Well, it’s not just social conservatives who should distrust Rudolph Giuliani, take a look at his ties to Cintra, Macquarie and all the open border players in the globalist NAFTA superhighway scheme known as the Trans Texas Corridor (TTC) in Texas. It gets juicy about halfway down…

Note: The author has an error. George H.W. Bush did not adopt Exon Florio in 1988, he was still VP then. Reagan did it. However, the reporter is right about Rudy. Press releases from Bracewell & Giuliani offered in links below.

Link to article here.

NAFTA Superhighway has Giuliani as key player

Diane M. Grassi

Diane M. Grassi
May 4, 2007
On March 25, 2005, U.S. President George W. Bush, former Canadian Prime Minister, Paul Martin and former Mexican President, Vicente Fox, authorized the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), now under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Most Americans have little to no knowledge of this seemingly innocuous sounding unofficial treaty and therefore believe there is little reason to be alarmed.

However, what could be misinterpreted as legislation which has been scrutinized, and has gone through the proper channels of government could not be farther from the truth, in that the U.S. Congress has had no direct disclosure of nor has taken part in its execution.

Legally, a treaty would require a two-thirds majority of the U.S. Senate to concur for its ratification as determined by the U.S. Constitution. Cleverly, however, since the SPP is not a treaty, the President was able to avoid such a required procedure by using the power of the Executive Branch. And in August 2006, President Bush additionally crafted a Signing Statement to passed legislation declaring it Constitutional for his administration to withhold information from or deny authority required from the U.S. Congress on the SPP and its negotiations.

With the recent swell and frequency of free trade agreements being passed in the U.S. Congress in the past few years alone, seemingly rushed through without genuine debate or challenge, it would be easy for the public to assume that the SPP was authorized by Congress and thinking matters pertaining to it were in the best interest of the American people. And sadly, many U.S. free trade agreements do not directly better the workers of the countries involved, but are solely reserved for big business profiting from cheap labor, and foreign lobbyists and bureaucrats enriching themselves.

But the SPP is cleverly disguised as a boon for all three North American countries and its citizens, yet has lacked input or oversight from federal, state, or municipal legislators nationwide. The goals of the SPP agenda largely include a call for transparency and unprecedented cooperation with respect to all three governments’ commerce and trade. The endeavor is to join forces in uniting as one competitive body in the global marketplace and to function as the North American Union (NAU), which at the same time whittles away at each country’s sovereignty, its national security and its laws.

The facilitation of the SPP will stem from the use of the U.S. interstate highway system providing the roads for inter-continental and interstate commerce. For that to happen will require retro-fitting of existing interstates as well as building new roads, including gas and power lines, including light rail, from the interior of Mexico, through the central corridor of the U.S. and on into Canada.

Both the proposed NAU and NAFTA Superhighway are offshoots of the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed in 1992 by then President Bill Clinton. At the time it was sold to the American people and the Mexican government as a win-win for both peoples and would re-balance the flow of trade back to Mexico in order for Mexican workers to earn a living wage. But that never transpired and instead backfired, resulting in the onslaught of nearly 20 million illegal aliens since, illegally crossing the U.S. southern border, supposedly looking for decent paying jobs.

But to fully understand the evolution of the call for the need of a NAFTA Superhighway it is important to at least understand the recent history behind it. The introduction of free trade policy has morphed into a priority of the U.S. government today, even putting national security at risk in order to fulfill its agenda. It was the Reagan Administration’s vision of free trade, a direct response to Japan’s explosive growth and expansion in both the automobile and electronics industries in the U.S., which began to shift the balance of trade and the lopsided result we now have today with most of our trading partners.

And fifteen years since the passage of NAFTA has not only enabled the U.S. to globalize arguably beyond proportions in all areas of commerce, industry and trade, but it has helped to foster public-private partnerships, a benign term used to mask what are essentially foreign-direct investments. And foreign-direct investment has grown precipitously since 1988 when former President George H.W. Bush signed the Exon-Florio Amendment to the Defense Production Act of 1950.

It was also in 1988 when then President George H.W. Bush, through Exon-Florio delegated his power to approve or disapprove such foreign acquisitions to the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Investments in the U.S. (CFIUS), relieving the President of the responsibility in determining national security threats in foreign-direct acquisitions. Unfortunately, the definition of national security in a post-911 world remains too narrow to address protection of critical infrastructure, a scarce defense supply, or preservation of technological standards, among many other risks, unquestioned back in 1988.

