It is useful to separate fact from myth when it comes to corporate-led globalization, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and attempts to expand its scope. The facts are sufficiently disturbing!

It is true that the ten-lane, four-football-field-wide version of a raised NAFTA highway cutting through the United States is a myth, as is the notion that the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) is a glide path to a single North American nation ruled by a common government. However, the premise of this story--that the mythical versions of the NAFTA Superhighway and the SPP were "not fabricated out of whole cloth" but "sewn together from scraps of fact" taken out of context--is also not correct.

Regarding the notion of a NAFTA Superhighway, there is no one single über highway. However, in fact, a significant amount of federal transportation funding has been appropriated since NAFTA's implementation in 1994 to widen and otherwise expand several major existing highways that have been designated--often by legislators seeking the additional highway funds--as "NAFTA corridors." These include north-south routes connecting major US-Mexico border crossings and connecting highways heading into the Midwest. Funding also was allocated for a Kansas "inland port" that was to provide for US Customs clearance of goods from Mexico well within US territory. Funding has also been allocated to expand various US-Mexico border crossings. As the story notes, the Trans-Texas corridor is very real, although it is the most actuated aspect of the NAFTA corridor concept.

These expenditures were not part of a secret conspiracy but rather an open recognition that NAFTA would result in production being moved to Mexico's lower wages and a greatly increased volume of goods shipped to the US consumer market. Since NAFTA's inception, what was a balanced trade flow between the United States and Mexico has exploded into a $62 billion deficit of goods now being produced in Mexico being shipped to the United States.

Moreover, the Bush Administration has once again acted to steamroll Congress and opened all US highways to Mexican-domiciled trucks. NAFTA included a US commitment to deregulate long-haul cross-border trucking. Translated out of NAFTAese, that means allowing trucks from Mexico, where drivers are paid a fraction of US driver's wages, to travel beyond the twenty-mile border transfer zone and onto all US roads. The Clinton Administration refused to implement this aspect of NAFTA after repeated studies by the Department of Transportation's own Inspector General showed that neither Mexico's long-haul fleet nor its driver licensing and safety rules met the requirements of US law. In 2001, a NAFTA tribunal ordered the United States to open the border to NAFTA cross-border trucking services.

The Bush Administration has repeatedly tried to implement this NAFTA order, providing an Exhibit A for how "trade" agreements can flatten basic safety policy. The latest Bush Administration move is a "slippery slope" strategy, cherry-picking 100 Mexican trucking firms with the best safety records whose fleets would gain immediate access to all roads in the United States, large and small. The idea with this bogus "pilot program" is to demonstrate that Mexican-domiciled trucks are safe and thus pave the way for access by all Mexican-domiciled trucks in the future.

The Bush plan violates a 2001 Congressional mandate requiring these trucks and drivers meet US safety standards regarding hours of service, driver training and licensing and vehicle safety. Already people have been killed by NAFTA trucks plying the previously-approved twenty-mile commercial zone in the border area.

Similarly, while much has been written lately on the SPP, once again we have to keep our eyes on the real culprit--NAFTA--and think about what needs to be done to alter or sunset NAFTA. Much of what is attributed to the SPP is actually just implementation of existing NAFTA obligations. For instance, a large aspect of what sparks public concern about the SPP is harmonization of the three nations' pesticide safety, food safety and other regulatory standards. However, that regulatory race to the bottom is in fact fully authorized in the NAFTA text. Dozens of NAFTA technical working groups that predate SPP by a decade are the real driving force behind the SPP's harmonization agenda. The vast majority of these working groups are meeting behind closed doors with no consumer or citizen input. The creepy SPP energy agenda is actually based in the "proportional sharing" rules of NAFTA's energy services text.

That said, SPP does pose real threats to our neighbors in Canada and Mexico. The ways in which SPP extends beyond NAFTA's existing mandate have to do with attempts to set a North American "security" policy that would extend many of the civil liberty roll backs we have experienced at home under the Patriot Act.

Further, a real issue with SPP is the opportunity it creates for hatching bad plans--by bringing together in regular closed-door meetings away from public scrutiny the heads of North America's largest corporations and three governments that have proved to have consistently retrograde agendas.

Will the new Democratic-majority Congress put the brakes on the Bush administration's obsession with the damaging NAFTA model? Worryingly, Congress is now heading towards votes to expand the failed NAFTA model to Peru and Panama. The majority of Democrats oppose these agreements. Members of Congress need pay careful attention to these issues. Freshman Nancy Boyda (D-Kansas), whose campaign focused on one of the proposed NAFTA corridors--Interstate 35--was one of many in 2006 who defeated long-term incumbents who turned a deaf ear to citizen concerns about NAFTA trucks and unfair trade.

And now just for fun (really! not serious at all and definitely not making any comparisons between Bush and any of the Democratic candidates)...

From the Canada Post:

U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama, already under fire from fellow Democratic candidates for his supposed inexperience and unguarded comments on American foreign policy issues, is raising eyebrows again after vowing to telephone the "president of Canada" if elected to the White House to begin renegotiating terms of the NAFTA trade deal.

Of course, later in the piece they also identify a Hillary Clinton quote as said by "Mr. Clinton."

And about Bush's prime ministerial relationship:

Mr. Bush has had some trouble with the names of Canadian prime ministers as well.

During the same 2000 campaign, CBC television comedian Rick Mercer -- posing as a news reporter -- tricked Mr. Bush into accepting the endorsement of "Canadian Prime Minister Jean Poutine" during a Republican gathering in Michigan.

Mr. Bush also repeatedly referred to Prime Minister Stephen Harper as "Steve" during a joint press conference in Washington last summer.

"It surprised me a bit," Mr. Harper later acknowledged with a chuckle during a radio interview. "I'm normally called Stephen ... but a few people, close friends of my mine, do call me Steve."