The Texas segment of the NAFTA Super Corridor is moving rapidly toward approval. When built, the Trans-Texas Corridor, or TTC, will be a major super-highway with six lanes moving in each direction, twelve lanes across in total, described in the 4,000 page draft environmental study as including separate lanes "for passenger vehicles and large trucks, freight railways, high-speed commuter railways, and a corridor for utilities including water lines, oil and natural gas pipelines, and transmission lines for electricity, broadband and other telecommunications services."
The TTC is expected to follow the current lines of Interstate 35, stretching from Laredo, Texas, on the Mexican border, heading toward Oklahoma City on the Texas border with Oklahoma.
An artist's rendition shows what the projected super-corridor highway is expected to look like.
The idea is to extend the rebuilt I-35 NAFTA super-corridor highway all the way from Laredo, Texas, to Canada, with extensions in Canada to be built out to Montreal in the east and Vancouver in the west. In Mexico, the super-corridor will connect via Mexican railroads with the port at Lazaro Cardenas.
A core design feature is to create a hub in Kansas City. Here the "Lazaro Cardenas – Kansas City Transportation Corridor" will open up a north-south route through the United States to bring in containers from the Far East. As described by Kansas City's Smart Port website:
The Lazaro Cardenas – Kansas City Corridor refers to a trade route linking Kansas City to key Asia-Pacific Markets via a ships-to-rail terminal at the port of Lazaro Cardenas in the State of Michoacan, Mexico. Thanks to an innovative series of international agreements, infrastructure improvements and new technologies, this corridor is a reality.
As the American economy expands and the economies of the Far East ramp up production to meet our demand for goods, the pace of international trade will exceed the ability of major West Coast ports such as Long Beach and Los Angeles to accommodate the flow of goods into the United States.
The NAFTA Super Corridor will be constructed largely by private companies that intend to operate the new I-35 as a toll road. North America's SuperCorridor Coalition Inc., or NASCO, is a "nonprofit organization dedicated to developing the world's first international, integrated and secure, multi-modal transportation system along the International Mid-Continent Trade and Transportation Corridor" Already, NASCO has received $2.5 million in earmarks from the U.S. Department of Transportation.
The NAFTA Super Corridor plan is ultimately to reduce the transportation costs of using cheap labor in China, South Korea and Indonesia to produce goods for American markets. Bypassing West Coast ports in the U.S. means bypassing U.S. union wages. Mexican port and rail transport are expected to keep the shipping costs low. Also, allowing free access to the U.S. to Mexican trucks means that the containers can be moved through the U.S. by Mexican nationals, again bypassing Teamster union wages and benefits typically paid U.S. truck drivers.
To get a feel for how transportation planners are influenced by globalist economic thinking, consider this 2005 analysis written by Leonard Krouner in the Voice of San Diego:
The Los Angeles/Long Beach and Seattle/Tacoma harbors are the only two West Coast ports between Alaska and Chile that can be used by super-cargo "post-Panamax" ships with a 4,000 standardized cargo container capacity. The ability to off-load, move, unload, store and distribute cargo from these ships requires expansion of California's transportation infrastructure. Delays increasing costs for cargo movement at the Los Angeles/Long Beach port such as those extant during the 2003 longshoreman labor unrest, and the 2004 arrival of too many ships in a single time period with cargo for distribution prior to the Christmas holidays are motivating mega importers Wal-Mart and Home Depot to invest in warehouse facilities in less expensive states such as Georgia.
None of this would be possible without the extensive work being done by the U.S. Department of Commerce working groups charged with implementing by new regulations the Strategic and Prosperity Partnership of North America, or SPP. The SPP agreement was reached between President Bush, President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin during their March 2005 summit meeting in Waco, Texas. The Bush administration plan is to create a North American Union along the model of the European Union, put in place by administrative regulations and departmental working groups under the SPP umbrella.
The U.S. Department of Transportation is actively working on a Free and Secure Trade program that would create special lanes to allow trucks from Mexico to cross the U.S. border with minimal electronic inspection, reducing the U.S. border with Mexico to no more than a speed-bump for authorized Mexican trucks entering the country.
On June 7, 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Department of Transportation v. Public Citizen ruled in favor of the Bush administration's argument that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration lacked the authority to exercise environmental controls to prevent Mexican trucks from openly operating in the U.S. under NAFTA. This ruling was key in the Bush administration's determination to open U.S. borders to Mexican trucks under the trade agreement. Had the Supreme Court decided otherwise, the NAFTA Super Corridor project would have suffered a setback.
I continue to argue that a "follow the money" strategy must be utilized to understand why President Bush has refused to close our border with Mexico, pushing instead for "comprehensive immigration reform" legislation that would allow the vast majority of illegal immigrants now in the U.S. to remain under a "guest worker" or "pathway to citizenship" provision. The underlying agenda of the Bush administration seems to be to create a NAFTA-plus environment in which workers, trade and capital will be allowed to flow unimpeded within the trilateral North American community consisting of the United States, Canada and Mexico.
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