Ford Plan in Mexico

FORD PLAN IN MEXICO

Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, everyone knows that America is losing its independence as goods that used to be made here are displaced by foreign imports. In fact, America is in unchartered waters today. We have an accumulated trade deficit of nearly $1 trillion a year.

Today, I want to talk a little bit about super NAFTA and what the Bush administration is planning to lock NAFTA in even tighter in this country and across the continent.

There is something called the Agreement on Security and Prosperity that is being negotiated by the Bush administration very quietly. No hearings are being held in this Congress. Most Americans have never even heard the term, but it really is the successor to NAFTA.

In addition to what it anticipates in terms of a new transportation corridor that will come up through Mexico and the American highway into the United States, it also includes the incentives to major corporations, such as Ford Corporation of our country that is laying off people in our country, now an additional 30,000 jobs to be lost here in the United States, and Ford is planning to employed over 150,000 more workers in Mexico, announcing it will be investing over $9.2 billion in Mexico.

It is hard to explain to the American people how big that investment really is, but truly it will employ 15 percent or 1 of 7 of all unemployed people in Mexico, so many of them having been uprooted from their farmsteads, because NAFTA included no transition provisions to allow people to have a life and to survive inside of Mexico's rural areas, and over 2 million families have been uprooted from Mexico's farm communities and are doing what, they are moving north to eat.

At the heart of our illegal immigration problem is NAFTA's disruption of the Mexican countryside.

But in any case, this Security and Prosperity Agreement, as it is being called, has no democratic underpinning to it. It is being negotiated by the very same elites that negotiated NAFTA.

And let's look at some of the signs of what is happening. It is suddenly clearer why a company from Spain called Cintra wants to be the gatekeeper on this new highway structure to manage the flow of goods from Mexico, including the hundreds of thousands of vehicles that Ford Motor intends to manufacture in Mexico after making its $9.2 billion investment there.

Cintra is a subsidiary of Ferrovial, the Spanish transportation company founded by multi-billionaire Rafael del Pino, who is one of the richest people in the world.

Cintra already operates the Chicago Skyway, one of the nodes along the way here under a 99-year concession, and is planning development of the Trans-Texas Corridor, which is another part of this plan.

Cintra is a 50/50 partner with Macquarie Infrastructure Group an Australian investment bank in another place in America called Indiana, where the Indiana Turnpike, can you believe this, has been leased to a foreign interest. And we are told that Ohio, the State that I represent, might be the next State to unwisely rent one of its major assets to a foreign nation.

Human Events magazine recently had this description. It said, ``The North American Super Corridor Coalition is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to developing this international, integrated multimodal transportation system along the international midcontinent trade and transportation corridor.''

Where does that sentence say anything about the United States?

Still, this group has received $2.5 million in earmarks from the U.S. Department of Transportation to plan this NAFTA superhighway as a 10-lane, limited-access road, plus passenger and freight rail lines running alongside pipelines originally laid for oil and natural gas.

One glance at the map of the NAFTA superhighway on the front page of NASCO's Website will make clear that the design is to connect Mexico, Canada and the United States into one transportation system. But guess what is going to happen? If you look at what is going on in Mexico, guess where Mexico is getting most of the parts to put into their production? Not from the United States. They are getting them from China. In fact, a lot of production in Mexico has been moved to China.

So imagine this: Huge container ships continuing to come in from China and Asia, hitting up against ports like Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico, where the workforce earns almost nothing, and the major ports in our country of Los Angeles, of Oakland, all along the west coast, I just wish we were shipping goods out. But right now our longshoremen and our dock workers are loading and unloading containers in the United States.

But you can go around the United States. You can bring in that massive set of shipments from Asia through Mexico and up into the United States.

And imagine if this corridor is then leased, leased to foreign interests who then charge tolls and become familiar with the transportation systems of the United States.

This is the heart of America. This can displace every other major transportation system that we have if this is locked in piece by piece, and we have plenty of evidence that that is exactly what is going on already as an underpinning to this agreement that is being called security and prosperity.

My question is, how much democracy will that agreement actually have in it? Will it be prosperity for all, or just for people who are rich enough to own global companies, like Cintra, that will invest anywhere, don't know the people in our communities, frankly don't care, and are willing to move production anywhere?

The people of the United States had better wake up. We'd better ask ourselves why are Americans having to work so hard for less? Why is it more expensive for them to send their children to college, and then those kids graduate with huge debts? Why isn't your pension plan secure? Why are you having to pay so much more for health care? Why is not your retirement benefit there forever?

Because these kinds of interests don't want you to have it because they are so filthy rich off the investments they are making globally. They don't care about you, they don't care about this country, they don't care about where you come from, and, my friends, they don't care about democracy.

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