Continental merger: a coalition of groups warns that President Bush's Security and Prosperity Partnership will lead to a merger of the United States, Mexico, and Canada, but Bush claims that the pact is not threatening. Who is being truthful?

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The U.S. media paid scant attention this past August when President George W. Bush headed for a meeting of the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (more commonly referred to as the SPP) in Canada. The two-day summit (August 20-21) with Mexico's President Felipe Calderon and Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as well as top government ministers and business leaders, was conducted behind a cordon of security and secrecy at a luxury resort in Montebello, Quebec, down the Ottawa River from the Canadian capital.

At the summit's concluding press conference on August 21, the three heads of state were confronted with charges leveled by critics of the SPP's goals and process. A Fox News reporter asked the trio: "Can you say today that this is not a prelude to a North American Union, similar to a European Union? Are there plans to build some kind of superhighway connecting all three countries? And do you believe all of these theories about a possible erosion of national identity stem from a lack of transparency from this partnership?"

President Bush evaded the questions and punched at straw men of his own making. "You know, there are some who would like to frighten our fellow citizens into believing that relations between us are harmful for our respective peoples," he said. "I just believe they're wrong. I believe it's in our interest to trade; I believe it's in our interest to dialogue." None of the summit critics, of course, had even remotely implied that the United States cease relations, trade, or dialogue with Canada and Mexico; those are legitimate, constitutionally permitted activities that our government and our peoples carry on (and have engaged in since our nation's founding) not only with our next-door neighbors to the north and south, but with virtually every country on Earth.

"I'm amused by some of the speculation, some of the old--you can call them political scare tactics," President Bush continued. "If you've been in politics as long as I have, you get used to that kind of technique where you lay out a conspiracy and then force people to try to prove it doesn't exist."

Prime Minister Harper also chose to respond with ridicule, joking that opponents of the SPP process were getting all worked up over something that was no more serious than candy regulations. "Is the sovereignty of Canada going to fall apart if we standardize the jellybeans? ... I don't think so," Mr. Harper chortled.

Opponents of the SPP, however, are worked up about far more than trade, dialogue, and jellybeans. As Bush, Harper, Calderon, and their aides met away from public scrutiny, leaders representing a coalition of more than 50 conservative organizations in the United States and Canada held a press conference at the Ottawa Marriott to deliver very serious warnings about the developing "partnership," which they claim is an unconstitutional scheme for economic and political merger of the three countries.

"Our message," said Howard Phillips, chairman of the Coalition to Block the North American Union, "is 'President Bush, President Calderon, Prime Minister Harper, tear down the wall of silence and let the people see what you are scheming to do.'" Mr. Phillips, who is also founder and chairman of the Conservative Caucus, stated at the coalition's Ottawa news conference: "Behind closed doors, step by step, the leaders of Mexico, Canada, and the United States are setting the stage for, first, a North American Community and, ultimately, a North American Union (NAU), in which new transnational bodies would gain authority over our economy, our judiciary, and our lawmaking institutions."

John F. McManus, president of the John Birch Society and a founding member of the Coalition to Block the North American Union, charged that the political elites are planning a duplicate of the European Union for our own hemisphere.

Who's Telling the Truth?

So, is the SPP a harmless (or even beneficial) trilateral effort aimed at improving relations, trade, and dialogue with Canada and Mexico, which has been wildly misrepresented by "conspiracy nuts," as President Bush claims? Or is the SPP actually a scheme to create an EU-style North American Union that will gradually submerge U.S. sovereignty into regional institutions, erase our borders, and terminate our constitutional republic, as its critics claim?

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The Security and Prosperity Partnership for North America was formally launched in Waco, Texas, on March 23, 2005 by President Bush, along with Mexico's then-President Vicente Fox and Canada's then-Prime Minister Paul Martin. The three leaders let it be known that their new SPP initiative was an effort to build upon and expand NAFTA, the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement. Their expressed goal for the SPP was the creation of "a safer, more prosperous North America."

Conceived completely as an executive-branch initiative, without any participation or authorization from Congress, the SPP established 20 trilateral "working groups" composed of current and former government officials, academics, and corporate leaders. The groups are directed to bring about continental "integration" on a wide range of political, economic, and social issues, such as manufacturing, transportation, energy, environment, e-commerce, financial services, food and agriculture, law enforcement, immigration, infrastructure, and health.

Who are the members of these working groups? Where and when are they meeting? What policies, programs, projects, and proposals are they hatching? How will these things affect our lives?

The Bush administration has resisted providing answers to these questions--to Congress, the media, or the American public. Much of what has come to light thus far about the SPP working groups has been as the result of U.S. government documents pried loose through Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) filings by Judicial Watch, a Washington, D.C.-based public-interest organization.

Leading SPP advocates publicly deny that their integration plans will bring about a centralized EU-style government that will override national, state, and local governance. Privately, however, in their speeches and writings, they acknowledge that this is precisely what they are constructing. Former U.S. Ambassador to Canada Paul Cellucci, for instance, in an October 30, 2006 address to the Canadian Defense and Foreign Affairs Institute, said:

   Now, I don't believe that we will ever
   have a, in name anyways, a common
   union like the Europeans have ... but I
   believe that, incrementally,
   we will continue to integrate
   our economies....
   I think ... 10 years from
   now, or maybe 15 years
   from now we're gonna
   look back and we're
   gonna have a union in
   everything but name.
   [Emphasis added.]

