A study in North American Union.

Just when you thought you had a grip on the NAU (North American Union) and its scope, more disturbing news arrives indicating that this horrendous project isn't half-baked, but ready to be forked.

The NAU first began gaining the attention of average American citizens in 2005, with the signing of the treacherous Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) and the release of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) report Building a North American Community (BNAC). The recentness of these eye-opening actions led many to believe that the NAU would be a long time in coming, but information continues to surface regarding the plethora of clever devices employed to sell the NAU to Americans and speed its arrival.

For those readers who are still completely in the dark about the NAU, it is, simply put, the transformation of NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement) into a full-blown economic and political merger of Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The advocates of the NAU are using an accelerated model of the deceptive process used to merge the countries of Europe into the European Union.

What better way to speed the NAU's coming than to avoid having to do a "sell" job altogether and simply train a new generation of Americans as ready believers? That's exactly what the NAU proponents are up to. In 1998, seven years before the SPP or BNAC appeared, four "North American" business schools (in Halifax, Montreal, Monterrey, and New York City) teamed up to create the PanAmerican Partnership, a business-training program sponsoring training and research emphasizing North American economic integration, and dedicated to building "the next generation of North American managers." The PanAm Partnership is the first NAFTA-focused business-training program--nearly 350 MBA students from the four partner schools have participated in the MBA plan. Each partner school has a PanAm track in its MBA program for students wishing to build careers in the new "North American" business environment.

Arizona State University (ASU) has taken this new paradigm a step further. Its North American Center for Transborder Studies (NACTS) has introduced a benchmark website, first designed in 2000, allowing "North Americanists" a resource for the growing body of research about economic integration in the NAFTA Triad. It was needed because advancement of economic integration was increasing "despite the lack of press and public attention," and a web presence would allow those in Triad countries to "link up." ASU's website claims the regional integration process deepens even without the kind of public attention enjoyed in Europe. (We think the lack of public and press attention was deliberate, allowing integration to occur under the radar of Americans who would object to the "sovereignty sellout" their leaders are perpetrating.)

It's interesting, in the least, to learn that ASU and NACTS have partnered with the North American Supercorridor Coalition (NASCO), the Kansas City Affairs and Trade Office (site of the NAFTA Super corridor inland port), and the Americas Society-Council of the Americas. Surprise. NASCO's website states it is developing a corridor-wide educational consortium and inviting universities to join its efforts to improve trade and transportation along the corridor. This consortium will bring together those institutions playing a role in training the next generation to solve international transportation problems and maximize opportunities for tri-national information sharing. Would it surprise anyone to learn that the Americas Society-Council of the Americas is dedicated to market integration in the Americas, and was founded by David Rockefeller? Rockefeller wrote in his 2002 autobiography, Memoirs, that he is proud to be an internationalist working against the best interests of the United States, and conspiring to build a one world government--with himself, no doubt, at the helm.

To be precise, he stated (on page 405, Chapter 27, entitled, "Proud Internationalist"):

   For more than a century ideological
   extremists at either
   end of the political spectrum
   have seized upon well-publicized
   incidents such as my
   encounter with Castro to attack
   the Rockefeller family
   for the inordinate influence
   they claim we wield over American
   political and economic institutions.
   Some even believe we are part of
   a secret cabal working against the
   best interests of the United States,
   characterizing my family and me as
   "internationalists" and of conspiring
   with others around the world to build
   a more integrated global political and
   economic structure--one world, if
   you will. If that's the charge, I stand
   guilty, and I am proud of it.

Mr. Rockefeller was for 15 years (1970-85) the chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, the principal organization pushing the NAU. The earlier mentioned document Building a North American Community was written by CFR task-force director Robert Pastor and is the uncontested blueprint for merging the United States, Canada, and Mexico into one political entity called North America. This recommendation appears on page 29: "to develop a network of centers for North American studies.... We recommend that the three governments open a competition and provide grants to universities in each of the three countries to promote courses, education and research on North America."

Predictably, Pastor is the director of the Center for North American Studies at American University, which is dedicated to the idea of moving forward with the trilateral agenda of regional integration. It seems that promotion is already in place and the BNAC document is simply justifying what has already been done.

If today's students on the PanAm track at a growing number of universities are indoctrinated into the glories of "North Americanism," the idea of an independent and sovereign America will be as distant an idea to them as even the word "America" will become. Orwell's character, Winston Smith, lamented that not even knowing the word "freedom" eliminated even the concept of it from the minds of his fellow citizens. That most certainly will be the fate of our children and theirs if this NAU train is not stopped.

Readers of THE NEW AMERICAN need to recognize that the attention given by the magazine to the NAU is nothing short of a May Day call for opposition to the biggest threat ever, or, as expressed in popular vernacular, we're toast.

Kelly Taylor is an Austin-based writer and filmmaker, and the producer of a politically based TV talk show.