From NAFTA to the NAU: NAFTA and the Security and Prosperity Partnership are gradual steps toward merging the United States, Mexico, and Canada into a North American Union.

In a few moments, I will sign three agreements that will complete our negotiations with Mexico and Canada to create a North American Free Trade Agreement. In the coming months I will submit this pack to Congress for approval ....

And, though the fight will be difficult, I deeply believe we will win. And I'd like to tell you why. First of all, because NAFTA means jobs. American jobs, and good-paying American jobs. If I didn't believe that, I wouldn't support this agreement.

So spoke President Bill Clinton on September 14, 1993, as he kicked off his campaign to win congressional approval for NAFTA. President Clinton called on Americans to resist "the fear tactics and the adverseness to change that is behind much of the opposition to NAFTA." Of the 19 serious economic studies of the potential effects of NAFTA, he said, "18 of them have concluded that there will be no job loss."

But Mr. Clinton went further. "I believe that NAFTA will create 200,000 American jobs in the first two years of its effect," he declared. In fact, said he, "I believe that NAFTA will create a million jobs in the first five years of its impact."

President Clinton was joined in the East Room of the White House by an impressive bipartisan lineup of former presidents: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George Bush (Senior). Like President Clinton, the former White House occupants extolled the virtues of NAFTA, insisted that bipartisan support for the measure was of utmost urgency, and assured Americans that the agreement would create many new jobs, not send them out of the country, as NAFTA opponents were claiming.

Of course, virtually everyone now knows that Clinton, Carter, Ford, and Bush--along with all the other NAFTA cheerleaders--were dead wrong. By 2006, NAFTA had cost the United States over a million jobs according to the Economic Policy Institute--although some estimates are much higher--and devastated entire industry sectors, as the article on page 10 recounts.

However, as important as the loss of those jobs and businesses are to our economy, there is another even more important impact that has, until recently, gone largely unnoticed and undebated. As the NAFTA bandwagon was being launched, some critics, including most especially this magazine, were pointing out that the real issue was not about genuine free trade, let alone the jobs that that trade would supposedly create. Nor was it about protectionism. No, what was really at issue in the thousands of pages of NAFTA legalese, we repeatedly noted, was a revolutionary plan to gradually, completely change our form of government.

The NAFTA agreements were setting in motion an ongoing process that would incrementally shift powers and jurisdiction from our national, state, and local governments to new regional institutions. NAFTA, we warned, would take policies concerning tariffs, transportation, the environment, labor, and other matters out of the hands of the U.S. Congress and state legislatures and hand them to regional bureaucracies and tribunals. NAFTA threatened to take away not only our jobs and manufacturing base, but our Constitution, our sovereignty, and our freedom.

Now, more than 13 years later, this NAFTA threat has become too obvious to ignore. Yet, except for CNN's Lou Dobbs, virtually all of the major media are ignoring it completely. On his June 21, 2006 broadcast, one of many segments exposing this mounting danger, Lou Dobbs noted, "The Bush administration's open-borders policy and its decision to ignore the enforcement of this country's immigration laws is part of a broader agenda." (Emphasis added.) Mr. Dobbs went on to charge that in setting up the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) with Mexico and Canada, "President Bush signed a formal agreement that will end the United States as we know it, and he took the step without approval from either the U.S. Congress or the people of the United States."

Broader Hidden Agenda

What is this "broader agenda" to which Mr. Dobbs referred? Will it really "end the United States as we know it"? Long before NAFTA was passed by Congress in November 1993, it was obvious to careful political observers that the so-called trade agreement was much more than a "trade agreement." No less a leading light of America's foreign-policy establishment than former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger confirmed NAFTA critics' worst fears in an important op-ed several months earlier.

Writing in the Los Angeles Times on July 18, 1993, Kissinger intoned that approval of NAFTA would be the single most important action that Congress could take during Clinton's first term. In fact, said Dr. Kissinger, passage of NAFTA "will represent the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War, and the first step toward an even larger vision of a flee-trade zone for the entire Western Hemisphere."

A "new world order"? A "free-trade zone for the entire Western Hemisphere"? And most Americans thought that NAFTA was simply about cutting tariffs, facilitating trade, and creating jobs!

