Minimizing the SPP

I had much the same reaction to Chris Hayes' Nation article that Chet describes here. Basically, Hayes starts from the premise that because delusional right-wingers are wrong about one aspect of North American integration, they must therefore be wrong about all aspects of it. Worse still, this is probably the only time a writer for The Nation would ever uncritically reproduce a Bush Administration quote -- in order to chuckle about those simple rubes in the sticks getting all ornery about nothing.

That said, I'm sympathetic because of the role played in American writing about NAFTA and deep integration by Jerome Corsi. This is the guy who helped make the word "swiftboat" a verb with regards to John Kerry, so I was already predisposed to write him off. Then, before I read about his involvement with anti-SPP activism, I saw he'd written a book about how we're not running out of oil at all, but rather there's a massive reservoir of oil at the center of the Earth, and the Russians have already tapped it so we should too. This is insanely wrong on so many levels, so I now knew the Corsi wasn't just a right-wing liar, but incredibly stupid as well. So when he started agitating about this so-called "NAFTA superhighway" I pretty much wrote it off, something I'm glad to see I was right to do.

This is an old story though: American progressives were never as agitated about NAFTA as Canadians or Mexicans were, because whatever else happens, American progressives remain American, and so it's nearly impossible to convince them (with reason) that an agreement with Canada and Mexico, those titans of the world, will threaten them. Still, it's funny that Hayes' article ran in the Nation. This is the same magazine that regularly publishes pieces about how the IMF, WTO, NAFTA, and other forms of global governance are a threat to American progressives. But none of that got in the way of publishing a piece about how much the right wing in Texas politics sure is fun to laugh at.

I don't know if there's a way for Canadians to convince American progressives that the SPP is genuinely a concern. That well's already been poisoned, and the Democratic party still belongs to the centrist wonkosphere when it comes to domestic issues -- meaning, in this case, an uncritical assumption in favour of anything labelled "free-trade".