Plan for superhighway ripped as 'urban legend'

Worldnetdaily.com ^ | January 26, 2007 | Jerome Corsi

[Paul Ross]

Plan for superhighway ripped as 'urban legend'

Congressman, DOT undersecretary disagree over threat to sovereignty

By Jerome R. Corsi
January 26, 2007, WorldNetDaily.com

Jeffrey N. Shane, undersecretary for DOT

Jeffrey N. Shane, undersecretary for DOT Congressmen and a policy official of the Department of Transportation engaged in a spirited exchange over whether NAFTA Super Highways were a threat to U.S. sovereignty or an imaginary "Internet conspiracy," such as the "black helicopter myths," advanced by fringe lunatics.

At a meeting Wednesday of the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Jeffrey N. Shane, undersecretary of transportation for policy at the U.S. Department of Transportation, testified.

During the questioning by committee members, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, asked Shane about the existence of plans for a "NAFTA superhighway."

Shane responded he was "not familiar with any plan at all, related to NAFTA or cross-border traffic."

After further questioning by Poe, Shane stated reports of NAFTA superhighways or corridors were "an urban legend."

At this, the chairman, Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., questioned aloud whether Shane was just "gaming semantics" when responding to Poe's question.

"Mr. Shane was either blissfully ignorant or he may have been less than candid with the committee," Poe told WND in a telephone interview.

Asked about the Department of Transportation's work with Dallas-based trade group NASCO, the North American SuperCorridor Coalition Inc., and the Texas Department of Transportation plans to build the Trans-Texas Corridor, Poe told WND "the NAFTA superhighway plans exist to move goods from Mexico through the United States to Canada. It appears to be another one of the open-border philosophies that chips away at American sovereignty, all in the name of so-called trade."

Poe said there are security obstacles to the project that must be addressed.

"I don't understand why the federal government isn't getting public input on this," he said. "We get comments like Mr. Shane's instead of our own government asking the people of the United States what they think about all of this. This big business coming through Mexico may not be good business for the United States."

Poe continued to insist "the public ought to make this decision, especially the states that are affected, such as Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and all the way through up to Canada. The public needs to make input on this. So, I don't understand, unless there's some other motive, why the public isn't being told about these plans and why the public is not invited to make input."

Rep. Virgil Goode, R-Va., introduced House Concurrent Resolution 40 earlier this week to express the sense of Congress that the United States should not build a NAFTA superhighway system and should not enter into an agreement with Mexico and Canada to form a North American Union.

Asked to comment on Shane's response to Poe, Goode dismissed Shane's claim that NAFTA superhighways were just another "urban legend."

"Let's take Mr. Shane at his word. Let Mr. Shane come over here from the Department of Transportation and endorse House Concurrent Resolution 40," he said. "If, in his mind he's not doing anything to promote a NAFTA superhighway and he's not doing anything to promote the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, then he won't mind joining his voice with ours to be in opposition to any such 'urban legend,' as he so calls it."

Goode added this comment in a playful retort to Shane's attempt to dismiss the discussion: "My prediction is Mr. Shane will run for the timber."

In a serious tone, Goode objected to Shane's attempt to play what he agreed was a game of semantics.

"When President Bush had the meeting in Waco, Texas, the three leaders called the new arrangement the 'Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America,' SPP for short," Goode said. "But, as is suggested by Congressman DeFazio at the hearing, the intent of people like Mr. Shane is to use different words and different names as a way to deflect attention from what they are really doing."

Asked about White House Press Secretary Snow's denial that there was any White House plan to create a North American Union, Goode's reply also was direct.

"I guess Mr. Snow is saying that a Security and Prosperity Partnership and a North American Union are not one and the same," he said. "That's just the use of his words, but is he denying that President Bush, President Fox and Prime Minister Martin had the meeting and came up with the Security and Prosperity Partnership in 2005? I doubt it."

Also present in the audience at the subcommittee meeting was Rod Nofzinger, director of Government Affairs for the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association. Nofzinger told WND Shane's denial struck him as less than genuine. In an e-mail to WND, Nofzinger commented:

"Considering what we know about the Bush administration's efforts to open the border to Mexican trucks and that DOT officials have met with groups such as NASCO, I was truly surprised to hear Mr. Shane say flat out that he had no knowledge of plans or meetings related to NAFTA or cross-border surface trade corridors."

Substantiating Nofzinger's argument is a speech Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta gave April 30, 2004, at a NASCO forum in Fort Worth, Texas. Mineta told the NASCO meeting:

"NAFTA has opened the doors to expanding and flourishing trade across our borders. Since its implementation, total U.S. trade with Mexico has increased almost 200 percent – with 70 percent of the U.S./Mexico trade passing through Texas.

"There are, however, some things that we still need to do in the United States to fulfill our obligations under the NAFTA treaty. One of them is to finally open the market between Mexico and the United States for trucking and busing."

