Coming Through! The NAFTA Super Highway

Articles

By Kelly Taylor, New American, August 1, 2006

http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/article_4088.shtml

All across America, mammoth construction projects are preparing to launch. The NAFTA Super Highway is on a fast track and it's headed your way. If you don't help derail it, you may soon be run over by it - both figuratively and literally.

The NAFTA Super Highway is a venture unlike any previous highway construction project. It is actually a daisy chain of dozens of corridors and coordinated projects that are expected to stretch out for several decades, cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and end up radically reconfiguring not only the physical landscape of these United States, but our political and economic landscapes as well.

In Texas, the NAFTA Super Highway is being sold as the Trans Texas Corridor. In simplest terms, the TTC is a superhighway system including tollways for passenger vehicles and trucks; lanes for commercial and freight trucks; tracks for commuter rail and high-speed freight rail; depots for all rail lines; pipelines for oil, water, and natural gas; and electrical towers and cabling for communication and telephone lines. One of the proposed corridor routes, TTC-35, is parallel to the present Interstate Highway 35 (I-35), slightly to the east, running north from Mexico to Canada. Its present scope is 4,000 miles long, 1,200 feet wide, with an estimated cost of $183 billion of taxpayer funds. It runs through Kansas City.

Integration vs. Independence

How would all of this affect you, your family, and your community? Let us count the ways. One of the most striking features of the proposed Super Highway is the plan to do away with our borders, as evidenced by the joint U.S.-Mexico Customs facility already under construction in Kansas City, Missouri. A U.S. Customs checkpoint in Kansas City? But that's a thousand miles inside America's heartland; isn't the purpose of U.S. Customs to check people and cargo at our borders?

Ah, but the mere asking of that question shows that you're still operating under the old paradigm that sees the United States as an independent, sovereign nation. However, that paradigm began to change following passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994. NAFTA, which was sold to the American public as a simple trade agreement, was actually far more than that, setting in motion a process for the gradual social, economic, and political "integration," or merger, of the three NAFTA countries - Canada, the United States, and Mexico - into a North American Union.

In 2005, this merger process became more explicit and aggressive when President Bush, Mexico's President Vicente Fox, and Canada's Prime Minister Martin launched what they call the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP). Any serious study of the SPP will clearly reveal that its ultimate aim is the dissolution of the United States into a North American Union patterned after the increasingly dictatorial regional government now running the European Union. Henceforth, under this plan, the borders between our nations will be incrementally erased in favor of a joint "perimeter" around all three countries.

One part of this plan calls for streamlining the flow of traffic from Mexico, including a massive increase in containers from China and the Far East offloading at Mexican seaports and then being transported by truck and rail into the United States via the new NAFTA Super Highway. These new cargo streams would cross the border in supposedly secure FAST lanes, checked only electronically until the first Customs stop in Kansas City!

What about all the repeated promises by the White House and Congress to make border security America's "top priority"? Moving Customs inspections hundreds of miles inland obviously contradicts those promises ... Does it make sense to effectively extend the border via this route when we are now doing such a poor job securing our existing border?

Under the Radar

Moreover, we can expect that similar inland joint Customs facilities, like the one in Kansas City, will be included in the other Mexico-to-Canada superhighway corridors. Of course, these corridors will not be secured, and the result - as intended - would be the de facto merger of immigration and Customs enforcement and the obliteration of the current national borders within the planned North American Union. That is precisely what one of the main architects of the SPP plan, Professor Robert Pastor of American University and the Council on Foreign Relations, has repeatedly advocated in his writings, speeches, and congressional testimony.

How is it possible that something this radical has gone so far virtually unnoticed when illegal immigration and border security are among the hottest political topics of the day? The politicians and the private contractors who have been pushing this merger scheme intended it that way, knowing full well that adoption and successful implementation of the plan would depend on keeping it under the public radar.

