Link to AP article here.

Bush Seeks Neighborly Agenda
By DEB RIECHMANN
August 20, 2007
MONTEBELLO, Canada (AP) – President Bush and the leaders of Mexico and Canada worked Monday to craft a plan to secure their borders in the event of a terrorist strike or other emergency without creating traffic tie-ups that slowed commerce at crossings after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Bush, Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper want their homeland security experts to figure out the best way to protect citizens in an emergency, perhaps an outbreak of avian flu, without snarling business among the trading partners.

More broadly, the goal of the North American summit was to seek middle ground on shared concerns about the border and a host of other issues ranging from energy to trade, food safety to immigration. The three-way meeting at a highly secured red cedar chateau along the banks of the Ottawa River focused on administrative and regulatory issues, not sweeping legislative proposals for North America.

Few, if any, formal announcements were expected. The meeting served to address thorny problems between the U.S. and its neighbors to the North and South and bolster a compact – dubbed the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America – that serves as a way for the nations to team up on health, security and commerce.

Several hundred demonstrators protested on issues such as the war in Iraq, human rights and integration of North America. One carried a banner that said: “Say No To Americanada.”

Calderon and Harper both want tight relations with Bush, yet don’t want to be seen as proteges of the unpopular president or leave the impression that the U.S. is encroaching on their sovereignty.

To that end, Harper is asserting his nation’s claim to the Northwest Passage through the Arctic.

The race to secure subsurface rights to the Arctic seabed heated up when Russia sent two small submarines to plant a tiny national flag under the North Pole. The United States and Norway also have competing claims in the vast Arctic region, where a U.S. study suggests as much as 25 percent of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas could be hidden.

Canada believes much of the North American side of the Arctic is Canada’s, but the United States says that the thawing Northwest Passage is part of international waters.

“We look at the Northwest Passage as an international waterway, and want the international transit rights to be respected there,” White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said. “But certainly President Bush will listen to what Prime Minister Harper has to say.”

Harper also plans to raise concerns about new passport requirements for travelers, longtime U.S. restrictions on Canadian softwood lumber exports and the war in Afghanistan.

Harper has said Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan will not be extended beyond 2009 without a consensus in the country and the Parliament. Canada has 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, fighting against the Taliban in the violet southern parts of the nation. Other countries, such as Germany ad Italy, restrict the use of their forces to more peaceful areas in the north.

With Hurricane Dean bearing down on Mexico, Calderon might have to cut his meetings short with Bush and Calderon. This is his first meeting with Bush since the U.S. immigration legislation died in the Senate. Calderon has called that a “grave error” and also is rankled by the Bush administration’s newly announced crackdown on employers who use illegal immigrants.

It’s unclear whether the United States will use the summit to announce a major new aid plan to help Mexico fight violent drug trafficking. U.S. anti-drug officials have been impressed with Caldron’s crackdown on drug traffickers since he took office.

But Calderon has repeatedly pushed the U.S. to take more responsibility in fighting the two countries’ common drug problem, including doing more to stop the flow of illegal U.S. arms into Mexico and trying to combat the demand for drugs north of the border. The issue of U.S. aid is a sensitive subject among Mexicans wary that U.S. help could lead to interventions that violate Mexican sovereignty.

Bush stepped off Air Force One and onto a red carpet at an airport in Ottawa where he was greeted by a bagpiper and a ceremonial honor guard dressed in red jackets and tall, black fur hats. Bush flew to the resort on the Marine One presidential helicopter, which landed in a grassy clearing along the water.

A few hundred protesters amassed at the gate of the resort. Police in riot gear used tear gas to hold back about 50 of them, who responded by flinging rocks, branches and plastic bottles. A line of police in riot gear jostled with about 50 demonstrators. A few hundred marched on the front gate of the summit compound shouting taunts.

“I’ve heard it’s nothing,” Harper said, dismissing the protests as Bush arrived at the Fairmont Le Chateau Montebello. “A couple hundred? It’s sad.”

Link to article here.

