Quietly, Quietly, Building the North American Union

By Steven Yates
for eco-logic Powerhouse

November 2006

Just when you thought it might be safe to go on to topics other than regional integration and trade practices driven by the love of money and the lust for power, you get blindsided again.

While ordinary Americans were reflecting on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, globalists of Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, were making their way quietly, quietly, to Banff, Alberta for the North American Forum held at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel, September 12-14. The meeting was closed-doors. According to some reports, buses with attendees were arriving at night. There was no print media coverage in the U.S., and very little in Canada; I was able to download an article from the Toronto-based Star. Those who do not get their news from the Internet, remain in the dark about one of the biggest unfolding events of the present decade: the globalist social engineering of a North American Union.

When trans-national committees of un-elected bureaucrats begin overruling our laws and precedents - or if elected officials bow to globalism on their own - we will know that Constitutional government is dead in America. The super-elite will then be free to do as they please...

WorldNetDaily was able to obtain materials marked "Internal Document, Not For Public Release." The whistleblower, Mel Hurtig, noted Canadian author, publisher, and leader of the National Party of Canada, told WorldNetDaily that the "secret meeting was designed to undermine the democratic process." It was clear that the intention was to keep this important meeting about integrating the three countries out of the public eye.

Representing the U.S. in Banff was Former U.S. Secretary of State George Schulz. Representing Mexico was Former Mexican Finance Minister Pedro Aspe. Representing Canada was Former Premier of Alberta, Peter Lougheed. The first session featured opening comments by each. The sessions that followed had names like, "A Vision for North America: Issues and Options," "Toward a North American Energy Strategy," "Demographic and Social Dimensions of North American Integration," and "Border Infrastructure and Continental Prosperity."

The event was co-hosted by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, the business wing of Canada's super-elite, and the Canada West Foundation, a "think tank" that has been promoting regional integration.

Prominent on the panel of the "Vision for North America" session was none other than Robert Pastor, who might go down in history as the Father of the North American Union. Pastor is the author of Toward A North American Community (2001), published by the globalist Institute for International Economics. He chairs the Council on Foreign Relations' Task Force on North America, and served as lead author of the CFR's "Building a North American Community" (May 2005). Among other things, this document proposes a North American "security perimeter" around all three nations by 2010. It was this that inspired CNN commentator Lou Dobbs to wonder, last summer, if our elites "had gone mad."

Providing the keynote address at the Banff confab was our very own Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, U.S. Department of Defense. Rummy's speech was entitled, "Opportunities for Security Cooperation in North America: Military-to-Military Cooperation."

When the powerful begin reading papers on "cooperation" between the military hierarchies of three nations, are there really grounds for doubt that we are looking at compromises of U.S. sovereignty, and possibly security, on an unprecedented scale? Currently, there is a North American Cooperative Security Act, sponsored also in 2005, and languishing in committee, but doubtless, far from dead. The plan here is to integrate Mexican and Canadian security forces into the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The terms security and prosperity were bandied about freely. This, of course, ties the North American Forum - actually the second, (the first, at Sonoma, CA, in October 2005 was also held in maximum secrecy) - to the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), now housed in the NAFTA office of the U.S. Department of Commerce, where it has received the full backing of our Secretary of Commerce, Carlos M. Gutierrez.

The watchword, however, was deep integration, which Pastor, the CFR, and outfits like the Canada West Foundation have been promoting. The many working groups created under the SPP umbrella are currently "harmonizing" regulations by all three governments on food, drugs, the environment, electronic commerce, rules of origin, textiles and apparel labeling, movements of capital and labor, and foreign policy. The various working groups have signed "memoranda of understanding," or "frameworks of common principles" - or are working on such - in all these areas.

If there's anything you can take to the bank, this "harmonizing" process is not about, e.g., increasing food and drug safety for the people; it is about making life easier (and profits fatter) for the super-elite CEOs in leviathan-sized food and pharmaceutical corporations - wired to leviathan-sized governments through public-private partnerships. What is likely is that food safety will go down, and consumers' choices of, say, dietary supplements, will become over expensive, poorly-tested, and therefore, possibly hazardous pharmaceuticals, will begin to be restricted. Major globalists, we ought to note, are well connected to the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry. Rummy owns over $5 million in stock in Gilead Sciences, the company that developed Tamiflu® and sold it to Roche, the pharmaceuticals giant. George Schulz owns more than $7 million in Gilead Sciences stock, and unlike Rummy, actually sits on the company's board. At one time, the concept of conflict of interest would have applied. Today, those in the trans-national globalist class do as they please, unencumbered by considerations of ethics, law, or Constitution.

When confronted, shills for the power elite (including on the SPP website, which for the past several weeks, has sported a disinformational "Myths and Facts" section) insist that its goals are benign. They just want to increase the prosperity of the three nations, so as to better compete with the booming economies of China and India, as well as the European Union, while also ensuring the safety of our peoples in an age of terrorism. The sovereignty and independence of Canada, Mexico, and the U.S., they insist, will be respected.

But if the super-elites of the three nations have the populations' best interests in mind, then why the secrecy? Why have the agendas (and memberships) of the various working groups of the SPP been kept out of sight, not even available on the SPP website? Why does the latter's "Myths and Facts" describe the SPP as only a "dialogue" between the leadership of the three nations, when it is clearly much more than that? Why has it been necessary to invoke the Freedom of Information Act to penetrate the wall of secrecy?

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 whistle-blowers.

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 trans-national 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 super-elite 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 super-elite's long-term goal for the Western hemisphere.

The super-elite 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 trans-national and globalist. As a populist, however, his instincts are sound. He understands that an FTAA would benefit the super-elite - 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 super-elite 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 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 trans-national 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 super-elite wielding absolute power.

Bentley outlines how the process occurs, in five steps, or phases.

First, the super-elite 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 it - 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 break-neck 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 place, you are on your way to political union under a regional, hegemonic authority.

Thus, what has taken the super-elite 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 trans-national committees of un-elected bureaucrats begin overruling our laws and precedents - or if elected officials bow to globalism on their own (as CA Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has done with NAFTA regulations on occasion) - we will know that Constitutional government is dead in America. The super-elite 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!

Steven Yates, Ph.D., teaches philosophy at the University of South Carolina Upstate and Greenville Technical College