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February 08, 2007

The North American Union?

Michael Blowhard writes:

Dear Blowhards --

Fun numbers for the day come from Arizona:

In [Arizona in] 2005, more Latina teens got pregnant than all other racial and ethnic groups combined ...Latina teens are three and a half times more likely than White teens to become pregnant in Arizona and are about one-third more likely to get pregnant than Hispanics nationwide.
This has helped keep Arizona's teen pregnancy rate one of the highest in the nation. And Arizona taxpayers are increasingly picking up the tab: 82 percent of all teen births in 2005 were paid for by the state's Medicaid program, up from 71 percent a decade earlier.

Which makes me wonder: How much is there to the whole "our elites want to merge Mexico, the U.S., and Canada into one gigantic unit" thing? Given the populace-defying way our elites carry on, it certainly sounds plausible. Wikipedia even has an entry on the North American Union. And here's the Wikipedia entry on Robert Pastor, said by some to be the plan's mastermind. Doesn't he seem like a creepy figure? And here's the entry on the ominous-sounding North American SuperCorridor Coalition.

But thinking about all this makes me feel like I'm in a '70s conspiracy thriller. So maybe these are just the ravings of paranoid maniacs. Still, a conspiracy or near-conspiracy would certainly explain a lot. So why isn't more noise made about it?

And how would you feel if it turned out to be true that our elites are erasing the boundaries between Mexico, the U.S., and Canada after all?

Best,

Michael

UPDATE: Rick Darby turns up some key evidence. Nice Rick quote:

This is what "the government of the people, by the people, and for the people" has come to in our time: a multi-national group of appointed officials and corporate heavyweights meeting secretly to plan ways to continually slice off bits of national sovereignty while keeping the chumps, er, citizens in the dark.

posted by Michael at February 8, 2007

Comments

And those who oppose this plan are-- what?-- "Pastor-baiters"?

Posted by: Reg Cæsar on February 8, 2007 11:56 PM

"And how would you feel if it turned out to be true that our elites are erasing the boundaries between Mexico, the U.S., and Canada after all?"

Not good. No offense.

Posted by: Canuck on February 9, 2007 12:26 AM

As for Pastor, creepy doesn't even begin. In the interview with Global Research he bemoans that it takes major crises like 9/11 for governments to move forward on bold initiatives (like his Union) with a "I'm not saying I want another 9/11 but..." vibe. Then this:

"There are alternatives to a crisis for getting a major decision adopted by the president and by the congress," Pastor responded. "But what I am saying is that we lack the kind of North American leadership we need. Our founding fathers created a system of governance that was not designed to be efficient but was designed to protect freedom. Therefore, you created checks and balances that did protect freedom but also made it difficult to move forward on important issues."

Sovereignty, democracy, republicanism, rule of law. Where does it all end?

Posted by: dennis on February 9, 2007 2:12 AM

Michael,

I expect you have already seen this, but if not, check out this.

Posted by: SamC on February 9, 2007 7:19 AM

A North American Union is a dream of sorts for some, similar to the EU. But it won't work, at least not in the long run.

History shows that the larger a political unit becomes, the more ill-defined it becomes with respect to its ethnic, cultrual, linguistic particularities. And those particularities are what keeps the state from flying apart. People are loyal to their own culture, not to arbitrarily defined polyglot blobs.

Of course, it's not difficult for monied and political leaders to draw up, de jure, a political entity that serves their economic interests, or within which they fancy themselves a ruling class. What's difficult, however, is to keep such a superstate functioning de facto.

A North American Union would be like the later Roman Empire, or the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman Empires -- too arbitrary, by definition, to function in the longer run. Conceively, it could all be held by force like the USSR, but that too fell apart witin two generations.

Posted by: PA on February 9, 2007 7:56 AM

No way, man. What a terrible thing to do to Canada!

