http://www.narconews.com/Issue46/article2691.htmlThe Age of Atlantica: As Goes Mexico, so Goes the US and Canada
The End of Sovereignty and Democracy Tolls for Upstate New York, Northern New England, Quebec and the Maritime Provinces, and, Soon, for Boston and NYC Too
By Al Giordano
Special to The Narco News Bulletin
June 6, 2007
Workers and farmers in the United States and Canada have been largely kept in the dark about the tragedy unleashed on their counterparts in Mexico with the 1994 entrance of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But the same all-out screwing is about to happen to them.
An alliance of big business owners is openly plotting the economic Mexicanization of an important region of the Northeast US and Eastern Canada. They call their new world “Atlantica,” and have imposed their borders around it as if drawing a new “country” on a Risk game board. Here’s the map of “their” new country, not one founded upon democratic decisions, but with orders barked from an unelected elite of corporate flunkies whose only law is to maximize profits for the owners. Maybe you can see your house or job, or that of family members and friends, on their map:
The Mexican Experiment Moves North
The Mexican family farm (in particular, the multi-family collectively-managed ejido system, once guaranteed by the Mexican Constitution, obliterated by a single trade agreement) was the first domino to fall. Since NAFTA’s 1994 beginnings, millions of displaced farmers fled to urban centers in and outside of Mexico, and the urban population boom brought consequent rent hikes and wage dips in those cities and suburbs.
Have you heard the modern axiom about this being the first time in human history that more people lived in cities than in the countryside? Some folks repeat it as if that’s some kind of wonderful. But it’s killing the quality of life in cities along with that upon the fruited plain. Whether you live in the country or the town, if you live in or near “Atlantica,” chances are that this economic system will force your own migration in your lifetime. Think you are safe and installed for life where you are now? Start to think like a Mexican instead.
The parade of bad consequences only gets noticed in the media in El Norte through a choreographed media “debate” over one of its symptoms: the historic spike in the wave of Mexican immigrants that have entered the United States and Canada over the past 13 years. The discourse – “should the government let so many Mexicans migrate north?” – is based on an absurd premise, because they are market forces, and not governmental laws, that create the phenomenon.
All the destruction and misery that has driven millions of Mexicans from their lands – a modern-day “dustbowl of capitalism,” forcing them into a migrant labor exodus – is about to be inflicted, in the exact same way, on the peoples and lands of what the bosses call “Atlantica.” Big business is about to carve up the United States and Canada, Rollerball style: first they’ll amputate Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Upstate New York, while slicing the Maritimes off from the rest of Canada, then they’ll mash them together under a pirate flag. Even those that have dreamed of Northern New England secession a la Ecotopia will awaken from their fantasy into an authoritarian nightmare marked by political repression (as in Mexico, police forces will serve to protect the private sector from pesky protesters) and ecological disaster.
Not surprisingly, Canadians are more alert to the threat against them than their US neighbors. Labor unions (or Labour, as they say up there), environmental and other organizations are mobilizing and sounding the alarm, to the extent that Canadian newspaper columnist Ralph Surette has called Atlantica “a public relations nightmare” for “the big players, the ones with the most heft and resources – to wit, big business, the Atlantic Provinces Chamber of Commerce, and so on,” that are behind the push toward Atlantica.
Surette writes that Atlantica’s “chief barker is the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS), whose very stock-in-trade is Cold War-style rhetoric. As our own big business-funded neo-conservative outfit… (AIMS) has been one of the bunch slagging Atlantic Canada as a place of fishermen on pogey whose problems can be solved by cutting the little guy and giving it all to the big wheelers of the global economy.”
The columnist is no foe of the project. He recommends merely that Atlantica’s backers dump the polarizing AIMS group, change the name of the mega-project, “play it down and call the conference something else next year.” Given the penchant of the powerful to throw their own overboard faster than you can say “Scooter Libby,” a PR facelift and name-change for the plot may well be in the works. But the Canadian labor movement, in particular, has grabbed Atlantica by the tail and does not seem at all ready to let it drift quietly from its blueprints into reality by any name. Less impressive, though, is the silence from the same sectors on the US side of the border. During a recent lecture tour up there, your correspondent found very few labor organizers, state legislators, environmental activists or others that ought to know that had even heard of “Atlantica.”
The US Commercial Media, of course, has successfully blockaded the facts about this “public relations nightmare” from trickling south, just as it has obscured the information about what a “free trade agreement” did to Mexico, leaving the members of the gringo population generally clueless and unprepared as the bell now tolls for them.
As Mexico went, so goes “Atlantica,” but the plot doesn’t end there. According to their own battlefield map, the Atlantican owners will then advance into Southern New England, Downstate New York and the Appalachian regions of the United States, and also up the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes, Windsor, Ontario and Detroit Michigan:
And here’s another of the schemers’ maps, of how they envision products will then be shipped, by sea or seaway, from Halifax to other East Coast and Great Lakes ports:
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