Naomi Klein on the Shock Doctrine

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism is out in paperback this month. She spoke with Amy Goodman about our current economic "perfect storm" and the potential for pro-multinational economic restructuring on Democracy Now! yesterday. Here's a very brief excerpt from a discussion of how corporate-controlled policymaking is failing people and the planet on every front.

There really is a kind of a tsunami of shocks facing not just the economy but people's lives, people's real lives. They're all intersecting. They're making each other worse. And ...this is what I mean by "the shock doctrine." There is a clear political strategy, and has been for several decades, to exploit these moments when people are desperate for quick-fix solutions and more inclined to believe in a kind of a magical cure, to push through very, very unpopular policies that don't actually solve the crisis at hand, that don't actually help people, but are incredibly profitable for multinational corporations.

You can also read a transcript at Alternet, here.

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McCain Pledges Allegiance to NAFTA

By Robert Borosage

July 1st, 2008 - 4:16pm ET

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Arizona Sen. John McCain continues his rousing campaign tour of the swing states of NAFTA this week. He will celebrate July 3 in Mexico City after a jaunt through Colombia to pledge support for the pending free trade accord with that center of cocaine trade. He surely will increase his margin over Illinois Sen. Barack Obama among business elites in Mexico and Canada. Obama will travel to Zanesville, Ohio, once more exposing himself to McCain's jibes about embracing "protectionist" policies.

No, this isn't a joke. McCain is stumping Colombia and Mexico, a week after his visit to Ottawa, championing the North American Free Trade Agreement to business elites in those countries.

McCain's has a pat routine for these junkets. He piously intones homilies on the benefits of free trade: "We need stand up for free trade with no ifs, ands or buts about it. We let trade and globalization be politicized at our own peril." He repeats a sanctimonious pledge never to "dishonor" America by even contemplating any deviation from the "sacred" NAFTA treaty. He issues stern condemnations of the dangers of "mindless protectionism." And expresses his fervent faith in the ability of American workers to compete with anyone anywhere.

You can't teach an old dog new tricks, goes the old saw. And with McCain, it seems ever more obvious that you can't trust an old salt on a new ocean. He simply doesn't get it. For years, the trade debate featured the above mantra he repeats. Trade, by definition, benefited America. Sure, a few privileged union workers might lose their cushy jobs and padded salaries, but they would find new jobs in the expanding global economy. Americans would prosper from investments abroad, our financial services industry would capture the high end of the expanded world economy, we'd sustain our manufacturing edge by becoming more productive and we'd benefit from lower priced goods imported from abroad. The earth was flat, Tom Friedman taught us, and we're all the better for it.

Except it hasn't quite worked out like that. Productivity went up, but wages stagnated at best and insecurity increased. Corporations clubbed workers with the threat of moving abroad, and cut back on salaries, job security, and benefits like health care and pensions. Families went ever deeper into debt as the cost of basics—education, health care, retirement security, and now food and gas—soared. More and more workers lost good jobs, only to be forced into those that paid less with fewer benefits. And now with the global workforce effectively doubled as China and India and the former Soviet Union joined the global maw, it isn't just industrial workers at risk, but some 30 million jobs that could face offshoring, according to such sober free trade advocates as Alan Blinder. Financial services did prosper, until their greed and gambling blew up in the housing bubble.

The U.S. went further and further into global debt, running up trade deficits that are still $2 billion a day despite the decline in the dollar. Last month, the Chinese announced they were netting $2.5 billion a month—$100 million an hour—in foreign exchange. Their sovereign investment funds are now hunting for good deals across the world.

NAFTA, sold as a source of jobs for the U.S. and a solution to the immigration flows from Mexico, hasn't worked that way either. Our trade deficit with Mexico has soared from a basic balance before NAFTA to an all-time high of $74.3 billion last year. Mexico now exports more cars to the United States than the U.S. exports to the world. Immigration tensions grew as small farmers got displaced in Mexico by subsidized U.S. food exports, and started coming north in large numbers.

Elites found ways to protect themselves. Lawyers, doctors, prescription drug companies use licensing and patent laws to protect their wages and profits, but most Americans worry about how their kids were going to sustain a middle-class life style. Globalization isn't the only reason the middle class is declining—the war on labor, the worship of the CEO and other factors contribute—but it certainly is a significant reason.

And across the world, developing countries discovered the NAFTA model didn't work for them either. The countries that have enjoyed success—the Asian tigers, China—play by a very different set of rules. They target industries, and pursue aggressive mercantilist policies to capture export markets. They run up large foreign reserves to be able to protect their currencies from global speculators. China's bosses have been happy to lend us the money to keep buying the goods our companies were making over there—and will manipulate the value of their currency until they capture the markets they are seeking. But it is hard to argue, as McCain does, that free trade is spreading democracy across the world when the most successful economy is a communist dictatorship.

Now even champions of free trade, like former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers admit this hasn't quite worked out as they hoped. Across the world, the revolt against the corporate trade model is growing. In the U.S., a majority —58 percent—of those polled in a January 2008 Wall Street Journal/NBC survey agreed that "globalization has been bad... because it has subjected U.S. companies and employees to unfair competition and cheap labor."

We face not a choice between "free trade" and "isolationism," as McCain claims, but the challenge of developing a serious strategy for sustaining a robust middle class in a global economy. It isn't a choice between keeping our word and "dishonoring" our commitments, but making a clear reassessment of how we get out of the hole we are in.

Sherrod Brown was elected to the Senate in 2006 through a campaign in Ohio focused on opposition to the trade treaties that have devastated manufacturing jobs in that state. He now has joined with other senators, unions, family farm groups, religious and public interest groups to put forth the TRADE Act. The bill calls for a halt on all new trade accords until the U.S. Comptroller General undertakes a comprehensive assessment of the benefits and the costs of our current agreements, looking at who has benefited—here and abroad—and who has suffered. The legislation then calls for developing a strategy that insures that the benefits of trade are widely shared, that we pursue a policy designed to benefit working people and Main Street, and not simply Wall Street. Obama has laid out elements of an alternative strategy that may form the basis of a new course.

McCain's response to this is like an Inquisition priest discovering free thinking in the pews. Doctrine is sacrosanct. Questioning it is dishonorable. He calls upon Americans to sustain the course we have been on, like lemmings marching stolidly to the sea.

He pretends this is an American tradition, claiming that "every time the United States has become protectionist... we've paid a very heavy price." But this ignores the entire history of this country's rise—with sharp eyed mercantilist trade policies behind tariff walls—to a world economic power with a broad middle class. "Yankee traders" were famed for cutting a tough, practical deal, not for sacrificing their interests for ideological principles.

Nor is McCain such an innocent. He says we mustn't "politicize" trade accords, but trade accords are already heavily politicized. Every trade agreement—particularly NAFTA—features fierce lobbying over every clause. McCain knows this because his entire campaign is staffed from top to bottom by corporate lobbyists, many of whom have earned a hefty buck lobbying to influence and pass trade accords. If McCain is elected, their clients know that they are in line to be first to the trough.

Saint John doesn't sully his rhetoric with these unseemly realities. He seems to want to make trade policy a centerpiece of his election campaign, and doing so will surely help him raise some dough. Obama should take him up on it. Let McCain stump the business elites of Mexico City, Bogota and Ottawa. Obama can join Sherrod Brown championing the concerns of working people in Zanesville and Flint and Pittsburgh. Let voters decide which candidate has his priorities right.

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This post originally appeared on HuffingtonPost.com.

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Is Obama Flipflopping on So-Called "Free Trade"?

Friday 20 June 2008

Opinion
by: Jonathan Tasini, glabour writers

http://www.truthout.org/article/pressuring-obama-free-trade

Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama takes a tour of the National Gypsum plant in February during his campaining during the primary election in Lorain, Ohio. (Photo: Rick Bowmer / AP)

Yesterday, Sen. Obama made comments to a business reporter that leave the impression that he is already shifting his stated position on NAFTA and, by extension, so-called "free trade". It is worth looking at as a sign where Sen. Obama really intends to lead us on trade if he wins the White House.

A few overall observations to try to steer the discussion in a productive way:

1. This isn't a debate about whether you are for Sen. Obama or for a third George Bush term. That's a no-brainer.

2. If elected, Sen. Obama has the potential to be a great president - not principally because of his abilities and vision but because of the expectations he has created from millions of people who are really pissed off and are ready to get behind deep, systemic change.

3. The issue of so-called "free trade" and, by extension, how one views the power of corporate America to shape our economic lives is, from my little vantage point, THE deep, systemic change question on the economic vision side. Sen. Obama's economic solutions, at least those embodied in his proposals to date, are inadequate, some seriously so, in meeting the expectations he has raised - which raises for him, and the Democratic Party, a very serious political dilemma. No more so than on the question of so-called "free trade".

4. Some would say, "let's not have these debates before November". That is a legitimate position with which I respectfully disagree. Whatever mandate Sen. Obama comes into office with (and I believe the election will not be close, Electoral College-speaking) has to be shaped by agreements and views shaped now.

So, yesterday, here is what Sen. Obama said to Fortune Magazine:

The general campaign is on, independent voters are up for grabs, and Barack Obama is toning down his populist rhetoric - at least when it comes to free trade.

In an interview with Fortune to be featured in the magazine's upcoming issue, the presumptive Democratic nominee backed off his harshest attacks on the free trade agreement and indicated he didn't want to unilaterally reopen negotiations on NAFTA.

"Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified," he conceded, after I reminded him that he had called NAFTA "devastating" and "a big mistake," despite nonpartisan studies concluding that the trade zone has had a mild, positive effect on the U.S. economy.

Does that mean his rhetoric was overheated and amplified? "Politicians are always guilty of that, and I don't exempt myself," he answered.

Here is what Sen. Obama says on his website about trade and NAFTA:

Obama believes that trade with foreign nations should strengthen the American economy and create more American jobs. He will stand firm against agreements that undermine our economic security.

• Fight for Fair Trade: Obama will fight for a trade policy that opens up foreign markets to support good American jobs. He will use trade agreements to spread good labor and environmental standards around the world and stand firm against agreements like the Central American Free Trade Agreement that fail to live up to those important benchmarks. Obama will also pressure the World Trade Organization to enforce trade agreements and stop countries from continuing unfair government subsidies to foreign exporters and nontariff barriers on U.S. exports.

