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Stop "NAFTA Plus" by Repealing NAFTA
by John F. McManus
November 27, 2006
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A growing number of Americans have already been alerted about plans to create a North American Union (NAU), merging the United States, Mexico, and Canada. While news of this monstrous betrayal has yet to reach most fellow citizens, widespread awareness about the enormous harm caused by NAFTA already exists. Closed factories, lost jobs, more open borders, even judicial panels overruling U.S. court decisions are NAFTA's legacy. Now, the newly crafted NAU, rightly dubbed "NAFTA Plus," is being steered toward enactment by some of the very same people who gave us NAFTA in the first place.

The impetus for U.S. entry into NAFTA began during the Reagan administration (1981-1989) when determined internationalist George W. Shultz served as secretary of state. In the late 1980s, with Shultz's eager concurrence, Mr. Reagan and his Canadian counterpart signed a Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement. To serve as his negotiator for trade matters, President George H.W. Bush named Carla A. Hills U.S. trade representative. In that post, she became the primary overseer and promoter of the NAFTA pact. Ms. Hills is a proud member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

During the campaign to persuade Congress to approve NAFTA, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, along with Shultz a proud internationalist and prominent CFR member, authored a newspaper column in which he resoundingly supported everything about NAFTA. "It will represent the most creative step toward a new world order taken by any group of countries since the end of the Cold War," he wrote, "and the first step toward the even larger version of a free-trade zone for the entire Western Hemisphere." (Emphasis added.) That kind of endorsement should have been enough for members of Congress to reject the idea, but they approved the measure and, in so doing, moved our nation a giant step toward immersion into regional and then global governance — government run by unelected elitists like those of the European Union — that is euphemistically known as the "new world order."

Fast forward now to 2006 when we find George Shultz and Carla Hills among numerous U.S. internationalists at a highly secret September 12-14 gathering of U.S., Canadian, and Mexican heavyweights. Their goal? To promote the creation of the North American Union. These would-be world rulers met at the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel in Alberta, Canada. No press was allowed at what was labeled for participants the "North American Forum." The Canada West Foundation and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, a group patterned after our nation's Council on Foreign Relations, hosted the event. But Canadian author and politician Mel Hurtig happened to be invited, and he blew the whistle after discovering the group's plans for "the integration of Canada into the United States." The tight secrecy about the entire event bothered him "hugely."

Each of the participating nations sent a few dozen high-level government and corporate dignitaries. Subject matter covered during the three days included energy, security, border infrastructure, and the demographic and social dimensions of merging the three nations. Obviously, these planners haven't left much out of their designs. Defending national independence wasn't on the agenda.

In addition to Shultz and Hills, the U.S. delegation featured Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Other U.S. participants included former Energy Secretary James Schlesinger; former CIA Director James Woolsey; former Defense Secretary William Perry; Wall Street Journal columnist Mary Anastasia O'Grady; the ever-present Robert Pastor whose 2002 Toward a North American Community served as a launching pad for the NAU; and Admiral Tim Keating, who leads the U.S. Northern Command.

It will now be a bit more difficult for President Bush to downplay the importance of the Security and Prosperity Partnership with Canada and Mexico, which he says is merely to increase trade and promote national security. After attending this gathering, Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon informed an Ottawa audience that the North American Forum was a "parallel structure to the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America."

So here we have some of the important NAFTA builders working to expand their destructive creation into a carbon copy of the European Union that is already dominant over 25 once-independent countries. Very few members of Congress have even heard about this treachery. As we have shown, it started with NAFTA, and is expected to become a North American Union, then an expanded union of the entire Western Hemisphere, and finally a union of all countries. But an outraged American public can pressure Congress to pull our nation out of NAFTA, and the whole scheme would collapse like a child's house of cards.