Thursday, June 25, 2009
The SPP (Security and Prosperity Partnership), according to its authors and proponents, has the stated purpose of providing greater cooperation on security and economic issues and of making North America more prosperous. It is being propagandized as being concerned with trade issues only and has working bodies concerned with Manufactured Goods and Sectoral and Regional Competitiveness, E-Commerce & ICT (Information and Communication Technology), Energy, Transportation, Food & Agriculture, Environment, Financial Services, Business Facilitation, Movement of Goods, and Health, and Immigration. However, critics argue that the SPP is a "blueprint for building a European Union-style merger of the three countries of North America", creating a "North American Union”
The SPP Partnership was founded in Waco, Texas on March 23, 2005 by Paul Martin, Prime Minister of Canada, Vincente Fox, President of Mexico, and George W. Bush, President of the United States. In the first part of a Joint Statement President Bush, President Fox, and Prime Minister Martin said, “We, the elected leaders of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, gather in Texas to announce the establishment of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America." But the fact is that the SPP is being implemented in secrecy from the electorate of each country and has not been subject to discussion or debate by the elected representatives of each country. The work on the SPP by elected officials is plainly illegal.
From an article by Jerome Corsi of 2006, “the SPP is headed by three top cabinet level officers of each country. Representing the United States are Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Representing Mexico are Secretary of Economics, Secretary Fernando Canales, Secretary of Government, Carlos Abascal, and Secretary of External Relations, Luis Ernesto Derbéz. Representing Canada are Minister of Industry David L. Emerson, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Public Safety, Anne McLellan, and Minister of Foreign Affairs Pierre Stewart Pettigrew.
In March of 2006, at the second summit of the SPP held in Cancún, Quintana Roo, Mexico, the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC) was formed. The NACC is a tri-national working group of the SPP and is composed of 30 corporate representatives from some of North America's largest companies (10 from each country). The NACC has been mandated to set priorities for the SPP and to act as a stable driver of the integration process through changes in government in all three countries.
So what does this mean? It means that even though there could be changes in government in each country, the NACC will continue its mandate to implement the SPP agenda. Political parties opposed to the SPP will simply not be allowed to gain power in the government. (We can talk more about how these parties are kept from power in the discussion period).
There’s another name for what our leaders are doing in relation to the SPP. It’s called TREASON. Treason by definition is “violation of allegiance toward one's country or sovereign, especially the betrayal of one's country or consciously and purposely acting to aid its enemies”. (In this case the enemy is the global ruling elite and our elected government members are agents of that elite). Treason is a high crime and is generally punishable by death.
Now let’s move on to the North American Union otherwise called the NAU.
The SPP could be said to be the mechanism to implement the North American Union. In other words, the SPP is the means and the NAU is the goal. The North American Union is “a continental union of Canada, Mexico and the United States, similar in structure to the European Union, including a common currency known as the amero.”
Working undercover to implement the NAU have been the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, and the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations. So you can see the NAU is not a plan originating from the people for their benefit, but from the corporate and financial sectors for their benefit.
I should spend some time here on the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). It has been called the most powerful agent of United States Foreign Policy outside the State Department. Its earliest origin, in the period 1917 to 1918, stemmed from a working fellowship of about 150 distinguished scholars, called "The Inquiry”. This led to the establishment of the CFR on May 30, 1919, along with its British counterpart, the Chatham House in London. The American participants who returned from the conference became drawn to a discreet club of New York financiers and international lawyers who had organized previously in June 1918 and was headed by Elihu Root, J.P. Morgan’s lawyer; this select group called itself the Council on Foreign Relations. They joined this group and the Council was formally established in New York on July 29, 1921, with 108 founding members, including Elihu Root as a leading member and John W. Davis, the chief counsel for J. P. Morgan & Co. and former Solicitor General for President Wilson, as its founding president. Davis was later to become Democratic presidential candidate in 1924. Other members included John Foster Dulles, Herbert H. Leyman, Henry L. Stimson, Averell Harriman and others.
Incidentally, an interesting side issue relating to CFR member, Harriman. Averell Harriman was the son of railroad baron E. H. Harriman. He established W.A. Harriman & Co, a banking business. In 1927 his brother E. Roland Harriman joined the business and the name was changed to Harriman Brothers and Company. In 1931 they merged with Brown Bros. & Co. to create the highly successful Brown Bros. Harriman & Company. Notable employees included George Herbert Walker, and his son-in-law Prescott Bush, father of former U.S. president, George H.W. Bush. Harriman also had financial connections with the WW II Nazis. On October 20, 1942, the U.S. government ordered the seizure of Nazi German banking operations in New York City. Various Harriman business interests were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act in October and November 1942.
