NAFTA Superhighway Has Giuliani As Key Player



Subject: [freedoms_voice] NAFTA Superhighway Has Giuliani As Key Player
Date: Tuesday, May 15, 2007 8:48 AM

NAFTA Superhighway Has Giuliani As Key Player
Diane M. Grassi

On March 23, 2005, U.S. President George W. Bush, former Canadian
Prime Minister, Paul Martin and former Mexican President, Vicente Fox,
authorized the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), now under the
auspices of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Most Americans have little to
no knowledge of this seemingly innocuous sounding unofficial treaty and
therefore believe there is little reason to be alarmed.
However, what could be misinterpreted as legislation which has been
scrutinized, and has gone through the proper channels of government could
not be farther from the truth, in that the U.S. Congress has had no direct
disclosure of nor has taken part in its execution.

Legally, a treaty would require a two-thirds majority of the U.S.
Senate to concur for its ratification as determined by the U.S.
Constitution. Cleverly, however, since the SPP is not a treaty, the
President was able to avoid such a required procedure by using the power of
the Executive Branch. And in August 2006, President Bush additionally
crafted a Signing Statement to passed legislation declaring it
Constitutional for his administration to withhold information from or deny
authority required from the U.S. Congress on the SPP and its negotiations.

With the recent swell and frequency of free trade agreements being
passed in the U.S. Congress in the past few years alone, seemingly rushed
through without genuine debate or challenge, it would be easy for the public
to assume that the SPP was authorized by Congress and thinking matters
pertaining to it were in the best interest of the American people. And
sadly, many U.S. free trade agreements do not directly better the workers of
the countries involved, but are solely reserved for big business profiting
from cheap labor, and foreign lobbyists and bureaucrats enriching
themselves.

But the SPP is cleverly disguised as a boon for all three North
American countries and its citizens, yet has lacked input or oversight from
federal, state, or municipal legislators nationwide. The goals of the SPP
agenda largely include a call for transparency and unprecedented cooperation
with respect to all three governments' commerce and trade. The endeavor is
to join forces in uniting as one competitive body in the global marketplace
and to function as the North American Union (NAU), which at the same time
whittles away at each country's sovereignty, its national security and its
laws.

The facilitation of the SPP will stem from the use of the U.S.
interstate highway system providing the roads for inter-continental and
interstate commerce. For that to happen will require retro-fitting of
existing interstates as well as building new roads, including gas and power
lines, including light rail, from the interior of Mexico, through the
central corridor of the U.S. and on into Canada.

Both the proposed NAU and NAFTA Superhighway are offshoots of the
North American Free Trade Agreement, signed in 1992 by then President Bill
Clinton. At the time it was sold to the American people and the Mexican
government as a win-win for both peoples and would re-balance the flow of
trade back to Mexico in order for Mexican workers to earn a living wage. But
that never transpired and instead backfired, resulting in the onslaught of
nearly 20 million illegal aliens since, illegally crossing the U.S. southern
border, supposedly looking for decent paying jobs.

But to fully understand the evolution of the call for the need of a
NAFTA Superhighway it is important to at least understand the recent history
behind it. The introduction of free trade policy has morphed into a priority
of the U.S. government today, even putting national security at risk in
order to fulfill its agenda. It was the Reagan Administration's vision of
free trade, a direct response to Japan's explosive growth and expansion in
both the automobile and electronics industries in the U.S., which began to
shift the balance of trade and the lopsided result we now have today with
most of our trading partners.

And fifteen years since the passage of NAFTA has not only enabled the
U.S. to globalize arguably beyond proportions in all areas of commerce,
industry and trade, but it has helped to foster public-private partnerships,
a benign term used to mask what are essentially foreign-direct investments.
And foreign-direct investment has grown precipitously since 1988 when former
President George H.W. Bush signed the Exon-Florio Amendment to the Defense
Production Act of 1950.

It was also in 1988 when then President George H.W. Bush, through
Exon-Florio delegated his power to approve or disapprove such foreign
acquisitions to the Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Investments in the
U.S. (CFIUS), relieving the President of the responsibility in determining
national security threats in foreign-direct acquisitions. Unfortunately, the
definition of national security in a post-911 world remains too narrow to
address protection of critical infrastructure, a scarce defense supply, or
preservation of technological standards, among many other risks,
unquestioned back in 1988.

The Exon-Florio Amendment authorizes the President to "suspend or
prohibit foreign acquisitions, mergers, or takeovers of U.S. companies if a
foreign controlling interest might take action that threatens national
security." And the term "foreign control" remains ambiguous and decidedly
so. The ramifications of the Exon-Florio Amendment reared its head when in
February 2006 CFIUS, an arm of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, became
widely recognized for its authorization of the Dubai Ports World to operate
multiple East Coast port operations including the Port Authority of New
York, and the ports of Baltimore and Miami.

