Bush sneaking North American super-state without oversight?

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.

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.

"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.

Yes, the mysterious new world order. Woooooeeeeeeeoooooo

Sorry Charlie. Wish it were so. But the verdict is in. Something is Rotten In Denmark... nee 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

My Bush epiphany

By Lawrence Auster
© 2000 WorldNetDaily.com

A few weeks before he was nominated as the Republican candidate for president of the United States, I happened to see Bob Dole being interviewed on TV. As I watched, everything I knew about Dole came to mind -- the love for big government that he had unembarrassedly revealed in his Senate retirement speech a few days earlier, the constant hints and sardonic asides by which he distanced himself from conservatives and accommodated himself to liberals, even the way his eyes kept shifting from side to side as he spoke. Suddenly the thought flashed into my mind: "He's not on our side; he's on their side."

It gives me no pleasure to say it, but George W. Bush, at least on some key issues, has given conservatives reason to have similar concerns about him. Of course, many conservatives were already put off by W.'s "compassionate" conservatism, his inclusion-soaked nominating convention, and his failure to say anything serious about the Clinton-Gore corruption of our national life. If W. would not take even a minimal stand against the epic illegalities and abuses of power that we have been living under, then how could his election be seen as a repudiation of those abuses, and how could it cleanse the country of the stain that Clinton has left?

By the same token, given the fact that W. panders to Hispanics and is so conspicuously fond of diversity, how can he be counted on to defend America's national identity and sovereignty from the organized Hispanic interest groups and globalist elites who are hostile to both? A case in point was his refusal during the primaries to criticize a Texas town where Spanish had been declared the official language.

Thus W. had already shown a troubling degree of softness on the important issues of public morality and national identity. But in a two-day period in late August, he went much further (or much further backward) on both fronts than he ever had before.

On the matter of public integrity, he announced his approval of Janet Reno's decision not to appoint a special counsel to investigate Al Gore's role in the 1996 campaign scandal. In doing this, W. was not just avoiding a "partisan attack" on Clinton-Gore corruption; he seemed to be going out of his way to help protect Clinton and Gore from accountability.

On the matter of national identity, W. delivered in Miami on Aug. 25 a major address on U.S.-Latin American relations, in which he unveiled a startling -- at least for a Republican -- view of America. We should pay close attention to his words:

Just go to Miami, or San Antonio, Los Angeles, Chicago or West New York, New Jersey ... and close your eyes and listen. You could just as easily be in Santo Domingo or Santiago, or San Miguel de Allende.

For years our nation has debated this change -- some have praised it and others have resented it. By nominating me, my party has made a choice to welcome the new America.

Let us be clear that W. is not (as Republican politicians including Reagan have done for decades) celebrating immigrants from diverse backgrounds on the assumption that they are becoming part of our culture and way of life. On the contrary, he is applauding the expansion and the increasingly dominant role of the Hispanic culture and the Spanish language in this country. He is explicitly welcoming the very things that are making America less and less like its historical self and more and more like Latin America.

To repeat, this is not the usual establishment conservative line of "immigration with assimilation." This is multiculturalism, the view of America as a collection of unassimilated yet "equal" cultures in which our former national culture will be progressively downgraded and marginalized.

Also surprising is W.'s claim that Republicans have "made a choice to welcome the new America." Did Republicans realize that by nominating W. they were not only committing themselves to a pro-multicultural candidate, but shutting down all debate on the issue?

Complementing W.'s support for the Hispanicization of American culture was his view of Mexico-U.S. relations:

In equating our intimate historic bonds to our mother country and to Canada with our ties to Mexico, W. shows a staggering ignorance of the civilizational facts of life. The reason we are so close to Britain and Canada is that we share with them a common historical culture, language, literature, and legal system, as well as similar standards of behavior, expectations of public officials, and so on.

We share none of those things with Mexico, which, along with the rest of Latin America, constitutes a cultural region quite distinct from that of the United States and Europe. Everyone, on both the left and the right, has always known this to be so. W., apparently, does not. As he sees it, our mere physical proximity to Mexico is tantamount to cultural commonality with Mexico.

W.'s delusions of cultural similarity don't stop there. "Differences are inevitable" between Mexico and the U.S.," W. continued. "But they will be differences among family, not between rivals."

Coming from the Republican candidate for president of the United States, the statement boggles the mind. It was bad enough when the Democrats in the 1980s started their socialist rant (soon echoed by the Republicans) that Americans are all "one family." But now George W., "The Man from Inclusion," has taken the "family" idea several steps further. For W., it is not just the United States, but the United States and Mexico, and ultimately the United States and the whole of the Americas, that constitutes one "family."

With this thoughtless cliché, W. is moving in symbolic terms toward the goal that Mexico's newly elected president Vicente Fox is calling for in concrete terms: the opening of the U.S.-Mexican border. After all, who would want to maintain national borders and high-tech barriers between members of the same family? Within a family there is unconditional support, mutual obligation, and the sense of a shared destiny -- not armed patrols and checkpoints.

Whether or not W. himself understands the logical implications of his "family" rhetoric, its political consequence if he becomes president will be the same -- the further delegitimization of our borders and our national sovereignty.

All of which leads up to the question: Why is he doing this? Most conservatives had accepted, if without enthusiasm, the pragmatic need for W. and other Republicans to project a warm and "inclusive" image, conspicuously embracing minorities and so on. But by no reasonable calculation did that require W. to embrace multiculturalism, any more than the need to avoid "negative attacks" on his Democratic opponent required him to praise Reno's cover-up of Gore.

Since his adoption of a multicultural vision of America makes no sense in political terms (indeed, it would tend to alienate his own base), the only explanation is that W. really believes in it. Watching his speech in Miami, you couldn't help but feel that W. is genuinely moved by this "We're all one family" sentiment. It is as central to his heart (about which he is always telling us) as the love of big government is to Bob Dole's.

Just as Dole at the 1996 Convention showed his liberal colors when he declared that the Republican party is rife with unspecified "haters" for whom "the exits are clearly marked," W. has unambiguously demonstrated his allegiance to the liberal policies of open borders and multiculturalism, characterizing everyone who dissents from those policies as driven by "resentment" and implying that they have no place in the Republican party. He has left no wiggle room for honest conservatives to tell themselves, "Well he's really on our side, the side of a unified American nation. He just has to say all these things about welcoming other cultures in order to get elected."

Of course, many principled conservatives feel they have strong reasons (I will leave it up to the reader to decide whether they are compelling reasons) to vote for W. They believe that with W. in the White House, there will be at least a chance of forestalling a further leftward lurch by the Supreme Court and such nightmarish statist projects (endorsed by Gore) as universal childcare. They also feel that our country cannot endure the continued debauching of our national institutions and character that has occurred under Clinton and Gore. But, if conservatives do mark their ballot for W. on Nov. 7, they should do it without illusions -- and they should be prepared to fight President Bush every inch of the way to preserve what remains of our national identity and sovereignty.

Lawrence Auster lives in New York City.

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