Harriman attended Yale where he joined the Skull and Bones Club, a satanic society and a recruitment body leading to members attaining various prominent societal positions. Skull and Bones also had as members three generations of the Bush family including George W. Bush. Also a disproportionate number of Skull and Bones members were said to enter the CIA.
So we see here the connection of the Bush family to Harriman and the Nazis. In fact, George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, helped finance the Nazi Party. Also, more importantly, we see the connection of the Banking elite to the CFR. We also see the connection of Skull and Bones with CFR members and with President George Bush. However, that was a long side issue.
Going back to the CFR…
Over time, the centre of power in the CFR shifted from the Morgan family, a U.S. banking family, to the Rockefeller family. The Rockefeller family today under David Rockefeller, is the most wealthy U.S. banking family, only second in power and wealth to the European-based banking family of the Rothschilds. David Rockefeller is part of the New World Order elite that strives for global domination.
The Rothschild family is said to be worth $100 trillion and some have even said as much as $400 trillion. It is commonly known that powerful banking families are at the top of the pyramid in terms of wealth and power and theyhave a strong influence on decisions at the highest levels and that affect every global citizen.
So now, we’ve looked at how the SPP was formed and how it is being used to institute a traitorous and unlawful merger of Mexico, the U.S. and Canada. We’ve identified the players of this treasonous act. We’ve identified the Council on Foreign Relations as the likely the main implementer of the North American Union. There’s so much more to talk about, but I’ll begin to draw things to a close now.
In the U.S. now, we now have a true fascist government. George Bush has said numerous times in public statements that he would like to be a dictator. He has given himself, through numerous bills and executive orders, the powers of a dictator. The U.S., at the moment, is under a virtual dictatorship and under virtual, undeclared martial law. The Congress and Senate have become powerless and are really accomplices in this executive coup by the Bush administration.
Change through the ballot box has been made, in my opinion, impossible. This also applies to Mexico and Canada. Our Canadian oppositional candidates might think otherwise, but in their hearts they know this is true. We have seen the inside cheating and manipulation of the primaries and the role the mainstream media has played in lying about the results and in excluding opponents of the neocons from debate or vastly cutting back their debate time. The electorate have been conditioned and brainwashed through the mass media and know little or nothing about these secret manipulations of the ruling elite. Many citizens will continue to vote for mainstream political parties such as the Liberals and Conservatives, whose leaders are handpicked by the ruling elite through the Bilderberg Club and other organizations. These controlled leaders will carry out the agenda of the ruling elite, including the implementation of the SPP and the NAU.
What we are looking at is the implementation of the NAU by around 2010. This will spell the end of Canadian sovereignty as unelected appointees from the corporate sector or allied to the corporate sector become our real government. From then on, the function of MPs in our parliament will be mainly to rubber stamp decisions made by the unelected, shadow government. We will have lost entirely our ability to control our own internal affairs through elected officials.
With NAU integration, our currencies will be merged into a common currency. This may not happen right away, but it will be inevitable. Also at some point, physical currency or fiat money will be ended and we will use electronic money out of necessity. We will be given an RFID card or we may even eventually be asked to have an I.D. chip implant. If we refuse to have the card or the chip implant, we may be criminalized or we simply may not be able to purchase goods or to even obtain employment. The alternative of bartering for necessities will probably become illegal. I remember hearing that the plan to make bartering illegal is being seriously considered to put into law.
There is also great danger of martial law being implemented. This will be directed at all those freedom loving people resisting fascist tyranny. Names of such people have been collected and are now on file. The FEMA internment camps are waiting and I have heard that they can hold up to 50 million people in the U.S. Another danger is the staging of a large, government false flag event to give the U.S. government a pretext for expanding its agenda of global imperialism. Iran is next in its gun sights.
The biggest and most unbelievable threat is the ruling elite’s desire to reduce the world’s population level by anywhere from 20% to 95%, depending on which information source you read. This is the Eugenics Plan to get rid of “useless eaters” and genetically "inferior" people, which has been talked about by various people including Aldous Huxley, Julian Huxley, Andrew Carnegie, J.P Morgan, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Edward Henry Harriman, John Davidson Rockefeller, Winston Churchill, Prince Phillip, and many more.