Posted by: Upstate Guy on February 9, 2007 8:32 AM

Well, since Ronnie Raygun took office, I've wondered why the wingnuts aggressively pursued policies that made us more like Mexico, and why they were so freaked when Clinton reversed that for a decade. Now I know why.

Posted by: yahmdallah on February 9, 2007 10:05 AM

Outstanding post at NRO's Corner, by Mark Kirkorian:

"According to a congressman's wife who attended a Republican women's luncheon yesterday, Karl Rove explained the rationale behind the president's amnesty/open-borders proposal this way: "I don't want my 17-year-old son to have to pick tomatoes or make beds in Las Vegas."

There should be no need to explain why this is an obscene statement coming from a leader in the party that promotes the virtues of hard work, thrift, and sobriety, a party whose demi-god actually split fence rails as a young man, a party where "respectable Republican cloth coat" once actually meant something. But it does seem to be necessary to explain.

Rove's comment illustrates how the Bush-McCain-Giuliani-Hagel-Martinez-Brownback-Huckabee approach to immigration strikes at the very heart of self-government. It is precisely Rove's son (and my own, and those of the rest of us in the educated elite) who should work picking tomatoes or making beds, or washing restaurant dishes, or mowing lawns, especially when they're young, to help them develop some of the personal and civic virtues needed for self-government. It's not that I want my kids to make careers of picking tomatoes; Mexican farmworkers don't want that either. But we must inculcate in our children, especially those likely to go on to high-paying occupations, that there is no such thing as work that is beneath them.

As Tocqueville wrote: "In the United States professions are more or less laborious, more or less profitable; but they are never either high or low: every honest calling is honorable." The farther we move from that notion, the closer we come to the idea that the lawyer is somehow better than the parking-lot attendant, undercutting the very foundation of republican government.

This is why the president's "willing worker/willing employer" immigration extravaganza is morally wrong — it's not just that it will cost taxpayers untold billions, or that it will beggar our own blue-collar workers, or that it will compromise security, or that it will further dissolve our sovereignty. It would do all that, of course, but most importantly it would change the very nature of our society for the worse, creating whole occupations deemed to be unfit for respectable Americans, for which little brown people have to be imported from abroad. In other words, mass immigration, even now, is moving us toward an unequal, master-servant society.

To borrow from Lincoln, our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. When it comes to this, I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty — to Saudi Arabia, for instance."

Posted by: PA on February 9, 2007 11:39 AM

I think the motivations of the elite might be a bit different. Paul Krugman pointed out, in a discussion of social security, that (1) the long term returns from investing in the stock market are likely to fall (2) because, in part the stock market is tied to the overall growth of the economy, and (3) the growth of the economy is significantly tied to the growth of the population. That is, slow population growth=slow economic growth=slow rise in S&P 500 index. (I can't find Krugman's original remarks, but here is the URL of a paper he wrote along with Dean Baker and Brad DeLong on the topic: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/BDK-BPEA.pdf)

I immediately thought: Hmmmmm...do you suppose that's the reason certain elements of the elite are so pro-immigration? We need more babies to keep GNP numbers going up?

I kinda think there's something to this.

Posted by: Friedrich von Blowhard on February 9, 2007 12:37 PM

Sometimes I think we should just give in. Dissolve the borders, outsource everything we can, sell Treasury Bonds like crack cocaine to zany furriners, and see how long we can get away with it ...

Posted by: Michael Blowhard on February 9, 2007 1:03 PM

To MBlowhard: We've essentially been getting away with it for 25 years already.

But to your article: I found it amusing that Latina teens are 3.5 times more likely than white teens to get pregnant in Arizona. So maybe they get pregnant at the same rate, but more Latinas travel to Arizona to make it happen? Is it the desert air? Something about Arizona. It appears that something is dangling in that sentence. I think it would have been clearer if the author had said: "In Arizona, Latina teens are 3.5 times more likely to get pregnant than whites."