• Amend the North American Free Trade Agreement: Obama believes that NAFTA and its potential were oversold to the American people. Obama will work with the leaders of Canada and Mexico to fix NAFTA so that it works for American workers.

Here is what Sen Obama said on the campaign trail:

"Sen Clinton has gotten mad at me, because I said she supported NAFTA," Obama said at a rally in Toledo. "She said, 'Well, that's misleading.' And I had to say, 'Well, hold on a second.' The Clinton administration championed NAFTA, passed NAFTA, signed NAFTA. She's saying that part of the experience that makes her the best qualified to be president is all the work that she was doing in the Clinton administration. You can't take credit for everything that's good in the Clinton administration and then suddenly say you don't want to take credit for what folks don't like about the Clinton administration."

Here is what Sen Obama said back in 2004 when he was running for the Senate:

"Obama said the United States benefits enormously from exports under the WTO and NAFTA. He said, at the same time, there must be recognition that the global economy has shifted, and the United States is no longer the dominant economy." [emphasis added]

I do not want to go down the road of the hoo-hah over what, if anything, was said to the Canadians by Sen. Obama's campaign because that is a black hole, with people still arguing whether it was true or not. I think the record, in his own words, is much more useful.

And what does that show? Believe it or not, I think this is complicated - and complication is not the stuff of political debate these days. Here is what I would say:

First, Sen. Obama believes in so-called "free trade". He has said so, on numerous occasions.

Second, during the campaign, he took a very hard, negative line against NAFTA, in large part because it was a useful - and correct - criticism of Sen Clinton's support for NAFTA (she simply lied about her past position but that is not the topic of this post so I'll just leave it at that).

Third, of more concern, he found it now necessary, as the nominee, to "moderate" his views on so-called "free trade", particularly to a business readership - the Fortune magazine interview. Instead, he could have co-sponsored a ground-breaking piece of trade legislation offered by fellow Democrats - but he has not. This should raise concerns about how he would conduct his presidency on the topic of trade, rhetoric aside. If even as the nominee he feels a need to appease the business community, what can be expected when he is president?

Fourth, I think he is somewhat conflicted. I think the community organizer in him comes out when he speaks to union audiences or listens to the policy arguments that make a persuasive case about the damage of so-called "free trade". He understands oppression and corporate power. But, I think he also has deeply ingrained a faith - misguided, I would add - in marketing phrases like "free trade" and "free market". I think those faiths have been ingrained in him not the least of which comes from his Harvard education, an institution where the belief in these marketing phrases is almost a religion.

From the beginning of his campaign, I have been concerned about the contradiction I see between Sen. Obama's calls for change, on the one hand, versus his continued advocacy for so-called "free trade" and the "free market", which, as I have argued before, are just marketing phrases. We need to keep asking questions (like these questions) now. I believe asking those questions will make Sen. Obama a better, stronger and, yes, a truly change president.

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What Does Obama's 'Love of Markets' Mean for Our Economic Future?

Naomi Klein: What Does Obama's 'Love of Markets' Mean for Our Economic Future?

By Naomi Klein, The Nation. Posted June 19, 2008.

Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC, "Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market."

Demonstrating that this is no mere spring fling, he has appointed 37-year-old Jason Furman to head his economic policy team. Furman is one of Wal-Mart's most prominent defenders, anointing the company a "progressive success story." On the campaign trail, Obama blasted Clinton for sitting on the Wal-Mart board and pledged, "I won't shop there." For Furman, however, it's Wal-Mart's critics who are the real threat: the "efforts to get Wal-Mart to raise its wages and benefits" are creating "collateral damage" that is "way too enormous and damaging to working people and the economy more broadly for me to sit by idly and sing 'Kum-Ba-Ya' in the interests of progressive harmony."

Obama's love of markets and his desire for "change" are not inherently incompatible. "The market has gotten out of balance," he says, and it most certainly has. Many trace this profound imbalance back to the ideas of Milton Friedman, who launched a counterrevolution against the New Deal from his perch at the University of Chicago economics department. And here there are more problems, because Obama--who taught law at the University of Chicago for a decade -- is thoroughly embedded in the mind-set known as the Chicago School.

He chose as his chief economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, a University of Chicago economist on the left side of a spectrum that stops at the center-right. Goolsbee, unlike his more Friedmanite colleagues, sees inequality as a problem. His primary solution, however, is more education -- a line you can also get from Alan Greenspan. In their hometown, Goolsbee has been eager to link Obama to the Chicago School. "If you look at his platform, at his advisers, at his temperament, the guy's got a healthy respect for markets," he told Chicago magazine. "It's in the ethos of the [University of Chicago], which is something different from saying he is laissez-faire."

Another of Obama's Chicago fans is 39-year-old billionaire Kenneth Griffin, CEO of the hedge fund Citadel Investment Group. Griffin, who gave the maximum allowable donation to Obama, is something of a poster boy for an unbalanced economy. He got married at Versailles and had the after-party at Marie Antoinette's vacation spot (Cirque du Soleil performed) -- and he is one of the staunchest opponents of closing the hedge-fund tax loophole. While Obama talks about toughening trade rules with China, Griffin has been bending the few barriers that do exist. Despite sanctions prohibiting the sale of police equipment to China, Citadel has been pouring money into controversial China-based security companies that are putting the local population under unprecedented levels of surveillance.

Now is the time to worry about Obama's Chicago Boys and their commitment to fending off serious attempts at regulation. It was in the two and a half months between winning the 1992 election and being sworn into office that Bill Clinton did a U-turn on the economy. He had campaigned promising to revise NAFTA, adding labor and environmental provisions and to invest in social programs. But two weeks before his inauguration, he met with then-Goldman Sachs chief Robert Rubin, who convinced him of the urgency of embracing austerity and more liberalization. Rubin told PBS, "President Clinton actually made the decision before he stepped into the Oval Office, during the transition, on what was a dramatic change in economic policy."

Furman, a leading disciple of Rubin, was chosen to head the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project, the think tank Rubin helped found to argue for reforming, rather than abandoning, the free-trade agenda. Add to that Goolsbee's February meeting with Canadian consulate officials, who left with the distinct impression that they had been instructed not to take Obama's anti-NAFTA campaigning seriously, and there is every reason for concern about a replay of 1993.

The irony is that there is absolutely no reason for this backsliding. The movement launched by Friedman, introduced by Ronald Reagan and entrenched under Clinton, faces a profound legitimacy crisis around the world. Nowhere is this more evident than at the University of Chicago itself. In mid-May, when university president Robert Zimmer announced the creation of a $200 million Milton Friedman Institute, an economic research center devoted to continuing and augmenting the Friedman legacy, a controversy erupted. More than 100 faculty members signed a letter of protest. "The effects of the neoliberal global order that has been put in place in recent decades, strongly buttressed by the Chicago School of Economics, have by no means been unequivocally positive," the letter states. "Many would argue that they have been negative for much of the world's population."

When Friedman died in 2006, such bold critiques of his legacy were largely absent. The adoring memorials spoke only of grand achievement, with one of the more prominent appreciations appearing in the New York Times--written by Austan Goolsbee. Yet now, just two years later, Friedman's name is seen as a liability even at his own alma mater. So why has Obama chosen this moment, when all illusions of a consensus have dropped away, to go Chicago retro?

The news is not all bad. Furman claims he will be drawing on the expertise of two Keynesian economists: Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute and James Galbraith, son of Friedman's nemesis John Kenneth Galbraith. Our "current economic crisis," Obama recently said, did not come from nowhere. It is "the logical conclusion of a tired and misguided philosophy that has dominated Washington for far too long."

True enough. But before Obama can purge Washington of the scourge of Friedmanism, he has some ideological housecleaning of his own to do.

Naomi Klein's latest book is The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

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Neo-Liberalism, the SPP, and the assault on the Black Nation

by Kali Akuno
Tuesday, May. 20, 2008 at 6:22 PM

The 4th SPP summit demonstrated to transnational capital how successfully a major US city and state can be transformed to realize profits. If transformation can be done in New Orleans, it can done anywhere in the US.

Neo-Liberalism, the Security and Prosperity Partnership Agreement, and the assault on the Black Nation.

Written by Kali Akuno
Monday, May 19th, 2008

The Fourth North American Leadership Summit, held in New Orleans, Louisiana on March 21st and 22nd, 2008 marked a watershed in the Battle for New Orleans and the global peoples' struggle against neo-liberalism and imperialism. The Summit was a continuation of the negotiations on the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) agreement between the Chief Executives of Canada, Mexico, and the United States. But, it was also much, much more.

President Bush's mission for this Summit was to consolidate many of the transformative gains he and the reactionary forces he represents have attained in New Orleans via their neo-liberal reconstruction program. This program is the most ambitious and far reaching application of neo-liberalism within US national boarders to date. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina this neo-liberal program has virtually eliminated the cities labor unions and turned the public education, housing, health care, transportation, and sanitation systems into private profit making enterprises. And it doesn't stop there. Bush also structured this Summit to be a international coming out party for Louisiana Republican Governor Bobby Jindal to showcase how an entire state government can possibly be privatized (Jindal aims to privatize the Louisiana educational system through the introduction of a state-wide voucher program).

In effect, the Fourth Summit was a calculated exhibition for tans-national capital to demonstrate how successfully a major US city and state can be transformed to realize profits. And the larger implications couldn't be clearer. What this says is that the US, which as the center of international capital and imperialism was long thought impervious to a complete neo-liberal transformation, is open ground cause if this transformation can be done in New Orleans, it can done anywhere in the US.

Conversely, the Fourth Summit was also a critical moment for the progressive forces of the Gulf Coast Peoples' Reconstruction Movement (RM). The coming of the summit further illuminated how central New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are to the overall program of imperialist globalization. And how central the task of dissolving the Black working class and the Black nation itself is to this project locally, nationally, and internationally. It also demonstrated the degree to which the Reconstruction Movement, and the Black Liberation Movement (BLM) which is its anchor, must organize, study, plan, and execute to overcome this challenge. To this latter end, the BLM, RP, and Global Justice movements on a whole must engage in a deeper interrogation of imperialisms neo-liberal project to dissolve the Black Nation to gain a more strategic understanding of the project to enable the forces of resistance to launch a potentially decisive counter initiative.

