North American Union Isn't Going Away

by Jerome R. Corsi

Posted Jan 09, 2007

Michael Medved has now published a second tirade on the issue of North American integration, this time attacking both Joseph Farah and me by name. John Hawkins has also responded briefly on his blog, taking the opportunity to issue yet another ad hominem attack, this time calling me “crazy.” Neither gentleman has yet responded to the substantive arguments or evidence that many of us have produced, demonstrating beyond a shadow of a doubt that North American integration is proceeding full speed ahead in the Bush Administration.Maybe Medved and Hawkins should include the Wall Street Journal in their list of those at whom they cast a flurry of personal abuse and invective. As early as July 2, 2001, Robert L. Bartley, then-editor of the Wall Street Journal, directly supported the idea of creating a North American Union in no uncertain terms, writing an editorial titled, “Open Nafta Borders? Why Not.” Bartley wrote:
Reformist Mexican President Vincente Fox raises eyebrows with his suggestion that over a decade or two Nafta should evolve into something like the European Union, with open borders for not only goods and investment but also people. He can rest assured that there is one voice north of the Rio Grand that supports his vision. To wit, this newspaper.Michael Medved wrote, “If the plans for a North American Union are coming from forces on the left as marginal as the fringies on the right who worry about such schemes, then there is, indeed, no reason for fear.” Perhaps Medved will want to revise this claim in view of the Wall Street Journal quotation his evidently deficient research failed to uncover.Bartlet’s Wall Street Journal editorial also tied his vision of a European Union evolving out of NAFTA with his endorsement of an amnesty combined with what today we would call a “pathway to citizenship.” His editorial continued, “North of the border, the solution to the problem of illegal immigration is to make it legal, or at least to normalize the movement of people.” Consistently, I have argued that President Bush’s refusal to secure our borders stems from his agreement on March 23, 2005, in Waco, Tex., to enter the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. Phyllis Schlafly has written an important piece noting that President Bush at Christmas 2006 pardoned 16 criminals, including five drug dealers. Yet, he has refused to pardon Border Patrol agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean, who were prosecuted under a law intended to punish drug dealers because they attempted to stop at the Mexican border a van carrying 743 pounds of marijuana.Do Medved and Hawkins support an open border policy? Do Medved and Hawkins support a guest worker program, even if the new law amounts to an amnesty for the millions of illegal aliens already in the United States? Possibly, we can get Medved and Hawkins to answer these questions directly.Medved and Hawkins make much of arguing that American University professor Robert Pastor has specifically gone on the record saying he does not support the creation of a North American Union. Yet, this is only part of the story. I have consistently pointed out that even Jean Monnet, a key intellectual architect of the European Union, acknowledged in his memoirs that he intentionally used a stealth methodology to advance his regional government goals. I have referenced an important book by Christopher Booker and Richard North, “The Great Deception: The Secret History of the European Union,” that presents a careful and exhaustive study of the intentional deception used by proponents to create the European Union. Medved and Hawkins refuse to respond to these points.The EU emerged from an initial coal and steal agreement through an incremental process. Then the 1957 Treaty of Rome created a European Common Market. From this, a European Community emerged. In 1991 at a meeting in the Dutch town of Maastrich, the European leaders drafted a new treaty revising the Treaty of Rome by replacing the European Common Market with a full-fledged European Union regional government. In 1999, 11 European countries decided to phase out their currencies in favor of the Euro by 2002. Those of us writing out against a North American Union and the Amero want to make sure the United States does not go through the same stealth process, a methodology even the editor of the Wall Street Journal endorsed in 2001. I have already advanced from NAFTA to the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America. What’s next? Medved and Hawkins are typically non-responsive to these points.Pastor’s objections to a North American Union are strictly pragmatic. Pastor has repeatedly called for the next stage to be what he calls the “North American Community.” Pastor wants to put in place a series of institutional structures, including his North American Development Fund,” all resulting in greater North American economic and political integration, such that we all begin to think like “North Americans” rather than citizens of the U.S. Canada, and Mexico. I interviewed Pastor by telephone on Dec. 13, 2006, after Pastor gave an interview in Spanish to the magazine Poder y Negocios. In that magazine interview, Pastor had argued in Spanish that a new 9/11 crisis might be needed to further North American integration. Pastor also expressed frustration that the lame-duck nature of the Bush Administration, the minority government in Canada, and the challenge from the left to Mexico’s new president, Felipe Calderón, were blocking the three governments from moving toward integration fast enough. With Pastor’s permission, I recorded my interview with him. I am going to reproduce here from the transcript a relevant segment of my interview with Pastor, in which I asked him a number of questions to determine if his objection to a North American Union was on pragmatic grounds.
