AmericanUnion.JPG

(Photo: Sign at a Ron Paul event in Ames, Iowa, August 10, 2007)

If the questions Mitt Romney receives at campaign events in Iowa are any indication, there is a great deal of concern in the state at the level of the Republican base about the possibility of America, Canada, and Mexico merging into one nation, and also about a proposed superhighway allegedly slated to run from Mexico to Canada, passing through Iowa on the way. Today, The Nation’s Christopher Hayes drills deep into the story of the NAFTA Superhighway and finds it to be a conspiracy theory of the first order — yet one that is based on real worries people have about the way multi-national corporations are increasingly invested in America’s infrastructure sector and taking advantage of globalization to avoid American labor laws and security regulations. Writes Hayes:

When completed, the highway will run from Mexico City to Toronto, slicing through the heartland like a dagger sunk into a heifer at the loins and pulled clean to the throat. 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.

And this NAFTA Superhighway, as it is called, is just the beginning, the first stage of a long, silent coup aimed at supplanting the sovereign United States with a multinational North American Union….

Prompted by angry phone calls and e-mail from their constituents, local legislators are beginning to take action. In February the Montana state legislature voted 95 to 5 for a resolution opposing “the North American Free Trade Agreement Superhighway System” as well as “any effort to implement a trinational political, government entity among the United States, Canada, and Mexico.” Similar resolutions have been introduced in eighteen other states as well as the House of Representatives, where H. Con Res. 40 has attracted, as of this writing, twenty-seven co-sponsors. Republican presidential candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire now routinely face hostile questions about the highway at candidate forums. Citing a spokesperson for the Romney campaign, the Concord Monitor reports that “the road comes up at town meetings second only to immigration policy.”

Grassroots movement exposes elite conspiracy and forces politicians to respond: It would be a heartening story but for one small detail.

There’s no such thing as a proposed NAFTA Superhighway.

Read the whole thing here.