Bush Administration Quietly Plans NAFTA Super Highway
by Jerome Corsi, Human Events, June 12, 2006
Last Updated:
Thursday, June 15, 2006 01:41:49 PM
Jerome Corsi
uietly but systematically, the Bush
Administration is advancing the plan to build a huge NAFTA Super
Highway, four football-fields-wide, through the heart of the U.S.
along Interstate 35, from the Mexican border at Laredo, Tex., to the
Canadian border north of Duluth, Minn.
Once complete, the new road will allow containers
from the Far East to enter the United States through the Mexican
port of Lazaro Cardenas, bypassing the Longshoreman’s Union in the
process. The Mexican trucks, without the involvement of the
Teamsters Union, will drive on what will be the nation’s most modern
highway straight into the heart of America. The Mexican trucks will
cross border in FAST lanes, checked only electronically by the new
“SENTRI” system. The first customs stop will be a Mexican customs
office in Kansas City, their new Smart Port complex, a facility
being built for Mexico at a cost of $3 million to the U.S. taxpayers
in Kansas City.
As incredible as this plan may seem to some
readers, the first Trans-Texas Corridor segment of the NAFTA Super
Highway is ready to begin construction next year. Various U.S.
government agencies, dozens of state agencies, and scores of private
NGOs (non-governmental organizations) have been working behind the
scenes to create the NAFTA Super Highway, despite the lack of
comment on the plan by President Bush. The American public is
largely asleep to this key piece of the coming “North
American Union” that government planners in the new trilateral
region of United States, Canada and Mexico are about to drive into
reality.
Just examine the following websites to get a feel for the magnitude
of NAFTA Super Highway planning that has been going on without any
new congressional legislation directly authorizing the construction
of the planned international corridor through the center of the
country.
NASCO, the
North
America SuperCorridor Coalition Inc., is a “non-profit
organization dedicated to developing the world’s first
international, integrated and secure, multi-modal transportation
system along the International Mid-Continent Trade and
Transportation Corridor to improve both the trade
competitiveness and quality of life in North America.” Where
does that sentence say anything about the USA? Still, NASCO has
received $2.5 million in earmarks from the U.S. Department of
Transportation to plan the NAFTA Super Highway as a 10-lane
limited-access road (five lanes in each direction) plus
passenger and freight rail lines running alongside pipelines
laid for oil and natural gas. One glance at the map of the NAFTA
Super Highway on the front page of the
NASCO
website will make clear that the design is to connect
Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. into one transportation system.
Kansas City
SmartPort Inc. is an “investor based organization supported
by the public and private sector” to create the key hub on the
NAFTA Super Highway. At the Kansas City SmartPort, the
containers from the Far East can be transferred to trucks going
east and west, dramatically reducing the ground transportation
time dropping the containers off in Los Angeles or Long Beach
involves for most of the country. A
brochure on the SmartPort website describes the plan in
glowing terms: “For those who live in Kansas City, the idea of
receiving containers nonstop from the Far East by way of Mexico
may sound unlikely, but later this month that seemingly
far-fetched notion will become a reality.”
The U.S. government has housed within the
Department of Commerce (DOC) an “SPP office” that is dedicated
to organizing the many working groups laboring within the
executive branches of the U.S., Mexico and Canada to create the
regulatory reality for the Security and Prosperity Partnership.
The SPP agreement
was signed by Bush, President Vicente Fox, and then-Prime
Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Tex., on March 23, 2005. According
to the DOC website, a U.S.-Mexico Joint Working Committee on
Transportation Planning has
finalized a plan such that “(m)ethods for detecting
bottlenecks on the U.S.-Mexico border will be developed and low
cost/high impact projects identified in bottleneck studies will
be constructed or implemented.” The report notes that new SENTRI
travel lanes on the Mexican border will be constructed this
year. The border at Laredo should be reduced to an electronic
speed bump for the Mexican trucks containing goods from the Far
East to enter the U.S. on their way to the Kansas City SmartPort.
The details of the NAFTA Super Highway are hidden
in plan view. Still, Bush has not given speeches to bring the NAFTA
Super Highway plans to the full attention of the American public.
Missing in the move toward creating a North American Union is the
robust public debate that preceded the decision to form the European
Union. All this may be for calculated political reasons on the part
of the Bush Administration.
A good reason Bush does not want to secure the border with Mexico
may be that the administration is trying to create express lanes for
Mexican trucks to bring containers with cheap Far East goods into
the heart of the U.S., all without the involvement of any U.S. union
workers on the docks or in the trucks.
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