Geri Wood, SPP Secretary, told Jerome R. Corsi that the working groups did not want to be “distracted by answering calls from the public.”
What incredible arrogance!
There is now a North American Competitiveness Council whose advisory board involves representatives from corporations including Wal-Mart, Chevron, General Motors, Lockheed Martin, and others. The NACC met in Washington in mid-August, but we have almost no information because again what was said was kept out of public view and this time we have (so far) no whistleblowers.
There is also a North American Energy Security Initiative, a North American Steel Trade Committee, an Automotive Partnership Council of North America, and a North American Aviation Trilateral, among other transnational bureaucracies formed under the SPP umbrella. Work is underway towards North American Emergency Management and towards Smart, Secure Borders (now there’s a phrase apt to make Orwell spin in his grave!).
There is also the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC), or NAFTA Superhighway, construction on which is scheduled to begin in 2007 by public-private partnerships (a foreign corporation, Spain’s Cintra, has already signed a contract). This system, which will parallel I-35 running north from Mexico all the way to Canada, with a branch extending I-69 also going to Canada through Port Huron, Mich. TTC-35 will consist of six lanes for passenger cars, four for trucks, a rails system, lines for telecommunications, oil and natural gas pipelines, etc. Its size across has been estimated at four football fields; construction will result in the taking of over 500,000 acres of land from farmers and ranchers in Texas alone through eminent domain. This puts last year’s roundly (and rightly) condemned Supreme Court decision in Kelo v. New London, Conn. in a new light!
There are, finally, the expected incursions into education which have been going on roughly during what we may come to call the SPP era. Students everywhere, at all levels from elementary school to colleges and universities, are being encouraged to think globally—to think of themselves as “world citizens,” which means supporting regionalism and downplaying loyalty to their own nations. Last year a group of students from ten universities spread across the U.S., Canada and Mexico met for a simulated “model Parliament,” the organizers declaring: “A North American Parliament is born.” The universities included Harvard and Robert Pastor’s home base American University, as well as Simon Fraser University and Universite de Montreal representing Canada and Monterrey University and Ecole nationale d’administration publique representing Mexico. The event, sponsored by the Canada-based North American Forum on Integration (NAFI), yet another think tank promoting deep integration, was held in the Mexican Senate last May. Pastor is on the NAFI board of directors.
The superelite has indeed been busy of late! Also meeting in September, this time in Miami (Sept. 15) was the Miami Herald Americas Conference. Attendees of this confab included more business and governmental elites from Latin and South America. They focused on “free trade agreements, open democracies and security.” One attendee in particular is worth noting: Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, our El Presidente’s brother, who gave the keynote address. Gov. Bush hailed our El Presidente as the “chief Latin Americanist” in Washington. He further let the cat out of the bag by urging Congress to pass “fast track” trade promotion legislation this fall that would authorize President Bush to reopen negotiations on the stalled Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the superelite’s long-term goal for the Western hemisphere.
The superelite had originally hoped to implement their FTAA by 2005, but didn’t count on the level of grass roots opposition either here or by influential South American leaders such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Chavez’s economics are wrong and I don’t think he correctly identifies his enemy—it isn’t President Bush personally or even “American hegemony,” but rather the emerging New International Economic Order which is transnational and globalist. As a populist, however, his instincts are sound. He understands that an FTAA would benefit the superelite—many of them based in America—at the expense of his people. To elites like Florida’s Gov. Bush, this is just capitalism: “I believe in entrepreneurial capitalism from the top of my head to the tip of my toes.” When superelite domination of national economies is equated with free market “capitalism” and no one with visibility questions it, should we wonder when the Hugo Chavezes of the world move “leftward”?
It may be useful to examine a brilliant article by Christopher S. Bentley’s entitled “Immigration & Integration,” from the July 24 issue of The New American. Bentley outlined in very clear fashion how “free trade” rhetoric is taking us into regional government and will proceed from there to world government. “Free trade” is a core tool of the emerging New World Order, currently building transnational corporatist “capitalism” that (given the collectivist ethos being ruthlessly promoted in schools at all levels) they expect will evolve naturally and easily into global socialism with the superelite wielding absolute power.
Bentley outlines the process occurs in five steps, or phases.