Mineta continued:

"And to our friends from Mexico who are here today, I say, 'Welcome, and get ready.' Opening the border is of mutual benefit."

Specifically referring to Interstate Highways 35, 29 and 94 – the core highways supported by NASCO as a prime "North American Super Corridor" – Mineta commented:

"You also recognized that the success of the NAFTA relationship depends on mobility – on the movement of people, of products, and of capital across borders. "The people in this room have vision. Thinking ahead, thinking long-term, you began to make aggressive plans to develop the NASCO trade corridor – this vital artery in our national transportation through which so much of our NAFTA traffic flows.

"It flows across our nation's busiest southern border crossing in Laredo; over North America's busiest commercial crossing, the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit; and through Duluth, and Pembina, North Dakota, and all the places in between."

In a statement provided WND by e-mail, DeFazio cut past Shane's attempt to dismiss the subject by ridicule, writing:

In the hearing, Undersecretary of Transportation for Policy Jeff Shane, in response to a question from Representative Ted Poe, said the NAFTA superhighway was an urban legend. Whatever the case, it is a fact that highway capacity is growing to and from the border to facilitate trade, and there is no doubt that the volume of imports from Mexico has soared since NAFTA, straining security at the U.S. border. Plans of Asian trading powers to divert cargo from U.S. ports like Los Angeles to ports in Mexico will only put added pressure on border inspectors. The U.S. needs to invest in better border security, including enhanced screening of cargo crossing our land borders.

Shane declined to comment for this article.

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[Toddsterpatriot]

People demand that the government provide essentials and some luxuries that their jobs won't afford them.

Doesn't mean the government will provide them. Unless you know something about big screens that I don't?

As jobs pay less

Link?

And the more jobs move out,

Link?

the more YOU'LL be soaked for the difference, if you're in the socioeconomic class I think you're in.

Which class is that?

And the rest of us will have to suffer under cancerous government, spreading everywhere to fill in the gaps.

Allow me to amend my original comment, Pay more for your stuff. For smaller government!!

[mysterio]

There are none so blind as those who will not see.

[eleni121]

It will hurt most port cities and small time truckers!

---

You mean those port cities like at Long Beach CA when thsoe "patriotic" longshoremen went on strike at the worst possible time in Autumn of 2002 disrupting the economy? Estimates put this effect at about $20 billion, even though President Bush invoked the Taft-Hartley Act after ten days.

Or are you talking about truckers --- you know those whose union officials appeal to racist and chauvinist sentiments. A statement on the union’s web site slanders Mexican drivers as potential criminals and says opening the border would “make it easier for traffickers to smuggle illegal drugs into the US.”

What a laugh since the teamsters are guilty of the worst kind of accidents and "drug driving" of anybody!

[Toddsterpatriot]

What, no ridiculous exaggeration? No unsourced assertion? I'm deeply saddened.

So what socioeconomic class am I in?

[mysterio]

NAFTA and Workers' Rights and Jobs The central focus of pro-NAFTA campaigning was the issue of U.S. job creation, so it is fair to measure NAFTA's real-life results against its backers' expansive promises of hundreds of thousands of new, high-paying U.S. jobs. However, even measured against the more lenient "do no harm" standard, NAFTA has been a failure. Using trade flow data to calculate job loss under NAFTA (incorporating exactly the formula used by NAFTA's backers to predict 200,000 per year NAFTA job creation) yields net job destruction numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Whether the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs qualifies as "a giant sucking sound" depends on the ear of the listener. It is clear, however, that NAFTA has indisputably led to widespread job loss, with over 412,177 U.S. workers certified as NAFTA casualties under just one narrow government program. The fact that job growth totally unrelated to NAFTA has produced a net gain in U.S. employment during this period in no way changes the reality that NAFTA has cost large numbers of individual workers their jobs,­ most of whom are now unemployed or working at jobs that pay less than the ones they lost.

The U.S. economy created jobs at a fairly rapid rate in the 1990s, but without NAFTA, hundreds of thousands of full time, high wage, benefit-paying manufacturing jobs would not have been lost. It is also important to note that while the U.S. economy is generating substantial numbers of new jobs in absolute terms, the quality of the jobs created is often poor. The U.S. Department of Labor projects that the professions with the greatest expected future growth in the U.S. are cashiers, waiters and waitresses, janitors and retail clerks. These and other lower-wage service jobs are the kind that will most likely be available to workers displaced by NAFTA. Economic surveys of dislocated workers shows that the jobs lost to NAFTA, in many cases high-paying manufacturing jobs, are, in the majority of cases, replaced by lower-paid employment. NAFTA also has had a negative effect on the wages of many Americans whose jobs have not been relocated but whose wage bargaining power with their employers is substantially lessened; NAFTA puts them in direct competition with skilled, educated Mexican workers who work for a dollar or two an hour ­or less. NAFTA was supposed to ameliorate this problem by raising Mexican living standards and wages. Instead, both have plummeted, harming the economic prospects for workers on both sides of the border.

link

[mysterio]

Boy, NAFTA is sure helping Mexico, too. I guess your cheap stuff is causing the rush across our border. Man, your cheap stuff is even more expensive than I first thought.

