By Steven Yates

In 1787, thirteen former-British colonies, that had briefly been independent states, agreed to create a free trade zone inside a shared security perimeter. People, goods, and capital would move freely throughout that region, ignoring previously existing borders. The union thus created was christened the United States of America.

In the early years of the 21st century, elites in three nations - the United States, Canada, and Mexico - are busy creating a new political configuration, called the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP). It would broaden and deepen the relationship created in 1994 among the three nations through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in dramatic ways.

The new architecture would include a free-trade-zone, protected by a common security perimeter, within which goods, people, and capital would move freely, across what had once been firmly established international borders.

First of all, it would require that U.S. citizens effectively surrender their citizenship in the independent Constitutional Republic founded in 1787. Unlike the USA, which was an organic outgrowth of a political system rooted in Anglo-Saxon laws, customs, traditions, and language, the political entity created through the SPP - in effect, the United States of North America (USNA) - would be a forced three-way marriage of wildly incompatible cultures and political systems.

The U.S. and Mexico are separated by language, and have fundamentally incompatible political systems. Canada, riven with linguistic and regional conflicts, is hard-pressed to maintain its own unity, without the additional complications that would arise from an effort to join with the United States and Mexico. Lacking the natural affinities that led the original thirteen states to create a Constitutional Republic, the USNA would likely be held together only through corrupt alliances among ruling elites, backed by undisguised force.

"Integration"

This past March, President Bush met in Cancun, Mexico, with Mexican President Vicente Fox, and Canada's newly-elected Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, to discuss the year-old SPP, which was formally inaugurated a year ago, in a similar trinational summit in Waco, Texas.

To judge from the official rhetoric emanating from various governmental sources, the SPP is a collection of harmless, or even commendable, multi-lateral initiatives. A March 23, White House press release observed: "The SPP will complement, rather than replace, existing bi-lateral and tri-lateral fora and working groups that are performing well."

The "working groups" casually referred to in that statement were created at the March 2005, Waco summit, to create common policies for the United States, Canada, and Mexico in various economic and security areas. Those groups are already laying the foundation for a European Union-style integration of the SPP member nations.

Though the leaders gathered at Cancun spoke in measured terms in describing this process, President Fox came close to giving away the game. His remarks underscored the demand for a new U.S. law ensuring "safe and respectful migration, respecting the rights of people."

Migration, unlike immigration, is the unhindered movement of whole peoples within national borders. Similar movement across a national border is either immigration, or emigration. Significantly, President Bush, too, said that the talks in Cancun often centered on "migration," tacitly endorsing the same subversive assumption, that the border between the U.S. and Mexico is as inconsequential as that dividing Utah from Nevada.

Devil in the Details

The joint statement on the SPP, issued on March 23, 2005, described it as an initiative to:

"... establish a common approach to security to protect North America from external threats, prevent and respond to threats within North America, and further streamline the security and efficient movement of legitimate, low-risk traffic across our shared borders."

Eight tri-national SPP "working groups" were then created, to deal with different subject areas, and instructed to report back within 90 days. Three months later, the working groups presented an array of ideas for new bureaucracies and "public-private partnerships," which were formed almost at once.

From the beginning, security - not liberty - has been one primary focus of the SPP's architects. The "security" agenda provides for three priority areas with these mandates:

1. secure North America from external threats;

2. prevent and respond to threats within North America; and

3. further streamline the secure movement of low-risk traffic across our shared borders.

Regional Insecurity

The idea that the SPP will provide Americans with additional security is absurd. Washington's efforts to secure our present borders are a spectacular failure - and yet, through the SPP, it would assume a large share of the responsibility for defending a much larger "perimeter" encompassing all of North America.

Representative Katherine Harris (R-FL), a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and a close political ally of President Bush, has introduced a bill into the U.S. Congress called the North American Cooperative Security Act. This bill would begin a process of integrating Canadian and Mexican defense institutions with those of the United States, expanding "consultations on defense issues," and "exploring the formation of law enforcement teams that include personnel from the United States and Mexico."

Repeating in places, almost word-for-word, the security strategy of the SPP, that measure is clearly intended to begin the process of bringing the military and security institutions of the three nations under a central authority, with a single chain of command. The implications of that merger are profoundly troubling, to say the least.