Eugenics was first practiced on a large scale by the Nazi Party in Germany with the passing in 1933 of the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Posterity," also known as the "Sterilization Law." Eugenics has also been implemented incrementally, being used to kill and sterilize, for instance, indigenous people worldwide. Even in our medical system we have palliative care units where people have been put to die. There is also a practice becoming more common of not giving priority to old people, under a rationalization that they are unproductive citizens and require too much resources to save, while at the same time alternative, non-drug means of bringing people back to health are being suppressed by the medical establishment.
http://whatisthespp.com/
On March 23, 2005, heads of government Vincente Fox, George W. Bush, and Paul Martin launched the North American partnership at a meeting in Waco, Texas, with the expressed goal of “a safer, more prosperous North America.”
Proponents of the partnership claim its purpose is to increase security and prosperity for all three nations through enhanced cooperation. Critics maintain the partnership will sacrifice U.S. sovereignty by establishing a “North American Union,” with open borders and a common currency. Recently, President Bush stated that he found these fears "amusing."
Judicial Watch does not find it amusing and is calling for complete transparency and disclosure in the matter. Follow the links below to read the recently released documents and learn more about the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America.
http://www.judicialwatch.org/SPP.shtml
Human Events Online has been leading the coverage of the so-called “Security and Prosperity Partnership,” a unilateral program implemented by the Bush Administration designed to set the course for a North American Union that would subsume our national sovereignty. A de facto treaty signed by the leaders of Canada, Mexico, and the U.S., the agreement was never submitted to the Senate for ratification. Now it can be revealed that plans for the North American Union include a tri-national “North American Union” ID card.
Recent testimony to Congress by a Homeland Security official reinforces the point. At a June 8 hearing before an immigration subcommittee, DHS counselor and acting assistant secretary Paul Rosenzweig touted something called the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI). In doing so, he cited the SPP and bragged that under the SPP, “Cabinet Secretaries and Ministers convened trilateral working groups to develop concrete work plans and specific timetables for securing North America and ensuring legitimate travelers and cargo efficiently cross our shared borders.”
The WHTI was established to implement legislation passed as part of the 2004 intelligence reform bill, which was in turn spurred on by the findings of the federal government’s ad hoc 9/11 Commission. A provision in that legislation required that everyone entering the United States, including Americans, present identity documents -- but all of the details were left to the Department of Homeland Security. The result was the WHTI, which aims to require that people entering the U.S. from Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, or Bermuda present either a new document called a “Passport Card” or other documents to be named which will meet certain standards to be determined. This requirement would also apply to Americans, who currently do not need a passport to travel to those countries but would need a document compliant with WHTI to return home.
By folding the WHTI into the SPP’s agenda for a North American Union, the Bush Administration is brazenly laying the foundation to turn WHTI into a backdoor tri-national ID system. And Americans may have little choice but to be integrated into it.
What forms of identification will be acceptable for the WHTI have yet to be finalized by DHS and the State Department. But as the Government Accountability Office reported to Congress, “A number of stakeholders are advocating a driver’s license with enhanced security features as a substitute for a passport. They maintain that when states adopt driver’s licenses with enhanced security features in accordance with the REAL ID Act, the document should be sufficient for land border crossings under the Travel Initiative.”
The REAL ID Act will force Homeland-Security-written standards onto state drivers’ licenses and link the state databases into a national ID system. Each draft of the legislation before the final version (passed as an amendment to “emergency” Iraq spending) said that national standards for state drivers’ licenses should be based on those recommended in a document called the “Driver License Agreement.” The DLA was a separate 23-page document drafted by American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, a kind of “trade association” of states’ DMV offices. Buried in the glossary of that document is a note that “states” eligible to join the standardized database system included provinces of Canada and states of Mexico. The provision referring to the DLA was pulled from the bill after Liberty Coalition and other groups brought attention to the matter. So this scheme for a North American Union ID is nothing new.
Chief among those “stakeholders” mentioned in the GAO report are many Chambers of Commerce (interestingly, the SPP is being run through the Department of Commerce) and other businesses along both sides of the border, working together under the name “Business for Economic Security, Tourism, and Trade” (BESTT). Rather than searching for a way to preserve both free markets and national sovereignty, BESTT dispatched 9/11 Commissioner Slade Gorton to testify to Congress on how machine-readable REAL ID drivers’ licenses “can be combined with other requirements, like the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, for purposes like border crossing.” Another BESTT representative, Luke Ford, has been telling Congressional staffers that Canadian drivers’ licenses could easily be tweaked enough to integrate into a REAL ID border-crossing system.