A lot of what you argue is incremental. First, for instance, we have NAFTA, then the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America which is in place right now. You have called the Council on Foreign Relations task force report entitled, Building a North American Community, a blue print for SPP. Now, you are advocating a next stage, which you call a North American Community. That sounds like an incremental advancement on North American integration, which, absent a crisis, is what you are recommending.PASTOR: Yes. What I am recommending is a series of functional steps. You could call them incremental, although I think they are a little bit more than incremental. Each of the proposals that I have laid out do represent more than just small steps. But it doesn’t represent the leap toward a North American Union, or even to some confederation of any kind. I’m not representing that. I don’t think either is plausible, necessary, or even helpful to contemplate at this stage.But, I want to concentrate on that, what you just said, “at this stage.” In your book Toward a North American Community you lay out three or four different ways that economic integration could lead to political integration, and there, as in this interview, you reject them. But your rejection is largely on pragmatic grounds, which could be summarized as “the countries aren’t ready yet.” It doesn’t sound like your saying that a political union is an inherently bad idea.PASTOR: Oh, I don’t think a political union is an inherently bad idea. Nor do I think it is a good idea for North America right now.Again, “right now” is the key part of that statement.PASTOR: I teach a course at American University in which I look at the different options and I put them before the students. The reason it is not a good idea at this state, perhaps ever, is because of people like yourself who begin to fear that their sense of America could disappear and therefore they become resistant to ideas that are as simple as obvious to me as creating transportation corridors between the three countries that trade more with each other by land than with any other countries in the world. To me that seems just straightforward. But if you’re fearful that somehow America’s sovereignty will disappear even if you just take these small steps forward, then you don’t do anything. Then you’re just mired in the status quo. Actually you’re not in the status quo, because in this world which is moving very rapidly you can’t stay competitive if you don’t move.We probably have some disagreements beyond fear. I might believe that the structure of laws we have in place in the United States is superior to what a regional configuration would be, even as demonstrated in Europe. That would be a separate argument than fear.PASTOR: That’s fair enough. I’ve just laid out one possible motive, I think there are others. And I think there are on each of these issues questions that I think should be on the agenda for discussion among the three publics. There are legitimate arguments on both sides.So, Pastor acknowledges that there are legitimate arguments on both sides of the North American integration debate and, contrary to Medved and Hawkins, Pastor was not abusive simply because I disagree with him. When asked specifically if he would say that a North American Union formed as a regional political government was an inherently bad idea, Pastor declined to do so. Moreover, Pastor admitted in the telephone interview that a main reason he rejects the idea of a North American Union right now is because of the opposition I have launched, based on my desire to preserve and protect U.S. sovereignty. One suspects Pastor would have preceded full speed ahead with full political integration of North America, if he had not encountered our strong resistance. Pastor is a globalist. Later in the interview Pastor said, “Globalization is a net plus for the world economy, for the middle class, and for all people.”Medved and Hawkins make much of the argument that Pastor’s views are not influential upon public policy because Pastor, an adviser to John Kerry in the 2004 presidential campaign, is not part of the Bush Administration. Nor is Pastor affiliated with any Bush Administration official at a top policy-making level. Yet, during the Carter Administration, Pastor served on the National Security Council, where he played a major role in the decision to hand the Panama Canal over to Panama via a treaty that Pastor helped negotiate. Had John Kerry won the 2004 presidential election, Pastor may have emerged once again with an influential policy job in the administration.Besides, do Medved and Hawkins seriously want to argue that academic arguments have no influence upon the formation of public policy? Pastor was a co-chair of the task force that authored the Council on Foreign Relations task force report titled, “Building a North American Community.” In his career, Pastor has alternated between government and academic positions, while continuing to serve non-governmental organizations such as the North American Forum on Integration, where Pastor currently serves on the board of directors. Pastor now has spent over a decade advancing his ideas about how North American integration should advance, in academics, in government, and as a key player in