The Exon-Florio Amendment authorizes the President to “suspend or prohibit foreign acquisitions, mergers, or takeovers of U.S. companies if a foreign controlling interest might take action that threatens national security.” And the term “foreign control” remains ambiguous and decidedly so. The ramifications of the Exon-Florio Amendment reared its head when in February 2006 CFIUS, an arm of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, became widely recognized for its authorization of the Dubai Ports World to operate multiple East Coast port operations including the Port Authority of New York, and the ports of Baltimore and Miami.

The balancing act of national security and foreign-direct acquisitions has relegated national security concerns to that of an afterthought, as the Department of the Treasury’s prime priority is expanding commerce in the global marketplace. Complaints about the secluded CFIUS process, however, predate the Dubai Ports World alarm bells of 2006. For it was in October 2005 when Senator Richard Shelby, (R) Alabama, called for hearings on the inclusion of Congressional oversight of CFIUS approvals. And it was prior to 2006 when Senator James Inhofe, (R) Oklahoma, lobbied for Congress to be able to reject CFIUS approvals.

As it stands, most every foreign acquisition sails through the approval process. Unless there is a 45-day investigation process after the required 30-day review by CFIUS, the President’s approval is not required and thereby never reaches the Congress for any interaction or input. Between 1988 and 2005 only two foreign acquisitions were unapproved out of 1,555 reviews. Both were withdrawn and eligible for later re-instatement.

Many foreign entities seek out a “pre-screening” with CFIUS’ member agencies, comprised of 12 departments of the U.S. government, if national security concerns are anticipated in order to mitigate the chances of non-approval and triggering the 45-day investigation.

The disparate interests of free trade and the protection of critical infrastructure, and in particular the U.S. highway system as well as public utilities, has given way to high-powered U.S. law firms and professional lobbyist organizations that lay the groundwork for foreign conglomerates to land foreign-acquisition contracts with cash-starved states amenable to foreign-direct investment.

Such is the case with the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC), the brainchild of the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) in concert with the SPP. It is a multi-billion dollar web of highway building, toll road maintenance, gas pipelines, public utilities and railroad contracts as complex and as multi-layered as the U.S. interstate highway system itself. A flurry of over 20 foreign acquisitions of interstate highway projects and toll road maintenance contracts have been approved since 2003 with many more nationwide working their way through state legislatures, such as that of the New Jersey Turnpike which Governor Jon Corzine believes is ripe for foreign funding.

But the TTC is the biggest and most massive highway building project of them all and for the first time will rely upon a foreign entity to not only maintain toll roads but to have a stake in building, controlling operations and tolls and expanding new roads and critical infrastructure. Additionally, eminent domain law will come into play in order to reconcile the taking of property and farmland for road expansion to accommodate pipelines and railroad tracks.

And much like the SPP planning, which took place behind closed doors, the TTC collaboration began in 2002 in Texas Governor Richard Perry’s chambers, where state legislators and taxpayers were deliberately cut out of negotiations and the bidding process. Negotiations began with the Spanish engineering transportation construction firm, Cintra Concesiones de Infrastructures de Transporte, S.A., a subsidiary of the Grupo Ferrovial, which specializes in toll roads and car parks and considered a leading developer of private-sector infrastructure throughout Europe.

At the center of negotiations for multiple legs of the Superhighway Corridor throughout Texas, is none other than Rudolph Giuliani’s law firm which landed the Comprehensive Development Agreement for a widening of Interstate-35, now referred to as the TTC-35, in addition to the Master Development Plans for State Highways 121 (see their press release here,) and 130 among other legs of the TTC. All negotiations for Cintra were and are presently handled by the law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani, LLP, of which Republican Presidential candidate, Rudolph Giuliani, has been a senior executive partner since March 2005. His law firm is the exclusive legal counsel for Cintra. Bracewell & Giuliani is comprised of 400 attorneys, based in Houston, TX with offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., London and Kazakhstan.

Cintra joined with San Antonio, TX-based Zachry Construction Corp. to help land the contracts, in which Zachry owns a 20% interest. The Cintra-Zachry proposal for TTC-35 includes a private investment of up to $6 billion in upfront payments for the complete construction, design and operation of a 316-mile toll road between Dallas and San Antonio, giving Cintra the right to set tolls and keep toll road profits for a period of 50 years, as it will for each road it has contracted.

The NAFTA Superhighway and its corridors will run from Southwestern Mexico through Laredo, Austin and Dallas, TX, into Kansas City, KA, serving as an inland customs port. The corridor will split in Kansas with one leg going to Winnipeg, Canada through Omaha, NE. The other leg goes to Toronto, Canada through Des Moines, IA, Chicago, IL and Detroit, MI.

