Posted on 10/09/2006 11:43:38 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Here's what the denizens of the political class are doing right now:
Standing at the front door, they're saying, "Look here! See this new border security bill we just passed. You can see we're on the job protecting the borders night and day!"
At the same time, sneaking through the back door is a quiet but well-greased effort to build a monster highway that is part and parcel of a plan to wipe out the borders altogether.
And by the way, that border bill does create a fence — maybe, somehow, sort of — it all depends on how the lawyers look at it.
Like many millions of other Americans, you probably have wondered why our leaders in both parties fight tooth and nail against popular demand to curb the flow of illegal aliens. Below, you will find one of the reasons for that — one that has just recently come to light.
First, let's set the table for all this:
The ink was hardly dry on President Bush's signature on an immigration bill before it appeared that Washington's bipartisan effort to foil the 80-90% of Americans who demand border security is still going full-steam ahead.
The president signed a bill authorizing start-up funding for a 700-mile fence along our southern border. Actually, our border with Mexico is 2,000 miles long, but the thinking was — well, this is better than nothing. It's a step in the right direction.
Hold the phone on that. Don't uncork the champagne bottles. The bourgeoisie may have been snookered again.
The fine print in the bill (or so says The Washington Post) gives the government an escape hatch to take the money supposedly earmarked for a border fence and spend it instead on other projects, such as roads, or to allow the Department of Homeland Security the option of its preferred "virtual fence." Also, Indian tribes, members of Congress, governors, and local leaders would have a say as to "exact placement" of the fence.
Moreover, as Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) has noted, "It's one thing to authorize. It's another thing to actually appropriate the money and do it."
Like most legislative weasel words and monkey wrenches that you're not supposed to know about, the contradictory wording of the bill was inserted in the dark of night while you slept. It was hammered out in the final pre-election session of Congress as a concession to the open borders crowd.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), a solid supporter of meaningful border protection, disputes the Post interpretation. He says the bill plainly says that the fence "shall" be built. It is not an option, he adds, regardless of other wording in the document. You can bet the lawyers are licking their chops on that one. The very fact that the legislation's meaning is in doubt reflects strong determination by many politicians that no real border security will ever happen, period.
Why?
In a previous column, we spotlighted one little-discussed reason elected leaders fight back so fiercely against the demands of the voters on this issue — i.e., Mexico has oil, and we may need more of it someday. (See "The running out of oil myth and the inside story on illegal immigration," Sept. 4, 2006.)
If you suspected at that time that there is much more to the story, you would have been right on the money.
There is underway a secret, under-the-radar, plan for a north-south super-highway spanning three countries — from Mexico through the United States and into Canada. This is part of a long-range scheme by internationalists ultimately to form a North American Union similar in structure to the European Union.
The word "secret" is used advisedly. The plan is regionalized, mostly in Texas. A lot of Texans do know about it, but few of them know the whole story because the project is being built in increments so as to keep it off the national radar screen of most, if not all, the mainstream media.
Understand we are not talking here about just any highway. We are talking about a "road" that is to be four football fields wide.
Jerome "Jerry" Corsi, the investigator who has been bird-dogging this development and unearthing more and more details — much to the chagrin of powerful moneyed political interests and their bureaucrats — has done the math on what this will mean in the Texas portion alone. He says we are looking at the removal of as much as 584,000 acres of productive farm and ranch land from the tax rolls permanently, while displacing upwards of 1 million people from their current residences.
With that kind of upheaval in the works, wouldn't you expect that there would be a political price to pay? For now, apparently not. A lot is riding on this for both parties, and any political advantage by one party would be canceled out by the political scales weighed on the other side.
Look for the alarm bells to be silent until after the election, if then. At some point, this issue will be on the front burner, according to Corsi, who is writing a book on the project. You can't keep it quiet forever. The immediate focus is on the initial portion of the plan involving the corridor from Lazaro Cardenes on the west coast of Mexico up through Texas and heading on up to a Mexican-controlled customs facility right in the heart of the United States at Kansas City, Missouri. The container shipments will be top-heavy with cargo from Communist China.
At full build-out, the toll corridor would be six lanes for trucks and automobiles, two tracks for "toll freight" railroading (Kansas City Southern), two tracks for high-speed passenger rail, and two tracks for commuter trains. In addition, there would be two spaces for energy pipelines. Calling it a monster highway is no exaggeration.
The NAFTA Highway was more or less hatched by a Strategic and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) meeting last year in Waco, Texas, with President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox, and Canada's then-Prime Minister Paul Martin. It was not a formal treaty or even a formal agreement. Corsi says it was just "a press release." To carry out the details of rewriting rules, regulations, and laws, there are twenty "working groups" meeting in secret to clear the path for the semi-secret thoroughfare.