Dispelling Myths

To deeply engage this interrogation some critical myths regarding the neo-liberal project must be dispelled. Chief amongst them is the position and perspective that neo-liberalism and free-trade agreements (FTA's) within themselves are the problem. The problem, meaning what constitutes the central threat to our movements and humanity on a whole, is capitalism and imperialism. Neo-liberalism and Free Trade Agreements like the SPP, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), etc., are mere ideological frameworks and strategic policy initiatives of capital to create the structural controls needed to realize profits.

Neo-Liberalism as an ideological program and FTA's and their regulating instruments like the World Trade Organization (WTO), were strategically developed by capital between the two great inter-imperialist wars of the 20th century to mitigate against the destructiveness of their rivalries and the development of a genuine socialist socio-economic alternative. To this latter end, international capital, under the stewardship of US capital, created the Breton Woods institutions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the General Agreement on Tariff's and Trade (GATT) / WTO to regulate and gradually integrate the world-capitalist system.

However, there were always tactical differences amongst capital as to how best to regulate this system, how fast to integrate it, and how to relate to the forces opposed to this system (including the colonized and oppressed peoples and nations of the world, the working and exploited social sectors within the imperialist nations themselves, and the revolutionary nationalist and anti-capitalist state projects of the world, particularly the Eastern Soviet block nations). Between 1950 and 1972 roughly, the dominant factions of capital enacted a program of compromise that allowed for a gradual integration and a limited degree of distributed capital accumulation that tolerated workers rights and national self-determination on a limited scale. This compromise was perhaps best described as "consensus capitalism".

This compromise was based on the steady growth of capital markets the world over following the second major inter-imperialist war (i.e. WWII). When this growth began to give way to declining rates of profit, inflation, and inter-imperialist antagonism over the divide of the spoils from the "Third World" in the 1960's, capital, particularly US capital gradually broke with the strategy of consensus capitalism and implemented a new strategy of capitalist accumulation. This new strategy is generally referred to as either neo-liberalism or the "Washington consensus". The Neo-Liberal strategy and program was originally articulated by Freidrich von Hayek in the 1940's, but wasn't unleashed on the world until the mid-1970's with the economic dismemberment of Chile under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. With the adoption of this new strategy the implementation speed and intensity of the Breton Woods agreements, particularly the utilization of FTA's, rapidly accelerated and created the global dynamics we are now confronting.

The Assault on the Black Nation

As Naomi Klein aptly proves in "Disaster Capitalism", structural crises are fundamental to the success of the neo-liberal strategy and program. Her analysis however has a major blind spot. That blind spot is the strategies correlating dependence on national oppression and racial inequality as mediated by the historical process of uneven development within the capitalist world-system.

The successful implementation of the neo-liberal program in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is directly contingent on the national oppression of New Afrikan and/or Black people, and the degree to which the regions Black community, particularly its working class sectors, can be assaulted with little or no consequence in this transformative process.

Following the massive press for Black Liberation mounted between the 1950's - 70's, US capital has been aiming to fracture and crush the Black nation and the strategic "internal" threat it posses to US imperialism and its hegemony over the capitalist world-system. Capital has executed a broad scope of strategic means to this end since the 1960's, including targeted repression and assassination, substantive buy-off programs, mass incarceration and warehousing, disinvestment from Black zones of inhabitance, and much, much more. The cumulative effect of these initiatives has been extremely devastating to the Black nation and its social stability and composition.

Despite the thorough nature of all of these initiatives, they were intentionally piecemeal. The political and social power accumulated by Blacks between the 1960's through the 80's, kept US capital from mounting a full on frontal assault against the Black nation. The dissipation of this power, due primarily to the retrenchment of the Black working class over the past 30 years, has shifted the balance of power decisively in favor of capital. The lack of a critical response to the emptying (in part through a forced military evacuation) of New Orleans and the numerous human rights abuses that have been committed against the peoples of the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, has allowed capital to experiment with the strategic option of ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing (and genocide), barring a few rare exceptions, has not been employed on the US mainland since the 1940's, primarily because the political costs were too high. Now that these costs have been minimalized, the strategic option of ethnic cleansing is being fully reincorporated into imperialisms arsenal (its international reintroduction started in Yugoslavia in the early 1990's).

Although the process is as of yet incomplete, New Orleans has in essence been strategically cleansed of its Black working class. This cleansing is the direct result of the neo-liberal strategy applied to the cities "reconstruction". As of February 2008, more than two and half years after the Hurricane, less than half of the cities Black working class had returned. Their return has barred by a coordinated set of policies and actions dictated by capital and enforced by the US government on all levels (Federal, state and municipal, i.e. parish) to ensure the destruction of the cities service institutions and ensure maximum corporate profits via privatizations (i.e. "public/private partnerships"). These policies and actions include hyper-inflated price gouging in the housing and utilities markets; the restriction of vital service provisions like water and electricity (for as long as two years in some locations in the Ninth Ward); the state seizure and demolition of tens of thousands of partially damaged and "abandoned" homes; the racist distribution of relief funds, like the Road Home Program, and insurance payout's; the barricading and destruction of more than four thousand units of public housing; the directing of the resources allocated to the cities redevelopment towards undamaged, predominantly white sections of the city (see the Ed Blakely's redevelopment plan); the ongoing military occupation of the city; and more. Capital has altered the "facts on the ground" as it relates to infrastructure in New Orleans to such an extent that a "right to return" for the cities historic ethnic majority is in fact not possible. In effect, New Orleans is being subjected to the "Palestinian Option" of displacement as development for its historic Black majority.

Viewed in this strategic light, the ethnic cleansing of New Orleans must not be seen as a limited geographic or tactical engagement. Rather, it must be viewed as an advanced assault against the entire Black Nation. Why? There are three primary reasons: 1) the dislocation of a considerable portion of the Black working class has created a highly volatile social force throughout the U.S. with high material aspirations, a deeply engrained consciousness of resistance to white supremacy and exploitation, and little patience; 2) this dislocated population has been deemed an expendable surplus by capital and society at large because of this volatility, and 3) the option of containment via mass incarceration and warehousing is rapidly approaching its peak limits. Given this, capital must explore other means to control this strategic liability.

Based on developments in New Orleans and a critical analysis of the means used to generate displacement via gentrification over the past thirty years, it can be surmised that this new strategic assault will be conducted via the following means: 1) the forced displacement of Black zones of inhabitance (via combinations of mass incarceration, gentrification, land speculation, predatory lending, and disaster capitalism), 2) the permanent militarization of these zones (including direct military occupations in direct violation of the Posse Comitatus Act), 3) the systematic exclusion of broad segments of the Black working class from the labor market (including from low-wage service employment), 4) the elimination or privatization of all public services and institutions in these zones and, and 5) the institutionalization of these arrangements via special legislative means.

This is directly where the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) agreement and other transnational agreements like it come into play.

The SPP and its Usages

The SPP for all intensive purposes is the consolidation of NAFTA via military means. These means include the development US led special security units that could be deployed in both Mexico and Canada; the centralization of intelligence between the three states; and the creation of super-security ports and highways to secure the transport of goods, services, and security forces. Capital is advancing this strategy to contain the resistance of the peoples and working classes it has dispossessed and discarded with the passage of NAFTA and to defend its gains it has acquired at their expense.

The Black nation is a primary target of the SPP agenda. But, it is not alone. The Indigenous peoples and nations of Mexico and Canada constitute another, as are the dispossessed workers and peasants of Mexico. This is illustrated by the fourteen-year assault against the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) and the Indigenous people of Chiapas and more recently against the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca or APPO inspired by retrenched Teachers. Both of these forces have played a vanguard role in the struggle against neo-liberalism on the North American continent, and have demonstrated from day one (remembering that the Zapatistas stormed to the worlds consciousness on January 1st, 1994 which was the commencement date for NAFTA) that this program would not be met without stiff resistance.
The SPP therefore represents a critical "learning" for capital and imperialism. The question is, will the Black nation and other peoples and workers movements of North America learn in response and act in kind in a united peoples front against imperialism and its neo-liberal globalization programs?

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SPP - "Bush's Trojan Taco"

AfD's Main Page for SPP

José Can You See? Bush’s Trojan Taco

By Greg Palast

Monday, April 21, 2008
www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/jos-can-you-see-bush-s-trojan-ta

Psst! George Bush has a secret.

While you Democrats are pounding each other to a pulp in Pennsylvania, the President has snuck back down to New Orleans for a meeting of the NAFTA Three: the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico.

You’re not supposed to know that – for two reasons:

First, the summit planned for the N.O. two years back was meant to showcase the rebuilt Big Easy, a monument to can-do Bush-o-nomics. Well, it is a monument to Bush’s leadership: The city still looks like Dresden 1946, with over half the original residents living in toxic trailers or wandering lost and broke in America.

The second reason Bush has kept this major summit a virtual secret is its real agenda. More important, the agenda-makers, the guys who called the meeting, must remain as far out of camera range as possible: The North American Competitiveness Council.

Never heard of The Council? Well, maybe you’ve heard of the counselors: the chief executives of Wal-Mart, Chevron Oil, Lockheed-Martin and 27 other multinational masters of the corporate universe.
And why did the landlords of our continent order our presidents to a three-nation pajama party? Their term is “harmonization.”

Harmonization has nothing to do with singing in fifths like Simon and Garfunkel. Harmonization means making rules and regulations the same in all three countries. Or, more specifically, watering down rules – on health, safety, labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on - in other words, any regulations that get between The Council members and their profits.

Take for example, pesticides. Wal-Mart and agri-business don’t want to reduce the legal amount of poison allowed in what you eat. Solution: “harmonize” US and Canadian pesticide standards to Mexico’s.
Can they do that? Can Bush just say, “Eat your peas – even if they’re radioactive?” Under NAFTA, at least the way George Bush reads it (or has it read to him), he can. At any rate, he does.

The three chiefs of state will meet privately with the thirty corporate chiefs where they are also expected to legally erase more of our borders, to expand the “NAFTA highway.” Technically, the NAFTA highway is a set of legal rules governing transcontinental shipment. Some fear NAFTA highway expansion will allow a new flood of cheap Mexican products into the US and Canada. Not so. Their hunger to expand the NAFTA highway is to bring in even cheaper Chinese goods.

Say what?

As trade expert Maud Barlow explained to me, the new “NAFTA highway” will allow Chinese stuff dumped into Mexico to be hauled northward as duty-free “Mexican” products. That’s one of the quiet agendas of this “Summit for Security and Prosperity,” the official Orwellian name for this meet. Think of the SSP “harmonization” as the Trojan Taco of trade.

