Oh wait...we don't get to vote on shit that actually affects our lives. And, instead of being outraged, the Canadian political blogosphere would rather engage in jerk off sessions over poll numbers and other minutia...I imagine it helps to distract from their relatively impotent lives...
Anyway, here are a few excerpts from what I found to be a good article on the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP):
Dubbed “NAFTA Plus” by pundits in the popular press, the SPP is the continuing expansion of free-trade policies that were consolidated under NAFTA ten years earlier. The winners and losers of this ongoing trilateral power alliance remain the same big capital in the North continues to expand its power at the expense of workers, their communities, and the environment in both the North and the South.
The U.S. is geographically, economically and politically the centre of this alliance, but the ruling classes of Canada and Mexico are willing partners in the plunder of the South. The current political strategy of big capital is to maintain power by extracting more profits than ever through the manipulation of various trade arrangements. To accomplish this goal, capitalists operate internationally, cementing cooperation between the ruling classes while pitting the working people of the three nations against one another through various offshoring and importing schemes.
The NAFTA corridor system is the backbone of the North American alliance of capitalism. A close look at the infrastructure of the NAFTA corridors exposes the long-range strategy of the trilateral partnership.
The Infrastructure
The North American SuperCorridor Coalition (NASCO) is a public facade of the trilateral trade alliance. On its website is a map of the NAFTA corridors with arrows radiating out from the heartland of the U.S. through Canada and Mexico, implying net export activities and prosperity for all three countries. The reality of NAFTA economics, however, is the predominance of imports of both goods and people from the South for consumption and service in the North.
...
The Traffic
The NAFTA corridor network is without a doubt the biggest surface transportation project in the history of North America. The economic and political significance of the project is not only in its size, however, but also in its ultimate purpose. The intended function of this extensive infrastructure can only be understood by looking at the traffic of both goods and people that the corridors are designed to carry.
The People. The passenger-vehicle lanes and commuter rail lines in the NAFTA supercorridors will accommodate all manner of intra- and inter-state travelers, but, under the authority of the SPP, a large proportion of the human traffic will be the millions of transient servants recruited in Mexico and Central America to work in the North under the guest-worker programs that are pending in the U.S. and Canada. (For an analysis of the U.S. guest-worker program introduced in the U.S. Congress in 2006 and currently under consideration, see my article “Transient Servitude: The U.S. Guest Worker Program for Exploiting Mexican and Central American Workers,” Monthly Review, January, 2007.)
To understand the impact of the guest-worker programs being promoted by the trilateral alliance, it must be kept in mind that they are not like the agricultural guest-worker programs of the past. Under the new programs, workers from the South will be admitted with non-sector-specific visas, and will be available to all industries in the North. The demand for this cheap labour will create unprecedented human traffic on the NAFTA corridors.
...The Impact
The impact of the SPP, as an extension of the free-trade policies established by NAFTA and manifested in the developing NAFTA transportation infrastructure, is reflected in the tag of NAFTA Plus: It will add to and intensify the problems created by NAFTA in both North and South.
The primary impact of the SPP scheme on working people in the North will be job-related. The trend of offshoring work from the North to the South and beyond to the far-eastern Pacific Rim will increase and continue to undercut the value of native labour as it has under NAFTA; the mass influx of Mexican and Central American workers under the terms of transient servitude that will accompany any North American guest-worker programs under NAFTA Plus will reduce the value of labour in the North to unprecedented lows.
OK. Forgive my splicing job with that article...
Links:
'Sharing the Plunder of the South: The NAFTA Corridors and Canada' by Richard D. Vogel via Canadian Dimension
Nation-wide protests against the SPP are planned for this coming weekend.
The Calgary protest is being held Sunday, August 19 between 12:00 and 1:30 p.m. at city hall. More on the SPP protest via Facebook
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