The "working groups" consist of government bureaucrats and others from all three countries. Corsi tried to find out where these groups were meeting, what decisions they were making, and who the major decision-makers were. So he made his inquiry of Geri Word of the U.S. Department of Transportation. He was told the information was unavailable because the groups were busy doing their work and did not want to be bothered or distracted by inquiries.
Corsi interpreted that as a way of saying the planners don't want to get the great unwashed all excited. Bad enough the farmers and others in Texas whose property would be displaced have been showing up in droves at hearings required by law and venting their anger. Planners don't want that discontent to spread elsewhere — at least not before the upcoming elections.
Those farmers and other Texas residents, Corsi told me, are likely to get their Kelo notices sometime after the elections November 7. Kelo, you may remember, is the Supreme Court decree that government can take your home away from you to make room for a strip mall or whatever. (See this column "Court decision: bad news/good issue for Bush?" — July 18, 2005.) It would surely apply to a mammoth private-public "partnership" such as the NAFTA Highway.
That outrageous court decision prompted anger on Capitol Hill. The House passed legislation to correct the situation months ago. But in the Senate (according to Lee Bellinger's American Sentinel), it has been held up by Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, the liberal Republican whose political chestnuts were pulled out of the fire in 2004 when the White House backed him over his conservative primary opponent Pat Toomey.
Construction on the super highway plan (dubbed the Trans-Texas Corridor — TTC) is to begin next year and completed by 2010. Then what?
"The plan is to do it incrementally," Corsi tells this column. "And once it's approved in Texas, the investors [led by capital groups such as Cintra Concessiones de Transport in Spain and Macquarie Infrastructure Group and Transurban in Australia] and bankers will next go to Oklahoma and they'll say, 'We've got money for you.'"
Corsi adds the Oklahoma Department of Transportation claims that state doesn't have any plans to build a NAFTA super-highway or to continue the Trans-Texas Corridor into Oklahoma. To which the investigator adds: "They're technically correct. They don't have any plan now. But I can pretty well guarantee they're going to have plans. They [the investors] are not building a four football field wide highway to end at the border. What are they going to do? Just stop it there?"
Out in the middle of nowhere? Even someone with reasonable intelligence and who did not just arrive on the turnip truck would have a hard time believing that.
The massive highway bill that finally cleared Congress a few months ago contained some elements of the TTC, but they were not specifically designated as such. They were made to look like parts of just another highway bill of the more routine variety.
The bottom line is the fix appears to be in to erase our borders with Mexico and Canada. Mexico's outgoing President Vicente Fox has identified the post-NAFTA agenda as absolute freedom of movement for persons, as well as goods, between Mexico and the United States. His foreign secretary (as quoted in the American Spectator) has called for "complete integration" or a merger between the U.S. and Mexico.
Pat Buchanan, in his current best-seller State of Emergency, sees Mexico's motivation as greed "to get their hands on America's wealth." Thus, one can see why a "border fence" bill would have the proverbial more holes in it than Swiss cheese, and also why the NAFTA highway is going forward, seemingly unstoppable. There's big money out there. And politicians from Washington to Mexico City to Ottawa to Podunk are scrambling to get on the gravy train before it leaves the station. If there's a plan to erase the borders between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada — and Corsi says the NAFTA Highway is part of that — any thoughts about preserving American sovereignty are to be sacrificed on the altar of the golden calf.
But of course, there's more to it than that. As Buchanan puts it, "The penultimate step toward world government, a North American Union built on the model of the European Union — which one day would merge with it in a World Union of Nations and Peoples — is on the table."
The quintessential "red flag" on this comes in a document by Dr. Robert Pastor, vice chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) Task Force on North America. He has issued a report flatly advocating the elimination of the borders between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada.
Pastor's treatise prompted the soft-spoken Lou Dobbs to exclaim on CNN that our elites have "gone utterly mad."
No only would all borders in North America be wiped out, according to Dr. Pastor's proposal, but there would be "economic integration" of the three countries, along with North-South highways and transnational railroads.
Pastor's solution to the problem of illegal immigration is simple: Stop defending the U.S. border. That's it. And as the good doctor cheerfully told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (June 13, 2005), by creating "a new consciousness among Americans," we would see "Mexico's economy grow faster than that of the U.S."
"Instead of stopping North Americans on the borders," Dr. Pastor says in his CFR paper, "we ought to provide them with a secure biometric Border Pass that would ease transit across the border like an EZ pass that permits our cars to speed through tolls." That is what planners have in mind for the NAFTA Highway.