Barlow is Chairwoman of the Council of Canadians. She is known as the “Ralph Nader of Canada” (not Nader version 2.0, The Spoiler Candidate, but Nader version 1.0, the consumer advocate). Because Americans are too distracted by the Punch-and-Judy primaries to complain about this lobby-fest on the bayou, Canadian Barlow is leading street protests against this greed-grab.

I caught up with this courageous Canadian (I’ve seen her face down corporate bullying we can’t imagine in the US) on her way down to New Orleans. Barlow’s particular concerns are first, the NSS agreement promotes a five-fold increase in the mining of Canadian tar sands for import, as liquid crude oil, into the USA, an idea filthier than a re-make of Debbie Does Dallas. “This is an insane model of development,” she says, especially given Bush’s recent claim that he wants to slow global warming.

Bush himself is pushing his Canadian and Mexican counterparts to adopt US-style “Homeland Security” measures so that, says Barlow, “we’ll all be zip-locked together in one security bag.”

There will be other anti-SSP protesters in New Orleans as well, from America’s populist Right. They are concerned that the Security and Prosperity Summit is worse than the “NAFTA on steroids” that Barlow fears. The populists see in the SPP a nascent “North American Union,” and the elimination of the good old US of A.

They’re wrong, of course. The U.S. of A. has been long eliminated, at least economically. The Competitiveness Council is a multinational crew, with one shared set of country clubs, beach homes, art collections, union busters and lobbyists knowing no borders.

The populist radio hosts railing against the coming North American Union don’t realize that these CEOs won’t take away their flags or Fourth of July or Star-Spangled Banner. The rags and flags will always be kept around to con the schmucks along the Yahoo Belt into donating their children to the Iraq Occupation or other misadventures. A billionaire like Carlos Slim, the richest man on the planet (sorry, Mr. Gates), didn’t buy the Mexican government to “protect” his nation from Gringos but to protect his media monopoly.

So there is no United States of America nor Canada nor Mexico - at least as we like to imagine ourselves in our national fairy tales: self-governing democracies run by we the people or nosotros el pueblo. There’s just the diktats of the North American Prosperity Council. Get used to it.

Barlow said that the US Ambassador to Canada told her the legal changes wrought in New Orleans will not be put before the three national Congresses for a vote. “We don’t want to open up another NAFTA.” So, they’ll skip the voting stuff. Democracy is so, like, 20th Century.

Is Bush just a reluctant participant in this “harmonizing” of our economic fate? The meetings are secret, so I can’t say for sure. But I note that, at the opening ceremony, if you read his lips, you can see our president singing the national anthem as, “José, can you see?”

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URGENT!!! CALL CONGRESS TODAY TO OPPOSE THE SPP

AfD's Main Page for SPP

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ALLIANCE for DEMOCRACY ACTION ALERT

URGENT!!! CALL CONGRESS TODAY TO OPPOSE THE SPP

On April 21-22, President Bush met in New Orleans with Mexican President Calderón and Canadian Prime Minister Harper to discuss implementation of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). Corporate America was represented at the meetings by the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC), a formal arm of the SPP. Working groups, made up of government officials and corporate executives, also met.

The Alliance, along with 17 other national organizations, sent a letter on April 21 to all members of Congress calling on them to

• Require the Bush administration to immediately halt SPP implementation and submit the process to Congressional oversight.
  

• Hold congressional hearings in which the process and goals of the SPP are thoroughly aired and input is invited from a broad cross-section of the public.
  

• Make subject to congressional vote the decision of whether SPP implementation should proceed.

A copy of the letter is attached. For this letter to be effective, it is essential that members of Congress receive calls from their constituents.

Representatives Marcy Kaptur, Maurice Hinchey, Peter DeFazio, Dennis Kucinich and 10 other members of Congress have also sent a letter to President Bush calling for a halt of the SPP “until the mechanisms of the SPP negotiations are made transparent and proper legislative oversight has been established.”

The Alliance’s critique of the SPP is far deeper than the need for Congressional oversight, since the SPP further establishes the corporate state and is based on an economy of “endless more.” However, the immediate action is to reinforce the attached letter.

To reach your members’ offices, call the US Capitol Switchboard at 202-224-3121 and ask to be connected to your House and Senate members.
Please let us know whom you contact and speak with and what response you get at afd@thealliancefordemocracy.org This will help us determine the next steps for action.

To read the letter, click on "Read More", below. For more information on the SPP, go to http://www.thealliancefordemocracy/SPP

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Organizational Sign-on Letter Against the SPP

April 21, 2008

Dear Member of Congress,

On the occasion of the 4th Leaders Summit of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), to be held in New Orleans on April 21-22, we take this opportunity to call on all members of Congress to educate themselves on the SPP, which was never brought to Congress for debate or vote. Our concerns include the opaque and undemocratic nature of the SPP, its definition of “prosperity” as the expansion of a failed trade model, and its definition of “security” as the expansion of military force and the restricting of civil liberties.

Congress has been entrusted with oversight on such issues of trade and security. It is imperative that they exercise their responsibility on this matter by examining what prosperity and security really mean. Rather than proceeding along the failed path of NAFTA, all efforts should be made to implement a trade agenda that focuses on the needs of communities and people. That agenda should include the voices of those populations most affected, as well as their advocates in civil society.

Therefore, as civil society advocates, we call upon the U.S. Congress to:

• Require the Bush administration to immediately halt SPP implementation and submit the process to Congressional oversight.

• Hold congressional hearings in which the process and goals of the SPP are thoroughly aired and input is invited from a broad cross-section of the public.
  

• Make subject to congressional vote the decision of whether SPP implementation should proceed.

The SPP is an executive-level, tri-national pact between Mexico, the United States and Canada, agreed upon in 2005 by the chief executives of the three countries. According to the official website, the SPP seeks to “provide the framework to ensure that North America is the safest and best place to live and do business. It includes ambitious security and prosperity programs to keep our borders closed to terrorism yet open to trade.” What differentiates the SPP from other security and trade agreements is that it is not subject to Congressional oversight or approval. The SPP establishes a corporate/government bureaucracy for implementation that excludes civil society participation.

As at past SPP summits the New Orleans meetings will be open only to government officials and representatives of the corporate sector. Civil society will be kept on the other side of the fence, their voice silenced. The leaders will hear reports from the various SPP working groups and receive advice and input from the North American Competitiveness Council (NACC). The NACC is made up of 30 large corporations, 10 from each of the three countries. Their interest is in maximizing profit and removing all impediments to such profit by lowering or removing “non-tariff barriers to trade.” In common language this includes local and state regulations such as food safety and environmental laws, labor rights and other measures designed to protect and enhance quality of life.

The SPP aims to reach its goal of economic growth by facilitating the flow of goods and capital, while ignoring the needs of people and communities. This translates to a further expansion of the neo-liberal agenda manifested through free trade agreements such as NAFTA and DR-CAFTA, except that approval from Congress is neither sought nor required. These trade agreements, while boosting investment and exports, have failed the vast majority of citizens in participating countries. NAFTA’s impacts have been well documented: the loss of over a million decent US manufacturing jobs to exploitative Mexican factories, the decimation of Mexico’s small-scale agriculture and subsequent rise in migration, the subordination of environmental law to investment rules, and the annulling of consumer protections in the name of corporate protections. After 14 years of such devastating legacy, the SPP now proposes to move even further in the same direction.

Meanwhile, the security side of the agreement seeks to “develop a common security strategy” and to create a common security perimeter for North America. The recent agreement between the U.S. and Canadian militaries (without Congressional approval) to allow cross-border, domestic military action can be viewed as integral to the SPP. In addition, the announcement last fall of the Merida Initiative, a U.S. program to provide $1.4 billion in training, intelligence and military aircraft to Mexico has been linked to SPP by critics of the agreement. Though not officially a part of SPP, it is a manifestation of the “deep integration” that is the core of the SPP strategy. Through implementation of the SPP, the U.S. is also exporting its War on Terror to Canada and Mexico through agreements on the sharing of intelligence, airline passenger lists, border surveillance programs and the further militarization of the border between the U.S. and Mexico—leading to erosion of civil liberties.

As New Orleans prepares to host the SPP summit, recent changes in the city foretell the SPP’s security objectives. In a move that could only be described as opportunistic the disaster resulting from Katrina is being used to alter the character and demographic makeup of New Orleans. The city has been highly militarized, with both National Guard and private military firms providing “security.” Documented cases of abuse and violence directed at residents of the city by these “security” providers show that the interest is not in protecting the residents, but in “securing” the city for developers. In this respect New Orleans is the perfect backdrop for the SPP summit, put forth as a model for the future of North America.

Facing a worrisome pact pushed forward in secrecy, it is time for Congress to halt this undemocratic approach and establish a process based on openness, accountability, and the participation of civil society. While civil society may be kept away from the SPP summit, their voices will still be heard in New Orleans at the People’s Summit. This gathering of residents, activists and other concerned people will link the Gulf Coast struggle to the fight for the survival of communities in Mexico, Canada and the rest of the United States.

Signed by the following members of U.S. civil society,

Alliance for Democracy Alliance for Responsible Trade (ART) APEN (Asian Pacific Environmental Network) ASOCOL (Association for the Sovereignty of Colombia) Campaign for Labor Rights Center of Concern Chicago Religious Leadership Network on Latin America CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras Democratic Socialists of America Fellowship of Reconciliation Task Force on Latin American and the Caribbean Global Exchange Global Ministries of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) Grassroots Global Justice Alliance

Institute for Policy Studies, Global Economy Project Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns National Family Farm Coalition (NFFC) National Network for Immigrant & Refugee Rights (NNIRR) New York CISPES (New York Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador NYC People's Referendum on Free Trade Nicaragua Network Portland Central America Solidarity Committee Portland Jobs with Justice Quixote Center SHARE Foundation: Building a New El Salvador Today United Church of Christ Vermont Workers' Center Witness for Peace

For additional information regarding the SPP please contact Jon Hunt at 202.550.7025 (cell) or Kathy Ozer at 202.543.5675 or 202.421.4544 (cell)

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SPP Summit Police prepare security

With protests expected, NOPD enhances security

by Laura Maggi, The Times-Picayune
Saturday April 19, 2008, 9:53 PM
www.nola.com/news/t-p/frontpage/index.ssf?/base/news-10/1208669689248010.xml&coll=1

The New Orleans Police Department is gearing up for an unknown number of protesters expected to arrive in the city this weekend to decry federal trade and security policies, as President Bush holds a two-day summit with leaders of Canada and Mexico to discuss economic and security issues among the three countries.

