Continental Merger
A coalition of groups warns that President Bush’s Security and Prosperity Partnership will lead to a merger of the United States, Mexico, and Canada, but Bush claims that
the pact is not threatening. Who is being truthful?
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
By William F. Jasper
Leading SPP advocates publicly deny that their integration plans will bring about a centralized EU-style
government that will override national, state, and local governance. Privately, however, in their speeches
and writings, they acknowledge that this is precisely what they are constructing.
|
The U.S. media paid scant attention
this past August when President
George W. Bush headed for
a meeting of the Security and Prosperity
Partnership of North America (more commonly
referred to as the SPP) in Canada.
The two-day summit (August 20-21) with
Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon and
Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper,
as well as top government ministers and
business leaders, was conducted behind a
cordon of security and secrecy at a luxury
resort in Montebello, Quebec, down the
Ottawa River from the Canadian capital.
At the summit’s concluding press conference
on August 21, the three heads of
state were confronted with charges leveled
by critics of the SPP’s goals and process.
A Fox News reporter asked the trio: “Can
you say today that this is not a prelude
to a North American Union, similar to a
European Union? Are there plans to build
some kind of superhighway connecting all
three countries? And do you believe all of
these theories about a possible erosion of
national identity stem from a lack of transparency
from this partnership?”
President Bush evaded the questions and
punched at straw men of his own making.
“You know, there are some who would like
to frighten our fellow citizens into believing
that relations between us are harmful
for our respective peoples,” he said. “I just
believe they’re wrong. I believe it’s in our
interest to trade; I believe it’s in our interest
to dialogue.” None of the summit critics, of
course, had even remotely implied that the
United States cease relations, trade, or dialogue
with Canada and Mexico; those are
legitimate, constitutionally permitted activities
that our government and our peoples
carry on (and have engaged in since our
nation’s founding) not only with our nextdoor
neighbors to the north and south, but
with virtually every country on Earth.
“I’m amused by some of the speculation,
some of the old — you can call them
political scare tactics,” President Bush
continued. “If you’ve been in politics as
long as I have, you get used to that kind of
technique where you lay out a conspiracy
and then force people to try to prove it
doesn’t exist.”
Prime Minister Harper also chose to respond
with ridicule, joking that opponents
of the SPP process were getting all worked
up over something that was no more serious
than candy regulations. “Is the sovereignty
of Canada going to fall apart if we
standardize the jellybeans?... I don’t think
so,” Mr. Harper chortled.
Opponents of the SPP, however, are
worked up about far more than trade, dialogue,
and jellybeans. As Bush, Harper,
Calderon, and their aides met away from
public scrutiny, leaders representing a coalition
of more than 50 conservative organizations
in the United States and Canada
held a press conference at the Ottawa
Marriott to deliver very serious warnings
about the developing “partnership,” which
they claim is an unconstitutional scheme
for economic and political merger of the
three countries.
“Our message,” said Howard Phillips,
chairman of the Coalition to Block the
North American Union, “is ‘President
Bush, President Calderon, Prime Minister
Harper, tear down the wall of silence and
let the people see what you are scheming to
do.’” Mr. Phillips, who is also founder and
chairman of the Conservative Caucus, stated
at the coalition’s Ottawa news conference:
“Behind closed doors, step by step,
the leaders of Mexico, Canada, and the
United States are setting the stage for, first,
a North American Community and, ultimately,
a North American Union (NAU), in
which new transnational bodies would gain
authority over our economy, our judiciary,
and our lawmaking institutions.”
John F. McManus, president of the John
Birch Society and a founding member of
the Coalition to Block the North American
Union, charged that the political elites
are planning a duplicate of the European
Union for our own hemisphere.
Who’s Telling the Truth?
President Bush at the Montebello summit with Mexican
President Calderon
|
So, is the SPP a harmless (or
even beneficial) trilateral effort
aimed at improving relations,
trade, and dialogue
with Canada and Mexico,
which has been wildly misrepresented
by “conspiracy
nuts,” as President Bush
claims? Or is the SPP actually
a scheme to create an EUstyle
North American Union
that will gradually submerge
U.S. sovereignty into regional
institutions, erase our
borders, and terminate our
constitutional republic, as its
critics claim?
The Security and Prosperity
Partnership for North
America was formally
launched in Waco, Texas, on
March 23, 2005 by President
Bush, along with Mexico’s
then-President Vicente Fox
and Canada’s then-Prime
Minister Paul Martin. The
three leaders let it be knownthat their new SPP initiative was an effort
to build upon and expand NAFTA, the
1993 North American Free Trade Agreement.
Their expressed goal for the SPP
was the creation of “a safer, more prosperous
North America.”
