Sabotaging U.S. Sovereignty... by Alan Caruba

The problem with the Bush administration is that not enough of its officials have read the U.S. Constitution. Take, for example, Section 2 of Article 2. When dealing with foreign nations, it says that the President “shall have the power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur”.

So, why is President Bush and his administration seeking to establish a North American Union that would, in effect, abolish the borders between Canada, Mexico, and the United States of America?

Moreover, it would involve our government in so many common regulatory mandates with these two nations as to render the sovereignty of the United States a memory of what national self-governance is supposed to be.

The name of this effort is called the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) and, guess what, it has not been submitted to the Senate for its oversight or concurrence because, by some magic of governmental definition, it is not a treaty. Instead, its administration is buried in the bowels of the Commerce Department.

It does have, however, the blessing of the political and corporate elites of all three nations. A visit to the SPP Internet website (www.spp.gov) says it “was launched in March of 2005 as a trilateral effort to increase security and enhance prosperity among the United States, Canada and Mexico through greater cooperation and information sharing”.















It is an attack on American sovereignty. In the smoothest and most soothing writing you will find anywhere, the website spells out the wonders of SPP. They include the North American Competitiveness Council, the North American Energy Security Initiative, the North American Emergency Management plan, and plans for “smart, secure borders”. And right now there are “working groups” whose purpose is to “improve productivity, reduce the costs of trade, and enhance the quality of life”.

And if you like snake oil, permit SPP to sell it to you by the barrel, by the boxcar, and by the tanker.

The SPP didn’t start out as an idea the presidents of the three nations started kicking around on March 23, 2005 in Waco, Texas, but it became the official policy of the United States at a special summit convened by President Bush and joined by then Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin.

Like so many really bad foreign policy concepts, SPP owes its origins to the Council on Foreign Relations; in this case, CFR’s Task Force on North America. Its report, “Building a North American Community” envisions the elimination of U.S. borders in just five years. Like termites eating away at the sovereignty of the United States of America, this grandiose scheme is a major threat to American security and prosperity.

The Marxist majordomo of this task force is Professor Robert Pastor who told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee “The best way to secure the United States today is not at our two borders with Mexico and Canada but at the borders of North America as a whole”. Oh, yeah????

This surely explains why Mexico is doing such a great job of stopping the drug smugglers or the one million Mexicans who each year consider the U.S. border a mere fiction in their pursuit of jobs President Bush keeps telling us Americans won’t take.

It took a couple of years after 9/11 for Canada to discover it had some fanatical Muslims in its midst who were plotting terrible things against it and the U.S. Yes, these are surely the nations in which we want to place the responsibility for America’s security. Who needs borders when you have friends like these?

A North American Union promises not only security, says SPP, but prosperity too. Without SPP, however, the three nations already do more than $800 billion in trilateral trade.

Surely the U.S. needs Mexico’s help to improve our economy? As the economist, Robert J. Samuelson, noted in a June column, “The subtext for the United States immigration debate is Mexico. Why doesn’t its economy grow faster, creating more jobs and higher living standards?” The answer to that has something to do with the endemic corruption that infests all levels of Mexico’s governmental and business sectors. Something is very wrong when Mexico’s economy must literally depend on the billions its illegal aliens send home from the U.S.

In 2002, the then-Mexican Foreign Minister Jorge Castanega explained to the local press that destroying the border involved “the metaphor of Gulliver, of ensnarling the giant. Tying it up, with nails, with thread, with 20,000 nets that bog it down: these nets being norms, principles, resolutions, agreements, and bilateral, regional and international covenants”.

Bush 43 is carrying out Bush41’s daft and dangerous “new world order” and his indifference to America’s illegal immigration crisis is symptomatic of the SPP objectives.

On June 15, U.S. Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez, Mexican Economy Minister Sergio Garcia de Alba, and Canadian Minister of Industry Maxime Bernier joined North American business leaders to launch the North American Competitiveness Council. The objective is the promotion of “regional competitiveness in the global community.”

As if the floundering economies of the member nations of the European Union were not warning enough, it is proposed that the United States enter into a similar union.

A lot of corporations with global interests like this idea. Among those sponsoring the North American Union are FedEx Corporation, Mittal Steel USA, General Motors Corporation, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Campbell’s Soup Company, Gillette Inc., Merck & Company, and Wal-Mart Stores.

Since the United States is already a signatory to NAFTA and CAFTA, why is SPP necessary? Just how many treaties, agreements and protocols are necessary to promote trade and economic growth?

Just how many nets and norms, traps and snares, will ultimately undermine U.S. prosperity, drive down the wages of America’s middle class, and improve the ability of the Mexican drug cartels to deliver their goods?

Like termites eating away at the sovereignty of the United States of America, this grandiose scheme, hatched in some darkened cavern of the Council on Foreign Affairs, is a major threat to American security and prosperity.

It was been introduced by fiat, by executive action, by a “summit” of the three nation’s leaders, and the time is long overdue for the Senate to demand to exercise its Constitutional responsibility and right to determine if it wishes to give its consent to yet another “entangling alliance”.

Alan Caruba writes a weekly column, “Warning Signs”, posted on the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center, www.anxietycenter.com. Merril Press has just published his book, “Right Answers”.
© Alan Caruba, 2006