Highway Robbery of Texas Roads
By Cathie Adams, president of Texas Eagle Forum
Published: 08-20-07

Texas drivers are tired of traffic gridlock. We want new roads built sooner rather than later, but we do not want a Trans-Texas Corridor that would surely invite more illegal drugs and more illegal aliens.

Legislators have gotten our message but since both highway funds, the State Highway Fund (a gasoline tax) and the Texas Mobility Fund (bond money), have been pilfered for other uses, there is no money for road building.

Members of the Texas Senate Transportation & Homeland Security Committee met on August 7 to discuss this funding dilemma. Committee Chairman John Carona suggested a new constitutional amendment to protect the two existing highway funds from future abuses. He also recommended linking the state gas tax to inflation, in order to keep pace with the economy. Both ideas could be helpful in the future, but do nothing to remedy our current state of affairs.

A new funding scheme, public-private partnerships, was also discussed which allows foreign interests to lease our infrastructure for 50-99 years. Like highway robbers, those private investors would profit as much as 39 times the road building cost and then take their loot and leave the country. That’s a bad deal for Texans who currently own our infrastructure, want to continue to own it and furthermore want our taxes / tolls to be invested back into road building.

The committee has until 2009 to come up with funding solutions, but they would be wise to consider WHY the demand for new roads is so great because it is not just because of population growth. The elephant in the room that no one wants to tackle is the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, which former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called “the architecture of a new international system.”

When Congress approved NAFTA in 1993 with a simple majority of both chambers in a lame duck session, they ignored the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that the international treaty be approved by two-thirds of the U.S. Senate. Setting aside our U.S. Constitution has destabilized our borders with Mexico and Canada and created new and mounting crises.

NAFTA has encouraged manufacturers to leave our shores presumably to avoid government regulations and union wages, but at what cost to American workers? Is it fair to force American workers to compete with millions of Communist government-enslaved laborers who earn about 30 cents an hour in Asia?

NAFTA has created a U.S. trade deficit of $725.8 billion, 26% of that, almost $233 billion, is with China. The deficit is not only unsustainable, the Chinese government is now threatening to liquidate its $1.33 trillion of foreign reserves, including about $900 billion in U.S. treasury bonds, as a political weapon if the U.S. imposes trade sanctions to force revaluation of the Chinese currency, the Yuan. Such a move would cause our dollar to collapse!

More than American jobs and the dollar being negatively impacted by NAFTA, importing goods that America used to manufacture causes an enormous strain to our nation’s infrastructure.

As a hearty endorser of this “architecture of a new international system,” President Bush agreed to a Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP, www.spp.gov) with Canada and Mexico without Congressional approval or debate in March 2005. He then directed the U.S. Departments of Commerce and Transportation to begin merging their bureaucracies with their counterparts in Mexico and Canada. In 2006 he met with the presidents of Mexico and Canada in Cancun, Mexico, and this year he took time from his vacation in Crawford to attend another closed-door meeting with them in Quebec, Canada.

As the President and most members of Congress deny their unconstitutional actions, every state is forced to deal with the consequences of NAFTA and the SPP. Taxpayers must pay for an invasion of illegal aliens and drug traffickers, as well as deal with colossal levels of congestion on our roads.

The tragic Minneapolis bridge disaster last August shined light on the overweight danger to our nation’s infrastructure. Federal transportation officials claim that one-fourth of our nation’s bridges are structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, and one-third of our major roads are in poor or mediocre condition. They further claim that the cost to repair roads and bridges would be $461 billion and that traffic congestion is costing drivers $63 billion a year in wasted time and fuel costs.

Congress is just as guilty as state legislators in spending our highway funds on other projects. To counter their pilfering, they created a new federal program that grants cities $848 million aimed at discouraging people from driving, and in many cases by imposing new tolls or fees. Some in Congress also wanted to raise federal gas taxes, but President Bush quashed that bad idea. Thus far Texas legislators have also rejected a gas tax increase, but they embraced both toll/tax roads and public-private partnership funding.