Posted by: annette on February 9, 2007 1:14 PM

I just read a quote from Lily Tomlin: "No matter how paranoid you get, it's impossible to keep up."

This posting is about a recent news story that may offer another clue about what's going down.

Posted by: Rick Darby on February 9, 2007 1:40 PM

Yes Michael, they are the ravings of paranoid maniacs.

I specially liked the bit that called the peso a "dollar-like currency". (Not true; the Mexicans even have red, purple and blue bills!)

Anyway, I'm sending your post to the producers form the Colbert Report. This is mana from heaven to them.

Posted by: Andrew on February 9, 2007 2:04 PM

Why sure, its just a bunch of BS!

The really sane people know that our country is only run by representative government, and that the best, most meritorious get in office. Businesses and foreign interests only lobby for the good of the American people, and pay large sums of money to do so. Conspiracies don't exist, even though they occur all the time in military and intelligence activities, which have tens of millions of classified documents and black budgets, and the threat of trials and imprisonment if anyone breaks the silence, not to mention collusions in the finance industry, corporations in price fixing, corporate espionage, etc. Yep, all the big guys tell us everything. That's very much like human nature. See, people scratch and claw their way to the top not so that they can get what they want, but so that they can serve others. Of course, its all done for the good of the American voters and consumers, you understand, half of whom don't bother to vote and all but 4 or 5% only worry about politics about a month or two before the election. That's why the politicians cater to the american people so much, because we pay huge amounts of taxes and don't really bother them. Wouldn't you cater to people who gave you lots of money and then asked to be left alone? Probably. You have a true and golden heart, like all the politicians. There are no secrets. You know everything there is to know!

Yep. you'll say its all a conspiracy until it happens. Of course, the politicians will try to hide it by keeping titles and other non-essentials nominally separate. But the borders will be wide open on the north and south, we will have a common currency, and mexican and canadian officials will suspiciously be "consulted" often in our "nation's" (?) capitol. I mean, if you have a security partnership (common defense), prosperity partnership (common currency, trade policies, and "governments" working to standardize laws), I guess you could say that, for all intents and purposes, we are one country. But nominally that will not be the case. Practically it will, but some love to live in the land of theory and know-it-all-ism. Far superior are they intellectually to those who fear overwhelming and largely unaccountable power, because it may work for its own advantage while trampling them like ants. There are no historical precendents like that. Only the really smart know that all great power is truly selfless and servile to the common man.

Sheesh, the next thing you'll be telling me about is how evil the Federal Reserve is. We all know what a bunch of conspiratorial crap that is. I mean, its perfectly logical that a government that has the power to print its own money should be 10 trillion dollars in debt! See, that's how it all works. Just imagine if you could print all the money you wanted, how far into debt you would be! Its all just conspiracy theory nonsense!

Posted by: BIOH on February 9, 2007 5:56 PM

This quote makes it sound like Latina girls get pregnant at a higher rate because of some essential component of their genome. More likely it's because of the subculture they must live in so they can be in the US -- many adult men without families, not enough privacy, no access to contraceptives, etc. in addition to just flat plain poverty. As soon as these girls have the same protections and privileges as mainstream girls, their fertility rate will be the same as mainstream girls.

Anyway, Canada is determined to keep the Yankee riff-raff out except for essential services and proper citizenship protocol. On the other hand, they are obliged by membership in the British Empire to grant citizenship to people from anywhere else in that Empire: Africa, Asia, etc. Of course, they don't call it an Empire now.

Prairie Mary

Posted by: Mary Scriver on February 9, 2007 6:22 PM

"On the other hand, they are obliged by membership in the British Empire to grant citizenship to people from anywhere else in that Empire: Africa, Asia, etc. Of course, they don't call it an Empire now."

As far as I know, there's no Commonwealth preference in immigration any more, more's the pity.

Posted by: Intellectual Pariah on February 10, 2007 6:10 AM