The balancing act of national security and foreign-direct acquisitions
has relegated national security concerns to that of an afterthought, as the
Department of the Treasury's prime priority is expanding commerce in the
global marketplace. Complaints about the secluded CFIUS process, however,
predate the Dubai Ports World alarm bells of 2006. For it was in October
2005 when Senator Richard Shelby, (R) Alabama, called for hearings on the
inclusion of Congressional oversight of CFIUS approvals. And it was prior to
2006 when Senator James Inhofe, (R) Oklahoma, lobbied for Congress to be
able to reject CFIUS approvals.

As it stands, most every foreign acquisition sails through the
approval process. Unless there is a 45-day investigation process after the
required 30-day review by CFIUS, the President's approval is not required
and thereby never reaches the Congress for any interaction or input. Between
1988 and 2005 only two foreign acquisitions were unapproved out of 1,555
reviews. Both were withdrawn and eligible for later re-instatement.

Many foreign entities seek out a "pre-screening" with CFIUS' member
agencies, comprised of 12 departments of the U.S. government, if national
security concerns are anticipated in order to mitigate the chances of
non-approval and triggering the 45-day investigation.

The disparate interests of free trade and the protection of critical
infrastructure, and in particular the U.S. highway system as well as public
utilities, has given way to high-powered U.S. law firms and professional
lobbyist organizations that lay the groundwork for foreign conglomerates to
land foreign-acquisition contracts with cash-starved states amenable to
foreign-direct investment.

Such is the case with the Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC), the brainchild
of the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) in concert with the SPP.
It is a multi-billion dollar web of highway building, toll road maintenance,
gas pipelines, public utilities and railroad contracts as complex and as
multi-layered as the U.S. interstate highway system itself. A flurry of over
20 foreign acquisitions of interstate highway projects and toll road
maintenance contracts have been approved since 2003 with many more
nationwide working their way through state legislatures, such as that of the
New Jersey Turnpike which Governor Jon Corzine believes is ripe for foreign
funding.

But the TTC is the biggest and most massive highway building project
of them all and for the first time will rely upon a foreign entity to not
only maintain toll roads but to have a stake in building, controlling
operations and tolls and expanding new roads and critical infrastructure.
Additionally, eminent domain law will come into play in order to reconcile
the taking of property and farmland for road expansion to accommodate
pipelines and railroad tracks.

And much like the SPP planning, which took place behind closed doors,
the TTC collaboration began in 2002 in Texas Governor Richard Perry's
chambers, where state legislators and taxpayers were deliberately cut out of
negotiations and the bidding process. Negotiations began with the Spanish
engineering transportation construction firm, Cintra Concesiones de
Infrastructures de Transporte, S.A., a subsidiary of the Grupo Ferrovial,
which specializes in toll roads and car parks and considered a leading
developer of private-sector infrastructure throughout Europe.

At the center of negotiations for multiple legs of the Superhighway
Corridor throughout Texas, is none other than Rudolph Giuliani's law firm
which landed the Comprehensive Development Agreement for a widening of
Interstate-35, now referred to as the TTC-35, in addition to the Master
Development Plans for State Highways 121 and 130 among other legs of the
TTC. All negotiations for Cintra were and are presently handled by the law
firm, Bracewell & Giuliani, LLP, of which Republican Presidential candidate,
Rudolph Giuliani, has been a senior executive partner since March 2005. His
law firm is the exclusive legal counsel for Cintra. Bracewell & Giuliani is
comprised of 400 attorneys, based in Houston, TX with offices in New York
City, Washington, D.C., London and Kazakhstan.

Cintra joined with San Antonio, TX-based Zachry Construction Corp. to
help land the contracts, in which Zachry owns a 20% interest. The
Cintra-Zachry proposal for TTC-35 includes a private investment of up to $6
billion in upfront payments for the complete construction, design and
operation of a 316-mile toll road between Dallas and San Antonio, giving
Cintra the right to set tolls and keep toll road profits for a period of 50
years, as it will for each road it has contracted.

The NAFTA Superhighway and its corridors will run from Southwestern
Mexico through Laredo, Austin and Dallas, TX, into Kansas City, KA, serving
as an inland customs port. The corridor will split in Kansas with one leg
going to Winnipeg, Canada through Omaha, NE. The other leg goes to Toronto,
Canada through Des Moines, IA, Chicago, IL and Detroit, MI.

