[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 9]
[House]
[Pages 12048-12049]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                          FORD PLAN IN MEXICO

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from Ohio (Ms. Kaptur) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, everyone knows that America is losing its 
independence as goods that used to be made

[[Page 12049]]

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.

                              {time}  1615

  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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