NAFTA highway hoax
Issue date: 4/24/08 Section: Opinions
Lou Dobbs called it. America is selling out its national sovereignty, dissolving its borders and making a serious move toward an oppressive police state with Orwellian consequences of super-surveillance. Don't believe him? Ask Bill O'Reilly about the vast left-wing conspiracy to consolidate the United States, Mexico and Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement. He will also tell you about the proposed NAFTA superhighway, a theoretical 20-lane wide monster running from Tijuana, Mexico all the way up to the Yukon, flanked on both sides by oil pipelines and tracks for freight trains, all in the name of facilitating the trade of Chinese goods to be shipped to gargantuan ports in Mexico. The highway will unite all three nations into a theoretical North American Union that is predicted by media pundits to bring ruin upon the already floundering economy of our current nation. It will have the effect of dissolving our borders and contributing to the influx of immigration from Mexico.
It doesn't take a genius to see that this proposal is a complete attack on our rights as individuals - some sources even go as far as to indicate that NAFTA is currently drafting an alternative to the American Constitution, stipulating that our rights are no longer inalienable, but are granted by a centralized government with the power to take them away. Hunter S. Thompson would be spinning in his grave it weren't for two important facts: 1) he was cremated, not buried, and his ashes were blasted into the atmosphere by a giant cannon, and 2) these claims about NAFTA threatening our national sovereignty are categorically untrue, the result of wild-fire Internet hysteria, based upon incomplete representations of key facts and fringe-media frenzy surrounding certain aspects of Bush administration policies.
Type the words "North American Union" into the Google search engine and you will be bombarded with upwards of 63,000,000 hits pertaining to this phenomenon as of 6:40 p.m. last night. According to Wikipedia, the North American Union is a theoretical conception for a joint union of Canada, Mexico and the United states mirroring the structure of the European Union, in some models, including the Amero, as the common currency. This proposal has been discussed in academic circles, but has of yet garnered no concrete government support from any of the three nations involved. The idea of a North American Union was first proposed in 1934, and included Central America, the Caribbean, Greenland and certain countries in South America, although widespread concern regarding its practical application only arose after NAFTA came into effect on January 1, 1994 under the Clinton administration.
It doesn't take a genius to see that this proposal is a complete attack on our rights as individuals - some sources even go as far as to indicate that NAFTA is currently drafting an alternative to the American Constitution, stipulating that our rights are no longer inalienable, but are granted by a centralized government with the power to take them away. Hunter S. Thompson would be spinning in his grave it weren't for two important facts: 1) he was cremated, not buried, and his ashes were blasted into the atmosphere by a giant cannon, and 2) these claims about NAFTA threatening our national sovereignty are categorically untrue, the result of wild-fire Internet hysteria, based upon incomplete representations of key facts and fringe-media frenzy surrounding certain aspects of Bush administration policies.
Type the words "North American Union" into the Google search engine and you will be bombarded with upwards of 63,000,000 hits pertaining to this phenomenon as of 6:40 p.m. last night. According to Wikipedia, the North American Union is a theoretical conception for a joint union of Canada, Mexico and the United states mirroring the structure of the European Union, in some models, including the Amero, as the common currency. This proposal has been discussed in academic circles, but has of yet garnered no concrete government support from any of the three nations involved. The idea of a North American Union was first proposed in 1934, and included Central America, the Caribbean, Greenland and certain countries in South America, although widespread concern regarding its practical application only arose after NAFTA came into effect on January 1, 1994 under the Clinton administration.