Conceived completely as an executivebranch
initiative, without any participation
or authorization from Congress, the SPP
established 20 trilateral “working groups”
composed of current and former government
officials, academics, and corporate
leaders. The groups are directed to bring
about continental “integration” on a wide
range of political, economic, and social
issues, such as manufacturing, transportation,
energy, environment, e-commerce, financial
services, food and agriculture, law
enforcement, immigration, infrastructure,
and health.
Who are the members of these working
groups? Where and when are they meeting?
What policies, programs, projects,
and proposals are they hatching? How will
these things affect our lives?
The Bush administration has resisted
providing answers to these questions — to
Congress, the media, or the American public.
Much of what has come to light thus far
about the SPP working groups has been as
the result of U.S. government documents
pried loose through Freedom Of Information
Act (FOIA) filings by Judicial Watch,
a Washington, D.C.-based public-interest
organization.
Leading SPP advocates publicly deny
that their integration plans will bring about
a centralized EU-style government that will
override national, state, and local governance.
Privately, however, in their speeches
and writings, they acknowledge that
this is precisely what they are constructing.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Canada
Paul Cellucci, for instance, in an October
30, 2006 address to the Canadian Defense
and Foreign Affairs Institute, said:
Now, I don’t believe that we will ever
have a, in name anyways, a common
union like the Europeans have … but I believe that, incrementally,
we will continue to integrate
our economies....
I think … 10 years from
now, or maybe 15 years
from now we’re gonna
look back and we’re
gonna have a union in
everything but name.
[Emphasis added.]
Canadian Prime Minister
Stephen Harper (right) says the
Montebello summit was only
about “harmonizing jellybeans,”
while President Bush says critics
are using “scare tactics.”
|
Critics, of course, are not
quibbling over what the SPP
architects might eventually
name their creation; they are
concerned with the creation
itself and what it actually
will do — and is already
doing. For instance, one of
the major objectives of the
SPP’s chief architect Robert
Pastor is the transfer of
$100-$200 billion from the
United States to Mexico for infrastructure,
education, and economic development. He
has been proposing this in speeches and
essays for the Council on Foreign Relations,
the Trilateral Commission, and SPP
gatherings. Documents obtained through
FOIA show that the U.S. Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS), the
Department of Transportation, and other
federal agencies are already funding, or
are planning to fund, these objectives.
HHS documents show that this department,
under the auspices of the SPP,
intends to enhance “Mexico’s competitive
position through the establishment
of a grant fund for … development of
infrastructure in Mexico.” Aside from
the important fact that the U.S. Constitution
provides no authority for the federal
government to tax Americans to build
“infrastructure in Mexico” (or any other
country), there is the additional grim fact
that one government study after another
has warned that our own infrastructure
— especially roads, highways, bridges,
and levies — is crumbling and in need of
hundreds of billions of dollars for repair
and construction. Sending badly needed
infrastructure funds to Mexico will further
hasten our own infrastructure decline and
accelerate the flight of American companies
and jobs to Mexico.
Sometimes the SPP programs are
smuggled into actual legislation, as in the
case of the “comprehensive immigration
reform bill” (S. 1639) promoted by President
Bush, Senator Edward Kennedy, and
a bipartisan cast. That bill, which was defeated,
would have authorized funds for
“the development of economic opportunities”
and “job training for citizens and nationals”
in Mexico. Most of the SPP agenda,
however, has been proceeding without
congressional scrutiny or consent, quietly
being implemented by the massive bureaucracy
of the federal executive branch. The
administration and its defenders claim that
the SPP agenda falls within the authority
already provided by NAFTA, which Congress
approved.
This threadbare defense is wearing very
thin. Even SPP advocates are admitting to
a “democracy deficit” and a “transparency
deficit” in the secret SPP process. At a
pro-SPP seminar sponsored by the Hudson
Institute on August 13, 2007 — just prior
to the Montebello SPP summit — Hudson
senior fellow Chris Sands acknowledged:
“Congress was shut out from the very
beginning of this [SPP] process. In the
last couple of years, we’ve seen increasing
concern on Capitol Hill about what’s
going on in these negotiations, requests for
information, discussion of having hearings,
bringing people forward just to know
more about what’s going on.”
Mr. Sands is coauthor with Professor
Greg Anderson of a pro-SPP report by
the Hudson Institute, entitled Negotiating
North America: The Security and Prosperity
Partnership. This report makes some
telling admissions, such as: “The SPP
was designed to function within existing
administrative authority of the executive
branch.” This is a “very technocratic process,”
they say, that is best carried out by
“technocrats.”
But the technocrats have some very
radical objectives, such as creating a
“continental perimeter” around our three
countries to replace our current national
borders; creating a “North American
passport”; merging our immigration, customs,
and law enforcement; facilitating a
free-flow migration of people among the
three nations; “harmonizing” our tax and
regulatory policies; and initiating education
policies that foster a “North American
identity” rather than national identities.
