed to the cooked “core inflation rate” the Fed pawns off on the public through the controlled news media). The contrarian International Forecaster estimates the actual inflation rate at 10.9 percent!

What is clear is that Bernanke’s Federal Reserve is following the agenda of Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve without significant change. What the Fed has done is create what author and contrarian economist Gary North describes as an “international time bomb.” The time bomb has two components: (1) the huge accumulation of fiat money; (2) the massive build-up of debt to foreign countries, some of whom (like China) surely do not have our best interests at heart! If the bomb goes off all at once, it will precipitate a global economic collapse that will make the Great Depression look like a bad day at the races by comparison.

Bernanke’s essay also weighed in against protectionism—always safe, since few economists consider protectionism a good idea. The problem here: arguments against protectionism are invariably presented as part of a false dichotomy with the globalist-managed trade being sold as “free trade.” Bernanke’s reasoning is fallacious because of the third alternative: the real thing, allowed to develop on its own rather than orchestrated through economic social engineering. It is difficult to know for sure what real free trade would look like right now, but since genuine free markets operate to enable all to pursue their needs, wants and interests unhampered by government interference and not bankrolled by government, central banks or foundations, it would probably reflect a mixture of the small and local with the large and international. But I digress. Bernanke’s argument is invalid, if its aim is to establish the necessity of global economic integration by making a case against protectionism.

Bernanke sees global economic integration as stemming from technological change. Following World War II, he states, “Technological advances further reduced the costs of transportation and communication… . Telephone communication expanded, and digital electronic computing came into use….” At first glance, this sounds reasonable. But it reflects ignorance of the elites’ long term motives and efforts to integrate the planet having integrated financial and economic systems.

In 1931—well before the explosion of developments Bernanke invokes (except for the telephone)—Arnold Toynbee, Fabian socialist, Rhodes Round Tabler and court historian for the British Royal Institute for International Affairs (counterpart to our CFR) gave a speech to the Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Affairs in Copenhagen entitled “The Trend of International Affairs Since the War” He told his fellow globalists of the day:

“If we are frank with ourselves, we shall admit that we are engaged on a deliberate and sustained and concentrated effort to impose limitations upon the sovereignty and independence of the fifty or sixty local sovereign independent States which at present partition the habitable surface of the earth and divide the political allegiance of mankind.”

Toynbee went on, “It is just because we are really attacking the principle of local sovereignty that we keep on protesting our loyalty to it so loudly. The harder we press our attack upon the idol, the more pains we take to keep its priests and devotees in a fool’s paradise—lapped in a false sense of security which will inhibit them from taking up arms in their idol’s defense.”

Toynbee then launched into an attack on national sovereignty of the sort reserved for his fellow elitists: “The local national state, invested with the attributes of sovereignty—is an abomination of desolation standing in the place where it ought not. It has stood in that place now … for four or five centuries. Our political task in our generation is to cast the abomination out….”

Finally: “… I will not prophesy. I will merely repeat that we are at present working, discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands, because to impugn the sovereignty of the local national states of the world is still a heresy for which a statesman or a publicist can be—perhaps not quite burnt at the stake, but certainly ostracized and discredited....” (Italics mine.)

This was well before Richard Gardner’s much more often cited remark in a 1974 issue of the CFR’s flagship journal Foreign Affairs that “the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than from the top down ... an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault.”

There is thus every reason to believe that dissolving national borders and working in the direction of a global state was on the agenda all along. The effort was intended to sail under the radar until it was too late; obviously, most Americans would reject it if they knew about it, since globalism both has and will mean a serious diminishing of the American standard of living through lost jobs; lowered wages; unchecked immigration; and massive debt (consumer, national and foreign).

Given all this evidence, attributing global economic integration to advancing technology commits a different fallacy, post hoc ergo prompter hoc (“after this, therefore because of this”). Technological change did not “cause” global economic integration, but happened alongside of it, and was perhaps encouraged as a path to eroding borders, undermining sovereignty, and setting us on course to regional political and bureaucratic integration, ending U.S. independence and paving the way first to regional government and then to world government.

David Rockefeller, international banker and archglobalist, stated back in 1993 following the passage of NAFTA: “Everything is in place—after 500 years—to build a true 'new world' in the Western Hemisphere.” Rockefeller and his colleagues in the CFR and the Trilateral Commission had a name for this new world: the New International Economic Order.

Ben Bernanke has sold his soul to this, else he would not have been appointed to one of the most powerful positions in this country, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Corporation.

Bernanke came to his home state of South Carolina two weeks ago, visiting his rural home town of Dillon (population 6,800), one of many rural towns in the Carolinas devastated by plant closings since the passage of NAFTA. The official unemployment rate in Dillon in June was 9.7 percent! Bernanke delivered remarks under the title “Productivity” (also available on the Fed website), again pushing globalization.

His message to the ordinary mortals struggling to survive in post-NAFTA South Carolina: change is going to be forced on you whether you like it or not. Recommendation: tailor your education to technology-driven economic development and become good little worker bees. Now I’ve nothing against learning new technology. What bothers me acutely: from the purveyors of education tailored to economic development we hear not a word about the Constitution or history or the economics of private property rights or critical thinking or other skills appropriate for citizens of a free society. What we heard instead from Ben Bernanke was a thinly veiled warning: you backward South Carolinians are dragging your feet on joining the New International Economic Order. Either get with the program or expect even worse unemployment, underemployment and abject poverty.

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