[Toddsterpatriot]

I'm sorry, did that Public Citizen (hehe) source prove that American wages are dropping? Did it prove that if only we bought more expensive goods, wages would be rising instead of falling? Because that seemed to be your earlier claim, but I just didn't see it in that Public Citizen (hehe) link.

[Toddsterpatriot]

Boy, NAFTA is sure helping Mexico, too.

While that is an interesting chart, what does Mexico's dysfunctional government and economy have to do with more expensive goods being better for your children or better for our smaller government?

[deport]

It will hurt most port cities and small time truckers!

---

Port cities... When the Panama Canal widening is completed Houston and the rest of the Texas Ports most likely will see increases. Now them 'small time truckers' I don't know. But when all is said and done they will need highways to handle the incoming both goods and people influx.

I think I read an article just a few days ago on FR about the major growth in the China port facilities to handle container exports and new facilities were being built on the Pacific Coast to off load them... I-10, I-40 corridors and others may be next to get major upgrades.

I guess if the people of the US would just not buy those goods coming in via those importers and then businesses could only warehouse so much before they'd decide not to bring anymore in. But my guess the public is not going to give up shopping at the major retailers like Walmart, Target, etc.

[mysterio]

Amazing how their government went "dysfunctional" right as Nafta passed. What an incredible coincidence.

[mysterio]

Did it prove that if only we bought more expensive goods, wages would be rising instead of falling?

Nah, no correlation there. The $3 I saved on that hammer is certainly worth America absorbing millions of illegal immigrants fleeing the great things NAFTA has done for their country.

[Toddsterpatriot]

Amazing how their government went "dysfunctional" right as Nafta passed. What an incredible coincidence.

Their government was dysfunctional long before NAFTA. Do you have a point in there somewhere?

[Toddsterpatriot]

The $3 I saved on that hammer is certainly worth America absorbing millions of illegal immigrants fleeing the great things NAFTA has done for their country.

Tell you what, take the hammer and build a border wall. Then find a better excuse for your desire for more expensive goods.

I wonder if you think we should just use US oil and gasoline? It might cost us $200 a barrel, would it be worth it? We wouldn't have to let any of that money go to nasty Canadians or Mexicans. What do you think?

[Paul Ross]

And more blasts from the past...

"We have them surrounded in their tanks"

"The American press is all about lies! All they tell is lies, lies and more lies!"

"I have detailed information about the situation...which completely proves that what they allege are illusions . . . They lie every day."

Why does this sound so much like our Commerce Dept.?

[mysterio]

Do you have a point in there somewhere?

Yeah, it's the point marked "1994" on the chart I posted above.

[mysterio]

Tell you what, take the hammer and build a border wall. Then find a better excuse for your desire for more expensive goods.

No, I think we should fine the corporations that hire illegals $100k per day per incident. I bet you then they'd make pretty sure their workers were legit.

I wonder if you think we should just use US oil and gasoline? It might cost us $200 a barrel, would it be worth it? We wouldn't have to let any of that money go to nasty Canadians or Mexicans. What do you think?

I think we should research every alternative fuel extensively and set up a 10 year plan to achieve near total energy independence. Personally, I'd like to see a lot of nuclear power plants pushed through and a biodeisel ramp up while we research converting cars to hydrogen.

Or conversely, we could just collect all of the hot air that gets tossed around during these NAFTA vs tariff debates and make electricity from that. lol.

[Toddsterpatriot]

If you knew anything about economics or markets, you'd know what happened in 1994.

[Toddsterpatriot]

No, I think we should fine the corporations that hire illegals $100k per day per incident. I bet you then they'd make pretty sure their workers were legit.

Sounds good to me. Then what will be your reason to whine about cheap goods?

I think we should research every alternative fuel extensively and set up a 10 year plan to achieve near total energy independence.

So is that a yes to $200 oil?

Or conversely, we could just collect all of the hot air that gets tossed around during these NAFTA vs tariff debates and make electricity from that.

If ignorance were wings, you could fly.

[mysterio]

Well, NAFTA was supposed to turn that country around. Guess not. but it paid off double for those who lobbied for it : dirt cheap labor in Mexico, and the added benefit of an exodus of cheap labor into the states. Whoopitydoo.

[Toddsterpatriot]

Well, NAFTA was supposed to turn that country around.

Did it increase trade?