As many as 10 lanes, one-mile wide will incorporate double rails and pipelines. The second corridor is planned from Brownsville to Houston, TX through Arkansas, Memphis, TN and into Norfolk, VA. While the principal use for these corridors is to speed Asian goods into the Central and Eastern U.S., it will require 145 acres of land per mile or 540,000 total acres of land. And in Texas, the state may utilize its own discretion in using eminent domain law in order to reach its goal.

Had gasoline tax revenues been properly allocated and solely reserved for highway projects over the years, neither Texas nor numerous other states would be as desperate for funds as they claim they now are, as many highway funds have been found to have been raided for other state projects and public funding.

The citizens of Texas only as recently as February 2007 began to attend state legislative hearings where many state lawmakers themselves were beginning to become familiar with the Cintra contracts. Several have called for a moratorium on at least the TTC-35 project, envisioned as a high-speed highway, until they can evaluate issues such as eminent domain, cost benefit analysis, environmental impact and homeland security ramifications.

Most interesting to the whole story is not only has Mr. Giuliani’s involvement in the NAFTA Superhighway not ever having been publicly addressed, but how a foreign company is awarded the building of a mass highway system, versus maintaining it, for the first time in U.S. history, and negotiated by the law firm of the top Republican candidate running for President of the United States. And truly disturbing is how such will not only have national and homeland security and sovereignty implications but how it is deliberately being kept away from the Halls of Congress.

Giuliani fancies himself as an expert on homeland security issues and a law enforcer. And he has amassed quite the portfolio since 2002, earning $20 million in that year alone, by selling himself as such. He owns Giuliani Partners, Giuliani Safety & Security and Giuliani Capital Advisors. In March 2007 he sold Giuliani Capital Advisors, a former Ernst & Young finance company he purchased in 2002, to Macquarie Infrastructure Consortium (see announcement on their web site here). Not coincidentally, it is a partner of Cintra’s in its shared operations of toll roads in both Indiana and Chicago, IL.

Bracewell & Giuliani represents some of the biggest multi-national oil, utility infrastructure and financial corporations both in the U.S. and abroad. With that have come the connections that Giuliani has been able to tap into for campaign donors, essential for his presidential bid, not only in Texas but nationwide, as he has become the consummate globalist. But more troubling than potential conflicts of interest as a public servant is his lack of compunction to secure U.S. borders and then planting himself squarely in the middle of one of the most controversial and historic highway system projects since the 1956 National Federal-Aid Highway Act.

Particularly unnerving, given Guiliani’s personal experience on 9-11, is his defense of open borders at any cost while condoning the NAFTA Superhighway Corridor and by extension the North American Union, without the purview or consent of the U.S. Congress or the will of the American people.

We should have seen it coming when Giuliani enacted Special Order 40 in 1994, during his tenure as Mayor of New York City, in ordering law enforcement officers to no longer check the legal status of suspects caught violating the law. We should have seen it coming when Rudolph Giuliani single-handedly decided that illegal aliens were not lawbreakers and also quit upholding the law. And unfortunately we now do see it coming. But sadly, he may now actually be handed the opportunity to no longer defend and abide by the U.S. Constitution of the United States of America.

View it on YouTube here.

We’re well past the “conspiracy theory” on this…WAKE-UP America and learn what Texans already know…we’re on our way to FORCIBLY becoming a North American Union, without borders, with a single currency, and with the exploitation of cheap labor that will destroy the American worker, entrepreneurs, and the American dream in order to facilitate global corporations’ massive influx of cheap goods from China.

The purpose of the NAFTA Superhighways, known as the Trans Texas Corridor in Texas, is to build trade corridors to get Chinese goods to market faster than the backlogged ports on the East and West coasts. It’s all part of a larger scheme to establish a North American Union without the approval of Congress or a vote of the American people.

Link to article here. It’s nothing short of stunning that our President, a Texan, is treating his state this way. To have to have one of our senators, Kay Bailey Hutchison, send a letter asking the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to BACK OFF from its illegal lobbying, is an abomination! This President and this Governor don’t seem to care one flip about representing the will of the people. We’re all supposed to let the elite Rockefeller Republicans rule and get out of the way while they “marry” (as James Ray of FHWA recently stated) our government with corporations. If these guys want a showdown, a showdown they will get. I’m quite confident Texans aren’t going to take this top-down, elitist cronyism where everything in America is for sale to the highest bidder (be it highways, ports, airports, lotteries, power plants) any longer.