But will this ultimately happen? The GAO report points out that Congress would have to pass legislation authorizing Homeland Security to require that an indicator of U.S. citizenship be explicitly included in the machine-readable data on nationalized REAL ID drivers’ licenses. Assuming DHS doesn’t go ahead and do so anyway when it releases REAL ID standards later this year, there is already legislation introduced in the House to include that information. The PACT Act, introduced by Reps. Louise Slaughter and John McHugh would also require the U.S. and Canada to develop identical documents for use under WHTI.
What all this means is that we are facing a situation where U.S. and Canadian drivers’ licenses, which Americans need to drive to work, go to a tavern, and generally navigate day-to-day life, will contain sensitive personal biometric information, interlinked and readable by the governments of Canada and Mexico. And depending on the standards decided upon by Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff, our drivers’ licenses could contain more information than the documents Mexicans use to cross into the U.S. legally; nevermind those who cross our insecure southern border without permission.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=16058
The groups, working under the North American Free Trade Agreement office in the Department of Commerce, are to implement the Security and Prosperity Partnership, or SPP, signed by President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Texas, on March 23, 2005.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50618
The fourth Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) summit was held in New Orleans last April 21st and 22nd.
At these summits, policies affecting North America's future have been discussed with no congressional oversight or public input. Mexican, U.S., and Canadian heads of state have been meeting since 2005 to determine policies ranging from water rights in Canada to a counter-drug aid package for Mexico worth 1.4 billion dollars.
The trilateral SPP was first announced on March 31, 2005 in Waco, Texas. Its mission is to increase continental economic integration and coordinate security systems. What has been coined as a "NAFTA-plus" agenda will be hitting people on the local level by affecting transportation, migration, and the environment, to name just a few areas.
This anti-democratic effort is backed by corporate leaders and senior government officials from each country. There are currently ten working groups on the SPP prosperity agenda and three on the security agenda that have set measurable goals and specific implementation dates.
Who is behind these agendas? The North American Competitiveness Council, comprised of the region's largest companies. 30 of these corporate entities have had privileged access to the summits and have made recommendations to be considered by Bush, Harper and Calderón. Many of these recommendations affect automotive, transportation, and manufacturing services, the idea of a NAFTA plus agenda being to reduce business costs and eliminating barriers to trade in North America.
We can base our predictions for a NAFTA-plus agenda on what history has already taught us. In Mexico, for instance, the employment rate was lower in 2004 than in 1990 according to the ILO, and the number of people living in poverty has been rising continuously, from 79,167,000 in 2000 to 85,016,000 in 2004. The consequent spike in migration across the northern border has occurred in conjunction with a loss of over one million U.S. manufacturing jobs since NAFTA was implemented—a 65 percent loss of employment in the industry. Meanwhile, instead of an expected US trade surplus with Mexico and Canada, the trade deficit grew, from $9 billion in 1993 to almost $90 billion in 2003. As in Mexico and the U.S., Canada saw its income gap widen, its stable, full-time employment decrease, and its social safety net mangled.
While there are many unknowns associated with the SPP and its NAFTA-plus agenda, what is known is that its members are not designing democratic, locally controlled policies for the future of North America. The policies promoted by Bush, Harper, and Calderón are sure to be more of the same and worse. We need to push for a Genuine Prosperity and Human Security agenda and for an urgently needed North American conversation on democratic integration from below.
http://www.globalexchange.org/spp.html
The same group that on their own website admits to being the predominant force in Canada behind NAFTA, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) — Canada’s most powerful interest group made up of the CEOs of the 150 largest corporations in Canada, many of which are subsidiaries of foreign, predominantly American, corporations — in January of 2003, issued a press release announcing the creation of their North American Security and Prosperity Initiative. In this, they proposed five main changes to be undertaken in the North American political-economic landscape: “Reinvent borders, maximize regulatory efficiencies, negotiate a comprehensive resource security pact, reinvigorate the North American defense alliance, and create a new institutional framework.”
Several months later, in November of the same year, the CCCE issued a short document titled, “Paul Martin urged to take the lead in forging a new vision for North American cooperation.” In this document, they stated that, “all of the CCCE’s 150 member CEOs are involved in this ambitious two-year initiative,” in which Thomas D’Aquino, president and CEO of the CCCE, “urged that Mr. Martin champion the idea of a yearly summit of the leaders of Canada, Mexico, and the United States in order to give common economic, social, and security issues the priority they deserve in a continental, hemispheric, and global context.”
When the CCCE’s two-year initiative ended, it formed a new task force, called the “Independent Task Force on the Future of North America” in conjunction with the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations and the U.S.’s most powerful think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), founded by the Rockefeller and Morgan families in 1921.
