North American Union - reality or crazy conspiracy theory?

[Martin_Hyde]

@Der Trihs

Why ? From a moral perspective the rich are often scum. From a practical perspective the non-rich contribute far more to society. If the rich all dropped dead we’d survive just fine; if everyone but the rich dropped dead, the rich survivors would be utterly screwed. And from an economic perspective, healthy people produce more.

“The rich are often scum” is simply your personal, unqualified opinion. I view them as an integral part of our economy, your mileage may vary.

Assuming that’s true, so what ? We aren’t comparing America then to America now, but America to Canada. And Mexico, but even America is probably better than Mexico.

My point is, that if we’ve improved our level of medical care now it only stands to reason we will continue to do so in the future.

It is indeed; the last thing our medical industry wants is for Americans to have the option of easy, mass access to such things as Canadian medical care and drugs. And Americans have a rabid hatred of socialized anything, anyway; for that reason alone we’d destroy their medical system.

We already have mass-access to Canadian medical care, yet we haven’t destroyed their medical system yet, at least we had not the last I had checked.

Cheaper drugs that cut into American pharmacuetical companies’ profits comes to mind. IIRC there’s been various disputes over that.

Perhaps there have been such disputes, however American pharmaceutical companies and their economic interests aren’t guaranteed to govern American policy, and they haven’t governed our policy very much from what I have seen.

[Martin_Hyde]

@Kimstu

But an unqualified, blanket assertion that the mere fact of being rich automatically makes one morally deserving of better medical care? What kind of crap is that?

It’s what I call “common sense.” If I can afford to pay for a better service than you, then I should get a better service than you. The idea that medical care is some special service is ludicrous, whoever can pay the most for it should get the best care.

[Lemur866]

@sqweels

There’s a not-so-thin line between being a conspirator and being a crackpot. Speaking as a crackpot, I’ve spent a fair amount of time thinking about how groups of nations could/should be lumped together to form “regional federations”. What with Europe leading the way, Sub-saharan Africa, the Arab states, Latin America, etc, could follow at their own pace (at the time, the Soviet bloc already a de-facto superstate).

The trouble with this idea is that third world countries usually do not have the political infrastructure to allow this to happen. The oligarchies or dictatorships that run third world countries have no desire to give up their ruling positions and hand power over to some supranational body. And countries that do have some sort of decent governance certainly have no interest in handing power over to a supranational body that would be dominated by the thugs and dictators. The dictators don’t want to give up their dictatorships, the non-dictators don’t want to be ruled by dictators.

Supranational unions of equals can only occur if the countries in question have ALREADY solved the basic problems of governance. Regional federations can improve things if the countries in question are already doing well, but they certainly aren’t a method for dragging a country out of the third world. It might work if those corrupt and impoverished third world countries joined already existing unions, and the union cleaned up the third world country. So we might see many north african countries trying to join the EU. The only problem is that the EU won’t want them.

[BrainGlutton]

@Martin Hyde

It’s what I call “common sense.” If I can afford to pay for a better service than you, then I should get a better service than you. The idea that medical care is some special service is ludicrous, whoever can pay the most for it should get the best care.

There are many apt phrases for that attitude. “Common sense” is very definitely not one of them.

[Cemetery_Savior]

@Der Trihs

Try walking the streets of Baghdad, which we invaded in part for the oil companies. The rich oil companies. And the rich are in a position to screw people over without hitting them on the head, they don’t need to mug people. And if they want to use force, they use armies and police.

And I never said a word about the poor being moral, or immoral for that matter, so it doesn’t matter.

Because they already have most of the money, so even the smaller percentage they pay amounts to a lot. And you leave out all the other taxes and fees that hit the common people harder.

Do you understand the term “consumer driven economy” ? No market, no jobs. The rich are largely parasitic.

Poor and middle class people are the people who both consume and make most of what this country has. The rich mostly shuffle money around, grind people down and take the credit for what the rest of the population accomplishes; parasites. How many jobs are there that involve only the rich ? And how many of those would have any relevance if everyone but the rich vanished ?

This “the rich are all that matter” attitude is sickening, and stupid. Most people, including most of the people who idolize the rich will never, ever be rich, or even close. The rich, again and again have shown that they are at best indifferent and as a rule outright enemies of the common people, not to mention the country they reside in ( why care about America when you have offshore accounts and walled mansions with guards ? ) The rich are out to benefit the rich, and no one else. That’s the way it’s always been, that’s probably the way it’s always going to be.

I had no idea that Chuckie Dickens was still alive.

Loved your Bleak House, sir.

-Cem

[Least_Original_User_Name_Ever]

I see it coming. It’s also inevitable. There’s NAFTA, and theres the European Union. There’s even the United Kingdom, but that’s a shitty example.

I’m also torn over it. I don’t think that I’d want to see some kind of one-world government because it seems inefficient at its core and inflexible at best.

However, that does seem like the end goal we’re working towards. Maybe it won’t be a one-world government, but it might be a 4 or 5 government world.

[Least_Original_User_Name_Ever]

@E-Sabbath

I’m mostly concerned that, if it were to be done, the opportunity would come up to rewrite the Constitution.

And remove those nasty and annoying bits like freedom of speech, right to petition, and so on.

That’s a big reason that I don’t want to see a major overhaul of the tax code. I think it’d be interesting to see what a flat tax would do or even to blow up the current system and rebuild it, but enough people would get what they want into it, it might end up being “worse” than what we’ve got right now.

