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The NAFTA Superhighway

shecky

Master Poster
shecky
Joined
May 24, 2002
Messages
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I've read references from folks I'd generally consider whackos of this "NAFTA Superhighway", but never gave it much thought until I came across this link today.

It will be four football fields wide, an expansive gully of concrete, noise and exhaust, swelled with cars, trucks, trains and pipelines carrying water, wires and God knows what else. Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness. Equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation's Wal-Marts.
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Something here for nearly everyone to get paranoid about. The usual suspects are up in arms. Even Ron Paul jumped on the bandwagon. Google pulls up tons of references. (Naturally, The Onion scooped everyone.) Except there isn't really such a proposal as "The NAFTA Superhighway".

What puzzles me the most is the notion that the scenario described above is supposed to be an evil scheme. The part about "four football fields wide" sounds a little exaggerated, but really. "High-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports...nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation's Wal-Marts"? That sounds like a pretty good thing, does it not?

Furthermore, would a NAFTA Superhighway really be anything new? North America is already covered with highways. It's already quite possible to travel by truck from AK to Canada to CONUS, to Mexico DF, and beyond. Making road and regulatory improvements to facilitate even better mobility seems like a very good thing to me.
 
I'm 100 football fields from the highway, so I don't care.

Seriously, developing such a "backbone" would increase vulnerablility to attack from various internal and external malcontents. From that perspective alone I call bovine excrement.

There are already a multitude of pipeline right of way's that don't follow electrical distribution, OR transportation networks. I am not familiar with communication paths, but suspect that they'd follow one of the above 3 mentioned.

NAFTA freeway? i doubt it.
 
robinson said:
http://www.governor.state.tx.us/divisions/press/pressreleases/PressRelease.2004-12-16.5115

It is evil because it is about breaking the western ports (Union run) by shipping to Mexican ports, (cheap labor), and bypassing the Western US, moving good from China to WalMart without paying Americans wages.

Brilliant plan. Especially when you get the taxpayers to fund it.

:D
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Thank you. Anyone living in a port city on the Gulf of Mexico is having an economic pin stuck into his palm.

DR
 
http://archive.ilwu.org/solidarityday/NYTimes20021125.htm
The longshoremen's basic wage, $27.50 an hour, will rise by $3 an hour, or almost 11 percent, over six years. With premiums, night differentials and overtime added, longshoremen now earn nearly $100,000 a year on average.
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My bold.

I have a tough time feeling sorry for Western doc workers. They make double the US median income. If they would back off a little, companies would not be so eager to ship to Mexican ports. They are pricing themselves out of the market.
 
Ohmer said:
http://archive.ilwu.org/solidarityday/NYTimes20021125.htm
My bold.

I have a tough time feeling sorry for Western doc workers. They make double the US median income. If they would back off a little, companies would not be so eager to ship to Mexican ports. They are pricing themselves out of the market.
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What, you think just anyone can pull a container off a ship? If that were the case, only people connected to union honchos would get to be longshoremen! Oh, wait... :rolleyes:
 
In Mexico, you can get men to unload ships for a thousand dollars a year! And you don't need any expensive equipment either.
 
It is evil because it is about breaking the western ports (Union run) by shipping to Mexican ports, (cheap labor), and bypassing the Western US, moving good from China to WalMart without paying Americans wages.

Brilliant plan. Especially when you get the taxpayers to fund it.
Click to expand...

:biggrin: Thank you. Anyone living in a port city on the Gulf of Mexico is having an economic pin stuck into his palm.
Click to expand...

How many Western ports does the Gulf of Mexico have?
 
It may turn out to be beneficial for The Port of Houston what with I-69 running literally right through the middle of it.

Myself, I'm a little worried about it since the land I own and plan to build a house on is in the potential footprint of I-69.
 
For all the talk of Chinese imports, the U.S. still imports more dollars' worth of goods annually from Canada than it does China ($303.4 billion compared to $287.8 billion in 2006; $155.7 billion compared to $148.0 billion for the first six months of 2007).
 
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