Starting on Sunday, the NOPD will switch to 12-hour shifts, which will help divert some officers from districts around the city to the Central Business District area, said Assistant Superintendent Marlon Defillo. Those shifts will last through Tuesday.

Security will be tightest around Gallier Hall, as well as around the Central Business District hotels where the North American leaders and their entourages will be staying. The security measures will include extensive street closures in the CBD that start on Sunday afternoon, Defillo said.

While the NOPD has been gearing up for potentially huge crowds, they don't expect a "gigantic" turnout of protesters, department officials said.

"We are prepared for the worst-case scenario," said Superintendent Warren Riley, who will be supported by the State Police and National Guard. "At this point we are not overly concerned."

Since Bush announced in his State of Union address that he would be holding the latest round of talks with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon in New Orleans, the NOPD began preparing for security with Secret Service, Defillo said. Trade talks among the leaders have consistently drawn protests of several hundred people, including in August in Quebec.

Defillo said officials looked at the security for the 1999 World Trade Organization conference in Seattle, which sparked not only large protest rallies, but also civil disobedience that disrupted talks and led to hundreds of arrests.

"We certainly don't object to people protesting, if it is a peaceful assembly," he said. Internet sites for various groups show several plans for protests, including one expected to assemble in Jackson Square on Monday about 8 a.m.

Jim Stachowiak, whose Freedom Fighter Radio Web site and Internet radio show has been touting the Monday gathering, said he expects a few hundred people to come to New Orleans to protest peacefully. They plan to rally against the Iraq war and against the talks among the North American leaders, which Stachowiak said many believe are a pretext to forming a continental government similar to the European Union.

Several left-leaning organizations have organized what they are calling a "People's Summit" that will kick off Sunday in Central City with theater demonstrations scheduled to include skits by Latino laborers, homeless residents of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina survivors, said Mayaba Liebenthal, the local chapter organizer for Critical Resistance New Orleans.

Workshops will be held Monday and Tuesday around the city, talking about the impact of trade agreements on average people and the disadvantages of privatization, Liebenthal said.

Laura Maggi can be reached at lmaggi@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3316.

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What Corporate Takeover Means for Heartland

Your Independent Journal from the Heartland

May 1, 2008

Exposing the Security and Prosperity Partnership
What Corporate Takeover Means for Heartland

By Ruth Caplan and Nancy Price
http://www.populist.com/08.8.caplan.html

[Print, More SPP Info, SPP Action Alert, SPP Flyers]

In our 4/1/08 TPP article, “The Stealth, Profit and Power Corporate Take-Over,” we emphasized how the Bush administration made an “end run” around Congress and the public to advance the emerging corporatocracy—government of, for and by the corporate elite—by creating the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). In effect, when President Bush, President Fox of Mexico and Prime Minister Martin of Canada met on March 23, 2005, and the Three Amigos shook hands on the deal, they were approving a silent corporate coup d’état in each country.

This “deal” created the SPP bureaucracy of tri-national security and prosperity working groups whose members include military and other government officials, alongside corporate and finance executives. The goal is to implement their collective vision already spelled out in influential position papers such as “Building a North American Community” released in March 2005 by the Task Force on the Future of America and “The North American Future Project” by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) released in 2007.

The North American Competitiveness Council (NACC), a key SPP group created in 2006, is made up of 30 senior private-sector representatives from Canada, Mexico and the US. In February 2007, they submitted 51 recommendations for SPP implementation through 2010.

What do they want to achieve?

NAFTA was a significant stage in the corporate take-over sold to us on the benefits of “free trade.” The SPP, sometimes called NAFTA-plus, is more than a trade agreement—it creates a hidden, undemocratic parallel governing structure of corporate, financial and government elites making decisions that impact our lives, shape the economy and transform the political order with devastating consequences for the environment and our civil liberties.
SPP proponents want to:

• Create a fully integrated North American economic region to be competitive with emerging economic regions such as China and India;

• Build a vast transport, warehousing and distribution system to promote the free flow of goods from low-wage countries like China into all reaches of the North American market;

• Increase the global competitiveness of remaining US manufacturers and service providers;

• “Harmonize” environmental and labor regulations to minimize labor and environmental compliance costs;

• Profit from extraction of natural resources throughout North America;

• Ensure that energy and other natural resources for manufacturing and construction flow to the US, enriching the elites of all three countries, while delaying the impact of resource depletion on the US standard of living;

• Ensure that water shortages do not constrain growth in the Southwest and other regions with increasing water deficits, without having to constrain use of water by agribusiness, mining, and manufacturing;

• Implement police and military surveillance and security systems

Because the efficient and secure movement of goods and natural resources is key to the SPP vision of prosperity, the Working Group on Transportation is one of ten Prosperity Working Groups. Its membership includes the US Department of Transportation (DOT), which is tasked with creating the new transport network of north-south SuperCorridors linking proliferating coastal and inland SuperPorts. These north-south corridors will in turn link to the existing and improved east-west Interstate highway system.

Driving profits through the heartland

There are at least six north-south SuperCorridor routes in various stages of planning, funding and construction and the following three go right through the US heartland:

• The Trans-Texas and International Trade Corridor was created in 1994, right after NAFTA was signed, to develop the world’s first international, integrated and secure multi-modal corridor system. Promoted by NASCO—North America’s SuperCorridor Coalition, Inc.—this corridor is the furthest advanced. Linking Mexico with Canada, the US segment begins in Texas with the I-35 Trans-Texas Corridor to be linked with I-29, I-80 and I-94 passing through San Antonio, Dallas, Oklahoma City, Wichita, Kansas City, Omaha, Fargo and branching to the east also through Des Moines and Duluth. NASCO uses the term “SuperCorridor” to make clear it is more than just a highway coalition (www.nascocorridor.com).

• The Great Plains International Trade Corridor is planned from Laredo, Texas to Denver, Colo., to Rapid City, S.D., to Canada. It is being promoted by the Ports-to-Plains Coalition (www.portstoplains.com).

The Canamex Highway planned to run from Nogales, Ariz., through Tucson, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Nev., Salt Lake City, Utah, Butte, Mont., to Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (www.canamex.org).

Based on the Trans-Texas Corridor plan, each SuperCorridor route could include six auto lanes and four truck lanes; two freight railway lines; high-speed commuter railways; infrastructure for utilities—water lines, oil and gas pipelines and transmission lines for electricity, broadband and other telecommunication services. How much of this could be realized for all corridors remains to be seen.

Kansas City SmartPort

The Kansas City SmartPort and other Inland SuperPorts are key centers along the Corridors for warehousing, redistribution and manufacturing. The Kansas City SmartPort is planned as “the transportation and logistic center of North America” with two north-south Corridors (routes 35 to Des Moines and 29 to Omaha) intersecting east-west Interstate 70, and with transcontinental rail and air transport lines converging. It will have more Foreign Trade Zone space than any other city totaling 10,000 acres over an 18 county area.

Who stands to benefit?

There are two sets of corporate interests—those like retail big-box stores and distribution centers, which will locate along the corridors to profit from selling the “endless more” of imported cheap goods, and those that will profit from extraction and transportation of natural resources like fossil fuels and minerals to the highest bidder. The potential for commercial export of water by the likes of T. Boone Pickens falls into the second category. These corporations are conveniently part of corridor groups like NASCO and SPP working groups so they can buy up land for access to natural resources, speculation and development along the corridors before the public and local communities are aware and can organize and advocate for an alternative vision.

Enterprise and Free Trade Zones located or planned along the proposed SuperCorridors and at SuperPorts give these corporations the added advantage of tax relief, incentives and credits. They also benefit when government uses eminent domain to acquire vast acreage of productive land for the Corridors and Ports, or when public land, such as a military base in Texas, is converted to private use for an Inland Port.

The People lose out when:

• Corridors are routed around or through their communities.

• Their tax dollars are used to improve and build the transport infrastructure and public highways are turned into private toll roads.

• Environmental and land-use regulations are lowered or do not apply in Enterprise and Free Trade Zones.

The “endless more” of imported goods and exported natural resources moving across oceans and along SuperCorridors increase global warming.

Mexican and Canadian corporations use NAFTA to challenge laws based on “regulatory taking of future profits” and leverage their power against the rights of people, communities and nature.

What does this mean for America’s heartland?

Already NAFTA has taken its toll on the heartland with the impacts of intensified industrialized farming such as CAFOs and agribusiness corn production for Mexico. The SPP will accelerate the transformation of the heartland. Imagine the market for water-thirsty corn-based ethanol with easy access to SuperPorts for global export. As the Ogallala aquifer is further devastated, imagine the pressure on Canada to export its water along these convenient corridors. Imagine the increased export of coal and coal-based methane from Montana and Wyoming as China’s need for coal continues to escalate in order to produce the “endless more” that will be imported on SuperCargo ships via the SuperPorts and SuperCorridors.

Imagine how construction of this transport network creates a huge demand for gravel, cement, asphalt, steel, wood and energy for manufacture and transport to construction sites that contribute to air pollution and global warming.

And, imagine how this transport network will carve up the productive agricultural heartland, disrupt ecosystems and impact wildlife!

Beyond these specific impacts with their dire implications for accelerated global warming, there is the loss of local autonomy and food security and the further advance of the emerging corporatocracy.

Citizens of the heartland and other progressive populists must speak up now.

Join with the Alliance for Democracy in calling for an end to this corporate coup d’état. Call for Congressional hearings in the heartland on the impacts of the SPP and the SuperCorridors on local communities, the environment, food security, and our freedom. Tell your members of Congress you don’t want privatized SuperCorridors gobbling up valuable farmland and exporting profits. For more on the SPP and SuperCorridors visit www.TheAllianceForDemocracy.org/SPP.

Ruth Caplan is co-chair of the Corporate Globalization and Positive Alternatives Campaign and Coordinator of the Defending Water for Life Campaign of the Alliance for Democracy. Nancy Price is co-chair of the Alliance for Democracy (thealliancefordemocracy.org).

Three Amigos to Meet at NAFTA-Plus Summit

President Bush, Prime Minister Harper of Canada and President Calderon of Mexico will meet April 21-22 in New Orleans in the 4th Summit of the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), along with government officials and corporate and financial executives (but not organized labor), to advance the SPP agenda.

