by Jerome R. Corsi
June 19, 2006
The Bush Administration is pushing to create a North American
Union out of the work on-going in the Department of Commerce under the Security
and Prosperity Partnership of North America in the
NAFTA office headed by Geri Word. A key part of the plan is to expand the NAFTA
tribunals into a North American Union court system that would have supremacy
over all U.S. law, even over the U.S. Supreme Court, in any matter related to
the trilateral political and economic integration of the United States, Canada
and Mexico.
Right now, Chapter
11 of the NAFTA agreement allows a private NAFTA
foreign investor to sue the U.S. government if the investor believes a state or
federal law damages the investor’s NAFTA business.
Under Chapter 11, NAFTA establishes a tribunal that conducts a behind
closed-doors “trial” to decide the case according to the legal principals
established by either the World Bank’s International Centre for the Settlement
of Investment Disputes or the UN’s Commission for International Trade Law. If
the decision is adverse to the U.S., the NAFTA tribunal can impose its decision
as final, trumping U.S. law, even as decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. U.S.
laws can be effectively overturned and the NAFTA Chapter 11 tribunal can impose
millions or billions of dollars in fines on the U.S. government, to be paid
ultimately by the U.S. taxpayer.
On Aug. 9, 2005, a three-member NAFTA
tribunal dismissed a $970 million claim filed by
Methanex Corp., a Canadian methanol producer challenging California laws that
regulate against the gasoline additive MTBE. The additive MTBE was introduced
into gasoline to reduce air pollution from motor vehicle emissions. California
regulations restricted the use of MTBE after the additive was found to
contaminate drinking water and produce a health hazard. Had the case been
decided differently, California’s MTBE regulations would have been overturned
and U.S. taxpayers forced to pay Methanex millions in damages.
While this case was decided favorably to U.S. laws, we can rest assured that
sooner or later a U.S. law will be overruled by the NAFTA Chapter 11
adjudicative procedure, as long as the determinant law adjudicated by the NAFTA
Chapter 11 tribunals continues to derive from World Court or UN law. Once a
North American Union court structure is in place can almost certainly predict
that a 2nd Amendment challenge to the right to bear arms is as inevitable under
a North American Union court structure as is a challenge to our 1st Amendment
free speech laws. Citizens of both Canada and Mexico cannot freely own firearms.
Nor can Canadians or Mexicans speak out freely without worrying about “hate
crimes” legislation or other political restrictions on what they may choose to
say.
Like it or not, NAFTA Chapter 11 tribunals already empower foreign NAFTA
investors and corporations to challenge the sovereignty of U.S. law in the
United States. Sen. John Kerry (D.-Mass.) has been quoted
as saying, “When we debated NAFTA, not a single word
was uttered in discussing Chapter 11. Why? Because we didn’t know how this
provision would play out. No one really knew just how high the stakes would
get.” Again, we have abundant proof that Congress is unbelievably lax when it
comes to something as fundamental as reading or understanding the complex laws
our elected legislators typically pass.
Under the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) plan expressed in May 2005 for
building NAFTA into a North American Union, the stakes are about to get even
higher. A task force report titled “Building
a North American Community” was written to provide a
blueprint for the Security
and Prosperity Partnership of North America agreement
signed by President Bush in his meeting with President Fox and Canada’s
then-Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Tex., on March 23, 2005.
The CFR plan clearly calls for the establishment of a “permanent tribunal for
North American dispute resolution” as part of the new regional North American
Union (NAU) governmental structure that is proposed to go into place in 2010. As
the CFR report details on page 22:
The current NAFTA dispute-resolution process is founded on ad hoc panels that are not capable of building institutional memory or establishing precedent, may be subject to conflicts of interest, and are appointed by authorities who may have an incentive to delay a given proceeding. As demonstrated by the efficiency of the World Trade Organization (WTO) appeal process, a permanent tribunal would likely encourage faster, more consistent and more predictable resolution of disputes. In addition, there is a need to review the workings of NAFTA’s dispute-settlement mechanism to make it more efficient, transparent, and effective.
Robert Pastor of American University, the vice chairman of the
CFR task force report, provided much of the intellectual justification for the
formation of the North American Union. He has repeatedly argued for the creation
of a North American Union “Permanent Tribunal on Trade and Investment.”
Pastor understands that a “permanent court would permit the accumulation of
precedent and lay the groundwork for North American business law.” Notice,
Pastor says nothing about U.S. business law or the U.S. Supreme Court. In the
view of the globalists pushing toward the formation of the North American Union,
the U.S. is a partisan nation-state whose limitations of economic protectionism
and provincial self-interest are outdated and as such must be transcended, even
if the price involves sacrificing U.S. national sovereignty.
When it comes to the question of illegal immigrants, Pastor’s solution is to
erase our borders with Mexico and Canada so we can issue North American Union
passports to all citizens. In his testimony
to the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere of the U.S. Senate Foreign
Relations Committee on June 9, 2005, Pastor made this
exact argument: “Instead of stopping North Americans on the borders, we ought
to provide them with a secure, biometric Border Pass that would ease transit
across the border like an E-Z pass permits our cars to speed though toll
booths.”
Even Pastor worries about the potential for North American Unions to overturn
U.S. laws that he likes. Regarding environmental laws, Pastor’s
testimony to the Trilateral Commission in November
2002 was clear on this point: “Some narrowing or clarification of the scope of
Chapter 11 panels on foreign investment is also needed to permit the erosion of
environmental rules.” Evidently it did not occur to Pastor that the way to
achieve the protection he sought was to leave the sovereignty of U.S. and the
supremacy of the U.S. Supreme Court intact.
The executive branch under the Bush Administration is quietly putting in place a
behind-the-scenes trilateral regulatory scheme, evidently without any direct
congressional input, that should provide the rules by which any NAFTA or NAU
court would examine when adjudicating NAU trade disputes. The June 2005 report
by the SPP working groups organized in the U.S. Department of Commerce, clearly
states the goal:
We will develop a trilateral Regulatory Cooperative Framework by 2007 to support and enhance existing, as well as encourage new cooperation among regulators, including at the outset of the regulatory process.
We wonder if the Bush Administration intends to present the Trilateral Regulatory Cooperative Framework now being constructed by SPP.gov to Congress for review in 2007, or will the administration simply continue along the path of knitting together the new NAU regional governmental structure behind closed doors by executive fiat? Ms. Word affirms that the membership of the various SPP working group committees has not been published. Nor have the many memorandums of understanding and other trilateral agreements created by these SPP working groups been published, not even on the Internet.