As many as 10 lanes, one-mile wide will incorporate double rails and
pipelines. The second corridor is planned from Brownsville to Houston, TX
through Arkansas, Memphis, TN and into Norfolk, VA. While the principal use
for these corridors is to speed Asian goods into the Central and Eastern
U.S., it will require 145 acres of land per mile or 540,000 total acres of
land. And in Texas, the state may utilize its own discretion in using
eminent domain law in order to reach its goal.

Had gasoline tax revenues been properly allocated and solely reserved
for highway projects over the years, neither Texas nor numerous other states
would be as desperate for funds as they claim they now are, as many highway
funds have been found to have been raided for other state projects and
public funding.

The citizens of Texas only as recently as February 2007 began to
attend state legislative hearings where many state lawmakers themselves were
beginning to become familiar with the Cintra contracts. Several have called
for a moratorium on at least the TTC-35 project, envisioned as a high-speed
highway, until they can evaluate issues such as eminent domain, cost benefit
analysis, environmental impact and homeland security ramifications.

Most interesting to the whole story is not only has Mr. Giuliani's
involvement in the NAFTA Superhighway not ever having been publicly
addressed, but how a foreign company is awarded the building of a mass
highway system, versus maintaining it, for the first time in U.S. history,
and negotiated by the law firm of the top Republican candidate running for
President of the United States. And truly disturbing is how such will not
only have national and homeland security and sovereignty implications but
how it is deliberately being kept away from the Halls of Congress.

Giuliani fancies himself as an expert on homeland security issues and
a law enforcer. And he has amassed quite the portfolio since 2002, earning
$20 million in that year alone, by selling himself as such. He owns Giuliani
Partners, Giuliani Safety & Security and Giuliani Capital Advisors. In March
2007 he sold Giuliani Capital Advisors, a former Ernst & Young finance
company he purchased in 2002, to Macquerie Infrastructure Consortium. Not
coincidentally, it is a partner of Cintra's in its shared operations of toll
roads in both Indiana and Chicago, IL.

Bracewell & Giuliani represents some of the biggest multi-national
oil, utility infrastructure and financial corporations both in the U.S. and
abroad. With that have come the connections that Giuliani has been able to
tap into for campaign donors, essential for his presidential bid, not only
in Texas but nationwide, as he has become the consummate globalist. But more
troubling than potential conflicts of interest as a public servant is his
lack of compunction to secure U.S. borders and then planting himself
squarely in the middle of one of the most controversial and historic highway
system projects since the 1956 National Federal-Aid Highway Act.

Particularly unnerving, given Guiliani's personal experience on 9-11,
is his defense of open borders at any cost while condoning the NAFTA
Superhighway Corridor and by extension the North American Union, without the
purview or consent of the U.S. Congress or the will of the American people.

We should have seen it coming when Giuliani enacted Special Order 40
in 1994, during his tenure as Mayor of New York City, in ordering law
enforcement officers to no longer check the legal status of suspects caught
violating the law. We should have seen it coming when Rudolph Giuliani
single-handedly decided that illegal aliens were not lawbreakers and also
quit upholding the law. And unfortunately we now do see it coming. But
sadly, he may now actually be handed the opportunity to no longer defend and
abide by the U.S. Constitution of the United States of America.

Copyright ©2007 Diane M. Grassi


--
Ray Keller
raykeller@xxxxxxxxxx





Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other
terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American ...the
unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or
state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the
hands of the people.

-Tench Coxe, 20 Feb 1788

Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and
strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a
woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound


Every man, woman, and responsible child has a natural,
fundamental, and inalienable human, individual, civil, and
Constitutional right (within the limits of the Non-Aggression
Principle) to obtain, own, and carry, openly or concealed, any
weapon -- handgun, shotgun, rifle, machinegun, anything
-- anytime, anywhere, without asking anyone's permission.
,
The Atlanta Declaration
-- L. Neil Smith
http://www.lneilsmith.com/

In truth, one who believes it wrong to arm himself against criminal
violence shows contempt of God's gift of life (or, in modern parlance,
does not properly value himself), does not live up to his responsibilities
to his family and community, and proclaims himself mentally and morally
deficient, because he does not trust himself to behave responsibly. In
truth, a state that deprives its law-abiding citizens of the means
to effectively defend themselves is not civilized but barbarous,
becoming an accomplice of murderers, rapists, and thugs and revealing
its totalitarian nature by its tacit admission that the disorganized,
random havoc created by criminals is far less a threat than are men and
women who believe themselves free and independent, and act accordingly.
- Jeffrey Snyder, "Nation of Cowards"




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