This task force released a statement on March 14, 2005 entitled, “Trinational call for a North American economic and security community by 2010.” In the Trinational Call, it was recommended that the North America nations create “a community defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter,” and to “harmonize” the areas of energy, security, education, military, immigration, resources, and the economy.
Nine days after this recommendation was issued, Bush, Martin, and Fox signed the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP), and in the joint statement explained it would, “implement common border security and bioprotection [enhanced surveillance] strategies, enhance critical infrastructure protection, implement a common approach to emergency response, implement improvements in aviation and maritime security, combat transnational threats, enhance intelligence partnerships, promote sectoral collaboration in energy, transportation, financial services, technology, and other areas to facilitate business, [and] reduce the costs of trade.” The SPP agreement oversees the creation of SPP “working groups” in each country, which have a mandate of overseeing “harmonization,” or “integration,” in over 300 policy areas.
Two months later, in May of 2005, the Independent Task Force on the Future of North America released a document titled, “Building a North American Community,” of which Canadian Task Force members included D’Aquino, Wendy Dobson, professor at University of Toronto and former president of the C.D. Howe Institute, Allan Gotlieb,(former Canadian Ambassador to the United States as well as being Chairman of the CCCE), and John Manley, former Liberal deputy prime minister.
The report’s recommendations included initiatives to establish “a common security perimeter by 2010, develop a North American Border Pass [North American ID card] with biometric identifiers, expand NORAD into a multi-service defense command,” share intelligence, develop Mexico’s energy resources, “harmonize” areas of energy, education, military, foreign policy, immigration, health, expand “temporary” migrant worker programs, and adopt a common external tariff.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8375
The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, a trilateral venture established in 2005 by the governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States, has released its North American Plan for Avian & Pandemic Influenza (pdf, 3.01mb). The plan, announced at the North American Leaders Summit at Montebello, Canada, “outlines how Canada, Mexico and the United States intend to work together to combat an outbreak of avian influenza or an influenza pandemic in North America.”
The plan “establishes a framework for action on priority areas including: trilateral emergency coordination and communication; joint exercises and training; response to outbreaks in animals; surveillance among animals and in humans; laboratory practices; research; personnel exchange; screening for air, sea and land travel; and maintaining continuity for critical infrastructure and key services,” according to a fact sheet prepared by the State Department’s Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs.
The report says that “if a novel strain of human influenza emerges outside North America, the three countries intend to work together to slow the introduction of the virus to the continent by preventing infected individuals from entering Canada, Mexico or the United States… Emphasizing a North American approach, rather than individualized approaches among Canada, Mexico and the United States, may be the best way to slow the spread of a novel strain of human influenza into our respective countries…”
http://govdocsblog.kentlaw.edu/wordpress/?cat=98
The document...
http://www.spp.gov/pdf/nap_flu07.pdf
Some of the SPP’s goals and objectives may be desirable and mutually beneficial. However, the manner in which SPP is being pushed — with secretiveness by both government and private sector interests, the lack of congressional oversight, and without the accountability ensured by the regular legislative process, policies pushed and public policy decisions made through administrative initiative with heavy influence by private corporate interests and foreign governments – has raised concerns among some federal lawmakers and the public.
Indeed, many of the corollary activities, such as secretive meetings of elites, state and local pushes for monstrous-sized highways, inland "ports" complete with Mexican customs stations in the heart of the United States, academic initiatives to indoctrinate American students to consider themselves by a "North American" identity rather than as Americans, Canadians, or Mexicans, and the like, have justifiably given rise to public skepticism, healthy scrutiny, publicity of the heretofore secret activities, and grassroots opposition efforts.
A key cause of concern relates to the procedure being pursued. For example, it is unclear under what legal authority the Bush administration is taking actions through SPP to harmonize U.S. regulations, policies, and standards with those of Canada and Mexico. No legislation has been enacted authorizing the SPP. No congressional hearings, bills, amendments, or normal legislative process has occurred to grant legal authority specifically approving SPP’s goals, in any public forum or fashion.
Congressional offices that have inquired say the administration claims it is acting under authority granted by NAFTA. But administrative divisions acting through SPP "working groups" have signed memoranda of understanding and entered other agreements with their Canadian and Mexican counterparts to implement SPP initiatives — with no congressional oversight, public notice or comment, or accountability through constitutionally ordained checks and balances.23
And to the extent the public and private sector arms of SPP are intertwined, reasonable skepticism leads many to question SPP’s goals and the process for achieving them. The SPP-related documents obtained by Judicial Watch through the Freedom of Information Act shed light on this secretive project and give further reason for skepticism toward and scrutiny of SPP.