When Texas taxpayers learned about Cintra, a foreign company public-private partnership, they were outraged. As a result, the legislature passed a moratorium on the public-private partnership scheme to build the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC), the Texas segment of the NAFTA Highway that bisects the entire country from Laredo, TX to Duluth, MN.

Regretfully, Governor Rick Perry vetoed not only the moratorium, but also a law to require our Attorney General to study the impact of federal laws on our state and a good eminent domain bill aimed at protecting farmers and ranchers from the unfair taking of 580,000 acres to build the 12-lane TTC super-highway.

The unconstitutional NAFTA treaty and unilateral SPP agreement are undermining our nation’s sovereignty and security. In order for America to remain strong, we must be able to:

• Produce our own food;
• Manufacture our own military equipment; and
• Prevent foreign powers from obtaining access to our heartland.

Americans know that our roads have become busier, but few recognize that most of that traffic is due to the fact that we are importing goods that we used to manufacture. Even fewer are aware that as much as 60% of our food is now being imported or that much of our military equipment manufacturing has moved offshore. Yet federal and state lawmakers seem more committed to enabling elitist global interests, than fulfilling their constitutional responsibility to protect citizens from outside threats.

Each state should study the impact of NAFTA and the SPP within its borders, which would rightly lead to the repeal of both.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: It has taken more than a decade to realize the impact of the NAFTA “architecture of a new international system.” It cannot be repealed outright, but as citizens realize the source of the chaos in our communities, then they will influence their Congressmen as we have done with our state legislators in Texas. As for the SPP, ask your Congressman to co-sponsor HR 40 that would require discussion and debate of the president’s unilateral agreement. Congressional switchboard: 202-224-3121.

Looking ahead to the 2009 Texas legislative session, let us ask our representatives to pass another eminent domain bill to protect property owners from unfair takings and another bill to require the Attorney General Abbott to study the impact of federal laws, i.e. NAFTA and the SPP, on our state. Capitol switchboard: 512-463-4630.

Link to article here.

China to install sensors along NAFTA highway
Documents reveal NASCO plan to militarize I-35
By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
August 18, 2007

Radio sensing stations to track traffic and cargo up and down the I-35 NAFTA Superhighway corridor are being installed by Communist China, operating through a port operator subsidiary of Hutchison Whampoa, in conjunction with Lockheed Martin and the North America’s SuperCorridor Coalition, Inc.

The idea is that RFID chips placed in containers where manufactured goods are shipped from China will be able to be tracked to the Mexican ports on the Pacific where the containers are unloaded onto Mexican trucks and trains for transportation on the I-35 NAFTA Superhighway to destinations within the United States.

NASCO, a trade association based in Dallas, Texas, has teamed with Lockheed Martin to use RFID tracking technology Lockheed Martin developed for the U.S. Department of Defense’s projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as at U.S. military stations throughout the world.

China has a central position in applying the RFID technology on I-35, given Hutchinson Port Holdings’ 49 percent ownership of Savi Networks, the Lockheed Martin subsidiary that will get the job of placing the sensors all up and down the NAFTA Superhighway.

Nathan Hansen, a Minnesota attorney, has archived on his blog a series of NASCO documents obtained under a Minnesota Data Practices Act.

Among these documents released by Hansen is a Letter of Intent between NASCO and Savi Networks which details how NASCO and Lockheed Martin intend to implement NAFTRACS.

The letter calls for Savi Networks to establish RFID sensors along the I-35 NAFTA trade corridor, with tracking designed to begin at Manzanillo and Lázaro Cárdenas, and include “inland points of data capture” positioned at Laredo, San Antonio, Dallas, Kansas City, the Ambassador Bridge, and Winnipeg.

Data captured by the RFID sensors would be sent to a data collection center that NASCO has named “The Center of Excellence.”

The Center of Excellence data collection center will be integrated into Lockheed Martin’s militarized Global Transport Network Command and Control Center that is installed and operating at the Lockheed Martin Center for Innovation or “Lighthouse” facility in Suffolk, Virginia.

