NAFTA Superhighway to Hell
Kerry Howley | August 16, 2007, 1:30pm
Chris Hayes
investigates the magical, mythical NAFTA superhighway:
When completed, the highway will run from Mexico City to Toronto, slicing through the heartland like a dagger sunk into a heifer at the loins and pulled clean to the throat. It will be four football fields wide, an expansive gully of concrete, noise and exhaust, swelled with cars, trucks, trains and pipelines carrying water, wires and God knows what else. Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness...
Indeed, the image of the highway, with its Chinese goods whizzing across the border borne by Mexican truckers on a privatized, foreign-operated road, is almost mundane in its plausibility. If there was a NAFTA highway, you could bet that Tom Friedman would be for it--what could be more flattening than miles of concrete paved across the continent?--and Lou Dobbs would be zealously opposed. In fact, Dobbs has devoted a segment of his show to the highway, its nonexistence notwithstanding.
It's all marvelously elaborate wish fulfillment for a certain kind of conservative. The racial composition of the country is changing, and how much more fun to blame coordinated, nefarious back door dealing than to acknowledge the millions of individual decisions that feed into demographic change. (We didn't sanction Mexican nannies at Deliberation Day!) Never mind that the opposite--maintaining demographic stasis--would actually require a coordinated, expensive, and abusive campaign.
Mr. nice Guy | August 16, 2007, 6:27pm | #
"Poor educational quality: Despite very good enrollment rates, the quality of the education Mexican children are getting is quite poor. Mexico, with a GNI per capita of $7,310, ranked 101st out of 125 countries for the quality of its math and science educational system. Vietnam, with a GNI per capita of $620, ranked 65th.
Literacy: Nearly 80% of Mexican 15-year-olds tested were incapable of performing even moderately difficult reading tasks.
High drop-out rates: In 2004, only 23% of Mexican adults between the ages of 25 and 64 had obtained a high school degree, versus 88% in the U.S. The average years of total schooling for a Mexican adult is 7.4, compared to almost 13 years in the U.S. "
http://www.worldfund.org/index.php?q=Mexico.html
Yeah, you'd have to be a racist to think that'll make for good driving, or good citizenship! Have you people ever known a lot of incredibly poor, deprived, poorly educated people? It's very little property rights or political discourse, more like fistfights and cockfights (nod to SIV). Lot's of superstition, impulsiveness, recklessness, sexism, homophobia, provincialism. Let's not romanticize that mess. Of COURSE they are not inherently dullards, duh. They just a stunted life of deprivation and mind numbing corruption. This is very unfortunate, and we should do everything we can to help raise them up. But Jesus you don't want peasants in your neighborhood, your streets or your country. Trust me, they make fundamentalists or urban street thugs in the US look like broadminded intellectuals.
Ron Paul | August 20, 2007, 11:23am | #
The proposed highway is part of a broader plan advanced by a quasi-government organization called the “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America,” or SPP.
The SPP was first launched in 2005 by the heads of state of Canada, Mexico, and the United States at a summit in Waco.
The SPP was not created by a treaty between the nations involved, nor was Congress involved in any way. Instead, the SPP is an unholy alliance of foreign consortiums and officials from several governments. One principal player is a Spanish construction company, which plans to build the highway and operate it as a toll road. But don’t be fooled: the superhighway proposal is not the result of free market demand, but rather an extension of government-managed trade schemes like NAFTA that benefit politically-connected interests.
The real issue is national sovereignty. Once again, decisions that affect millions of Americans are not being made by those Americans themselves, or even by their elected representatives in Congress. Instead, a handful of elites use their government connections to bypass national legislatures and ignore our Constitution-- which expressly grants Congress the sole authority to regulate international trade.
The ultimate goal is not simply a superhighway, but an integrated North American Union--complete with a currency, a cross-national bureaucracy, and virtually borderless travel within the Union. Like the European Union, a North American Union would represent another step toward the abolition of national sovereignty altogether.
A new resolution, introduced by Representative Virgil Goode of Virginia, expresses the sense of Congress that the United States should not engage in the construction of a NAFTA superhighway, or enter into any agreement that advances the concept of a North American Union. I wholeheartedly support this legislation, and predict that the superhighway will become a sleeper issue in the 2008 election.
Any movement toward a North American Union diminishes the ability of average Americans to influence the laws under which they must live. The SPP agreement, including the plan for a major transnational superhighway through Texas, is moving forward without congressional oversight-- and that is an outrage. The administration needs a strong message from Congress that the American people will not tolerate backroom deals that threaten our sovereignty.
