Canada Preparing Ports for NAFTA Superhighway

Yansgshan Port, China
The new Yangshan deep-water port development near Shanghai required the construction of the 31.3 km Donghai bridge. The five berths currently operational (Phase 1) have an estimated annual capacity of 2.5 million containers (twenty-foot equivalent units). By 2020, the Port will have 30 berths and an estimated capacity of 25 million containers.

Canada is developing Pacific ports to compete with the U.S. ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, as well as with the Mexican ports of Manzanillo and Lazaro Cardenas, in an attempt to draw a substantial market share of the millions of containers expected to flow into North America in the coming decades from China and the Far East.

To attract Chinese container traffic, the Canadian government has launched a major ports-rail-truck-airport transportation infrastructure designed to build its version of the emerging NAFTA Superhighway.

In October 2006, the Canadian minority government under the direction of Conservative Party leader Stephen Harper launched the Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative, or APGCI, as a key component of Canada's national transportation policy.

The idea is to prepare deep-water Pacific Ocean ports on Canada's West Coast to facilitate the import of millions of multi-modal containers from China as a "free trade gateway" between Asia and North America.

Mexico plans to extend the Trans-Texas Corridor south in what government officials in Mexico are calling a "Trans North America Corridor."

According to Transport Canada, Canada's equivalent to the U.S. DOT, rail and road connections through Prince Rupert and Vancouver B.C. will carry the Asian containers into Canada through Edmonton and Calgary in Alberta.

From there, the planned rail-truck-passenger superhighways will head toward Winnipeg, where cross-border connections south will direct the containers from China and the Far East onto the Interstate 35 corridor in the U.S., establishing a major link in the emerging continental NAFTA Superhighway.

The Canadian government has committed $1 billion to develop transportation infrastructure in the Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative, identified as "a network of transportation infrastructure including British Columbia's Lower Mainland and Prince Rupert ports, their principal road and rail connections stretching across Western Canada and south to the U.S., key border crossings and major Canadian airports."

Canada Transport states clearly a major purpose of the Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor Initiative is to increase Canada's share of North America-bound container imports from Asia.

"Canada's Asia-Pacific Gateway and Corridor offers world class marine, rail, road and air infrastructure closer to Asia than all its North American competitors," the Transport Canada website announces.

In Jan '07, David Emerson, minister of international trade and minister for the Pacific Gateway, led a trade delegation of Canadian transportation and logistics senior execs on a mission to Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai, where Emerson and the Chinese minister of communications signed an updated agreement "to foster cooperation on intermodal transportation gateways to support international trade."

Transport Canada articulates how the vision of a North American economy has driven the development of Canadian national transportation policy.

"The integrated North American economy provides the 'platform' for Canada's successful global engagement," a brochure on the Transport Canada website proclaims in the process of explaining Canada's National Policy for Strategic Gateways and Trade Corridors.

According to Transport Canada, between 1995 and 2005, Canada's exports more than doubled, from $3.5 billion to $7.1 billion, in Canadian dollars.

Between 1995 and 2005, Canada's imports from China grew almost 550 percent, jumping from $3.6 billion to $29.6 billion, with these dramatic growths expected to continue.

"Canada's Asia-Pacific Gateway is a burgeoning national strategy that is responding to the rise of Asian economies and the challenges and opportunities Asia now poses for Canada," the official website of the Asia-Pacific Gateway states.

The province of British Columbia has devoted $12 billion for new transportation infrastructure and has established the Asia Pacific Trade Council to build marketing links with China and the Far East.

Canada's Prince Rupert and Vancouver are both deep-water ports suited to accommodate the post-Panamax class of container Megaships China is building.

Anti North American Union protests planned in 7 cities for November 17th

Organizers are planning to protest the North American Union in 7 cities on November 17th. Protests are planned in Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Yakima, WA.

The nation wide protest march is in opposition to the Security & Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) and establishment of a North American Union between the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

The website dubbed ‘March for America’ states:

“The SPP is a “hostile takeover of democracy” by the leaders of the United States, Canada & Mexico in collaboration with un-elected and unaccountable corporate elite “working groups” who are integrating and “harmonizing” policies and regulations between the three nations without any public forum or congressional oversight.”

Critics have charged that the Bush administration has been attempting through Executive Initiative to replace U.S. representative government with a North American Union. The SPP was not authorized by Congress.

They see moves that have increased the power of the Executive Branch of government as a tool to be used at the behest of an international oligarchy.

The proposed plan for a North American Union on the Council on Foreign Relations wevsite, calls for a 15 member council that includes five members from each nation, which will set the agenda for the president instead of Congress.

The plan also calls for replacing Congress with a North American Parliament and a North American Court to replace the U.S. Supreme Court as well as a new continental perimeter and a continental tariff. It also calls for integrated Homeland Security and Customs.

Former Mexican President Vincente Fox has said recently that he supported massive immigration into the U.S. in order to integrate the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, to further the long term goal of a North American Union.

Why Bush will not leave office in 2009

Let us think like business consultants analyzing the decisions of a business that claims it is going to close its door in just a year. What kinds of decisions is it making? Here is a quiz, if you still doubt that we need to shift our thinking and recognize what appears to be 'a paper coup.':

- Is building a US Embassy in Baghdad the size of eighty football fields and at a cost of well more than half a BILLION dollars evidence of short- or long-term thinking?

