[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] José Can You See?

[Bill Totten]

Bush's Trojan Taco

by Greg Palast

http://www.gregpalast.com (April 21 2008)


Psst! George Bush has a secret

While you Democrats are pounding each other to a pulp in Pennsylvania, 
the President has snuck back down to New Orleans for a meeting of the 
NAFTA Three: the Prime Minister of Canada and the President of Mexico.

You're not supposed to know that - for two reasons:

First, the summit planned for New Orleans two years back was meant to 
showcase the rebuilt Big Easy, a monument to can-do Bush-o-nomics. Well, 
it is a monument to Bush's leadership: The city still looks like Dresden 
1946, with over half the original residents living in toxic trailers or 
wandering lost and broke in America.

The second reason Bush has kept this major summit a virtual secret is 
its real agenda - and the real agenda-makers. The names and faces of the 
guys who called the meeting must remain as far out of camera range as 
possible: The North American Competitiveness Council.

Never heard of The Council?

Well, maybe you've heard of the counsellors: the chief executives of 
Wal-Mart, Chevron Oil, Lockheed-Martin and 27 other multinational 
masters of the corporate universe.

And why did the landlords of our continent order our presidents to a 
three-nation pajama party? Their agenda is "harmonization".

Harmonization has nothing to do with singing in fifths like Simon and 
Garfunkel.

Harmonizationmeans making rules and regulations the same in all three 
countries. Or, more specifically, watering down rules - on health, 
safety, labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on - in other 
words, any regulations that get between The Council members and their 
profits.

Take for example, pesticides. Wal-Mart and agri-business don't want to 
reduce the legal amount of poison allowed in what you eat. Solution: 
"harmonize" US and Canadian pesticide standards to Mexico's.

Can they do that? Can Bush just say, "Eat your peas - even if they're 
radioactive"?

Under NAFTA, at least the way George Bush reads it (or has it read to 
him), he can.

When the three chiefs of state meet privately with the thirty corporate 
chiefs, they are also expected to erase a bit more of our borders. 
Technically, they will expand the "NAFTA Highway" - which is, in 
addition to lots of new blacktop, a set of regulations governing
transcontinental shipment. Some fear NAFTA Highway expansion will allow 
a new flood of cheap Mexican products into the US and Canada. Not so. 
The Council's hunger to widen the NAFTA highway is to bring in even 
cheaper Chinese goods.

Say what?

As trade expert Maude Barlow explained to me, the new NAFTA Highway will 
allow Chinese stuff dumped into Mexico to be hauled northward as 
duty-free "Mexican" products. That's one of the quiet aims of this 
"Summit for Security and Prosperity", the official Orwellian name for 
this meet. Think of the SSP "harmonization" as the Trojan Taco of trade 
with China.

Barlow is Chairwoman of the Council of Canadians. She is known as the 
"Ralph Nader of Canada" (not Nader version 2.0, The Spoiler Candidate, 
but Nader 1.0, the consumer advocate). Because Americans are too 
distracted by the Punch-and-Judy primaries to complain about this 
lobby-fest on the bayou, Canadian Barlow is leading street protests 
against the SSP greed-grab.

I caught up with this courageous Canadian (I've seen her face down 
corporate bullying we can't imagine in the US) on her way down to New 
Orleans. Barlow is especially horrified that the SSP agreement promotes 
a five-fold increase in the mining of Canadian tar sands for import, as 
liquid crude oil, into the USA, an idea filthier than a re-make of 
Debbie Does Dallas. "This is an insane model of development", she says, 
especially given Bush's recent claim that he wants to slow global warming.

Bush himself is pushing his Canadian and Mexican counterparts to adopt 
US-style "Homeland Security" measures so that, says Barlow, "we'll all 
be zip-locked together in one security bag".

There will be other anti-SSP protesters in New Orleans as well, from 
America's populist Right. They are concerned that the Summit is worse 
than the "NAFTA on steroids" that Barlow fears. The populists see in the 
SPP a nascent "North American Union", and the elimination of the good 
old US of A.

They're wrong, of course. The USA was eliminated years ago, at least 
economically. The globalizers, the Competitiveness Council members, are 
a multinational crew, with one shared set of country clubs, beach homes, 
art collections, union busters and lobbyists knowing no borders.

The populist radio hosts railing against the coming North American Union 
don't realize that these CEOs won't take away our flags or Fourth of 
July or Star-Spangled Banner. The rags and flags will always be kept 
around to con the schmucks along the Yahoo Belt into donating their 
children to the Iraq Occupation or other misadventures. Likewise for 
Mexico's rulers: A billionaire like Carlos Slim, the richest man on the 
planet (sorry, Mr Gates), didn't buy the Mexican government to "protect" 
his nation from Gringos but to protect his media monopoly. The 
corporation that purchases Canada's leaders, Barrick Gold of Toronto, 
has looted treasuries from Tanzania to Nevada to Chile - and shared the 
spoils on both sides of the border with their well-greased advisors 
Brian Mulroney, former Prime Minister of Canada, and George Bush Sr, 
former head of the US CIA.

So there is no United States of America nor Canada nor Mexico - at least 
as we like to imagine ourselves in our national fairy tales: 
self-governing democracies run by we the people or nosotros el pueblo. 
There's just the diktats of the North American Prosperity Council. Get 
used to it.

To underscore the fact that you aren't invited, nor our elected 
representatives, Barlow related to me that the US Ambassador to Canada 
told her the legal changes wrought in New Orleans will not be put before 
the three national Congresses for a vote. "We don't want to open up 
another NAFTA", he told her. So, they'll skip the voting stuff. 
Democracy is so, like, 20th Century.

Is Bush just a reluctant participant in this "harmonizing" of our 
economic fate? The meetings are secret, so I can't say for sure. But I 
note that, at the opening ceremony, if you read his lips, you can see 
our president singing the national anthem as, "José, can you see?"
_____

Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Best 
Democracy Money Can Buy (2003) and Armed Madhouse: Sordid Secrets and 
Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild (2007). Sign up for Palast's 
investigative reports for BBC on RSS feed at
http://feeds.feedburner.com/gregpalast-articles

Make a donation to the not-for-profit Palast Investigative Fund and 
receive a DVD of the untold story of the drowning of New Orleans, Big 
Easy to Big Empty, made for Democracy Now! at 
http://www.PalastInvestigativeFund.org.

Note: On May 1, in New York, Palast will speak at the international 
conference of the victims of Barrick Gold mining operations. Information 
soon at www.GregPalast.com

http://www.gregpalast.com/jose-can-you-see-bush%e2%80%99s-trojan-taco/#more-1999



TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/