The Myth of the NAFTA Superhighway

[Toro]

Or, How Conspiracy Theories/Mass Hysterias Get Started

When completed, the highway will run from Mexico City to Toronto, slicing through the heartland like a dagger sunk into a heifer at the loins and pulled clean to the throat. It will be four football fields wide, an expansive gully of concrete, noise and exhaust, swelled with cars, trucks, trains and pipelines carrying water, wires and God knows what else. Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness. Equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation's Wal-Marts.

And this NAFTA Superhighway, as it is called, is just the beginning, the first stage of a long, silent coup aimed at supplanting the sovereign United States with a multinational North American Union.

Even as this plot unfolds in slow motion, the mainstream media are silent; politicians are in denial. Yet word is getting out. Like samizdat, info about the highway has circulated in niche media platforms old and new, on right-wing websites like WorldNetDaily, in the pages of low-circulation magazines like the John Birch Society's The New American and increasingly on the letters to the editor page of local newspapers.

"Construction of the NAFTA highway from Laredo, Texas to Canada is now underway," read a letter in the February 13 San Gabriel Valley Tribune. "Spain will own most of the toll roads that connect to the superhighway. Mexico will own and operate the Kansas City Smart Port. And NAFTA tribunal, not the U.S. Supreme Court, will have the final word in trade disputes. Will the last person please take down the flag?" There are many more where that came from. "The superhighway has the potential to cripple the West Coast economy, as well as posing an enormous security breach at our border," read a letter from the January 7 San Francisco Chronicle. "So far, there has been no public participation or debate on this important issue. Public participation and debate must begin now."

In some senses it has. Prompted by angry phone calls and e-mail from their constituents, local legislators are beginning to take action. In February the Montana state legislature voted 95 to 5 for a resolution opposing "the North American Free Trade Agreement Superhighway System" as well as "any effort to implement a trinational political, government entity among the United States, Canada, and Mexico." Similar resolutions have been introduced in eighteen other states as well as the House of Representatives, where H. Con Res. 40 has attracted, as of this writing, twenty-seven co-sponsors. Republican presidential candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire now routinely face hostile questions about the highway at candidate forums. Citing a spokesperson for the Romney campaign, the Concord Monitor reports that "the road comes up at town meetings second only to immigration policy."

Grassroots movement exposes elite conspiracy and forces politicians to respond: It would be a heartening story but for one small detail.

There's no such thing as a proposed NAFTA Superhighway.

Though opposition to the nonexistent highway is the cause célèbre of many a paranoiac, the myth upon which it rests was not fabricated out of whole cloth. Rather, it has been sewn together from scraps of fact.

... continued

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070827/hayes

 

[ScreamingEagle]

Or, How Conspiracy Theories/Mass Hysterias Get Started

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070827/hayes

Your article from The Nation is going to convince us that the superhighway is just a hysterical figment of our imagination? I suppose you want to sell us the Brooklyn Bridge next?

Actually, the article brings out many facets of the situation that all point to the reality of a superhighway - whether there is an officially "proposed" superhighway or not.

The San Antonio Toll Party (like the Boston Tea Party) did not come about in a vacuum.

 

[Toro]

Your article from The Nation is going to convince us that the superhighway is just a hysterical figment of our imagination?

Yes.

The conspiracy theories that play on the weaknesses of the human mind are in full force with the "NAFTA Superhighway."

If you know anything about goods distribution and transportation links in Canada and how Winnipeg isn't particularly relevant in the flow of goods across Canada nor its relative importance in the Canadian economy, you'd realize how silly the theory is.

I suppose you want to sell us the Brooklyn Bridge next?

Are you sure the Chinese/Mexicans/Canadians/UN/space aliens don't already own the bridge?

 

[RetiredGySgt]

Yes.

The conspiracy theories that play on the weaknesses of the human mind are in full force with the "NAFTA Superhighway."

If you know anything about goods distribution and transportation links in Canada and how Winnipeg isn't particularly relevant in the flow of goods across Canada nor its relative importance in the Canadian economy, you'd realize how silly the theory is.



Are you sure the Chinese/Mexicans/Canadians/UN/space aliens don't already own the bridge?

I own that Bridge. It was a Birthday present from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. In fact the Mormon church secretly owns everything. Aren't you guys screwed? )