THE TRUE STORY OF THE NAFTA SUPERHIGHWAY.
(Photo: Sign at a Ron Paul event in Ames, Iowa, August 10, 2007)If the questions Mitt Romney receives at campaign events in Iowa are any indication, there is a great deal of concern in the state at the level of the Republican base about the possibility of America, Canada, and Mexico merging into one nation, and also about a proposed superhighway allegedly slated to run from Mexico to Canada, passing through Iowa on the way. Today, The Nation's Christopher Hayes drills deep into the story of the NAFTA Superhighway and finds it to be a conspiracy theory of the first order -- yet one that is based on real worries people have about the way multi-national corporations are increasingly invested in America's infrastructure sector and taking advantage of globalization to avoid American labor laws and security regulations. Writes Hayes:
(Photo: Sign at a Ron Paul event in Ames, Iowa, August 10, 2007)If the questions Mitt Romney receives at campaign events in Iowa are any indication, there is a great deal of concern in the state at the level of the Republican base about the possibility of America, Canada, and Mexico merging into one nation, and also about a proposed superhighway allegedly slated to run from Mexico to Canada, passing through Iowa on the way. Today, The Nation's Christopher Hayes drills deep into the story of the NAFTA Superhighway and finds it to be a conspiracy theory of the first order -- yet one that is based on real worries people have about the way multi-national corporations are increasingly invested in America's infrastructure sector and taking advantage of globalization to avoid American labor laws and security regulations. Writes Hayes:
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.