well-positioned non-government organizations that seek to impact public policy. So, let me ask once again, what exactly do Medved and Hawkins find annoying—that a NAU and the Amero could be the end result of the North American integration currently happening, or that I might suggest the Bush Administration could be following the Jean Monnet path intentionally? Again, gentlemen, we would appreciate a direct answer to the question.Medved clearly seems most concerned that no one should criticize Bush, especially now that the 110th Congress has begun under Democratic control. Somehow appointing himself as a cheerleader for the conservative movement, Medved argues that we need “a united Republican Party and a re-energized conservative movement that isn’t distracted and paralyzed by non-existent threats concerning non-existent plans to terminate the independent survival of the United States.”Yet, while Medved has gyrated hysterically, he has evidently not taken up the challenge to study and discuss calmly the many issues I have raised concerning government websites and other public documentation. Does Medved simply dismiss the Department of Commerce website that documents the trilateral working group activity proceeding under SPP? Has Medved ever looked at the Texas Department of Transportation website that documents the 4,000 miles of Trans-Texas Corridor super highways that TxDOT aims to build over the next 50 years with financing from Cintra, the investment consortium from Spain? Nor do I agree that Republican Party unity is either a necessary or a sufficient condition to obtaining a re-energized conservative movement. Resisting Bush on immigration might do far more to re-energizing the conservative movement than blind adherence to the immigration policies the Bush administration has advanced. Unfortunately, as the term RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) suggests, being Republican today is not by definition equivalent with being conservative. In the final analysis are Medved and Hawkins basically just Republican Party apologists?Perhaps Medved has opposed Democrats on the radio so long that he considers it his responsibility to keep Republicans in office at any cost. I disagree. One of the main reasons much of the conservative movement has parted ways with the Bush Administration over the past two years is because of Bush’s determination to pursue guest-worker amnesty legislation rather than to secure our borders. No matter how much cheerleading Medved does, much of the conservative movement will oppose Bush strongly once again if the administration moves in the 110th Congress to push a “comprehensive immigration reform” bill such as S. 2611, the immigration bill co-sponsored by Senators Teddy Kennedy (D.-Mass.) and John McCain (R.-Ariz.). Regardless of how much Medved attacks me, many conservatives are preparing right now to oppose Bush if the administration goes down an open-borders path that many conservatives, as well as the U.S. public, have already soundly rejected. But character assassination seems to be Medved’s preferred methodology. Somewhat surprisingly, Medved has returned to mine the ground of my old Free Republic comments. Medved, who appears to have a deficiency in his ability to do solid research, may not realize that I have repudiated those comments and apologized for them long ago. As I have explained many times, the statements on Free Republic were written to be sarcastic, some of them to be ironic, others just to be provocative. The comments, as Medved presents them, are totally out of context and not reflective of my true views. On the subject of what I truly believe, I am the final authority. Let me again state for the record that my history of working to support the state of Israel attests to my true affection for the Jewish people worldwide. Nor am I anti-Catholic, since the truth is that I was born and raised in the Catholic faith, and I plan to die a Catholic as well.Medved and Hawkins obviously want the argument about North American integration to go away. Unfortunately, their main tactics to date have been to engage in an unrelenting campaign of invective and sophomoric name-calling, tactics which in truth more disgraces them than those of us against whom their vituperation is aimed. Still, I want to thank once again Medved and Hawkins for the continuing attention they are drawing to my arguments and the issue of North American integration. Somehow, Medved, an author himself, seems to object that I might make an economic living by writing. Until now, I had always assumed Medved was a capitalist, seeing how strongly he protests that he is now a conservative. Maybe that is another assumption about Medved that I will have to reconsider. At any rate, Medved should be aware that his histrionics do more to sell books for me, regardless whether Medved ever deigns to afford me the dubious honor of appearing on his radio show, or not. Far from being indignant, as Medved mistakenly assumes I am, the truth is that I am actually currently appreciative of the controversy. Medved should be advised, however, that appreciation and tolerance from those of us he is determined to malign may not be unlimited, as Columbia University may soon have the opportunity to discover.
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