Not everyone in Congress is asleep at the switch on this issue. Reps. Virgil Goode (R-Va.); Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) — whose whole congressional career has focused on the illegal aliens issue; Ron Paul (R-Tex.); and Walter Jones (R-N.C.) have co-sponsored a resolution expressing "the sense of Congress that the United States should not engage in construction of a North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) Superhighway system or enter into a North American Union (NAU) with Mexico and Canada."
I pointed out to Jerry Corsi that these four are good men, but that they do not carry the clout in the House that would match the political weight of — say — a committee chairman. He allowed as how that may be true, but at least "it's a start."
This whole business of erasing borders and redistributing the wealth of nations would fit perfectly with the agenda actively pursued by billionaire George Soros. (See last week's column "Will George Soros Rule America?") Soros colleague Jeffrey Sachs is the director of the United Nations Millennium Project, described by Canada Free Press as "the largest global wealth distribution program ever conceived [See The Shadow Party p.225]." Authors David Horowitz and Richard Poe describe Sachs as a "Columbia University economist, long-time Soros associate and Shadow Party operative."
"The whole [NAFTA Highway] thing is packaged to sound good, y'know security and prosperity — we're all for that," Corsi remarked to this column. "[But] we're not for necessarily inviting Canada and Mexico to offices within our Department of Transportation or to rewrite our laws."
There's much more to this. But for now, what we have outlined here should be enough to absorb. Later.
;-)
"Sorry, but this IS moonbat stuff."
I thought moonbats were left-wing kooks. Wingnuts are right-wing kooks. This is kookery, but it is nativist kookery. Unless this is in the paranormal borderlands where right-wing kookery meets left-wing kookery.
Are you saying that the agenda being laid out on SPP.GOV is untrue?
What agenda is that?
I can't tell the difference between the lunatic fringe on the right and the lunatic fringe on the left.
The political spectrum is a circle, not a straight line, in my opinion.
Its the left and the right against the middle.
The far right has much more in common with Ralph Nader than it does with either major political party. It's weird.
And the AFL-CIO & Earth Justice. And Chavez, Obrador, & Morales.
Where have you been? You qualify for the "Dumb@$$ of the Month" award for that remark.
FYE, (For Your Education) TSR created and has managed (in an evenhanded manner) THE Ping List on the TTC. He includes articles on all sides of the issue -- and pings folks who are both pro and con re the TTC.
Illegals : Last-minute bill changes funding for border fence into virtual fence instead
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1714847/posts
Okay, I accept your premise that the article is full of lies and ignorance.
For my sake, point them out, please.
Shout and scream obscenities all you want... (btw.. against FR policy, where have you been)...
Do Not Curse and S*** and D*** are not good either.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1070896/posts
The Virtual Fence is very possible/probable... otherwise why did they change the last second the legislation?
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1714847/posts
Lots of other sources?....... If so why fool with the moonbat stuff then?
"What agenda is that?"
The agenda being sold on SPP.GOV that is being implemented by the Commerce Department but was never presented to Congress for approval. That agenda.
AFL-CIO works both sides of all immigration questions.
Thanks.
Though I see no need of a barking moonbat alert for basic facts.
The Lie: the author said the concept of the TTC began with the SPP in 05
The Reality: Texas recognized the looming transportation problem in the 80s. The Center for Transportation Research at UT was given the job of coming up with the ideas. They released a number of reports with the last one, in 96, recommending the multi-modal corridor.
The Lie: This is the NAFTA Highway
The Reality: There are numerous NAFTA highways that terminate/originate at the border, in all border states. One is even called the Canamex. If, there was one particular road that would be worthy of being called THE NAFTA HIGHWAY, it wouldn't be the TTC 35, it would be the federally designated, to be constructed, interstate 69 linking Port Huron with Laredo. 60% of the freight passing between Mexico and the US crosses at Laredo. 60% of the freight passing between the US and Canada crosses at Port Huron.
Look, Texas has had large population growth and more is projected. For many reasons, most of the freight between the US and Mexico goes thru Texas. I hope the kooks will give us permission to build the roads we need.
One again, I'll let you lead off.
I suspect that the agenda of the SPP, as you see it, is entirely different from the way I see it. One again, I'll let you lead off.
Has the agenda on SPP.GOV been presented to, approved, and funded by Congress. If not --- why is it going forward? This has nothing to do with how you or I see it, but it has everything to do with why Congress has not "seen" it.
Don't ask me I didn't post it.
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