Texas Trying To Save 'NAFTA Superhighway'?

The imperial dream of the US ruling class, of a Greater Amerika standing astride the entire North Amerikan Continent, its markets and resources, with its own internal "Lebensraum" pressures building, naturally continues to flicker as a flame even after its practical possibility has already passed. Amerika is an Empire on the wane already, and the whole world already knows it, except maybe for Harper and his overly committed Con crew, who dasn't dare look the reality full in the face.

Fuck, the greater likelihood is that Amerika is going to begin to break up, and Texas along with broke California is going to slide back into the embrace of Mexico. At least as great a likelihood as this ongoing "continental" acid trip dream.

Coyote

Intersting that this article runs parallel with this one:
http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article/2359 ... ple-digits
Not only will the building of the "super highway" consume scarce resourses, but the highway cannot be used without the continuing abundance of cheap fuel.

I've read this guy before. If he is anywhere near right, as I think he is, the "recovery" is of greatest likelihood to quickly tank back into collapse. It poses a serious quandry that imposes severe limits on any further "major" capitalist expansion, and may even be its "end limit" development possibility.

Here is a guy who supports capitalism, who nonetheless is managing to remain objective about what is going down around one the other major issue across from the "class issue" that is about to explode on the system, and that is the growing "environmental collapse" issue. They are both shoes getting ready to drop here, as the economic crises deepens on the one hand, and the hoped for direction of recovery around cheap energy begins to unravel as well.

Without a major social and economic change that irrevocably alters, even revolutionizes and begins to move human society outside the constraints of capitalism, we may well be about to live through "interesting times' in a whole lot even more scarier possibility way.

The Three Horsemen, it would seem, have already begun their ride, yet one more time around the globe.

Coyote

My wife and I have crossed Canada, from Montreal to Vancouver,in 1955 by motorcycle in 4 weeks, long before the the Trans Canada Hwy was built, much of it on gravel roads.

For all practical purposes, there was very little cross country traffic, but local industries were popping up and growing in leaps and bounds every day, by the hundreds, people had well paying jobs, one breadwinner per family was enough, and most of Canada was still owned by Canadians, instead by the multinational corporate mafia, the biggest crooks in history.

So, what have we gained with this "globalization", "free trade" BS? Homelessness, incomes dropped by 50 to 70%, the world's economy is owned and controlled by a few of the biggest criminals, the environment is going downhill and the hospitals are jammed with people, poisoned by thousands of chemicals in the air water and all the foods thrown at us.

The purpose of this NAFTA Hwy is total enslavement through incompetence and the resulting enforced reliance on our "betters", who are even now stealing our eyes out.

Ed Deak.

Thanks for that little gem, Ed! It nicely sums up the corporate mentality......

I joined the navy the year after your motorcycle ride. Damn I remember the feel and character of that time, which you captured pretty damned well in a few lines. From there, we have way more people and whacks more stuff, but in my sense of what has gone down, the quality of life and the environment have steadily tanked. It would have been better really, and sure as hell no worse, if the Natives had been able to continue to hold onto the country and influence the direction of development.



We didn't know it at the time of course, but relatively, the fifties were a sweet, innocent time really. And no, I don't advocate going back, for they were not good times in lots of ways as well. It's just that what has tended to pass for progress over the years, really, at its fundamental core, has not been, certainly not for the land-, which now gets called the environment.

But indeed, well said Fait.

Coyote

If I may add a couple of cents to the esteemed RickW's Fiat's and Coyote's dollars:

T. Boone Pickens, the 81 year-old Texas oil and gas billionaire now extolling the virtues of the NA windpower corridor, said about one month ago that he didn't consider the 770 members of the Calgary business community constituting his audience as "foreign". To my way of thinking, ever since oil hit it big in Alberta, the US oil corporations (Texans basically) have always considered Canadian oil as theirs. If one goes to Calgary, one sees a city that looks and feels little different than the other two ugly mid-continent oil centres: Dallas and Denver. The continuing mindset of Kline and subsequent chronies grew out of their suckling of corporate Texas oil teats.

http://www.oilweek.com/news.asp?ID=23158

From a purely greed-filled short-term economic gain perspective, their plans make sense. A north-south super railway/energy corridor even makes sense if agricultural/silvacultural (flora and fauna) and the energy production from the centre of the continent went to feeding/supporting other nations/peoples that find themselves experiencing hardship. The gulf of Mexico is a warm-water port that is relatively storm free in the winter months. Of course, its designers want the corridor for the subjugation and exploitation of Fiat Lux's "scarce resources" which includes the energy consumed by the workers being exploited. Even now, 95% of the food products in NA markets is soy, wheat and corn dependent. Monsanto will truly use and grow ever more powerful with this corridor.

