Close your eyes, please. Picture a big map of the US. Now look at a massive new highway running north/south through the center of the country, four football fields wide. Isn't that 400 yards? Equals 1200 feet? Which is almost a quarter of a mile or half a kilometer?
You can open your eyes now and see where the highway goes.
It's a little like a tree with its roots in Mexico, two major roots running north and northeast to Laredo. Once past Laredo and into south Texas, it charges straight north, 400 yards wide, to Kansas City. There it splits, one branch running through Chicago and Detroit to Toronto and Montreal, the other branch running northwest through Omaha and Fargo to Winnipeg and then to the west coast of Canada.
It's no bike path. It's new NAFTA highway.
Once complete, the new road will allow containers from the Far East to enter the United States through the Mexican port of Lazaro Cardenas, bypassing the Longshoreman’s Union in the process. The Mexican trucks, without the involvement of the Teamsters Union, will drive on what will be the nation’s most modern highway straight into the heart of America. The Mexican trucks will cross border in FAST lanes, checked only electronically by the new “SENTRI” system. The first customs stop will be a Mexican customs office in Kansas City, their new Smart Port complex, a facility being built for Mexico at a cost of $3 million to the U.S. taxpayers in Kansas City.
You think I'm kidding? The project has been on the hotplate here in Texas for a couple of years with protesters trying to stop it. They can't.
As incredible as this plan may seem to some readers, the first Trans-Texas Corridor segment of the NAFTA Super Highway is ready to begin construction next year. Various U.S. government agencies, dozens of state agencies, and scores of private NGOs (non-governmental organizations) have been working behind the scenes to create the NAFTA Super Highway, despite the lack of comment on the plan by President Bush. The American public is largely asleep to this key piece of the coming “North American Union” that government planners in the new trilateral region of United States, Canada and Mexico are about to drive into reality.
You haven't heard about it? Maybe that's because the plan includes a lot of politically very unpopular features. For starters, it will have a huge and very negative environmental impact, starting with the farm and ranchland seized in order to have 400 yards of asphalt and pollution, not even taking into account the service industries growing up along the length of it. Then there's the matter of bypassing union labor. Oh, and the open border it requires at both ends -- that should send some Minute Men into convulsions. And no "robust debate." No way.
Missing in the move toward creating a North American Union is the robust public debate that preceded the decision to form the European Union. All this may be for calculated political reasons on the part of the Bush Administration. A good reason Bush does not want to secure the border with Mexico may be that the administration is trying to create express lanes for Mexican trucks to bring containers with cheap Far East goods into the heart of the U.S., all without the involvement of any U.S. union workers on the docks or in the trucks.
For more on this quiet blockbuster of a project yet to hit the mainstream media, you'll need to check out the article at Human Events, a conservative journal.
Update, February 10, 2008: The New York Times has a further report on the Texas road project.