On a purely literary aspect, The United States had the West. No other country really has had anything like that. The West and the idea of the West and going out West is uniquely American, as is the amount of space we have. Imagine if we were able to get the West two or three more times. (but at what cost?)

[Least_Original_User_Name_Ever]

@BrainGlutton

There are many apt phrases for that attitude. “Common sense” is very definitely not one of them.

Right. It’s like we skip basic human decency and go straight for the pocketbook.

(not speaking for Mr. Hyde, but…) Hey, I’m rich! I can afford the best care and, dammit, it works pretty good for me. I see no reason why we should change the system. I can only lose out, right?

[BrainGlutton]

Update: Here is a very timely, well-researched and thorough debunking of the whole NAFTA Superhighway/North American Union set of conspiracy theories.

[Attack_from_the_3rd_dimension]

@saoirse

It’s not socialized unless it’s spread over the society. But, yes, if Medicaid and Medicare were expanded to cover the entire country, it would be socialized medicine.

The other spot in the US that uses a mini-socialized medicine model is the armed forces. Whenever I visit my military family in the US, and take my mother to the doctor, I’m amazed at how easy and efficient, even pleasant, it is to navigate the Army health care system (this is Tripler, not Walter Reed), and how much it reminds me of the health care back home in Soviet Canuckistan.

Kenghisghan

[An_Gadai]

If St. Pierre Et Miquelon seceded from France and declared independence and entered the union they might provide a bulwark against US domination of such a union.

[garius]

Yes, Her Majesty would probably be quite pleased to become monarch of the USA and Mexico.

Fuck THAT.

The American Rebellion was the best thing that ever happened to us - we really dodged a bullet there!

[BrainGlutton]

@BrainGlutton

Update: Here is a very timely, well-researched and thorough debunking of the whole NAFTA Superhighway/North American Union set of conspiracy theories.

Interesting analysis from said article:

. . . The myth of the NAFTA Superhighway persists and grows because it taps into deeply felt anxieties about the dizzying dislocations of twenty-first-century global capitalism: a nativist suspicion of Mexico’s designs on US sovereignty, a longing for national identity, the fear of terrorism and porous borders, a growing distrust of the privatizing agenda of a government happy to sell off the people’s assets to the highest bidder and a contempt for the postnational agenda of Davos-style neoliberalism. Indeed, the image of the highway, with its Chinese goods whizzing across the border borne by Mexican truckers on a privatized, foreign-operated road, is almost mundane in its plausibility. If there was a NAFTA highway, you could bet that Tom Friedman would be for it–what could be more flattening than miles of concrete paved across the continent?–and Lou Dobbs would be zealously opposed. In fact, Dobbs has devoted a segment of his show to the highway, its nonexistence notwithstanding. “These three countries moving ahead their governments without authorization from the American people, without Congressional approval,” he said. “This is as straightforward an attack on national sovereignty as there could be outside of war.”

Though the story of the highway has been seeded and watered in the fertile soil of the nationalist right wing–promoted by Birchers and Corsi, co-author of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s book about John Kerry–it also stretches across ideological and partisan lines. Like immigration and the Dubai ports deal, it divides the Republican coalition against itself, pitting the capitalists against the nationalists. And more than a few on the center-left have voiced criticisms as well: Teamsters president James Hoffa wrote in a column last year that “Bush is quietly moving forward with plans…for what’s known as a NAFTA superhighway–a combination of existing and new roads that would create a north-south corridor from Mexico to Canada… It would allow global conglomerates to capitalize by exploiting cheap labor and nonexistent work rules and avoiding potential security enhancements at U.S. ports.” Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Boyda, from eastern Kansas, invoked its specter early and often in her improbably successful 2006 campaign against Republican incumbent Jim Ryun. A campaign circular inserted in local newspapers warned that “if built, this ‘Super Corridor’ would be a quarter-mile wide and longer than the Great Wall of China.” Boyda told me that her attacks on the highway “hit a real nerve because enough people had the same concerns.”

What might at first have been a niche obsession has bled, slowly but surely, toward the mainstream. “The biggest problem of these conspiracy theorists,” says Robert Pastor, a professor of international relations at American University and a leading proponent of increased North American integration, “is that they are having an effect on the entire debate.”

Add up all the above ingredients–NASCO, SPP, Lázaro Cárdenas, the Kansas City SmartPort, the planned pilot program allowing Mexican truckers to drive on US roads–and you still don’t have a superhighway four football fields wide connecting the entire continent. Which is why understanding the persistence of the NAFTA highway legend requires spending some time in Texas, where Governor Rick Perry and his longtime consigliere, Texas Department of Transportation commissioner Ric Williamson, are proposing the $185 billion Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC), 4,000 miles of highway, rail and freight corridors, the first of which would run up from the border through the heavily populated eastern part of the state. Plans for the TTC call for it to be up to four football fields wide at points, paving over as much as half a million acres of Texas countryside. The first section will be built and operated by a foreign enterprise, and when completed it would likely be the largest privatized toll road in the country.

And unlike the NAFTA highway, the Trans-Texas Corridor is very, very real.

The article goes on to describe a grass-roots movement in Texas in opposition to the TTC – some object to the plan to charge tolls (a new thing in Texas), some fear their farmland will be taken to build the thing, and some are just nuts.