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By Jerome R. Corsi
Arizona State University has created a new trilateral research center to advance the continuing globalist agenda to integrate the United States, Mexico and Canada into a North American configuration.
The North American Center for Transborder Studies, or NACTS, makes clear that while North American integration advocates may have backed off promoting the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America as their vehicle to create a North American Union, the globalist effort to integrate North America economically and politically continues under different names.
NACTS Director Rick Van Schoik held a press conference Feb. 10 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to appeal directly to President Obama to utilize his first foreign presidential trip, to meet with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, "to strengthen U.S. partnerships with its neighbors on challenges ranging from border security and environmental protection."
Prominent among members of the NACTS Board of Advisors is Robert A. Pastor, who for more than a decade has called for the creation of a North American Community, which would include a central bank to manage a new currency, the amero, to replace the dollar.
In the July/August 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, published by the Council on Foreign Relations, Pastor wrote an article entitled "The Future of North America," in which he declared that the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, or SPP, is "dead" in wake of exposure from sources such as WND and CNN's Lou Dobbs.
Reference to the SPP appears nowhere in NACTS documents.
At the National Press Club, Schoik unveiled a new 28-page document entitled, "North America Next: A Report to President Obama on Building Sustainable Security and Competitiveness."
In the first of a series of eight recommendations to Obama, NACTS recommended an expansion of the Merida Initiative.
WND has reported on the Merida Initiative under which the U.S. Congress, at the strong urging of the Bush administration, allocated last December a total of $197 million of the $500 million authorized, under a $1.6 billion program.
The Merida Initiative aimed to provide U.S. military assistance in the form of training and equipment to the Mexican military to help it contain the drug cartels.
NACTS second recommendation was to "energize and expand the North American Trilateral Leaders' Summit" to provide "solutions to needs throughout North America."
Under this recommendation, NACTS neglected to address whether or not the Obama administration should continue or discontinue the operation of some 30 trilateral bureaucratic working groups organized under SPP to "integrate and harmonize" U.S. laws and regulations into North American laws and regulations across a wide range of policy issues, including border security, transportation, health, energy and the environment.
NACTS recommended the creation of a "revolving fund for infrastructures in North America" in which the three nations would pool resources to "maximize the competitiveness benefit vis-à-vis Asia and Europe and jump-start our collective economic engine."
WND reported in July 2006 that Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, withdrew legislation to create a North American Investment Fund Act – a similar idea to the NACT proposal for an infrastructures fund – after WND pointed out the legislation would have put into place a key piece of Pastor's plan to create a North American Community.
In his 2001 book "Toward a North American Community," Pastor argued a North American Development Fund would advance the "North American integration" needed to produce the union as a super-regional government according to the model of the European Union.
Pastor was vice chairman of a May 2005 task force report by the Council on Foreign Relations entitled "Building a North American Community." Creating a North American Investment Fund was also a key recommendation of the CFR task force report.
The NACTS report also recommended the creation of an "effective trade and transportation plan with Canada and Mexico" as well as creating a common border crossing permit with a "single window" electronic form, a joint customs team and common U.S.-Mexican and U.S.-Canadian booths to prevent duplicative border procedures and expedite crossings.
NACTS also recommended creating a North American Greenhouse Gas Exchange to facilitate the type of "cap-and-trade" step toward a global tax the Obama administration has recommended.
This recommendation confirms NACTS has embraced global warming alarmism, as has the Obama administration, despite what WND reports is continued scientific debate on whether or not human emissions of greenhouse gases cause global warming and the new fear of "climate chaos" that recent unusually cold winters have caused anti-carbon fuel advocates to substitute as their new banner.
NACTS' "North America Next" document repeatedly argues that the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, has been responsible for massive continental job creation.
"Almost 40 million jobs were created n Canada, the U.S. and Mexico between 1993 and 2007, and today," the executive summary notes, without pointing out that the U.S. trade balances with both Mexico and Canada have become negative under NAFTA.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau's Foreign Trade Statistics, in 1993, the year President Clinton signed NAFTA into law, the U.S. enjoyed a nearly $1.7 billion favorable balance of trade with Mexico, exporting approximately $41.6 billion and importing approximately $39.9 billion.
By 2008, the trade balance had reversed, such that the U.S. had a negative $64.4 billion trade balance in Mexico's favor, after the U.S. exported approximately $151.5 billion to Mexico and imported $215.9 billion.
With Canada, the U.S. in 1993 already had a $10.7 billion negative trade balance, which had expanded to a $74.2 billion negative by the end of last year.
What these data would suggest is that the net new jobs created under NAFTA in North America are likely being created in Mexico and Canada, not in the U.S.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. manufacturing sector has lost approximately 4 million manufacturing jobs since 2000, nearly 25 percent of the total manufacturing workforce.
Partner universities for the ASU North American Center for Transborder Studies include four Mexican universities and two in Canada.
Also included on the trilateral Board of Advisors is Stephen Blank, co-director of the North American Transportation Competitiveness Research Council.
Blank has been the driving force behind the North America Works II conference held in Kansas City, Mo., Dec. 1-2, 2006. The meeting was organized by the David Rockefeller-created Council of the Americas to discuss "North American competitiveness" and the SPP.
Pastor and Blank are joined on the NACTS board by fellow North American Forum on Integration, or NAFI, board member Christine Frechette, the founding president and executive director of NAFI.
As WND has reported, NAFI conducts an annual "North American Model Parliament" in which 100 university students from the U.S., Canada and Mexico participate in an exercise in which they simulate a North American parliamentary meeting in which the students role-play North American legislators, lobbyists and journalists.
American University continues to list Pastor as on sabbatical, but the university media relations office told WND he has returned.
The NACTS Board of Advisor lists Pastor as the director of the Center for North American Studies at American University in Washington, D.C.
Yet, WND reported last year that Pastor explained in an e-mail that he had stepped down as vice president of International Affairs at American University and as director of the Center for North American Studies in the Office of International Affairs, a program he had headed since he began at American University in 2002.
Last year, WND also confirmed that American University President Neil Kerwin had decided to shut down Pastor's Office of International affairs.
The university media relations office told WND in a phone call that there is no current phone number for the Office of International Affairs.
The number the university media relations gave WND as the phone number for the Center for North American Studies was answered as "The Elders."
WND has reported that Pastor had begun working with The Elders, a conflict-resolution group of world figures, including Nelson Mandela and Jimmy Carter.
A WND e-mail to The Elders asking to determine Pastor's relation with group went unanswered.
A WND phone call to Pastor was also not immediately returned.
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