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Critics, of course, are not quibbling over what the SPP architects might eventually name their creation; they are concerned with the creation itself and what it actually will do--and is already doing. For instance, one of the major objectives of the SPP's chief architect Robert Pastor is the transfer of $100-$200 billion from the United States to Mexico for infrastructure, education, and economic development. He has been proposing this in speeches and essays for the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, and SPP gatherings. Documents obtained through FOIA show that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Department of Transportation, and other federal agencies are already funding, or are planning to fund, these objectives.

HHS documents show that this department, under the auspices of the SPP, intends to enhance "Mexico's competitive position through the establishment of a grant fund for ... development of infrastructure in Mexico." Aside from the important fact that the U.S. Constitution provides no authority for the federal government to tax Americans to build "infrastructure in Mexico" (or any other country), there is the additional grim fact that one government study after another has warned that our own infrastructure--especially roads, highways, bridges, and levies--is crumbling and in need of hundreds of billions of dollars for repair and construction. Sending badly needed infrastructure funds to Mexico will further hasten our own infrastructure decline and accelerate the flight of American companies and jobs to Mexico.

Sometimes the SPP programs are smuggled into actual legislation, as in the case of the "comprehensive immigration reform bill" (S. 1639) promoted by President Bush, Senator Edward Kennedy, and a bipartisan cast. That bill, which was defeated, would have authorized funds for "the development of economic opportunities" and "job training for citizens and nationals" in Mexico. Most of the SPP agenda, however, has been proceeding without congressional scrutiny or consent, quietly being implemented by the massive bureaucracy of the federal executive branch. The administration and its defenders claim that the SPP agenda falls within the authority already provided by NAFTA, which Congress approved.

This threadbare defense is wearing very thin. Even SPP advocates are admitting to a "democracy deficit" and a "transparency deficit" in the secret SPP process. At a pro-SPP seminar sponsored by the Hudson Institute on August 13, 2007--just prior to the Montebello SPP summit--Hudson senior fellow Chris Sands acknowledged: "Congress was shut out from the very beginning of this [SPP] process. In the last couple of years, we've seen increasing concern on Capitol Hill about what's going on in these negotiations, requests for information, discussion of having hearings, bringing people forward just to know more about what's going on."

Mr. Sands is coauthor with Professor Greg Anderson of a pro-SPP report by the Hudson Institute, entitled Negotiating North America: The Security and Prosperity Partnership. This report makes some telling admissions, such as: "The SPP was designed to function within existing administrative authority of the executive branch." This is a "very technocratic process," they say, that is best carried out by "technocrats."

But the technocrats have some very radical objectives, such as creating a "continental perimeter" around our three countries to replace our current national borders; creating a "North American passport"; merging our immigration, customs, and law enforcement; facilitating a free-flow migration of people among the three nations; "harmonizing" our tax and regulatory policies; and initiating education policies that foster a "North American identity" rather than national identities. Then there are policies aimed at "income gap" equalization, which of course will be achieved by a continuous downward trend for U.S. citizens, as Mexican incomes rise. This is what former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was advocating in his controversial March 2007 remarks in which he called for opening the "window" for skilled workers to enter the United States in order to "suppress the skilled-wage level and end the concentration of income." As these policies come into the open, the SPP advocates know there will be a public backlash that will be felt in Congress.

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According to the Hudson Institute authors, "As criticism of the lack of transparency and public accountability of the SPP negotiations has grown, congressional interest and concern about the SPP has also grown." Hence, say Sands and Anderson, "Congressional hostility represents the biggest threat to the continuation of the SPP after Montebello, and after the end of the Bush administration."

Many patriots certainly intend to increase congressional hostility into a genuine threat to the continuation of the SPP. "We have no choice," says the John Birch Society's president, John E McManus, "but to fight and defeat the SPP, and repeal NAFTA, the foundation upon which the SPP is being built."

By both word and deed, the SPP architects have revealed their plans to copy the EU model of rule by technocrats and executive decrees. Mexican President Vicente Fox openly stated, prior to the launch of the SPE that the "long-range objective is to establish an ensemble of connections and institutions similar to those created by the European Union."

In their 2003 book The Great Deception, British authors Christopher Booker and Richard North describe the decades-long process of creating the European Union as "a slow-motion coup d'etat, the most spectacular coup d'etat in history." Booker and North show that the EU has become the greatest concentration of political power in the history of mankind. That is precisely what the EU's architects intended it to become; but they didn't tell that to the people of Europe when they first began promoting what they called "the project" after World War II. It was launched as the European Coal and Steel Community, and soon after expanded into the European Economic Community (EEC), better known as the Common Market, to promote trade and ease of travel. Gradually, as more political integration took place, the EEC became the European Community, or EC. Finally, it changed names once again, from EC to EU. The NAFTA/SPP architects are copying the EU slow-motion coup d'etat blueprint--but on an accelerated schedule.

Congress has the constitutional authority--and duty--to stop this usurpation of power and this planned transformation of the United States. And the defeat last summer of the dangerous immigration-amnesty legislation showed that Congress can be prodded to act. It further acted in a surprise vote last summer to cut off federal transportation funds to the SPP working groups. That historic vote came on July 24 on an amendment offered by Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) to an appropriations bill prohibiting the use of funds by SPP working groups. The Hunter amendment passed the House with a landslide 362-to-63 vote.

How do we account for such stunning bipartisan opposition to something as supposedly inconsequential as harmonizing jellybean labels? The answer is that a rapidly growing grass-roots movement of American citizens is becoming aware of the SPP threat, and they are making their voices heard in Washington, D.C. But, as these recent battles have shown, members of Congress are not likely to take appropriate action on these urgent matters until a significant number of determined constituents become active and light fires underneath them.