Free Republic

PHOENIX - A veteran Republican lawmaker is accusing President Bush of pushing a behind-the-scenes agenda that will result in the United States being merged with Mexico and Canada. State Sen. Karen Johnson, R-Mesa, said she believes the Security and Prosperity Partnership, being run out of the White House and the U.S. Department of Commerce, is little more than a secret plan to end U.S. sovereignty by 2010. And she said Congress is being kept in the dark until the point that it becomes a done deal. Johnson, who will head the Senate Education Committee this coming session, said the signs...

Could the Dollar's Collapse Prompt a New Currency? by Jerome R. CorsiPosted Dec 20, 2006A large and growing trade deficit with China under NAFTA threatens a dollar decline that could well set the stage for the emergence of the Amero as a unified North American currency. In 2005, the U.S. balance of trade deficit with China was $201 billion, a 25% increase over 2004. In 2006, China’s foreign exchange reserves topped $1 trillion, a staggering amount considering that before 1979 China’s foreign exchange reserves had never surpassed $1 billion. Approximately 70% of China’s foreign exchange reserves, some $700 billion, are...

Anger. Confusion. Concern. These were just some feelings that the majority of people in the packed Collin County Central Jury Room expressed in the three-hour-long public hearing held Tuesday night about the technically preferred alignment of the Outer Loop. About 16 people officially spoke during the public comment period of the meeting, where the court voted 4-1 to approve the technically preferred alignment. Commissioner Joe Jaynes made the motion to approve the alignment, Commissioner Phyllis Cole seconded the motion, and Commissioners Jack Hatchell and Jerry Hoagland voted to approve the alignment. County Judge Ron Harris voted against the motion. He...

Ric Williamson, a former state legislator and longtime pal of Gov. Rick Perry, runs the monthly meetings of the Texas Transportation Commission like a traffic cop. Staff members give brisk status reports before Williamson dismisses them so the next bureaucrat can take the podium. If members of the public embark on a diatribe, Williamson will let them prattle on with an air of friendly indulgence. Then, rounding his shoulders and leaning forward—using body language no doubt perfected when he and Perry were freshmen state representatives harrying their elders—he’ll pleasantly announce that their time is up. As commission chairman, Williamson sits...

Robert Pastor, a leading intellectual force in the move to create an EU-style North American Community, told WND he believes a new 9/11 crisis could be the catalyst to merge the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Pastor, a professor at American University, says that in such a case the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, or SPP – launched in 2005 by the heads of the three countries at a summit in Waco, Texas – could be developed into a continental union, complete with a new currency, the amero, that would replace the U.S. dollar just as the euro has...

Slowly but surely, retired United Airline Capt. Ray Lahr and attorney John Clarke are prying open the can of worms known as the TWA Flight 800 investigation, and sooner or later the major media will have to take notice. WABC in New York already has. Two weeks ago, the station's Jim Hoffer did a short feature headlined "Major court ruling in TWA Flight 800 case." What proved to be most newsworthy about the feature, however, was not the ruling in question but a surprising admission by former NTSB managing director Peter Goelz. As Hoffer noted, and has been reported here...

A new study throws cold water on a long-cherished claim of toll road advocates, surprising some of them, and could redefine a debate over if and how Texas should toll its highways. For more than a year now, state officials have scared the dickens out of motorists by saying the gas tax would have to go up $1.20 a gallon to build all the roads needed statewide over the next quarter-century. That would almost triple the 38.4 cents drivers now pay in federal and state fuel taxes. Since that's politically impossible to do, the argument goes, toll roads should be...

Texas' gasoline tax has been stuck at 20 cents per gallon since 1991. Unfortunately, the cost of building new roads and expanding existing ones is no longer anywhere near the levels of 1991. Fifteen years of inflation have sharply increased the cost of building new highways, as well as expanding and maintaining existing ones. In terms of purchasing power, the 20-cent gas tax is now worth only about 14 cents when adjusted for inflation. Meanwhile, Texas' need for more roads is greatly expanding because of the population explosion that has occurred over the past 15 years and is expected to...

I found the comments by Robert Pastor in the Dec. 1 guest commentary, “Making a competitive continent,” to be most interesting. He sells his ideas with positive-sounding phrases like “opportunity to reinvigorate a deteriorating relationship” and “markets for U.S. goods.” Dr. Pastor hints at some of his ideas for achieving these and other goals, but apparently he thinks we’re not ready to hear about his ultimate goal, a North American Union. As in … no more independent United States of America. I think a little background on Mr. Pastor is in order. One of the principal authors of the Security...

Lockheed Martin is working with North America's SuperCorridor Coalition – the Dallas-based trade association – on a $40 million deal to build high-tech sensors to track cargo remotely along a superhighway stretching from Texas to Canada. John Mohler, a senior vice president at Lockheed told the "North America Works II" transportation conference last week in Kansas City that 14 sensor locations would be established in the next three months to track specific cargo shipments along the NASCO corridor The superhighway incorporates Interstates 35, 29 and 94. The sensor locations would include the Mexican port of Lázaro Cárdenas; Laredo, Texas; Kansas...