The public is being shut out of the official meetings, but a “People’s Summit” will link the post-Katrina Gulf Coast struggle for justice to the fight for the survival of communities in Mexico, Canada and across the US in the face of the SPP and NAFTA. The goal is to build collective knowledge and action to transform the SPP and NAFTA, which serve the corporatocracy, and assert the right of people to determine their future.

Reports will be posted at www.TheAllianceForDemocracy.org/SPP

Read more!

Divergent U.S. Critiques of the Security and Prosperity Partnership: From Anti-Immigrant to Pro-Democracy Perspectives

[Print, More SPP Info, SPP Action Alert, SPP Flyers]

A l l i a n c e
for Responsible Trade

A National Coalition for Just and Sustainable Trade Policies

P.O. Box 5206
Hyattsville, MD 20782
E-mail: toml@quixote.org
Web site: www.art-us.org

Manuel Pérez Rocha
September 2007

Working Paper:

Divergent U.S. Critiques of the Security and Prosperity Partnership:
From Anti-Immigrant to Pro-Democracy Perspectives

1. Introduction. Divergent reasons to oppose the SPP.

After the exclusive summit between Prime Minister Stephen Harper, President George W. Bush and President Felipe Calderon in Montebello, Quebec, last August, it has become more evident that there is a growing concern and awareness in the US of the secretive Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) among the three countries. Opposition from civil society in Canada and Mexico is clearly defined by progressive groups who oppose the neoliberal agenda imposed by transnational corporations under the NAFTA regime. However, in the United States, criticisms come from two very divergent perspectives: 1) from progressive groups concerned, like Canadians and Mexicans, about how the continuation of economic deregulation and the hegemonic influence of the US in determining military and economic policy affect human rights and democracy in the region and 2) nationalist isolationist groups that are fearful of rising immigration and loss of US sovereignty with the SPP.

A wide array of civil society organizations in Canada, Mexico and the US have obtained information and are doing analysis to put the SPP on the public’s radar. The SPP, fostered by the White House and embraced by the presidents of the three countries in Waco, Texas in 2005, consists of broadening and deepening the scope of NAFTA (hence it is also known as NAFTA Plus). It has a double purpose, of enhancing corporate profitability and creating a North American security perimeter to fend off internal and external “threats”. The main troublesome characteristic, however, has been the secrecy with which the executives have proceeded.

According to official information , the main elements of the SPP are:

Security Agenda: this includes the creation of a perimeter of enhanced security in the North American region, namely against “external threats”, and “internal threats” within the region, and to increase the “efficiency of safe and low risk transit” through the shared borders.

Prosperity Agenda: for the promotion of further deregulation in trade and investment to boost “competitiveness.” This agenda is also known as “NAFTA Plus” and includes building infrastructure projects, further removal of trade tariffs and rules of origin, reducing the transaction costs of trade, and promoting regulatory harmonization.

Manuel Pérez Rocha is an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. The project on the SPP and the NAFTA Plus Agenda is coordinated with the Global Economy project at the IPS directed by Sarah Anderson.
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Progressive social and environmental organizations and labor unions have been the whistle blowers of the secretive nature of the SPP. However, in the United States conservative and anti-immigrant organizations have also raised their voices, have attracted more media attention and have managed to engage in debates and discussions with government officials and academics.

The analyses and conclusions made by progressive versus anti-immigrant organizations differ greatly. Progressive organizations consider the SPP to be the continuation of the deregulation of the economies in order to harmonize with the regulatory systems of the United States, with the final purpose of serving US corporative interests. In addition, the SPP aims to build up border surveillance infrastructure as part of the U.S. “War on Terror,” with disturbing implications for civil liberties. Hence, the SPP is likely to deepen “North American” integration but based on the continued subordination of Canada and Mexico, assimilating the U.S. dictates and following its sole leadership, ultimately for its own benefit.

According to the Canadian network Common Frontiers, the SPP is about bringing prosperity to large corporations in North America “who want to remove all obstacles to unfettered investment” on an unequal footing among the three countries, and security for the United States by means of “drawing up changes to Canadian and Mexican regulations and procedures so they will be in sync with Washington’s security agenda” .

According to Teresa Healy of the Canadian Labour Congress, on its economic agenda, the SPP is about “policy harmonization that increasingly opens social life across the continent to the discipline of the market, and in this respect it is about increasing the power of corporations and ongoing deregulation”. The security agenda “embodies the reactionary response to terrorism led by the United States (and thus) followed by Canada and Mexico” being a worrisome advance in terms of civil liberties and being “immigrants and workers of colour (who) face specific threats under the new security regime” .

In Mexico, the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade (RMALC) defines the SPP as the “Agreement in which the executives of the three countries along with the CEOs of great transnationals and the military industry attempt to impose on our peoples through a transnational, oligarchic and militarist project, another mechanism for the geo-economic and geo-strategic expansion of the United States not only at a regional but also at hemispheric and global levels” . According to analysts like John Saxe Fernandez of the Autonomous National University of Mexico “the laws now give the ‘imperial presidency’ unprecedented powers for the establishment of unconstitutional and police-state-like ‘anti terrorist’ structures in the US now being fostered in Canada and Mexico through the SPP (which is) having profound repercussions in Mexico and Canada, since the US new anti terrorist strategy claims that homeland security can only be achieved by locating US security and intelligence units in Mexican and Canadian ports, seaports, railways and highways” .

In sharp contrast to this criticism of the SPP based on the assertion that the U.S. police and military forces are imposing their economic and political agenda on Canada and Mexico, some conservative and anti-immigration organizations in the U.S. view the SPP as a threat to and dissolution of US sovereignty and as an initiative which will open the borders of the three countries to migrant labor and “illegal aliens”. This state of paranoia in the US seems to be growing due to increased immigration pressures from Mexico and other Latin American countries, but these groups do not wish to address the reasons why millions in the developing world are forced to leave their homes in search of better opportunities, where “the poverty, inequality and insecurity related to U.S. trade policies are clearly push factors” . Rather, they carry on with the misconception that “immigration concerns can be addressed through domestic policies rather than by tackling root causes” .


2. The Anti-Immigrant Movement’s Myths about the SPP

• “The SPP will finally open up US borders for unlimited immigration from Mexico”.

Anti-immigrant groups equate the SPP with what they believe to have been President Bush’s intentions to provide amnesty for 12 million “illegal aliens” – the majority of which are Mexicans. These groups criticize recommendations for entry procedures that consist of simplifying NAFTA’s visa system by extending it to a wider range of professional occupations and are fearful of a US – Mexico Social Security agreement, “that would imply Mexican illegal aliens (getting) Social Security credit for unlawful U.S. work… underestimating the costs to U.S. tax payers, hastening the insolvency of the U.S. Social Security”. They fear alien commuters who may gain a special status to commute and to the notion of living on one side of the border and working on the other, given that this neighborliness and continued border crossings would represent hidden taxes on U.S. taxpayers and an increase of a blended traffic of smugglers of narcotics and immigrants.

Immigration is perhaps the single theme that has unleashed this wave of nationalist defensiveness, in spite of the fact that within the SPP immigration is dealt with only from the standpoint of boosting business competitiveness. One of the main goals of the SPP is clearly stated as being to “Improve the legitimate flow of people [note: mainly professionals] and cargo out of our shared borders, and facilitate legitimate travel to and within North America. Reduce the costs of trade through efficient movement of goods and people Technical labor force, on a temporary basis”. The government of the US has also made it clear that the immigration issue with Mexico is limited to the “normal bilateral channels with Mexico”, and not through the SPP.

• “ The SPP is like the European Union, with free labor mobility along with free trade” (see appendix)

This myth is so prevalent that President Bush felt the need to address it at the Montebello summit. For the conservatives, the SPP aims to imitate the European Union and would include the freedom of labor mobility along with that of goods, services and capital. Although there are no documents available to support this, the basic assumption is that any movement towards political cooperation among the three countries would be equal to opening up the labor markets and harmonizing the labor standards downwards.

Many conservative critics presume that the “SPP treats free flows of labor and goods within the continent as necessarily connected, as if equal parts of a formula to yield prosperity”, and think that according to classic economics “trade and immigration bring about different effects and should not be combined, if economic success is the goal” . The main concern of anti-immigrant groups is that the SPP would ‘open the borders’, which would mean drawing Mexicans workers northward, thus stealing jobs and diminishing the incomes of U.S. workers.

• “The SPP is about creating a North American Union with institutions like those in the EU” (see appendix)

The fear is that the SPP will go beyond trade per se in the trilateral relationship and move towards comprehensive economic and political integration similar to the European Union, paving the way for a full scale North American Union (NAU). The ideas of Robert Pastor in his book Toward a North American Community are generally the fodder for suspicion that a NAU would be based on supranational bodies growing out of the SPP that would only grow in size and power, at the expense of national sovereignty and individual rights and liberties . The Minutemen say that “critics of the North American Union claim that multinational unelected organizations would supersede institutions such as the U.S. Supreme Court and relegate the U.S. congress to the modern equivalent of the Roman Senate, more of a tradition than a form of representative government” .
The fear is that these supranational bodies would include unelected and unaccountable tribunals that would dictate US policy in a myriad of aspects including immigration, such as those that Pastor has suggested: a North American Court of Justice, a North American Trade Tribunal and a North American Social Charter. Mexico is not viewed as a trustworthy partner for cooperation, for example in programs to reduce violence along the border. They are even less supportive of ideas to promote technology transfer through an investment fund that so far has only been timidly proposed in the SPP.

• Against a “North American” Identity or Interest.

The conservative SPP critics worry about any language which speaks of a North American identity or North American interest, and instead insist on only thinking of “American national interest”. They warn of academic initiatives to indoctrinate students to consider themselves as having a North American identity rather than as being American, Canadians or Mexicans and they fear an eventual loss of American exceptionalism to a blended North American ‘culture’. They also fear contamination from what they view as Mexico’s long ingrained ills, such as corruption, endemic ineffectiveness of governance, and weak judicial systems with monopolistic and socialistic elements.

Sometimes the anti Mexican groups call on Canadians to join ranks since according to them Canada shares much more in common with the US than Mexico does in terms of economic development, culture, history, the system of government and ultimately the predominance of English. Samuel Huntington, the controversial author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is often cited to back up their arguments that Latin American and Western cultures differ fundamentally, and to explain why , in their view, Mexicans resist stubbornly to assimilating US culture.