PREMEDITATED MERGER
Battle with feds brewing over ‘superhighway’
Texas legislators overwhelmingly pass bill blocking construction

By Jerome R. Corsi
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

A battle between Texas and the Bush administration is brewing over construction of the Trans-Texas Corridor after the state legislature passed a two-year moratorium. The Texas House passed HB1892 Wednesday after the Senate last week approved an earlier version of the moratorium on a project some critics see as part of a “NAFTA superhighway” system and ties with Canada and Mexico that threaten U.S. sovereignty. The bill has been sent to Gov. Rick Perry for signature by May 14, but it passed with veto-proof margins of 27-4 in the Senate and 139-1 in the House.

The Bush administration appears determined to fight the moratorium.

WND reported last week FHWA Chief Counsel James D. Ray wrote a four-page letter to Michael Behrens, executive director of the Texas Department of Transportation, threatening the loss of federal highway funds if the legislature were to pass a two-year moratorium of the public-private partnership financed by Cintra, an investment consortium in Spain.

WND previously has reported TTC-35, the nation’s first NAFTA superhighway, is a four-football-field wide car-truck-train-pipeline toll road the Texas Department of Transportation plans to build parallel to Interstate 35 from Laredo, Texas, to the Texas-Oklahoma border south of Oklahoma City.

TTC is a public-private-partnership heavily promoted on the FHWA website, largely because the corridor will be financed by Cintra, an investment consortium in Spain that will manage the toll road under a 50-year lease.

On Tuesday, Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, R–Texas, wrote to the Federal Highway Administration objecting to a threatening letter the agency recently wrote the Texas Department of Transportation.

Hutchinson wrote J.Richard Capka, the FHWA administrator, charging that Ray’s letter “placed a cloud over current actions being taken in the Texas Legislature.”

Hutchinson further wrote that as “someone who has worked to increase Texas’ share of federal transportation dollars, I understand the need to make sure that Texas has all options to leverage funds.”

Hutchinson cautioned, “While the administration plays a valuable role in providing technical guidance and assistance for states considering legislation which may impact federal funds, there is a fine line between analysis and advocacy in those deliberations.”

Hutchinson invited Capka to take steps to remove the threatening impression caused by Ray’s letter.

In the looming battle, the Bush administration can expect to find an ally in Rep. Mike Krusee of Williamson County, Texas.

WND has confirmed a previous report that Ray’s letter was prompted by a request Krusee sent to FHWA asking for an opinion specifically on HB1892, the version of the moratorium that passed the Texas House.

WND also previously reported Krusee was a prime mover of the enabling legislation the Texas legislature passed paving the way for the TTC project. In November 2006, Krusee barely won re-election to the Texas legislature, after a campaign in which his support of TTC development was hotly contested.

In a scathing attack on Krusee, the Texas blog EyeonWilliamson.org posted charges that Krusee has pursued a private consulting contract to help consultant Wilbur Smith Associates, a transportation infrastructure consulting firm, shepherd a proposal through the Department of Transportation’s “Corridor of the Future” grant competition.

Wilbur Smith Associates proposes to build a new cross-country toll road along the Interstate 10. The Wilbur Smith proposal was designed to meet the “Corridor of the Future” emphasis on public-private partnerships of the type Krusee has pushed for years through the Texas legislature.

On Feb. 1, Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters announced that the Interstate-10 proposal was among the eight “Corridor of the Future” finalists.

Krusee was also invited Feb. 9 to speak at an invitation-only White House “Transportation Leadership Summit,” which EyeonWilliamson.org took to be “evidence of Krusee’s ever-increasing favor with the Bush administration.

WND contacted Krusee’s office and asked a series of specific questions, including whether Krusee had a business relationship with Wilbur Smith Associates, as charged by EyeonWilliamson.org.

Instead of answering the specific questions, James Walpole, a spokesman for Krusee, e-mailed to WND a press release.

The statement affirmed Krusee had asked FHWA for an opinion on the moratorium bill

“Since I had questions about whether the tollway moratorium now passed by the Senate would jeopardize precious federal highway funding,” the press release read, “I asked the federal highway administration to give its opinion.”

WND also has reported the Texas ports of Houston and Corpus Christi are planning to accommodate megaships from China that will pass through an expanded Panama Canal. Both ports are working with the Texas Department of Transportation to connect with TTC projects for the Chinese containers to be transported inland.