SIG

I agree entirely, SharingIsGood.

And let's face it, from a purely market, money making for wealthy shareholder's, beholden to no country or peoples perspective, the NAFTA and all its off-shoot developments make total sense, I have no doubt. Villains are not irrational people. Indeed, they are often, the successful ones, supremely rational at the pursuit of their own interests. And part of that rationality invariably involves, of course, an attractive enough carrot, held out just far enough from Old Dobbin, to keep him behaving and moving forward. (Old Dobbin is always hungry, and a carrot is never very far away from his thoughts and desires. Usually, one pay cheque.)

You are entirely right.

Coyote

Just to throw a point in Alberta's favour, had Bay Street bothered to invest in Alberta in the 50's, and help develop it's energy resources, we wouldn't be having this conversation about north-south corridors today. But it was Yankee money that went into Alberta, as Bay Street preferred to invest outside of Canada's borders (thank you federal government assinine tax rules!).

Coyote: yea, that carrot often seems to be just close enough for Old Dobbin to get a nibble every now and then. With offers of at least 10 different credit cards a year, Dobbin sometimes stretches enough to gain a solid bite on that carrot (bought a new snow mobile or a quad) only to find that his Fridays' carrot rations continually seem smaller. Oh, what the hell! It's Friday, and Dobbin doesn't want to think about it, he's worked hard, he deserves a bit of a piss-up with the boys: "Everybody, a round of drinks on Ole Dobbin, here!" YeeHaw! "An, let me at some of those pull-tabs!"


Excellent point, RickW.
The Bay Street boys were fools for letting the oil get away. Weren't (and aren't) the Bay Street boys "old money" boys with roots in England, by and large. They didn't really want to get their hands dirty nor have to learn the oil business from the rough and tumble roughneck kinda guys. They would have had to do business with guys like T. Boone Pickens, for heaven's sake! In my younger days, I worked in the oil fields - for Halliburton of all things! It was not a buisiness for babies. Even at the top one had to get out into the mud. Donny Halliburton, himself, walked up to me while I was calf high in drilling mud and asked if I wanted to go to Saudi with a new oil and gas well fracture division he was putting together. Yeah, the oil business was no place for corporate weenies. The men in the field wouldn't have it. As far back as the 60s and 70s, Halliburton did have one thing right, the biggest carrot of all: corporate profit-sharing (non voting shares, of course) for all employees that accrue from the time they join the company. All shares earned for the first 5 years are forfeited if you quit the company. Had I stayed with the company, they would have made me a millionaire several times over by now, if I lived though it. They worked me an average of 15 hours per day, 12 days on and 2 off for my few months with them. I imagine I would have ended up a shallow Dick Cheney sorta' somebody: shudder, shudder. The Bay Street boys, having come out of their prep schools and academies would not have fit in with that bunch. For the Bay Streeters to deal with raw resources, it was far better to exploit some less-educated peoples in other parts of the world - places where the boss flies in, wears white, never gets dirty. Places where the boss sends engineers into the field to act as intermediaries with the hired help.

What I fail to unerstand is how the "newbie" Bay Streeters, such as the Bronfmans let oil get away. Sam Bronfman ran booze to the States, so he couldn't have been a weenie. Why didn't he invest in Alberta oil?
http://esask.uregina.ca/entry/bronfman_family.html

I dunno, I'll never be able to speak for him. My hunch is that he probably had easier fish to fry. CPR was in bed with Standard Oil of New Jersy (and it's affiliates). They had mutual back-scratching agreements in place. The learning curve and strong arms needed to take on those American oil boys was probably more than he had time for. The oil industry has always had a high degree of intrigue and murder - even genocide. Recent history shows that one need only look at Vietnam, Iraq, Sudan, and Nigeria to know that this is so. Perhaps Bronfman was more interested in supplying the oil field workers with booze . When one is gaining wealth, there are only so many directions one can place resources.

To stop the Americans, The Old Boys Club on Bay Street could have pressured for legislation to make oil a resource available only for Canadian firms to exploit. This is where the ball was dropped. But oil was not a traditional family business for the Bay Streeters; they merely had to expand what they were already controlling in Canada. My take still is that oil is (and was) bloodsport and the know-how would have had to have been imported from those violent and uncouth Texans.

Follow the link above and we see just how powerful the US oil industry is. If they really want that NA corridor, they are going to get it. I certainly will not stop them.

Can't have been any worse than organized crime around prohibition. But maybe you are right in that money only goes so many places......