Highway to Hell

Imagine a huge road built for semi-trucks, a quarter-mile wide, running from Mexico City through the U.S. to Winnipeg, Canada. Imagine further that the trucks running this road and hauling inanimate or perhaps living freight would not be required to stop for inspection or documentation anywhere along the route except Kansas City.

You may not have to imagine very long, because this so-called “Nafta Superhighway” may soon become a reality, and in fact plans for the Texan leg of this asphalt magic carpet, known as the Trans-Texas Corridor, are already well advanced according to a March 4 London Telegraph article by James Langton.

The potential of such a road for increasing both smuggling and U.S. companies’ exploitation of Mexican labor is obvious. But what many of the road’s opponents, both conservative and liberal, are most worried about is threats to U.S. sovereignty.

Republican Ron Paul, a Texas congressman, says the road is part of a secret Bush-Vicente Fox campaign for "an integrated North American Union" - complete with its own currency, an independent, cross-national bureaucracy, and unregulated travel across moribund international borders. "It would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty," Paul Claims.

Bush administration officials deny that there is any transnational plan, and a Department of Transportation undersecretary told a congressional committee this month that the government’s only objective in considering the Nafta Superhighway was “to improve existing roads.”

But documents published by the website Judicial Watch, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, show that the U.S., Candadian, and Mexican governments’ plans for the North American Union, while not in the final stages, are way past the “what if” stage. These documents are the record of a September 2006 meeting in Banff, Canada of an entity called the North American Forum, which included high-level officials from the U.S., Mexico and Canada. U.S. attendees included then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, NORTHCOM* Commander Admiral Timothy Keating, NORTHCOM Political Advisor Deborah Bolton, and former Secretary of State (and Bechtel Corp. board member) George Shultz.

Judicial Watch reports that “The North American Forum presentations discussed immigration and border enforcement; full economic and energy integration including infrastructure and transportation; a North American investment fund; and common customs and duties.” Minutes from the meeting show that the group also discussed what it referred to as "evolution by stealth."

Writing at the conservative website Human Events, commentator Jerome R. Corsi recalls another meeting of a year ago “in Waco, Texas, at the end of March 2005” where “U.S. President George W. Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox, and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin committed their governments to a path of cooperation and joint action.”

“What is the plan?” Corsi asks. “Simple, erase the borders. The plan is contained in a ‘Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America’ little noticed when President Bush and President Fox created it in March 2005.”

Corsi goes on to quote from the report that issued from this meeting, “Building a North American Community,” which says in part, “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.”

“President Bush intends to abrogate U.S. sovereignty to the North American Union, a new economic and political entity which the President is quietly forming, much as the European Union has formed,” Corsi concludes.

The Nafta Superhighway would provide a giant first step in the implementation of this agenda. And like Jerome Corsi, many Texans working to stop the Trans-Texas Corridor are conservatives who would normally be supporters of President George W Bush, but are suspicious of his support for “free trade.”

For example, Hank Gilbert, a Texas rancher angrily reflects that "At the Battle of the Alamo people came from all over the US to fight for our sovereignty. Now we are giving it away to the very people we fought." Like many others he believes the Nafta Superhighway will make it easier for cheap goods to flood into the US. "Farmers fear that this kind of globalization will put them out of business," he says.

Gilbert neglects mentioning, although he knows, that cheap labor will flow into the U.S. along with the cheap goods the proposed highway could deliver. Both are key components of global capital’s imperialist agenda, in which the unimpeded flow of both labor and manufactures across unregulated borders would establish an economic regime of capital triumphant, in which the rewards, such as they are, invariably go to the lowest bidder. The exploitation of Mexican workers, both here and in Mexico, is a key component of this agenda, and the Nafta Superhighway the initial step in achieving it.

*NORTHCOM is a unified combat command of the U.S. military, created in 2002 in the wake of 9/11 and responsible for military operations in security in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, and the northern Caribbean. There are now six such unified commands located worldwide and serving as the primary administrative instrument of the American Imperium. For example, the command in charge of the Middle East and headquartered at MacDill AFB in Tampa, Florida is called CENTCOM.