A number of other similar admissions surfaced around the same time. Pro-NAFTA author William Orme, for instance, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post acknowledging the larger agenda. When NAFTA was first proposed, he wrote:

   Critics in all three countries claimed
   that its hidden agenda was the development
   of a European-style common
   market.... NAFTA's defenders said
   no. They argued that the agreement is
   designed to dismantle trade barriers,
   not build a new regulatory bureaucracy.
   NAFTA, declared one congressional
   backer, "is a trade agreement, not
   an act of economic union."

   Yet the critics were essentially
   right. NAFTA lays the foundation
   for a continental common market,
   as many of its architects privately
   acknowledge. Part of this foundation,
   inevitably, is bureaucratic: The
   agreement creates a variety of continental
   institutions--ranging from
   trade dispute panels to labor and environmental
   commissions--that are,
   in aggregate, an embryonic NAFTA
   government. [Emphasis added.]

Kissinger's assessment of NAFTA's grander vision for the entire hemisphere was soon reconfirmed by President Clinton himself. In his November 13, 1993 radio address, Clinton declared that NAFTA "will quickly grow larger as we bring in the rest of Latin America." Planning was already underway. In December 1994, President Clinton hosted the Summit of the Americas in Miami, which served as the launching pad for the planned expansion of NAFTA to the hemispheric grouping prophesied by Kissinger.

The name given to the proposed venture was the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). But that name is as deceptive as NAFTA's. "This is not a trade summit, it is an overall summit," President Clinton's chief of staff Mack McLarty told reporters at the time. "It will focus on economic integration and convergence."

The ambitious plan to expand NAFTA to include the entire Western Hemisphere (minus Cuba)--more than three dozen countries--in one decade proved to be a bit of an overreach, even with the impressive lineup of political heavy-weights and corporate elites that formed the FTAA support wing. Besides President Clinton and former President Bush, along with their zealous followers in the Democratic and Republican parties, the FTAA bandwagon could boast the horsepower of the most influential brain trusts and policy centers: the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Council of the Americas, the Forum of the Americas, the Institute for International Economics, and the Brookings Institution, to name a few. The substantial clout of these organizations was magnified by the support of high-powered corporate elites who dominate the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Yet, with all of this political and financial muscle, the pro-FTAA forces were unable to meet their 2005 target date. In fact, by the time the Miami FTAA Ministerial Summit rolled around in November 2003, the advocates of hemispheric merger were forced to face reality: no matter how much propagandizing, arm-twisting, and bribing they might employ, opposition to the FTAA--both in the United States and in Latin America--was too strong to overcome. For the time being, that is.

Following the example of the designers of the European Union (EU), the FTAA architects switched gears. The EU superstate has been built with two processes operating simultaneously, what the EU technocrats refer to as "widening" and "deepening." Widening refers to the adding of more member states, from the six original members in 1951 to the current EU 27. Deepening refers to expanding jurisdictions to include matters such as education, labor, environment, immigration, narcotics trafficking, energy, organized crime, counterterrorism, police and military cooperation, and infrastructure development. The NAFTA/FTAA architects have adopted both the coded jargon and deceptive methods of their EU brethren.

With the FTAA widening effort blocked, the hemispheric-merger engineers are pushing full-tilt on the deepening button, working to create what critics call a North American Union. They call the main vehicle they are using for this effort the Security and Prosperity Partnership, or SPP. It first came to light publicly on March 23, 2005, when President Bush convened a special summit to announce the project in Waco, Texas, with Mexican President Vicente Fox and Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin. The three heads of state directed their cabinet ministers to establish a dozen working groups tasked with finding new ways for the three NAFTA members to build "partnerships." By June, the ministers had identified, said Bush State Department spokesman Roger Noriega, "over 300 initiatives spread over twenty trilateral [meaning U.S., Canada, and Mexico] working groups on which the three countries will collaborate," in what the ministers described as a "dynamic, permanent process."

On what matters are these working groups "collaborating"? How will this collaboration impact us--our economy, our jobs and businesses, our families and communities, our constitutional system, our security, our sovereignty, our freedoms? We don't know for sure because this "dynamic, permanent process" is also a very secretive process. Following the EU's example, the SPP participants claim to honor the principle of "transparency," meaning that all of their dealings will be open and visible to the public. But, as with the EU integration schemes, the SPP has been notorious for refusing to open its meetings and documents to public scrutiny.