Lockheed Martin’s GTN was developed for the U.S. Department of Defense as an electronic system used to support supply shipments and defense logistics to U.S. armed forces deployed worldwide.

GTN is operated by the U.S. Transportation Command at Scott Air Force Base in Illinois.

In releasing to the public the NASCO internal documents, Hansen characterized NASCO’s Total Domain Awareness as “an Orwellian nightmare,” commenting that, “At least Orwell’s tyrants had the dignity to be creative with the names of their various maniacal bureaucracies.”

NASCO documents describe Total Domain Awareness as the ability to “automatically gather, correlate, and interpret fragments of multi-source data,” including data received from radar, Automatic Identification System shipboard radar, Global Positioning System, open source data including weather reports, military intelligence data, law enforcement data, bioterrorism data, plus video surveillance and security cameras.

Hansen comments about the NASCO Total Awareness Domain that, “Truly, a major defense contractor tracking our every move here in our own country is undoubtedly a threat to our liberties.”

As WND has previously reported, Hutchison Port Holdings owns 49 percent of Savi Networks, a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin’s wholly-owned subsidiary Savi Technology.

A contract signed with NASCO authorizes Savi Networks to place a system of RFID sensors along the entire length of I-35 to track RFID equipped containers which travel the I-35 NAFTA Superhighway, including those Chinese containers that enter the continent through the Mexican ports of Manzanillo and Lázaro Cárdenas.

The Federal Highway Administration website is currently archiving a slide show presentation by Tiffany Melvin, NASCO’s executive director, containing a discussion of the North American Facilitation of Transportation, Trade, Reduced Congestion and Security, designed to track containers along I-35 with Savi RFID technology and to provide the information to “various federal and state DOT (Department of Transportation) participants.”

Hutchison Ports Holding operates the ports at Manzanillo and Lázaro Cárdenas, as well as both ends of the Panama Canal.

Savi Technology spokesmen refused to return WND calls after messages were left at the company for three consecutive days.

Link to article here.

Read Jerry Corsi’s book, The Late Great USA, the Coming merger with Mexico and Canada, to see the irrefutable evidence for yourself. Search this web site for SPP, NAFTA Superhighway, or North American Union to connect the dots. Anyone who believes the Governor over ordinary citizens and documents available from our own government needs their head examined.

Remember Perry is pushing the Trans Texas Corridor (against his own Party’s platform) to such a degree that he vetoed a bill that would have protected landowners from their land being taken and given to private interests for private gain, HB 2006, he vetoed the people’s moratorium bill on privatized toll roads, HB 1892, and his ex-aide worked for the company awarded the bid to build the Trans Texas Corridor before and after working for the Governor. He barely won re-election running on strong border security, and, in less than a month after he won, flip-flopped and came out for open borders and a guest worker program. Perry’s not looking out for you, and his word is for sale to the highest bidder just like our highways. While politicians and reporters are busy trying to marginalize watchdogs, our government is laying the groundwork for deep integration with Canada and Mexico through the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). Since 19 state legislatures have passed resolutions against it, it’s getting tougher for Perry and his crowd to make the “conspiracy theory” charge stick.

Perry’s push for super highway raises conspiracy buzz
Some say it’s part of a plan to create one nation in North America
By R.G. RATCLIFFE
Aug. 18, 2007
Houston Chronicle
AUSTIN — Black helicopters, the Illuminati, Gov. Rick Perry and the Trans-Texas Corridor are all now part of the vernacular of the global domination conspiracy theorists.

Perry’s push for the Trans-Texas Corridor super highway is part of a secret plan, the conspiracy theorists say, to create the North American Union — a single nation consisting of Canada, Mexico and the United States with a currency called the Amero.

Government denials of the North American Union and descriptions of it as a myth seem to add fuel to the fire. A Google search for “North American Union” and “Rick Perry” returns about 13,400 Web page results.

“Conspiracy theories abound, and some people have an awful lot of time on their hands to come up with such far-fetched notions,” said Perry spokesman Robert Black.

