Free Republic

Former Congressman Jim Kolbe was named by Gov. Janet Napoltano to head a task force working to get a NAFTA superhighway built from Mexico through the Southwest and Mountain West to Canada. Kolbe, who retired at the end of last year, will chair the state’s Canamex Task Force. The Canamex highway is proposed to run from Guadalajara, Jalisco, to Edmonton, Alberta. Through Arizona it would use a combination of upgraded existing highways and new highways from Nogales to the Nevada state line, south of Las Vegas

The merchant shipping industry has failed a second time to short-circuit California's effort to combat the toll on the health of its population from air pollution caused by oceangoing vessels. The industry is contesting California's authority to regulate fuel used by seagoing vessels up to 24 miles off its coast. The Air Resources Board estimates the vessels' emissions of particulate matter cause 300 premature deaths across the state every year. California mandates that ships "use cleaner marine fuels in diesel and diesel-electric engines, main propulsion engines, and auxiliary boilers" while operating far beyond the traditional three-mile jurisdictional limit. The Pacific...

Plans have been finalized by Mexico to develop Punta Colonet as a West Coast Mexican alternative to the U.S. ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach. The proposal includes a deep-water Pacific Ocean port on Mexico's Baja California peninsula about 150 miles south of Tijuana that could serve as a destination for the 30 million containers headed to North America from China and the Far East each year, according to a report published Tuesday in the Los Angeles Times. The on-again, off-again plan to develop Punta Colonet has been discussed before as the number of containers from China grows and...

Topic: Globalism The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) is planning on building a new super highway system called the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC). The Trans-Texas Corridor will not be just another interstate and will it will be used by more than just automobiles. It will include 10 lanes for traffic, two high speed rail tracks, four standard rail tracks, utility lines, oil pipelines, and gas pipelines. The Trans-Texas Corridor will consist of many corridors segments that are 1,200 feet wide, with each mile consuming 146 acres of land. This land is currently ranch and farm land that is being taken by...

Truck, ship and cargo-handling equipment pollutants would be reduced 50 percent in five years under a clear air proposal for the Long Beach and Los Angeles harbors. Cleaner vehicles and shore-side electrical outlets so vessels can shut down diesel engines while dockside are key elements of the plan unveiled Wednesday. "This is an action plan, this is not a study. The days of yakkin' are coming to a screeching halt," harbor commission president S. David Freeman said. Proposals also include retrofitting and replacing cargo-handling equipment and locomotives. The plan, which now enters a 30-day public review period before approval by...

Red China is investing heavily in developing deep-water ports in Mexico to bring an unprecedented volume of containers into the U.S. along the emerging NAFTA Super Highway. This move signals China’s emergence as the unexpected economic winner in the North American Union free market. Hutchinson Ports, a wholly owned subsidiary of China’s giant Hutchinson Whampoa Limited (HWL) is investing millions to expand the deep water ports the company manages at Lazaro Cardenas and Manzanillo on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Now Hutchinson Ports is pledging millions more to develop Punta Colonet, today a desolate Mexican bay in Baja California. Mexico plans over...

Yuma, Ariz., farmers should exhale a small but short-lived sigh of relief over the news from Union Pacific that the railroad has backed off its initial plans to jointly bid with the Hutchinson Port Authority on a proposed port and rail line at Punta Colonet, Baja Calif., Mexico. The proposed gargantuan-sized port would, in part, import foreign-made goods for distribution by rail to stores across the United States. While Union Pacific had originally planned to bid on the railroad puzzle piece, the railroad focused, in part, on potential routes from Mexico into the U.S. through Yuma, Ariz. Unfortunately, among the...

¡Pobre México! Tan lejos de Dios, y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos. (Poor Mexico! So far from God, and so close to the United States.) —General Porfirio Díaz, President of Mexico, 1877–1911Capital’s relentless search for cheap labor constantly alters the flow of surface transportation in North America with widespread consequences. The end-of-century deindustrialization of the United States and importation of cheap commodities from the Far East through the West Coast reversed historical east-west transportation patterns and established Los Angeles and Long Beach as the largest ports in the nation. To minimize transportation costs, which for many products are...

Mexico has canceled the disputed mineral concession at Punta Colonet that has held up development of a massive port-rail project geared to create a trade route from Asia into the American heartland through Baja California.

Arizona Clean Fuels can check off another item on its "to-do" list. The company has received title to the property where it plans to build an oil refinery in eastern Yuma County. Arizona Clean Fuels has purchased 1,460 acres from the Wellton-Mohawk Irrigation and Drainage District for a total of $14,681,100, the Yuma County Assessor's Office confirmed Tuesday. The sale closely followed a transfer of the land Monday from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to WMIDD. The land transfer was authorized in the Wellton-Mohawk Title Transfer Act, passed by Congress on June 20, 2000, and signed into law by President...

WASHINGTON – There are mixed signals coming from Mexico about the fate of a proposed mega-port in Baja California for mainly Chinese goods that would be shipped on rail lines and "NAFTA superhighways" running through the U.S. to Canada. The port at Punta Colonet, planned as a major container facility to transfer Asian goods into America's heartland, got at least a temporary setback when a Mexican businessman announced a competing project in which he was seeking to secure mineral rights in the area. Gabriel Chavez, originally one of the principal movers behind the port plan, now says there are significant...