Selling the US Down the Rio Grande - by George W. Bush

Greg Palast said it was a secret. Not quite or at least not all of it was a secret.

The North American Leaders' Summit met yesterday in New Orleans for the fourth and final time. Ben Feller of the Associated Press wrote an innocuous article about it saying that Bush intended to be "trumpeting trade over the 'scare tactics' of economic isolation."

Remember the first rule when Bush says something: Don't believe it!

The summit was planned for New Orleans two years ago, says Palast. It "was meant to showcase the rebuilt Big Easy, a monument to can-do Bush-o-nomics. Well, it is a monument to Bush's leadership: The city still looks like Dresden 1946, with over half the original residents living in toxic trailers or wandering lost and broke in America."

But that's not the focus of the real story Palast has to tell. This meeting was kept under wraps until the last moment because it was "ordered" by what Palast calls "The North American Competitiveness Council." He's really talking about the head honchos of such companies as "Wal-Mart, Chevron Oil, Lockheed-Martin and 27 other multinational masters of the corporate universe."

So, at the behest of these powerful executives, the leaders of the United States, Canada and Mexico gathered in New Orleans to find out the desires of their corporate masters in order to better serve them. The main wish of the big bosses is "harmonization," says Palast. That means "making rules and regulations the same in all three countries. Or, more specifically, watering down rules -- on health, safety, labor rights, oil drilling, polluting and so on - in other words, any regulations that get between the Council members and their profits."

Palast uses the example of pesticides. Wal-Mart and agri-businesses don't want to reduce the amount of poison they use on the food they grow so the honchos "harmonize" U.S. and Canadian pesticide standards to meet Mexico's standards. Hah!


The expectation is that when the three national leaders meet privately with their corporate bosses, they will "expand the 'NAFTA highway,'" ... which "some fear ... will allow a new flood of cheap Mexican products into the US and Canada."

That's not it, says Palast. "Their hunger to expand the NAFTA highway is to bring in even cheaper Chinese goods."


The most fearsome thing about all of this is not merely the secrecy but the fact that our lives are being manipulated in every which direction and we don't even know. All we see is the result: a tanking economy, global warming, American jobs exported all over the world, inflation, sky-high oil prices, etc., etc.

As Palast says, "...there is no United States of America nor Canada nor Mexico - at least as we like to imagine ourselves in our national fairy tales: self-governing democracies run by we the people or nosotros el pueblo. There's just the diktats of the North American Prosperity Council. Get used to it.


Palast has much more to say and you can read the entire essay here.