Nevertheless, while Canada may be a less alien culture than Mexico, they criticize Canadian social policies, its socialistic outlook on public policy issues, and its approach to governance which are seen as indications that “Americans” would lose a great deal of freedom and self determination should the SPP advance.

• “Mexico and Canada are not to be trusted for a North American security perimeter”

From the perspective of the conservative critics, Mexico is incapable of establishing a security perimeter for North America in its southern border with Guatemala in order to stop Central American “aliens”, such as the US requires and is one of the SPP’s main elements. For them, more Central Americans crossing into Mexico would mean more “aliens” admitted into a North American union. Here the concern is that because of Mexico’s corruption, putting US hopes in Mexico to secure its southern border would be very risky and ineffective

These groups fear also that the liberalization of the trucking industry would increase the smuggling of illegal aliens, foreign slaves, drugs and firearms into the United States as well as money laundering activities. Mexico’s inability to protect their borders is to be feared as well as Canada’s liberal and lax asylum policy that “has enabled terrorists and other foreign extremists to put down roots” .

• “The SPP will threaten the superior US health care system”

For the xenophobes, the US is superior not only to Mexico but also to Canada in every aspect of life including its public health system. They believe that with the SPP, public health threats will increase in the US.

With Mexico, they fear that exotic diseases from third world countries will spread like the hemorrhagic form of dengue fever and other diseases previously eradicated in the United States. Also, they fear that the United States will see even more Mexican patients arriving at its clinics and emergency rooms seeking charity care and would result in increased financial strains on what they consider an already stressed health care system, and that privately insured Americans will see even more health care costs transferred to their costs.

In the case of Canada’s health care, the “SPP would provide greater means for Canadian patients to seek health care in the US, and for Canadian health workers to move to the US” because Canada still “maintains a socialized health system…imposes government price controls on all aspects of health care; rations care (and) restricts private care efforts”. According to their logic, the SPP would provide further incentives for a Canadian flow from its “inefficient socialized medicine system” to the freer United States health market .

• “The SPP means the end of US sovereignty”.

The Stop SPP webpage of the Minutemen states that the SPP includes “erasing our borders, abolishing the US Dollar, and basically turning over the operation of our country including our justice system to an unholy cabal. Who is to gain? Mexico and Bush’s cronies. Who is to loose? First our middle class, then all US Citizens”. Conservative groups believe that the SPP would have huge implications for sovereign US policy, impacting the country’s capacity to guard its physical space and even the “end of the United States as we know it”. By joining in a SPP, Canada and Mexico could outvote the US because this a party of three, and start undermining US sovereignty in favor of a European Union-style supra-national government. From their perspectives, the SPP would foster a NAU similar to the EU, again, where richer countries, like Germany and the UK, have joined with poorer ones like Ireland and Portugal and have been forced, in their view, to share their wealth through the transfer of funds for social cohesion and structural development. Under this view, it would be “the United States, with the greatest achievements of wealth, liberty, order, and culture, (that) stands to lose the most among the SPP partners” .


3. Dismissing the far right xenophobes and what the SPP really means.

The US government has responded to the xenophobic critique of the SPP with a Myths vs Facts section on the official web site. For instance, the page responds to the “myth” that the SPP is meant to deal with immigration reform: “Immigration reform is a legislative matter currently being debated in Congress and is not being dealt with in the SPP”. Trying to debunk the “myth” that “the SPP will result in the loss of American jobs,” the US government unveils one of the real objectives and assumptions behind it: “the SPP seeks to create jobs by reducing transactions costs and unnecessary burdens for U.S. companies, which will bolster the competitiveness of our firms globally. These efforts will help U.S. manufacturers, spur job creation, and benefit consumers” . These are the same arguments used for selling NAFTA in 1994, which has failed to produce the promised results.

According to the Department of Commerce, the SPP is about providing the “framework so that North America is the safest and best place to make business in the world”; a place for “more super highways for trade” and a “North American security perimeter”.. Some analysts are concluding that the SPP does not pose much of a threat . Defenders of the SPP explain that it is about facilitating the movement of legitimate goods and labor and stopping illegitimate goods and illegitimate labor. According to Robert Pastor “we are not competing with Mexico for jobs but with China” and “a freer system of trade is in our interest” . On the eve of Montebello’s summit Pastor charged that the three governments have reacted defensively by watering down a series of wide-ranging objectives and have “allowed the relationship to be defined by an extremist fringe that fears any co-operative initiative is a slippery slope toward dissolution of sovereignty”. Pastor is clear that even when Canadians and Mexican groups express fears due to the fact that they are the weaker partners, “the most vociferous have emerged in the United States” who see the SPP “as tantamount to treason” and names Lou Dobbs of CNN as an example of those who see a conspiracy for a North American Union.

But what is really striking from Pastor’s comments is that it is a good example of how the governments and the intellectual proponents behind the SPP are using the right wing fears to dismiss wider and more profound criticism, and try to downplay the importance of the actual process. In Pastor’s words, “The summit in Montebello should be very important. The agenda for North American co-operation is overflowing with issues that have been neglected for a decade… instead of tackling this agenda, the three leaders have identified a few issues –avian flu, emergency management, and a new regulatory framework- and practically the only ones invited to the meeting are the CEOs of some of the largest corporations”. True, a few CEOs are the only invited but not only to Montebello but to the whole process, under the North American Competitiveness Council, and they are already providing dozens of “recommendations” that are being picked up and implemented, ranging from an Intellectual Property Action Strategy, to the further elimination of rules of origin, as well as a Trilateral Agreement for Cooperation in Energy Science and Technology. All these were announced in Montebello. The bilateral cooperation agenda between the US and Mexico on drug trafficking received a boost too, with the announcement of a sharp increase of US aid to Mexico. The details of all these agreements remain under the veil of secrecy justified by the need to increase security to boost “competitiveness”.

Although SPP proponents want to believe that NAFTA has been a success and that now it needs to be deepened, they also acknowledge that NAFTA has given much of what it had to give and that corporations are finding it better and easier to invest their capital in China and other countries with a cheaper labor force. In Reality, NAFTA has been a disaster for the Mexican working and middle classes and the SPP is not meant to address the consequences of a failed and unfair economic policy. The SPP is justified with NAFTA’s same worn out rhetoric that according to Jeff Faux, of the Economic Policy Institute, “was sold to the people of each nation on the promise that it would bring large net benefits in better jobs and faster growth [(but instead it)] protects the interests of large corporate investors while undercutting workers’ rights, environmental protections and democratic accountability”. Hence the SPP should be seen just as NAFTA, “not as a stand alone treaty, but as part of a long term campaign by the conservative business interests in all three countries to rip up their respective domestic social contract” .

Anti-immigrant groups do not recognize that it is the market forces in the United States that create the demand for foreign workers or that the economic pressures driving so many Mexicans to migrate are a result of the failure of policies promoted in Mexico under pressure from the United States and the international financial institutions. Despite growing evidence that NAFTA has provoked millions of peasants in Mexico to flee the countryside in a desperate search for jobs, mostly in the US, few politicians and other individuals in congressional and public debates have acknowledged that “reducing poverty, inequality, and joblessness abroad is the only long term solution to immigration concerns in this country ”.

Very different from the fears of the conservatives and right wing groups that call for the erection of walls between nations, are the root causes that we must address to help redress the misery to which millions of human beings are subject. Indeed, as Jeff Faux has written, “the continued willingness every year of hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens to risk their lives crossing the border to the United States because they can not make a living at home is in itself testimony to the failure of NAFTA to deliver on the promises of its promoters.” With the SPP the governments want to inject vitamins from the same failed formula, but with the added ingredient of proceeding behind doors, in secret meetings and circumventing congressional oversight. That the debate on the SPP must be opened up is, perhaps, the only aspect on which both US conservative and progressive organizations agree.


4. Some of the concerns of progressive groups with the SPP

On Process:

• Lack of Democratic Oversight

The SPP is deliberately not conceived as a treaty or agreement in order to circumvent congressional and parliamentary processes of scrutiny and approval, and it excludes members of Congress and members of Parliament from the summits, ministerial meetings and working groups that operate behind closed doors. It remains unclear under what legal authority the executives dictate regulatory convergence and the harmonization of policies and standards. Representatives of the United States and Mexico, and parliamentarians of Canada, are working on the SPP to tackle this democratic deficit, and are increasingly coordinating amongst themselves .

• Civil society and the media excluded

The SPP excludes civil society organizations as well as the media in general from their meetings and deliberations. The governments argue that they are open to civil society recommendations, but this is only through filling forms on web pages. Some representatives of civil society in the US, both from conservative and progressive groups, have filed Freedom of Information of Act (FOIA) requests, but thus far, these requests have not revealed much substance because what has been released is mostly irrelevant information.

• Only big business

The SPP responds only to the “recommendations” issued by the ad-hoc formed North American Competitive Council (NACC) with representatives almost exclusively from the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, The Business Roundtable in the U.S. and the Consejo Mexicano de Hombres de Negocios (Mexican Council of Businessmen). No other non government group has been invited to be a stakeholder of the SPP .

On Substance:

• Continuing Deregulation for Trade and Investment

The SPP is about cutting “red tape” for business and continuing economic deregulation through the further elimination of rules of origin, enhancing intellectual property rights and promoting investment opportunities for transnational corporations. So far only large corporations have benefited from increased trade and investment opportunities within NAFTA, and tens of thousands of small and medium companies that provide most of the employment in Mexico have closed because they are unable to compete. If this trend continues, Mexico will continue lacking a sound and endogenous economic and social development that provides for its people and their livelihoods. The deepening of economic policies that cause the elimination of the capacity of governments to promote the viability of local and national economies will increase the immigration pressure which in the context of the SPP is seen as an “internal threat” to US security. The response of strengthening border controls through the "harmonization" of security policies that violate civil liberties and basic human rights is unacceptable.