Perry enhanced the conspiracy buzz earlier this summer by traveling to Turkey to attend the secretive Bilderberg conference, which conspiracy theorists believe is a cabal of international monied interests and power brokers pressing for globalization.

And the conspiracy rhetoric is likely to ratchet up this week as President Bush meets with Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper in Quebec in their third summit to discuss North American relations under the Security and Prosperity Partnership.

“There is absolutely a connection with all of it,” said Texas Eagle Forum President Cathie Adams. The Trans-Texas Corridor “is something not being driven by the people of Texas.”

The first, and most controversial, leg of the Trans-Texas Corridor plan is a proposed 1,200-foot-wide private toll road to run from Laredo to the Oklahoma border parallel to Interstate 35. This TTC-35 would be built by a consortium headed by Spanish owned Cintra S.A. and Zachry Construction Corp. of San Antonio.

The seed of the North American Union controversy rests in the 1992-93 passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Under that treaty, Interstate 35 was designated informally as the NAFTA highway.

‘Stealth’ attempt

Fast-forward to March 2005 to Crawford, when President Bush, Harper and then-Mexican President Vicente Fox agreed to pursue the Security and Prosperity Partnership, SPP. The idea was to promote cooperation among the countries on economic and security issues.But conservative author Jerome Corsi — in his new book: The Late Great U.S.A.: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada — argues the SPP is a “stealth” attempt to wipe out the nations’ borders and form a single economy like the European Union.

With an entire chapter dedicated to Perry’s Trans-Texas Corridor plan, Corsi says the first step to integrating the economies is to integrate the transportation infrastructure.

“His (Perry’s) actions have been to fight hard to build this toll road and not listen to the objections expressed by the people of Texas,” Corsi said.

Corsi became nationally known in 2004 as the co-author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry. Corsi said extensive research shows the SPP has created working groups on the North American Union that answer to presidential Cabinet secretaries.

“This is more of a shadow bureaucracy, a shadow government already in effect,” Corsi said. “Unless it is stopped, it will turn into a North American Union with an Amero.”

The official federal Web site for the SPP has a section dedicated to busting the North American Union as myth.

“The SPP does not attempt to modify our sovereignty or currency or change the American system of government designed by our Founding Fathers,” the site says.

But that has not stopped a growing opposition to the North American Union by groups such as the Eagle Forum, The Conservative Caucus and the John Birch Society.

‘Wanted’ individual

The North American Union also has been fodder for cable television commentators: CNN’s Lou Dobbs and Fox’s Bill O’Reilly.Perry fueled his role in the debate in June by attending the Bilderberg annual conference, a secretive closed-door meeting of about 120 business, government and media leaders from Europe and North America.

Republican presidential candidate and U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Lake Jackson was asked about the trip on the syndicated talk radio show of Alex Jones in June. Paul said the trip was “a sign that he’s involved in the international conspiracy.”

Jones’ Web site features mug shot-like photos of Perry labeled “Wanted for Treason.” Jones in an interview said Perry’s trip and the Trans-Texas Corridor show a willingness by the governor to sell out Texas’ infrastructure to international bankers.

“Perry is actively waging war, economically in the interests of the elites and neomercantilism,” Jones said.

The 2001 book Toward a North American Community: Lessons from the Old World for the New by Robert A. Pastor, an American University professor and director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management, is cited by Corsi as the blueprint for the merger.

“I’ve never proposed a North American Union,” Pastor said. “The only people who talk about a North American Union are those people who are trying to generate fear.”

Belief in sovereignty

Pastor said greater cooperation between the three countries makes sense for both economics and internal security.Pastor said those promoting the conspiracy are doing so because of “historical xenophobia,” “a fear of immigrants, mostly from Mexico” and a “traditional isolationism.”

Black said there is no way the governor would support merging the U.S. with its neighbors.

“The governor is a firm believer in the sovereignty of the United States. Too many of our brave men and women have died defending it,” Black said.

Link to article here.

