Bush, Calderon Plot Economic and Military Integration at NOLA Summit

At the center of today's "Three Amigos" Summit in New Orleans between George W. Bush and his homologues, Mexico's Felipe Calderon and Stephen Harper of Canada, is the sovereignty-swallowing nexus between trade, migration and military policy.As mentioned in the Times Picayune, Bush and Calderon held bilateral talks today in which they discussed NAFTA, the proposed free trade agreement (FTA) with Colombia and regional security. Much of the chatter in the press focused on how Calderon and Bush "defended" NAFTA and free trade.

Lacking in all of the coverage of this and other regional summits is any notion of the symbiotic relationship between trade and militarization throughout hemisphere, including the U.S.. None of the press, for example, makes the connection between how economy-integrating trade policies like NAFTA or the proposed U.S.-Colombia FTA are inevitably accompanied by increases in the domestic policing and military budgets of the U.S. and its "Latin American trade partners" like Colombia, home to the worst human rights record in the Americas thanks to the more than $4 billion in military aid it receives from the U.S.

As they continue negotiating an exponential increase in the military aid Mexico receives from the U.S., Bush and Calderon appear to be plotting a Colombianization (drug wars, counterinsurgency wars combined with free trade) just a stones throw from our southern border.

Nothing was said in today's summit coverage about how Calderon and Bush are actually "defending" free trade with real guns and real troops.This link between increased free trade and mushrooming military budgets makes sense when we consider that border-smashing corporate interests represented by Bush and Calderon need uniformed people with guns to quash social tensions (formerly known as class conflicts) exacerbated by economic restructuring. Put another way, when the soft power middle class cushion between rich and poor gets tattered beyond repair by free trade, it is replaced by the hard power military cushion in both the U.S and Mexico.

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Comments

[Brittanicus]

We have the agenda of the globalist, open border, free traders pushing for the free movement of cheap labor throughout the North American Continent Padlocks on closed premises reveal that thousands of American industries have closed down, because they cannot compete with cheap labor in other countries, because of this ugly treaty called NAFTA.

The only people who appreciate the one-sided outcome of the free trade agreements are the wealthy, its not the hundreds of thousands of US citizen workers unemployed. Fair and harmonious free trade is good for the country, but not when this nation is paying 15% percent duty on importing goods into Mexico. The fundamental menace to this country and our wiltingeconomy. The trade deficit through the first 11 months of last year came in at $662 billion dollars, on pace to jump 17 percent from 2004's record deficit. In fact, the trade deficit has nearly doubled since the president Bush took office.

First we need to get our own citizens hired, instead of the 12 to 30 million foreign nationals that is catastrophic to our economy. Now right now, we need THE SAVE ACT. We need to remove by deportation or ATTRITION people who broke our immigration laws. Originally laughed at the super Mexican-Canadian highway was envisioned as a conspiracy theory.

Ask the Texas land owners who have been holding town hall meetings and demonstrations against TXDOT. The NAFTA highway is to streamline goods across America, for Communist Chinese institutions like Walmart .

[philistine]

US expansion of militarism to Mexico is a scary scenario that I hadn't foreseen. Even if Democrats hold the White House and both branches of Congress at the beginning of 2009, it will take decades to undo the extensive global damage that the NeoCons have gleefully inflicted, and the stacked courts won't make it any easier.

It took decades for the fascists to take us here; it will no doubt take decades more to return to some degree of normalcy--assuming we get the opportunity.

Good night and good luck....