- These walls would crumble if the next legitimate president independently ends the war. How about defending and expanding the basis for FISA violations at this late stage -- after all, these folks will be gone in a year?

- How about the decision to fight so hard for a US attorney who will defend the view that the President is above the law?

- Why would that matter so much in an administration folding its tents?

- Why the rush to establish Guantanamo as a permanent part of the landscape and even seek money at one point to double its size -- if the next President, a truly independent Republican or Democrat, might just close it down?

- Why the push to expand a war that makes no military or popular sense, rush through military tribunals that the next President might just disband, and, by the way, drum up a fresh new World War III?

- Do the neo-cons advising Giuliani look like a fresh page for an independent, transparent election or an ideological continuity of government in themselves?

- Do these look like the short-term tactics of a fading administration -- or the institutional strategic bases for some kind of new long-term beginning?

- Why work so hard to make sure that the man who defended the infamous "enemy combatant" concept will be the new Attorney General?

Increasingly, reputable figures are starting to talk about `a coup.' Jim Hightower notes in an important essay, "Is a Presidential Coup Under Way?," that a coup is defined in the dictionary as a sudden forced change in the form of government. (He also spells out the basis for a rigorously modeled impeachment and criminal prosecution.)

Daniel Ellsberg's much-emailed speech on recent events notes that, in his view, a `coup' has already taken place. Ron Rosenbaum speculates in an essay on Slate about the reasons the Bush administration is withholding even from members of Congress its plans for Continuity of Government in an emergency -- noting that those worrying about a coup are no longer so marginal.

Frank Rich notes the parallels between ourselves and the Good Germans. And Congress belatedly realizes as if waking from a drugged sleep that it might not be okay for the Attorney General to say the President need not obey the law. Congress may realize why Mukasey CAN'T say that `waterboarding is torture' -- the minute he does so he has laid the grounds for Bush, Cheney and any number of CIA and Blackwater interrogators to be tried and convicted for war crimes.

They are so keenly aware that what they have been doing is criminal that laws such as the Military Commissions Act of 2006 have been drafted specifically to protect them and the torturers and murderers they have directed from criminal prosecution. That is why insisting that Mukasey say that waterboarding is torture is, in spite of the alarming apparent defection of Feinstein and Schumer, an important tactic and even the perfect opening for the impeachment bid that Kucinich is bringing on November 6th to be followed by Congressional investigations into possible criminality.

Cheney / Rockefeller CFR North American Union deception

Watch as the evil bastards of the CFR unite to destroy America. Interesting to see Cheney's Master, David Rockefeller directing the questions...

North American Union Blurring Borders - SPP

In 2005, the Council on Foreign Relations published the “Building a North American Community,” a report that describes a future North American Union and ideas for how to get there.

By 2010 North America will be a single community with one “common perimeter” and no internal borders. There is also talk of redistribution of wealth — meaning, no doubt, that rich Americans should be taxed to aid Mexico in eliminating its perennial corruption and squalid living conditions.

To date, the leaders of the United States, Canada and Mexico have followed the CFR’s blueprint in establishment of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. Our government portrays the partnership as being in the best interests of Americans. Who wouldn’t want security and prosperity? However, the connection between security and open borders doesn’t seem to exist. The majority of Americans are already prosperous by global standards.

I should point out that the final product of the partnership will not be another NAFTA. There will be free trade, not to mention free movement of people and potential terrorists between the three nations of North America. But the major problem is that the concept undermines the United States more so than any attack or war in our history. The last time that inhabitants of this land were dealt such a blow to their freedom, they founded a new nation.

The government’s attempt to sneak into a North American Union, one small step at a time, violates the nation’s core principles. The SPP is subject to neither authorization nor oversight of Congress. It is controlled by the executive branch, and enforced through regulations, rather than laws created through the proper legislative process. Basically, the United States is beginning to give up its sovereignty without the average citizen or elected representatives having a say. It’s the worst foreign policy decision since Woodrow Wilson’s laughable League of Nations.

In light of this conspiracy, the federal government’s refusal to enforce immigration laws doesn’t seem so strange. It’s the first step in opening the borders. As if the situation wasn’t bad enough, we can look forward to even greater erosion of our culture and traditions.

Habla espanol? If not, you’d better learn.

North American Union Fact Sheet

The effort is in its infancy, however the Bush Administration has been operating in secret for at least two years to establish what can only be described as a North American Union with Mexico and Canada, along the same lines as the European Union.

If that happens it can only mean an eventual end to the U.S. Constitution as our ruling document, replaced instead with a new North American Government. That is what is happening in Europe today. We believe it can and will eventually lead to the surrender of U.S. sovereignty, independence, and national borders. It will result in the establishment of a North American currency called the “Amero,” as the dollar is junked.

The U.S. will provide the army for defense. Gone will be U.S. citizenship. Gone will be any kind of border control between the three nations of North America. Plans are well underway to establish a NAFTA Super Highway, to be the width of eight football fields. It will run from Mexico to Canada, running through the middle of the United States.

NAFTA Realities and FTAA Dangers

The proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) will extend the free trade and investor rights policies of NAFTA to the southern tip of South America and the Caribbean. It is being negotiated in secret without input from labor, environmental, or human rights organizations and, barring citizen unrest, will be implemented by no later than 2005. Read an analysis of the agreement, NAFTA Realities and FTAA Dangers (below) by Katie Quan and view the follwing links to dozens of position papers, training materials, and organizations.