• Securing Energy for the United States

Beneath “a thin veneer of talk about ‘North American’ energy security, the real purpose of the SPP is to mobilize Mexican and Canadian energy resources to enhance US security” (RMALC, fact sheet on SPP and petroleum), through the installation of a North American integrated energy market in a deregulated context that guarantees supplies. In Mexico, conventional oil reserves are in decline, having fallen to just 11 years worth of production at the end of 2006. Despite public opposition and constitutional limits, Mexican governments have had the command for years to open up the Mexican energy sector to private investment and under the SPP this pressure is increased, “with a little privatizing help from oil transnationals”. Canada gave away its ability to control the levels of oil and gas exports to the US when it signed NAFTA and as result it is obliged to send 65% of its production stateside and needs to import 40% of its oil for domestic consumption .

• Energy and Environmental Concerns

In Canada, a major concern of environmentalists is the SPP goal to facilitate the extraction of oil, as well as the construction of oil pipelines from that country to the United States. Radio-Canada reported that Canadian officials promised to streamline environmental approvals to facilitate the expansion of oil production from tar sands from around one million barrels a day to five million barrels by 2030, with most of these extra barrels exported to the US. Oil extraction from tar sands has high environmental costs and critics warn that if the Canadian government were to tighten environmental standards related to this process, it could open the door to lawsuits from the U.S. corporations that are the primary investors in this sector.

• Violating Civil Liberties on the Borders.

The SPP provides for an ongoing process of negotiation on the terms of expanded border surveillance infrastructure with worrisome implications for civil liberties. It commits Canada to share vast amounts of information with the U.S. government, including the fingerprints of refugee and asylum seekers. This issue has become extremely controversial in light of the experience with Maher Arar, the Canadian detained by U.S. officials, wrongly accused of having links to terrorists, and rendered to Syria, where he was tortured for over a year. Already Canada and the US share a no fly list and other “intelligent borders” surveillance mechanisms.

• Towards a “Plan Mexico”

Recently, the governments of Mexico and the US have been negotiating a multiyear aid package supposed to combat drug cartels in Mexico. While the specifics of the aid package have not been made public, press reports state that elements of this aid package could include wire-tapping equipment, which without the necessary oversight may open the door to illegal spying activities on Mexican citizens, aircraft to transport Mexican anti-drug teams, and assorted training initiatives for Mexican officials. These talks have been mostly hidden from the media, legislators and the public until now given Mexican sensitivities about past US invasions and interventions on Mexican soil .

• Regulatory Convergence. Food Safety as an example.

The SPP includes the aim of harmonizing and developing common standards for food safety and the “elimination of identified differences”. This would put at greater peril the food sovereignty and food culture of peoples in the hemisphere and could mean an increased use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) across borders. The SPP will also promote an increased trade of agricultural products produced by large agro industrial corporations in a context where Mexican peasant groups are struggling for what remains of their livelihoods and against the total elimination of agricultural tariffs (in particular to basic grains like maize and beans) scheduled within NAFTA for January 1, 2008. In Canada, the government has announced that “Canadians will have to adapt to having more pesticides in their imported foods as it harmonizes [raising] the amount of allowable pesticides on imported fruit and vegetables to bring it in line with US and Mexican levels” .

• Strengthening the subordination of Mexico and Canada to the US

Several studies and critics charge that the SPP responds to the logic of deepening the relations of subordination of Mexico and Canada to the United States, and ensuring that the interests of large corporate interests of the US military-industrial complex are met. Far from a supranational government like the EU, governments operate behind doors but under the hegemony of the United States.


5. Conclusions

Contrary to what many conservative and anti immigration groups believe, the North American region will continue being dominated by the United States and the SPP is an instrument for economic and political control. Even at its early stages most dealings and agreements under the SPP umbrella have been carried out between the US and Mexico or the US and Canada and US regulations tend to be the standard for the processes of regulatory harmonization. Hence, the SPP serves to broaden the sphere of US extraterritorial influence and domination over the sovereignty of the territories and governance of its two neighbors.

Based on the recommendations of the big business-led NACC, the SPP will go much further than NAFTA in deregulating the economies of Mexico and Canada on behalf of corporate interests. This will in turn have a continued negative impact on Mexico’s endogenous economic development, which is the main cause for migration of millions to the United States.

Worse still, the SPP lacks democratic checks and balances and guarantees that economic and security directives go around Congress, the media, and civil society. If there is one thing that US progressive and conservative organizations have in common it is that they are all against the secrecy and undemocratic way the SPP has proceed since its inception. All disagree with the secretive meetings of elites, the lack of congressional oversight, public notice or comment, or accountability through established checks and balances. Any future integration, whatever its rationale, must define in the open its founding pillars and direction.

However, contrary to the outdated and unrealistic protectionist measures demanded by the conservatives, progressive organizations like the Trinational Network (made up of broad coalitions of trade activists in each country) will continue working for the ideal that the United States will someday honor the sovereignty of other countries and guarantee the protection and promotion of human rights and civil liberties for all. The SPP is the path which heads in the wrong direction.

Endnotes

1. For official information on SPP see www.spp.gov
2. Common Frontiers Canada, “Integration by Stealth, The Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP)”.
3. Teresa Healy, Deep Integration in North America: Security and Prosperity for Whom?, Canadian Labour Congress, February 20, 2007.
4. Red Mexicana de Acción frente al Libre Comercio. Cuaderno 7: “La Alianza para la Seguridad y la Prosperidad de América del Norte ASPAN / TLCAN Plus”, México 2007.
5. John Saxe Fernandez, “Globalization and Security: The US ‘Imperial Presidency’: Global Impacts in Iraq and Mexico”, in Hans Günther Brauch, John Grin, Úrsula Oswald et al,(eds) Globalization and Envirnomental Challenges. Reconceptualizing Security in the 21st Century. Berlin-Heildelberg-New York-Hong-Kong-London-Milan-Paris-Tokio.Springer-Verlag (2007) in press.
6. Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh and Robin Broad “Just Livelihoods”, in “Just Security, and Alternative Foreign Policy Framework”, Foreign Policy In Focus, Institute of Policy Studies, June 2007.
7. Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh and Robin Broad, 2007
8. James R. Edwards, Jr. Ph.D. “The Security and Prosperity Partnership; It’s Immigration Implications”. Center for Immigration Studies. Washington, D.C. June, 2007.
9. Ibid
10. See Jerome S. Corsi, “Meet Robert Pastor, the Father of the North American Union” in http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=16189. Human Events is a newspaper of the conservative movement.
11. http://stopspp.com/stopspp/?page_id=2
12. Edwards, 2007. Op Cit.
13. Ibid
14. Ibid
15. SPP Myths and Facts. www.spp.gov
16. Ibid
17. Marcela Sanchez, The Washington Post, July 13, 2007.
18. Panel of discussion on the Security and Prosperity Partnership, convened by Judicial Watch, National Press Club, Washington D.C., June 20th, 2007.
19. Robert Pastor, “Montebello`s summit is less than it seems”, The Globe and Mail
20. Joint Statement: Prime Minister Harper, President Bush and President Calderon. North American Leaders Summit.
21. Jeff Faux, introduction to Campbell, Salas and Scott, “Revisiting NAFTA: Still not Working for North American Workers”. Economic Policy Institute, Briefing Paper #173, 2006.
22. “Illegal immigrants are in Northern Virginia for the same reason that they are in so many other parts of the country: their labor is in demand. That’s not going to change, unless the powers that be in Price William and Loudoun (counties) have discovered a way to defeat market forces”. Nativism’s Toxic Cloud, The Washington Post editorial, July 22, 2007.
23. Sarah Anderson, John Cavanagh, Robin Broad, Op. Cit.
24. See Press Release: “Legislators and Civil Society Groups of the North American Region call for halt to Security and Prosperity Partnership and Replacement of NAFTA”, June 6, 2006. and Summary Report of “the 2nd North American Forum on a People Centered Approach to Trade, Ottawa, Canada, June 5th, 2006.
25. North American Competitiveness Council, Initial Recommendations “Enhancing Competitiveness in Canada, Mexico and the United States; Private Sector priorities for the Security and Partnership of North America (SPP)”
26. See “Enhancing Competitiveness in Canada, Mexico, and the United States; Private-Sector Priorities for the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP)” Initial Recommendations of the North American Competitiveness Council (NAAC)”, February 2007.
27. See Press Statement “A Coup d’Etat lies behind the ‘Three Amigos’ SPP Summit”, The Trinational Network RQIC, RMALC, ART, Common Frontiers; members of the Hemispheric Social Alliance. August 17, 2007.
28. Ibid
29. Ibid

Also: Linklater Andro, “The Center Shouldn’t Hold”. The New York Times Op-ed. July 4, 2007.

Appendix: Will the SPP Create a EU-style North America Union? Not really .

Media coverage of the SPP has focused largely on the degree to which North America as a region will emulate a European Union type of integration. The following frame distinguishes between some of the founding pillars of the historic construction of the European Union and the SPP of North America which is a continuation of the NAFTA economic model, but with the added component of providing a security framework under the US dominance.

	The European Union	The NAFTA area under the SPP
Scope	An expanding Political and Economic union (open to neighboring countries)	A partnership for competitiveness of business and security among the US and exclusively with its two neighboring countries
Politically	Political union to guarantee peace amongst its nations and neighbors	Guarantee the security needs of the US under the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror”
Economically	Common market based on common standards with a common currency	Competitiveness for transnational companies based on free trade and exploiting comparative advantages
Institutions	A myriad of political and economic institutions; parliament, commission, court, etc.	No institutions; only the North American Competitiveness Council, a body for business consultation, has been created
Worker’s mobility	Elimination of borders for the free mobility of people; union between Western and Eastern Europe symbolized by the removal of the Berlin Wall	Only facilitate the flow of “legitimate” and “safe” transit. Immigration issue remains bilateral; hardening immigration policies; towards a wall between US and Mexico.
Labor, Environmental, and Social standards	EU member governments are required to uphold common and high standards. Financial and technical assistance are available to support compliance, but governments that continue to fail to enforce the standards can be penalized and, as a last resort, threatened with expulsion from the EU.	NAFTA labor and environmental “side agreements” have weak enforcement mechanisms that have done virtually nothing to strengthen protections. NAFTA offers no support for monitoring or enforcement of labor rights.
Reduction of asymmetries and inequalities	Transfer of massive funds for social cohesion and for reconstruction and development have leveled the Common Market playing field.	Disparities have widened since NAFTA (see World Bank figures) and Mexico remains heavily indebted to US and IFI’s
Public Participation	Several avenues for civil society input in policymaking.1) the European Economic and Social Committee, 2) the social partnership process.	NAAC, the business group, has the only official role in the SPP deliberation process.

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