Then there are policies aimed at “income
gap” equalization, which of course will be
achieved by a continuous downward trend
for U.S. citizens, as Mexican incomes
rise. This is what former Federal Reserve
Chairman Alan Greenspan was advocating
in his controversial March 2007 remarks
in which he called for opening the “window”
for skilled workers to enter the United
States in order to “suppress the skilledwage
level and end the concentration of
income.” As these policies come into the
open, the SPP advocates know there willbe a public backlash that will
be felt in Congress.
According to the Hudson
Institute authors, “As criticism
of the lack of transparency
and public accountability
of the SPP negotiations
has grown, congressional
interest and concern about
the SPP has also grown.”
Hence, say Sands and Anderson,
“Congressional hostility
represents the biggest
threat to the continuation of
the SPP after Montebello,
and after the end of the Bush
administration.”
Many patriots certainly
intend to increase congressional
hostility into a genuine
threat to the continuation of
the SPP. “We have no choice,”
says the John Birch Society’s
president, John F. McManus,
“but to fight and defeat the
SPP, and repeal NAFTA, the
foundation upon which the
SPP is being built.”
By both word and deed,
the SPP architects have revealed
their plans to copy the EU model of
rule by technocrats and executive decrees.
Mexican President Vicente Fox openly
stated, prior to the launch of the SPP, that
the “long-range objective is to establish an
ensemble of connections and institutions
similar to those created by the European
Union.”
|
In their 2003 book The Great Deception,
British authors Christopher Booker and
Richard North describe the decades-long
process of creating the European Union as
“a slow-motion coup d’etat, the most spectacular
coup d’etat in history.” Booker and
North show that the EU has become the
greatest concentration of political power
in the history of mankind. That is precisely
what the EU’s architects intended it to become;
but they didn’t tell that to the people
of Europe when they first began promoting
what they called “the project” after World
War II. It was launched as the European
Coal and Steel Community, and soon after
expanded into the European Economic
Community (EEC), better known as the
Common Market, to promote trade and
ease of travel. Gradually, as more political
integration took place, the EEC became
the European Community, or EC. Finally,
it changed names once again, from EC to
EU. The NAFTA/SPP architects are copying
the EU slow-motion coup d’etat blueprint
— but on an accelerated schedule.
Congress has the constitutional authority
— and duty — to stop this usurpation
of power and this planned transformation
of the United States. And the defeat last
summer of the dangerous immigrationamnesty
legislation showed that Congress
can be prodded to act. It further acted in a
surprise vote last summer to cut off federal
transportation funds to the SPP working
groups. That historic vote came on July 24
on an amendment offered by Rep. Duncan
Hunter (R-Calif.) to an appropriations
bill prohibiting the use of funds by SPP
working groups. The Hunter amendment
passed the House with a landslide 362-to-
63 vote.
How do we account for such stunning
bipartisan opposition to something as
supposedly inconsequential as harmonizing
jellybean labels? The answer is that a
rapidly growing grass-roots movement of
American citizens is becoming aware of
the SPP threat, and they are making their
voices heard in Washington, D.C. But, as
these recent battles have shown, members
of Congress are not likely to take appropriate
action on these urgent matters until a
significant number of determined constituents
become active and light fires underneath
them.
William F. Jasper joined the staff of The John Birch Society in 1976 as a researcher and soon became a contributing editor to the Society's magazines, American Opinion and The Review of the News. When those publications merged in 1985 to become THE NEW AMERICAN, Mr. Jasper continued to serve as a writer and contributing editor until 1990, when he was promoted to the position of Senior Editor.
Over the past three decades, William Jasper has researched and written extensively on foreign and domestic politics, national security, education, immigration, constitutional issues, the culture war, and most notably, the United Nations. His renown as an investigative journalist and insightful analyst on a wide array of topics has made William Jasper a frequent and highly sought guest on many radio and television programs.
He is the author of the 2001 book, The United Nations Exposed and the 1992 book, Global Tyranny-Step by Step: The United Nations and the Emerging New World Order. Both books were praised by many as the most authoritative and detailed expose' of the UN ever written. Mr. Jasper's coverage of UN events has included attendance at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the UN 50th Anniversary Founding celebration in San Francisco, the July 1998 UN Summit on the International Criminal Court in Rome, and the UN Millennium Summit in New York City during September 2000.
Born in Madison, Wisconsin, William Jasper grew up in the Pacific Northwest and is a graduate of the University of Idaho. Mr. Jasper receives critical support from his wife Carmen and their two sons.
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, any copyrighted material herein is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For further information please refer to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
|