Congress tells Bush: Back off SPP agenda
Lawmakers’ letter warns ‘stealth’ effort to ‘harmonize’ could undermine security
By Jerome R. Corsi
World Net Daily
August 17, 2007

Twenty-two members of the U.S. House of Representatives – 21 Republicans and a Democrat – are urging President Bush to back off his North American integration efforts when he attends the third summit meeting on the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America next week in Montebello, Quebec.
They make it clear that continuing any such agenda at this point would be disregarding growing apprehension in Congress about the plans.

“As you travel to Montebello, Canada later this month for a summit with your Canadian and Mexican counterparts, we want you to be aware of serious and growing concerns in the U.S. Congress about the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) you launched with these nations in 2005,” the letter said.

While the letter authors express their support for the president’s “desire to promote good relations with our neighbors to the north and south,” they are worried about the secretive manner in which SPP is being conducted and concerned it “may actually undermine our security and sovereignty.”

“For instance,” the letter said, “measures that would make it easier to move goods and people across borders could have the effect of further weakening this country’s ability to secure its frontiers and prevent illegal immigration.”

The letter also cited documents obtained by Judicial Watch in a Freedom of Information Act Request that suggest, “Such secretiveness seems not to be accidental.”

WND was among the first news organizations to obtain and publish the agenda and the list of attendees for a secret North American Forum meeting held at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in Banff, Alberta, Canada, from September 12-14, 2006. The meeting was closed to the press and the documents obtained by WND were marked “Internal Document, Not for Public Release.”

President Bush with then-Mexico President Vicente Fox, left, and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin in March 2005 at the inaugural summit of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (White House photo)

Judicial Watch also used a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain a set of notes from the Pentagon attendees at the secret Banff meeting.

One particularly disturbing comment was noted in the official conference record of the speeches given, as recorded in the “Rapporteur Notes” obtained by the Judicial Watch FOIA request. In Section VI of the conference, entitled “Border Infrastructure and Continental Prosperity,” the reporter summarized as follows:

To what degree does the concept of North America help/hinder solving problems between the three countries?

• Vision is helpful
• A secure perimeter would bring enormous benefit
• While a vision is appealing working on the infrastructure might yield more benefit and bring more people on board (“evolution by stealth”)

Reflecting on those perceptions, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said, “It is not encouraging to see the phrase ‘evolution by stealth’ in reference to important policy debates such as North American integration and cooperation. These documents provide more information to Americans concerned about the Security and Prosperity Partnership. The more transparency the better.”

The members also noted in their letter the amendment added by Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., to the transportation funding bill.

As WND reported, Hunter successfully offered an amendment to H.R.3074, the Transportation Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2008, prohibiting the use of federal funds to participate in SPP-related working group meetings in the future.

The members noted in their letter that, “This vote is an indication of the serious concerns felt by those of us in Congress and by our constituents about this initiative – concerns that will only be intensified if pursuit of the SPP continues out of public view and without congressional oversight or approval.”

The last paragraph of the letter called upon the president “not to pledge or agree to any further movement in connection with the SPP at the upcoming North American summit.”

The letter concluded that, “in the interest of transparency and accountability, we urge you to bring to the Congress whatever provisions have already been agreed upon and those now being pursued or contemplated as part of this initiative, for the purpose of obtaining authorization through the normal legislative process.”

Signatories to the letter included the following members of the House of Representatives:

• Rep. Terry Everett, R-Alabama
• Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-California
• Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colorado
• Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas
• Rep. Nancy Boyda, D-Kansas
• Rep. Walter Jones, R-North Carolina
• Rep. David Davis, R-Tenn.
• Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Georgia
• Rep. John Boozman, R-Arkansas
• Rep. John Duncan, R-Tenn.
• Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Virginia
• Rep. Tom Price, R-Georgia
• Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, R-Florida
• Rep. Sue Myrick, R-North Carolina
• Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Alabama
• Rep. Gary Miller, R-Calif.
• Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa
• Rep. Greg Walden, R-Oregon
• Rep. Michael Rogers, R-Alabama
• Rep. Thaddeus McCotter, R-Michigan
• Rep. Robert Aderholt, R-Alabama
• Rep. Todd Akin, R-Missouri