We The Paranoid Right-wing Xenophobes

This month, President Bush will host the leaders of Canada and Mexico to advance the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), a project Lou Dobbs has predicted will "end the United States as we know it." Lou sounds downright blasé, though, compared to all the online ranting and raving on this subject. The video "North American Union and Vchip Truth" cranks things up another notch. Viewed more than 4.8 million times, it presents the SPP as a big step towards a single world government, with David Rockefeller preventing any resistance by implanting us all with Vchips. We can only hope this is satire, but the 10,000 comments by Youtubers suggest that many viewers aren't getting the joke. All this would be simply entertaining if it weren't for the fact that the SPP truly is a dangerous initiative -- but not for the reasons cited by the xenophobes.

Source: AlterNet.com

"Policital scare tactics"

The leaders of the United States, Mexico and Canada last week downplayed critics' fears that they are seeking to create a North American Union. Wimps! Instead of being defensive, they should have called for much greater economic integration.

An unusual mixture of ultra-conservative anti-immigration groups and leftist anti-free trade organizations had sent out alarm bells through the Internet that the three presidents were about to merge the three countries into a single North American Union, and to create a single currency, the "Amero." [...]

The John Birch Society Web site has claimed that "one of the (SPP's) first orders of business will be a borderless North America -- spelling the end of our nation's independence."

"This is, no matter what anyone tells you, a very serious and unprecedented challenge to the sovereignty of this nation," CNN's fear-monger- in-chief Lou Dobbs told his audience with characteristic anxiety April 4.

Asked about the three leaders' reaction to this hysteria, American University's Center for North American studies director Robert Pastor told me: "By their silence and defensiveness, the presidents have allowed the relationship to be defined by an extremist fringe that fears any co-operative initiative will lead to the dissolution of sovereignty. The leaders were too timid."

(Source: The Modesto Bee)

Mainstream Media Opinion

Bet your bottom amero that U.S. sovereignty is safe

The John Birch Society staked out some turf in downtown Seattle last Saturday, holding flags and carrying signs. The signs read, "Preserve the Traditional Farm," "Stop Benefits to Illegal Aliens," "Keep America Sovereign" — and a curious one, a slash through the initials "NAU."

[...] The U.S. government has a Web site, www.spp.gov, in which it says that "in no way, shape or form" does it plan "the creation of a European Union-like structure" in North America. That appears to be so — but denials don't matter to a certain type of mind, which assumes that appearances are false and truth is concealed.

[...] The Birchers might have an argument if they said NAFTA could, over a long time, prepare the American mind for continental government. It would be something to think about. But it would not be potent enough to bring out protesters on a Saturday afternoon.

So they overreach. They warn of such fantasies as the replacement of the U.S. dollar by a new currency called the amero. No politician proposes this. A professor of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver published "The Case for the Amero" in 1999. But it was one book, and the Canadian dollar was below 70 cents at the time. The loonie has since revived, and the Canadians are not about to discard it.

Sovereignty, for the moment, is safe.


Source: Seattle Times