Mexico is ruled by a political establishment intimately connected to that nation's narco-terrorist syndicates. A 2004 United Press International investigative report into the estimated 3,000 kidnappings in Mexico each year noted: "Mexico has a history of complicity between law enforcement and actual kidnappers."

In a March 31, Houston Chronicle op-ed column, Judge Michael McSpadden of Texas' 209 District Court described some things he learned five years ago while he served "as part of a contingent of Texas judges [who met] with then-President-elect Vicente Fox's transition team in Mexico City, to discuss possible changes in Mexico's justice system."

Judge McSpadden wrote:

"Jury trials were not allowed, even though guaranteed by Mexico's Constitution. There was no live confrontation of witnesses - the judge decided the case upon the written "declarations" of witnesses. No bonds were allowed in cases considered serious - such as a false report to a public official."

While Canada's law enforcement system is cleaner and more competent than Mexico's, that country presents a different set of potential security risks. Thanks largely to that country's devotion to multi-culturalism and political correctness, Canada is becoming a haven for Muslim refugees, a growing population, in which terrorists can take cover.

Corporatism, Not "Prosperity"

The goals of the "prosperity working groups" are similarly misleading. The prosperity agenda, originally announced a year ago, promoted three broad agendas: improving productivity, reducing the costs of trade, and enhancing the quality of life. But, what will their practical effect be?

One useful illustration of the SPP's "prosperity" agenda is the proposed Automotive Partnership Council of North America, which would "help identify the full spectrum of issues that impact the industry, ranging from regulation, innovation, transportation infrastructure, and border facilitation." This calls for integration of both business and government, throughout the region, through networks of public-private partnerships.

"Public-private partnerships" are better described as "corporatism" - the merger of big business with big government, described by Mussolini as the foundation of fascism. In such partnerships, government is always the senior partner. The SPP's "partnership" will offer incentives to businesses to help further integration, because they'll get preferential treatment by government. This system will actually circumvent marketplace competition, leading to fewer choices for consumers. It will also permit the emerging regional government to exert more control over business.

International Tribunals

The SPP is the product of the same minds that devised NAFTA, a sister-agreement and predecessor of the SPP. The basic treaty of that supposed free-trade accord is laid out in thousands of pages of dense regulations, creating scores of unaccountable bureaucratic bodies, including several trade tribunals, whose rulings are binding on the citizens of the three NAFTA nations.

Law professor, Peter Spiro, of Hofstra University, said that the implementation of the NAFTA tribunals was "a fundamental reorientation of our Constitutional system. You have an international tribunal essentially reviewing American court judgments."

And, elected officials in the United States have begun giving precedence to NAFTA rules, over the interests of Americans. For example, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger was told by advisers in 2004 that a proposed tax incentive package encouraging California road-builders to recycle 32 million used tires from California's vehicles, would violate NAFTA rules by favoring American recyclers over those of Mexico and Canada. Schwarzenegger dutifully vetoed the bill.

Globalist Disclosures

As if the history of NAFTA didn't provide enough clues as to where the SPP is taking us, there is still more evidence - the unguarded words of politicians and their associates in the know.

Following his election in 2000, Mexican President, Vicente Fox, told an audience in California that his government would "use all our persuasion, and all our talent, to bring together the U.S., Canadian, and Mexican governments so that in five or ten years, the border is totally open to the free movement of workers." Fox was similarly candid in a 2002 address to an audience in Madrid: "Eventually, our long-range objective is to establish with the United States, but also with Canada, our other regional partner, an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union."

The actions and statements of some U.S. politicians have been similarly telling. The Bush administration's proposed "guest worker" program, which is amnesty for illegal immigrants, is a key part of this tri-national integration scheme.

Many of President Bush's staunch supporters, who see him as a flinty-eyed custodian of our national security, are puzzled over what they see as his uncharacteristic squishiness on the issue of protecting our borders. They don't understand that George W. Bush has long been a proponent of amalgamating the United States with Mexico, and is an unabashed proponent of regional integration as well.

The SPP, the instrument of that betrayal, does not have any broad base of public support, beyond the tiny cluster of political, corporate, and bureaucratic elites that gave us NAFTA and CAFTA.

Americans, by the millions, have been infuriated by the spectacle of illegal aliens marching in the streets of our cities, demanding they be given a fast track to citizenship. Our fellow citizens must be educated about the real design behind the drive for illegal-alien amnesty, and mobilized to defeat both amnesty and the ongoing drive to create the SPP.

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

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