Tuesday, April 22, 2008

SPP : Lobby-fest on the Bayou

While Harper, Bush, and Calderon mug for the cameras in the ruins of New Orleans and the North American Competiveness Council get on with the business of mugging the rest of us, here's a few words for the populist Right from Greg Palast at Tom Paine : José Can You See? Bush's Trojan Taco


"There will be other anti-SSP protesters in New Orleans as well, from America’s populist Right. They are concerned that the Security and Prosperity Summit is worse than the “NAFTA on steroids” that Barlow fears. The populists see in the SPP a nascent “North American Union,” and the elimination of the good old US of A.
They’re wrong, of course. The U.S. of A. has been long eliminated, at least economically. The Competitiveness Council is a multinational crew, with one shared set of country clubs, beach homes, art collections, union busters and lobbyists knowing no borders.

The populist radio hosts railing against the coming North American Union don’t realize that these CEOs won’t take away their flags or Fourth of July or Star-Spangled Banner. The rags and flags will always be kept around to con the schmucks along the Yahoo Belt into donating their children to the Iraq Occupation or other misadventures.


So there is no United States of America nor Canada nor Mexico - at least as we like to imagine ourselves in our national fairy tales: self-governing democracies run by we the people or nosotros el pueblo. There’s just the diktats of the North American Prosperity Council. Get used to it."

2 comments:

skdadl said...

Och, Alison, I came here for a little commiseration. I've just come from an (excellent) American site I frequent, where for two days it has been all primaries all the time. The very first mention of New Orleans I've seen appeared sometime last night, guy who had read Palast and reported it semi-wrongly, and that's it. Sigh.

So I just added my little piece on the subject, but that's at the end of a very long election thread, and I'm sure I'll be EPU'd any moment now by a new discussion. The Merkin left just does not know about this stuff, doesn't know what to do with it, and they are definitely distracted at the moment by their elections.

Sigh.

Alison said...

Where is your piece, Skdadl?

There's not a lot to report on New Orleans actually - it's mostly just an op after all - but I just read the transcript of the amigos' joint statement at the WH and it's very largely about Colombia!
Link in post above.

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