When publicizing its FOIA documents from the Banff conference, Judicial Watch questioned the goals and procedural machinations being taken to advance SPP:
The notes for the presentations document the need to overcome popular opposition to North American integration: "To what degree does a concept of North America help/hinder solving problems between the three countries? . . . While a vision is appealing[,] working on the infrastructure might yield more benefit and bring more people on board (‘evolution by stealth’)."
"It is not encouraging to see the phrase ‘evolution by stealth’ in reference to important policy debates such as North American integration and cooperation," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. "These documents provide more information to Americans concerned about the Security and Prosperity Partnership. The more transparency, the better."24
The use of a phrase like "evolution by stealth" to describe the modus operandi for achieving any public policy change — particularly something as fundamental and sweeping as the SPP or a North American Union — is disturbing in the extreme. To close observers, that troubling approach is all too familiar.
In the 1970s, globalist thinker Richard N. Gardner laid out an approach to eroding national sovereignty, one pursued by elites ever since. Advocating the creation of "institutions of limited jurisdiction and selected membership," he thought entities like the Security and Prosperity Partnership "will have a better chance of doing what must be done to make a ‘rule of law’ possible among nations — providing methods for changing the law and enforcing it as it changes and developing the perception of common interests that is the prerequisite for successful cooperation." Gardner characterized this, interestingly, as "an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece" to "accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault" of constructing U.N.-style, omnibus mechanisms.25 (emphasis added)
Trying to integrate three distinct nations, sets of laws, cultures, and historical contexts by "stealth" or "end run" clearly does not serve the public interest or any member of any national government or official who may be party to this illicit undertaking. Such a strategy tacitly admits that the goals would fail to prevail in the marketplace of ideas and a fair political fight. At a minimum, the secretive process like that of the Bush administration and its SPP collaborators gives the appearance of trying to pull something over on the American people.
Of further serious concern is the fact that the SPP follows the precedents of NAFTA and the trade regime to which the United States has increasingly adhered. As Jessica Vaughan reported, NAFTA provided "temporary" visas for Canadians and Mexicans. Those visas effectively have served as a back door to permanent immigration, while having an adverse "noticeable effect on employment prospects and salaries for Americans in health care and computer-related fields."26
Furthermore, the World Trade Organization has dictated to the United States in many cases — an unelected, unaccountable, supranational body telling sovereign nations what they must do. Vaughan cited a General Accounting Office report that found the United States a defendant in about half the cases brought to the WTO, the WTO coercing the United States to change its policy in several instances (while at the same time "no other country’s laws or regulations were affected") including steel tariffs in 2003, and WTO "generally unsympathetic to its members’ domestic determinations."27
Clearly, any appreciable escalation of trilateral integration through SPP will require some third party with the power to adjudicate disputes among SPP members. Professor Robert Pastor has contemplated this need and facilitated its conceptualization. Pastor put on a conference focusing on the development of a continental legal system. Proposals discussed at Pastor’s conference included a North American Court of Justice, a North American Trade Tribunal, and a North American Social Charter.28 Such a body would likely be constituted by equal membership of the three nations in the SPP. As in the case of other international bodies, the U.S. representative would very likely be outvoted 2-to-1 in most disputes, regardless of the law and the facts. This could very well result in an unelected, unaccountable international tribunal dictating U.S. immigration, trade, tax, transportation, environmental, energy, safety, and social and economic policy to the United States.
National security expert Frank Gaffney has noted the ultimate effects of an SPP regime that supersedes national sovereignty:
Such rules are intended to govern trinational trade, transportation, immigration, social security, education and virtually every other aspect of life in North America. There are new institutions being proposed, too, such as a North American Tribunal with authority to trump rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court.
If Congress persists in paying no attention to the emerging SPP/NAU — which seems likely, given that most in the Democratic leadership are sympathetic to transnational progressivism, if not rabid Transies themselves — it will soon find itself effectively out of a job.