Thanks largely to the investigative work of Joyce Mucci, who heads the Kansas City-based Mid-America Immigration Reform Coalition, and author/economist Jerome Corsi, the NAFTA Super Highway has begun to be a very hot topic. Using Missouri's Sunshine Law, Mrs. Mucci's group has pried loose a number of documents that are causing the public and private champions of the NAFTA Super Highway to squirm and stonewall. "They were going along great guns with this whole plan, with all of their high-powered politicians, law firms, PR firms, and corporate contractors - and virtually no opposition, until now," Mrs. Mucci told The New American....

Super Highway Robbery

Aside from erasing our borders - which is no small matter in and of itself - the NAFTA Super Highway would profoundly impact Americans in many other ways.... Millions of acres are scheduled to be paved over and that means using eminent domain to condemn lots of private property for the Super Highway corridors and rights-of-way.

But every American, ultimately, would be dramatically impacted by this onrushing scheme. How? First of all, in the pocketbook... To assist in financing the mammoth Super Highway, plans call for converting many current roads, which taxpayers have already paid for, to tollways for all motor vehicles.

If the NAFTA Super Highway goes through as planned, millions of Americans can expect to pay with their jobs as well....

Thus, U.S. taxpayers would have to pay for reduced transportation costs for foreign producers. In addition, the "continental" plan calls for U.S. taxpayers to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to extend this "infrastructure development" (highways, railways, bridges, power plants, telecommunications, seaports) through Mexico and Central America.

How will it do that? Under the Coordinated Border Infrastructure Program of the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act of 2005 - A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU) (whew!), U.S. funds apportioned to a border state may be used to construct a highway project in Canada or Mexico, if that project directly facilitates cross-border vehicle and cargo movement!...

Additionally, SAFETEA-LU allows U.S. states to use tolling on a pilot basis to finance Interstate construction and reconstruction, and to establish tolls for existing Interstate highways to fund the new Super Highway corridors. Austin, Texas, is already experiencing fierce struggles over converting its already-paid-for Interstate and state highways to toll roads...

This planned wedding of Mexico's cheap labor force with brand new infrastructure would make Mexico an irresistible magnet for all manufacturers now remaining in the United States....

Scores of Corridors

An additional Super Highway route known as the Interstate 69 corridor (TTC-69) would enter Texas from Mexico as three spur lines at Laredo, McAllen, and Brownsville, which then will join together to head north through Houston, to Memphis, Tennessee, to Port Huron, Michigan, to Toronto, Canada.

Wait, there's more. To the west of the proposed TTC lies the proposed route of the Ports-to-Plains Corridor, running north from Laredo through West Texas, the Oklahoma Panhandle, to Denver and ultimately Canada. What? Another one? Yes, and plans are very advanced. Its website identifies this corridor as a NAFTA corridor alternative to TTC-35, the one paralleling I-35.

What does the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) have to say about this? Once again, stonewalling rules. In telephone interviews with congenial TxDOT employees, the expected mantra repeated to this writer is how necessary the corridor is to accommodate projected population and trade growth, and how beneficial it would be to the economies of Texas, the U.S., and Mexico. TxDOT's Public Information officer denied that the TTC was part of any bigger scheme of nationwide corridor building, and claimed that notion was simply misinformation. Yet in a June 30, 2001 article in the Austin American Statesman, the same spokesperson claimed the aforementioned Ports-to-Plains Corridor would be linked to existing Interstate highways in Denver as part of a NAFTA super corridor.

And that's not all. There's also CANAMEX, another super corridor like the TTC, which spans the West from Mexico to Canada going through Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and Montana. And we learn from the CANAMEX Corridor Coalition website that the number of congressionally designated high priority corridors in the United States has been expanded from 43 to 80!

Yes, 80 corridor routes have been designated across the United States in an effort to speed the construction of infrastructure necessary for what the SPP calls "the streamlined movement of legitimate travelers and cargo across our shared borders."

...When viewed in the aggregate, they can only be seen as a means to so thoroughly restructure and integrate the three countries so as to permanently blur the distinctions, and to make their merger into a regional government seamless and even appealing....

If you've asked yourself why you did not know about a project of this magnitude, or where Congress got the authority to designate High Priority Corridors in the first place, your first job is to contact your representative and howl...

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