Also alarming is the fact that this entire shadowy process is being heavily influenced by--if not directed outright by--powerful private organizations that are unaccountable to the American people.

This was pointedly brought home last fall when a secret high-level meeting about North American integration in Banff, Canada, was made public. The September 12-14 conference at the famous plush resort was sponsored by the North American Forum, a private group of former government officials and business and financial elites. However, top U.S., Canadian, and Mexican officials participated in the meetings, which discussed how to bring about integration of the three nations on matters of energy, transportation, immigration, customs, infrastructure, taxes, and other areas. (See sidebar on page 33.)

We know some of what transpired at the conference because Judicial Watch, a public interest group, was able to pry loose documents of some of the Banff proceedings through Freedom Of Information Act filings. Especially troubling is the admission against interest in the minutes that these elites are trying to engineer public support for their North American Union merger plan "by stealth."

This admission surfaced in a panel moderated by Canada's former Deputy Prime Minister John Manley entitled "Border Infrastructure and Continental Prosperity." The panel minutes noted the need for secrecy, stating: "While a [North American] vision is appealing, working on the infrastructure might yield more benefit and bring more people on board ('evolution by stealth.')" The parenthetical "evolution by stealth" was in the original quote.

This is not anything new. The main private organization providing the intellectual brainpower for the Banff conference, as well as the SPP in general, is the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Before President Bush announced the formation of the SPP at his Waco summit, the CFR had already delivered the blueprint for the project, a report entitled Creating a North American Community. It is virtually indistinguishable from what the Bush administration is implementing.

The report was produced by a special task force of experts from the CFR. The U.S. vice chairman of the task force, Professor Robert Pastor of American University, is generally regarded as the principal author of the report. Dr. Pastor, who was also a key adviser to President Clinton on NAFTA, has been at the forefront of the push to transform NAFTA, through "deep integration," into an EU-style regional government. The CFR publicly insists that is not its intention. "A new North American community will not be modeled on the European Union or the European Commission, nor will it aim at the creation of any sort of vast supranational bureaucracy," its task-force report declares.

However, those are precisely the kind of denials that the CFR's counterparts in Europe gave to the public all the while they worked in secret to scuttle national sovereignty and build the EU superstate. It has only been in recent years that some of the records have surfaced revealing the colossal deceptions engaged in by these European Union insiders. Two of the key operatives during the EU's founding period of the 1950s were French Prime Minister Robert Schuman and French Planning Minister Jean Monnet, both ardent socialists.

It is noteworthy that Dr. Pastor, often referred to as the "father" of the SPP and the North American Union, presented one of his most detailed essays on North American "integration" in the June 2005 "Jean Monnet/Robert Schuman Paper Series," a joint project of the Jean Monnet Chair of the University of Miami and the Miami European Union Center. The Pastor essay says on its cover page: "This publication is sponsored by the EU Commission."

At the very beginning of his essay, Pastor acknowledges that NAFTA "can be considered a kind of draft constitution for an emerging region," and all but baldly admits that he can hardly wait until it completely replaces our U.S. Constitution. He is especially eager to create new continental institutions that will have real power to sweep aside what he derides as our "aging conception of sovereignty."

"Sovereignty, in brief," says Pastor, "is a misleading if not a mistaken defense against an increasingly open and integrated world." He rhetorically asks: "Are the three governments prepared to give up their sovereignty for a wider community?" The institutions to which he proposes the countries give up their sovereignty include a North American Advisory Council, a North American Council, a North American Parliamentary Group, a Permanent Court on Trade and Investment, and a North American Customs and Immigration Force--just for starters.

It is important to realize that Dr. Pastor is not just some balmy ivory-towered professor; he is one of the leading architects of the drive for continental, and then hemispheric, union. The plans he helps draft in elite private circles soon are implemented as official government policy. He was one of the leading participants at the above-mentioned secret meeting in Banff.

What is unmistakably clear--from the SPP documents thus far available and the visible actions and programs the Bush administration has already initiated --is that the SPP is a fast-track project aimed at bringing about full economic and political merger of the NAFTA countries into a North American Union (NAU), modeled after the EU. Lou Dobbs has rightly called it "an absolute contravention of our law, of our Constitution, every national value."

It is also clear that the "deep integration" SPP/NAU system Pastor and his cohorts envision cannot come to fruition without ultimately abolishing and replacing the constitutional system under which we now live. It's time to act.