Think that unimaginable? Consider this fact: By some estimates, as much as 85 percent of the rules, regulations and laws that govern everyday life in the U.K. have never been considered, let alone enacted, by the British Parliament. Instead, they have been handed down as edicts by the unelected, unaccountable Transies who run the European Union from Brussels.29
In fact, the 50th anniversary of the European Union shows what could well be in store for Americans should the U.S. government continue to force the SPP and mass amnesty-guestworker legislation. The EU began as a six-nation Common Market under the Treaty of Rome. It evolved through stages, such as a European Economic Community, into the 27-nation European Union, complete with a common currency, the Euro. This despite popular opposition at every step. FT/Harris polls cited by the Christian Science Monitor found 44 percent of citizens in the EU’s five largest states believe their country has not improved by joining the union. Critics cite too-quick expansion of the EU, lack of public input, and that "bureaucrats at EU headquarters in Brussels had become answerable to no one as they issued more and more regulations governing everyday life, from cheese production to environmental protection."30
The EU bureaucrats and EU backers continue to prod for the next step at integration, a constitution. Already rejected by the French and Dutch in 2005, Germany is pushing the Berlin Declaration to call for an EU constitution by 2009; a constitution would cede more national sovereignty and empower further the very supranational institutions that increasingly dictate to member states and regulate their citizens’ lives.31
Without a doubt, the initiation of any tribunal that gives Canada and Mexico the ability to outvote America could lead only one direction. That direction is the further diminution of American sovereignty, and with it the unfavorable position in politicized rulings, loss of control over immigration and border security, the redistribution of American wealth, the undermining and erosion of the American standard of living, and the eventual loss of American exceptionalism to a blended North American "culture" that forsakes many aspects of American life taken for granted today.
Foreign Workers Unlimited and American Entitlements Drained
For immigration, SPP has serious implications. Documents from the Commerce Department disclose that SPP advocates intend to dramatically expand the inflow of foreign workers. "Work must continue to formalize a transnational technical labor force that could work in any North American country on a temporary basis."32
At the same time, the SPP working groups within and among U.S. government and private sector collaborators have pursued a goal, to "facilitate legitimate travel to and within North America."33 The Bush administration has worked to fashion a mass legalization plan, including a "guestworker" program as the mechanism to amnesty nearly all 12 million illegal aliens — the majority of whom are Mexicans.34 Legalized aliens would receive a perpetually renewable "Z" visa, while new foreign workers would obtain a "Y" visa. No existing temporary visa categories, such as H2A or H1B, would be eliminated under the Bush plan. The Senate immigration bill of 2007, S. 1348’s substitute language, has this structure as its crux.
And given the mindset reflected in the SPP documents, a North American "guestworker" visa should be anticipated. The Council on Foreign Relations task force recommended just such liberalization of continental migration:
Experience with the NAFTA visa system suggests that its procedures need to be simplified, and such visas should be made available to a wider range of occupations and to additional categories of individuals such as students, professors, bona fide frequent visitors, and retirees.
. . . A long-term goal should be to create a "North American preference" — new rules that would make it much easier for employees to move and for employers to recruit across national boundaries within the continent.
. . . Canada and the United States should consider eliminating restrictions on labor mobility altogether and work toward solutions that, in the long run, could enable the extension of full labor mobility to Mexico as well.35
The CFR’s short-term recommendations urged the United States to expand temporary worker programs for Mexicans’ benefit and implementation of the U.S.-Mexico Social Security totalization agreement.36 The Bush administration began negotiating a totalization agreement with Mexico early on. The U.S. Social Security Commissioner signed an agreement in 2003, but it has not cleared the White House because of public attention and controversy.
The United States has some 20 such agreements with other nations, including Canada. Totalization allows a wage earner from one nation who lives in another country during part of his career to get retirement earnings credit for the time spent abroad. In general, such arrangements amount to a reciprocity agreement between two nations, whereby retirement taxes are reconciled for the benefit of a noncitizen worker with his home country’s government retirement system.
However, the Bush administration’s deal with Mexico has drawn extensive criticism. A congressional hearing in 2003 revealed that the Mexican totalization agreement vastly underestimated the costs to U.S. taxpayers. Mexicans who worked in the United States, their dependents, and survivors could draw Social Security benefits after only six quarters of U.S. work (compared with 40 quarters for an American worker to qualify), and Mexican illegal aliens could get Social Security credit for unlawful U.S. work.37
Given that other U.S. totalization agreements are with developed countries, and involve relatively few workers and minimal illegal immigration, the Mexico agreement, if implemented, would pose a tremendously expensive, unfunded liability on American taxpayers. It would hasten the insolvency of U.S. Social Security. The U.S. General Accounting Office called the Social Security Administration’s exceedingly low cost estimates of this agreement "highly uncertain" and found SSA’s projections of previous totalizations often fell far below actual costs — "usually by more than 25 percent," if not by "several orders of magnitude."38 Therefore, a totalization agreement with Mexico would unfairly advantage Mexico and disadvantage the United States. Considering it in the context of the SPP, totalization makes a bad package even worse.