First, the superelite creates a free trade area. This lowers barriers to the trade of goods and services among member nations, while quietly instituting a raft of political and bureaucratic controls. This was done in Europe in the late 1940s. In North America, think NAFTA / CAFTA.
Second, it creates a customs union, which adds a common external trade policy and expands the bureaucracy to implement it. Think of that common “security perimeter” planned for North America.
Third, it creates a common market, which ends restrictions on migration and allows labor and capital to move freely across increasingly meaningless national borders of member states. “This,” Bentley wrote, “is exactly what is behind the Bush Administration’s fanatical zeal to implement its guest worker / amnesty program.” Indeed, the Bush regime’s immigration policy—or lack of—makes perfect sense if we simply accede that Bush is committed philosophically to a borderless, globalized world.
Fourth, it develops the foregoing into an economic union—which requires a fully harmonized regulatory structure, a common currency, a common tax policy and a common fiscal policy. Robert Pastor and others have advocated replacing the dollar and the peso with a common North American currency that would be called the amero.
The fifth and final phase, political union, follows almost naturally, given that since Keynes the idea of an economy—national or global—not regulated to the teeth by bureaucrats hasn’t been on anyone’s radar. Political union develops out of the system of public-private partnerships, yielding a symbiosis between international bankers, other corporations, and the governmental-bureaucratic establishment.
The EU is practically to this point, its Parliament able to implement significant elements of the EU Constitution despite member nations like France and the Netherlands getting cold feet last year.
These phases are, in the last analysis, not separable but part of a single guided process. The SPP working groups and attendees of meetings like this North American Forum are taking us in the same direction as Europe at breakneck speed. NAFTA’s Chapter 11 tribunals actually begin laying in place the final phase of the process by reviewing U.S. court decisions. If you have an internationalized legal process, then as enforcement mechanisms fall into placce you are on your way to political union under a regional, hegemonic authority.
Thus what has taken the superelite took over 50 years to accomplish in Europe could be done in North America in about half the time. Not helping matters is the American sheeple’s indifference to what doesn’t affect them directly and immediately. We will still have a geographical entity known as the U.S. Much of our political infrastructure will doubtless remain essentially intact. The sheeple will doubtless continue to have their sports contests every Saturday and the latest Survivor on prime time. The globalists, after all, want the masses to stay entertained, and they probably don’t care how the sheeple entertain themselves so long as the economy keeps humming. But they will have complete control over everything of real importance, being able to overrule whatever court decisions or Congressional legislation they decide contravenes official globalist policy. Our Constitution will be history. To be sure, we barely have a Constitution now. But at least our national elites must pay lip service to Constitutional government.
When transnational committees of unelected bureaucrats begin overruling our laws and precedents—or if elected officials bow to globalism on their own (as Calif. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has done with NAFTA regulations on occasion)—we will know that Constitutional government is dead in America. The superelite will then be free to do as they please, which will probably be to begin integrating North America and Europe into a larger union. Other groups around the world are working towards integrating other regions including the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Africa, and elsewhere.
The nation-state, under attack from many libertarians as well as globalists, will be extinct in another decade or so if all this comes to pass. Many libertarians, unfortunately, are hostile to the idea of a world based on any principles other than economic abstractions. While defending the rights of short-term thinking consumers to buy cheap Chinese crud in Wal-Mart or the supposed rights of employers to hire illegal aliens to give Americans cheap lettuce, they are playing into the hands of individual liberty’s enemies—who, one can be sure, are employing long-term thinking. Bubbles of frenetic free market activity are being allowed, e.g., corporations to pursue cheap labor, consumers to buy cheap goods, as a means to the desired end: a globalized, integrated, centralized world.
I have great oceanfront property in Nebraska to sell to anyone who thinks this is leading to a stateless, anarchocapitalist paradise!
© 2006 Steven Yates - All Rights Reserved
He is the author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (1994), Worldviews: Christian Theism Versus Modern Materialism (2005), around two dozen philosophical articles and reviews in refereed journals and anthologies, and over a hundred articles on the World Wide Web. He lives in Greenville, South Carolina, where he writes a weekly column for the Times Examiner and is at work on a book length version of his popular series to be entitled The Real Matrix (hopefully!) to be completed this summer.
E-Mail: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com.