Beth Gorham, The Canadian Press Published: Tuesday, November 21, 2006 WASHINGTON -- A U.S. legislator who backs tough anti-immigrant measures and more security at the Canada-U.S. border is warning Americans that President George W. Bush is plotting to integrate the continent. And he says Prime Minister Stephen Harper “buys into it.” Colorado Republican Tom Tancredo, revered by some U.S. conservatives for his efforts to staunch the flow of illegal immigrants from Mexico, said this week that Bush is a dangerous internationalist. “He is going to do what he can to create a place where the idea of America is just...

A MASSIVE road four football fields wide and running from Mexico to Canada through the heartland of the United States is being proposed amid controversy over security and the damage to the environment. The "nation's most modern roadway", proposed between Laredo in Texas and Duluth, Minnesota, along Interstate 35, would allow the US to bypass the west coast ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to import goods from China and the Far East into the heart of middle America via Mexico, saving both cost and time. However, critics argue that the ten-lane road would lay a swathe of concrete...

The cameras are rolling. Michael Richards is ad-libbing. "You ought to read Hinomaus," he informs a stunned actor. Behind the monitors, the production crew is in stitches. "Hinomaus?" Like so many of Richards' impromptus, it's ridiculous, and real, and funny at the same time.

n When we first started hearing about plans for the Trans Texas Corridor, no one in our area seemed to know or care much about it. Now, this project seems to be all people are talking about. In the beginning, all we heard was a major highway would be built; we've found out that this is not quite true. It will be a toll road system with pipe lines and a rail system, and if you live in the north end of the county, it will not be "somewhere" else, it will either be at your front fence or back...

As the controversy escalates regarding the Trans-Texas Corridor, I find alarming an Express-News article dated March 12, 2005. It is titled "State gets in fast lane to new toll road system" and subtitled "Go-ahead given for planning Trans-Texas Corridor segment." It is the announcement of the signing of the first contract for this project, and it extols the "cutting-edge, bold and forward-looking" aspects of Rick Perry's plan. Yet today, amid the discussions about farmland, foreign involvement and NAFTA, I hear little about the subject of one small paragraph near the end of this article. The paragraph reads, "Traffic levels on...

Truckers are being called on to boycott a decision by Indiana to lease a highway to foreign investment groups. Todd Spencer, executive vice president of the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association, OOIDA, has called for truckers to bypass the Indiana Toll Road, which has been leased to a consortium composed of Cintra Concesiones de Infraestructuras de Transport, S.A., a Spanish investment consortium with ties to Juan Carlos and the ruling family of Spain, and the Australian investment firm Macquarie Infrastructure Group. In an article on the OOIDA website, Spencer argues, "This is a way to send the message that as more...

n Friday night at the Roans Prairie Community Center, Mark Holmes was there to show the film documentary, "Truth Be Tolled," directed by San Antonio resident William H. Molina. Mark has an enlarged map of Grimes County showing the proposed path that the Trans Texas Corridor will take. When I first got upset about this project was when I found out that it would elimate the Historic Oakland Cemetery. When looking at the map, I found that this is not the only cemetery in our area that will suffer. Others included are Independence Cemetery right off FM 2620, Shiro Cemetery...

There have been conferences, academic papers, mock student parliaments and secret meetings on a confederation of the U.S., Canada and Mexico into future North American Union, but, until now, few officials of any of the three countries have publicly called for the creation of a European Union-style merger. In a panel discussion on U.S.-Mexico relations last Tuesday at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Enrique Berruga, Mexico's ambassador to the United Nations, came right out and said a North American Union is needed – and even provided a deadline. Berruga said the merger must be complete in the next...

If all the meetings on the Trans-Texas corridor proved one thing, it was that the majority of the people, both Democrat and Republican, are against it. We still have one more chance to show our strong opposition and that is at the ballot box on Nov. 7. Since the contract for the corridor would run for 50 years, maybe more, by which time gasoline will only be a memory, how does it make any sense to build an ethanol plant in Temple while destroying the blackland prairie needed to grow the corn to process there? It doesn't! Since the motivating...

(October 30, 2006)—The multi-billion-dollar Trans Texas Corridor will pump billions of dollars into the state’s economy and will create millions of jobs according to a new study by Waco-based economist Ray Perryman. Click Here To Read The Full Report In “Moving Into Prosperity: The Potential Impact of the Trans-Texas Corridor on Business Activity in Texas,” Perryman says the project will make the state’s economy more competitive. “Because the TTC enhances efficiency, improves logistics, and reduces transportation time and costs, it increases the ability of companies within the region to expand intrastate trade and operations, and, thus, increase market size and...