To the extent the United States might retain the ability to set its own immigration policies under an SPP or a North American Union regime, experience shows that the greatest flow of persons would occur from the poorest country (Mexico) to the richest (United States). Making it easier for more Mexicans to treat the United States as a "cash cow" where they may live and work without assimilating or attaching themselves psychologically and politically will only serve to further diminish American national identity, sovereignty, and self-government — not to mention leave America economically worse off.
In addition, the ramifications of Mexico’s stated intention to expand its own agricultural guestworker program, which imports other Latin Americans, especially Guatemalans, are uncertain.39 More Latinos crossing into Mexico would mean more aliens admitted into a "North American Union" party. Would those aliens be able to more easily exploit that opportunity and abscond to the United States? Would Mexico’s endemic corruption represent another way for criminals to deal in fake IDs and identity fraud for these new "willing workers" from Latin America?
Existing U.S. visa policies already serve the cause of continental integration, SPP’s goal. For example, the Border Crossing Cards that the United States issues to Mexicans include biometrics, but inspectors often do not authenticate the card bearer’s identity or record entries. Because this is a "secure" ID, the administration exempts card holders from the US-VISIT entry-exit program.
Border Crossing Cards were originally good for 72 hours in the United States, but now card holders may stay for up to 30 days. This sort of laxity in standards and processes has translated into a growing problem with imposters and card-bearers using the document "as a de facto work permit or residence permit." The effect is "a handy tool for encouraging and increasing the essentially unregulated cross-border flow of people under the guise of a ‘secure’ document."40
Other indications of where the administration would seek to go using its SPP "discretion" are the TN visa, which was created under NAFTA. NAFTA listed qualifying professions for this visa, which has no cap or prevailing wage requirement and may be renewed indefinitely. But subsequent trade agreements have listed only those occupations not qualifying for a similar visa. Also, the scope of activities permitted under the B-1 (business traveler) visa was expanded for Mexicans and Canadians under NAFTA. Many "services" that come very close to "employment" in any other context are now allowed.41
Further, alien commuters, who live in Mexico or Canada and work in the United States, may gain special status to commute. These aliens must qualify for permanent residency and prove employment. However, even third-country nationals living in either country may qualify for this special treatment. Such a "guestworker" model under SPP would vastly expand the pool of foreign workers and America’s loss of control over its borders.
A related instance of "blurring the lines" is the many accommodations the United States has made at ports of entry. By America’s making it more convenient for cross-border commuting, the United States aids and abets "individuals who are essentially committing economic and social arbitrage by living on one side and working on the other."42 This "neighborliness" on America’s part has led to vast resources expended on inspection. And at no fee to border crossers, border crossings represent a hidden tax on U.S. taxpayers. Crossers, especially international commuters, are an untapped revenue source of people who pose a direct cost to the United States, as well as needles in a vastly increasing haystack of traffic, in which smugglers of narcotics and illegal aliens blend.
At a minimum, the people whose cars, and businesses whose tractor-trailer trucks, clog land crossing points entering the United States should pay a user fee. Those imposing the costs of border security and inspections should have to pick up the actual costs they impose on this nation. Many Americans never leave this country. The same is true of many Canadians and Mexicans. These taxpayers should not be forced to provide what amounts to a form of individual or corporate welfare, especially to foreigners. Such a step toward fairness and equity should be taken regardless.
But in light of the SPP and its encouragement of exponentially greater border crossing volume, those private parties who derive the benefit of this privilege of entry into the United States should bear the actual cost they impose, starting with entry into this country. Market incentives would quickly work, and many would decide to make other arrangements, adopt different business practices, and the end result would be decreased volume of crossers and more revenue to the U.S. treasury.
http://www.numbersusa.com/content/learn/issues/national-sovereignty/the-security-and-prosperity-partnership-.html
More...
http://www.summitneworleans.org/neo-liberalism-security-and-prosperity-partnership-agreement-and-assault-black-nation
http://www.magic-city-news.com/Tom_DeWeese_79/Is_the_Security_and_Prosperity_Partnership_the_beginning_of_a_North_American_Union7454.shtml
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Security_and_Prosperity_Partnership_of_North_America
http://www.hudson.org/files/pdf_upload/HudsonNegotiatingNorthAmericaadvanceproof2.pdf
http://www.spp.gov/myths_vs_facts.asp
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