Quote:
| The second reason Bush has kept this major summit a virtual secret is its real agenda. More important, the agenda-makers, the guys who called the meeting, must remain as far out of camera range as possible: The North American Competitiveness Council. Never heard of The Council? Well, maybe you’ve heard of the counselors: the chief executives of Wal-Mart, Chevron Oil, Lockheed-Martin and 27 other multinational masters of the corporate universe. And why did the landlords of our continent order our presidents to a three-nation pajama party? Their term is “harmonization.” Harmonization has nothing to do with singing in fifths like Simon and Garfunkel. Harmonization means making rules and regulations the same in all three countries. Or, more specifically, watering down rules – on health, safety, labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on - in other words, any regulations that get between The Council members and their profits. Take for example, pesticides. Wal-Mart and agri-business don’t want to reduce the legal amount of poison allowed in what you eat. Solution: “harmonize” US and Canadian pesticide standards to Mexico’s. Can they do that? Can Bush just say, “Eat your peas – even if they’re radioactive?” Under NAFTA, at least the way George Bush reads it (or has it read to him), he can. At any rate, he does. The three chiefs of state will meet privately with the thirty corporate chiefs where they are also expected to legally erase more of our borders, to expand the “NAFTA highway.” Technically, the NAFTA highway is a set of legal rules governing transcontinental shipment. Some fear NAFTA highway expansion will allow a new flood of cheap Mexican products into the US and Canada. Not so. Their hunger to expand the NAFTA highway is to bring in even cheaper Chinese goods. Say what? As trade expert Maud Barlow explained to me, the new “NAFTA highway” will allow Chinese stuff dumped into Mexico to be hauled northward as duty-free “Mexican” products. That’s one of the quiet agendas of this “Summit for Security and Prosperity,” the official Orwellian name for this meet. Think of the SSP “harmonization” as the Trojan Taco of trade. |
Evidently, an earlier meeting in Quebec was centered on public relations and "handling" criticism of NAFTA in the US, and there was a subsequent meeting in Mexico:
Quote:
| A meeting of the SPP that was virtually unreported in the U.S. and Canada on February 27-28, 2008 in Los Cabos, Mexico, was disclosed in the Mexico City newspaper La Jornada. According to the newspaper, the Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez visited Mexico City prior to the Los Cabos meeting "to renegotiate NAFTA" by offering the information to Mexico that undisclosed U.S. corporations and the U.S. government are planning to place as much as $141 billion in new investments in Mexico under the Mexico National Infrastructure Project 2007-2012. In a press release published February 21 on the U.S. Trade and Development Agency website, the agenda for the February 26-28 meeting in Mexico City was presented. At this meeting Secretary Gutierrez planned to announce United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) grants totaling more than $1.7 million made "to promote the development of transportation, energy and environmental projects under Mexico's National Infrastructure Program". Another press release on the USTDA website documents the launching by President Calderon of Mexico's National Infrastructure Program in July, 2008. Its goal is to create $141 billion dollars worth of new infrastructure investment opportunities for U.S. firms by 2012. An announcement posted on the homepage of the Department of Commerce's SPP website on Feb. 28 confirmed that Gutierrez and Department of Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff traveled to Los Cabos to meet with ministers from Mexico and Canada in preparation for the fourth SPP annual summit meeting to be held in New Orleans on April 21-22. |
But here in the good ol' US and A, AP's report include Bush's name-calling of presidential candidates who criticize NAFTA:
Quote:
| Bush joins Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Monday in New Orleans for his fourth and final North American Leaders' Summit. Despite its lofty name, the two-day meeting is more about technical cooperation than dramatic dealmaking. If there is to be one prevailing issue on the agenda, it will be trade. The three countries already share the largest trading partnership in the world, totaling nearly $1 trillion a year. Heading into the meeting, Bush said he plans to talk to Harper and Calderon about expanding trade in the Western Hemisphere. The timing comes as the United States is mired in an economic slide, and many displaced workers and labor leaders blame trade for shipping jobs overseas. A particular political target is the North American Free Trade Agreement, which turned the U.S., Mexico and Canada into a giant trade zone 14 years ago. Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have both threatened to pull the U.S. out of NAFTA as a means to pressure Canada and Mexico to negotiate more protections for workers and the environment. Bush calls the idea isolationist and reckless. |
