Author: mopress

It is in each of our interests to find ways to work more fully together so that, in the global economy, we will be able not just to survive, but to flourish. We cannot succeed absent greater North American integration, or without more rapid Mexican development, which, as a consequence, is in our strategic interests to promote.
–from the Executive Summary of “A Compact for North American Competitiveness” (April 2005)

There is perhaps no relationship between the United States and any other nation so encumbered by history, geography, and culture—and so graced with opportunity—as the US relationship with Mexico.

Yet despite the complex nature of this relationship, or perhaps as a result of it, virtually every attempt historically to put the bilateral relationship on a sound footing for the longer term has been frustrated by missed signals, mutual provocations, and external events unrelated to a common agenda.

It was with this in mind that in the second half of the 20th century the US Council of the Mexico-US Business Committee (MEXUS), in conjunction with its counterpart Mexico Council, committed to formulating and advancing a common agenda that would be mutually rewarding for the people and governments of the United States and Mexico. Only by rationalizing the existing relationship, it was felt, would both nations be able to direct their energies toward mutually rewarding activities, rather than constantly working to overcome the latest real or perceived slight.

After all, with a shared border of almost 2000 miles, the United States and Mexico were going to
be neighbors, whether they liked it or not. The only question was whether they would also be
partners and friends.

Out of such thinking during the 1980’s came the idea for a set of common goals and principles for both governments to observe in regulating cross-border trade and investment. In just a few years this initiative resulted in the US-Mexico Framework Agreement, and then, with the addition of Canada, blossomed into the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Negotiation of NAFTA was a signature achievement of the first Bush Administration, and passage on a bipartisan basis was a signature accomplishment of the Clinton Administration. Not only did MEXUS play a
critical role in the conceptual work that led to NAFTA, its members also wore out significant shoe leather on Capitol Hill, ultimately leading to successful passage. It was an achievement of which MEXUS is justifiably proud.

But the agenda is far from complete. In fact, as much remains to be done in the next ten years of NAFTA, if not more, than the first 10 years. In particular, as China comes on line economically, MEXUS will continue to seek new and creative ways to advance the North American competitiveness dialogue.

Founded in 1948, the Mexico-US Business Committee (MEXUS) is the oldest binational private sector business organization with a focus on economic, commercial, and political relations in North America. As a forum for senior business leaders to interact regularly with their counterparts in government, MEXUS was critical in the conceptualization, promotion, passage, and emplementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement….

The US Council of MEXUS is a standing committee of the Council of the Americas, and plays an active leadership role in public policy discussions that shape North American economic relations….

Excerpts from “A Compact for North American Competitiveness: A Strategy for Building Competitiveness within North America” (April 2005)
http://www.americas-society.org/coa/publications/papers.html

Executive Summary

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The emergence of China, India, and others in the global marketplace has caused anxiety among observers, but only in relatively few instances are coordinated steps being taken to gain full economic and political advantage of this new world. That is particularly true within North America, defined as the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Since NAFTA went into effect in 1994, only rarely have North American leaders envisioned and sought the competitive benefits accruing with greater regional economic integration. To the extent such efforts have occurred, it has generally been within the context of “making
NAFTA work better.”

To be sure, NAFTA can work better, and it should, particularly in terms of the dispute resolution process. But the original trade agreement was only the first step. If North American economic integration ends with NAFTA, we will soon find ourselves at a
competitive disadvantage with Asia, because the relative gains from NAFTA have already largely been eroded by the Chinese and, to a lesser extent, Indian economic explosions.

Significant work must be done in the face of the looming competitiveness challenge from Asia. In response and consistent with the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America announced by Prime Minister Paul Martin, President George Bush, and President Vicente Fox on March 23, 2005, the US Council of the Mexico-US Business Committee proposes a Compact for North American Competitiveness as a means to address these issues.

At the heart of the Compact lies a grand bargain: the United States and Canada will work closely with Mexico to mobilize additional public and private sector resources to advance Mexico’s development. In exchange, Mexico will commit to a robust program of
second-generation reforms in regulatory harmonization, the rule of law, and infrastructure
improvements, including education, which will create conditions necessary to attract the long-term domestic and direct foreign investment that ultimately drives development.

Within this general framework, specific (non-exclusive) areas for concentration would
include border security and efficiency, energy security, and increasing labor mobility. The
Compact would have at its core the following:

• Promotion of policies in all three nations designed to unlock the full development and job creation potential of the private sector.

• Establishment of a Development Fund for Mexico, with proportional contributions from all three nations, so long as Mexico commits to implementation and
benchmarking of a mutually-agreed reform agenda.

• Support for the integration of all factors of production, including labor, through a robust, enforceable temporary worker program.

• Aggressive promotion of research and development through the identification of specific opportunities for joint cooperation and cross-border investment.

The key question is, why? Why should the United States and Canada care about Mexican development beyond a general humanitarian instinct or a fear of the potential of increased export of illegal activities (migration, narcotics, security threats) brought on by
potential economic uncertainty on our southern border?

The answer is simple to articulate, but extraordinarily difficult to achieve. If the United States and Canada plan to compete with China and other emerging economies by the time Asia reaches greater economic
maturity in 2020 or 2030, both nations will have to put in place now the economic and commercial frameworks to take full advantage of economic efficiencies that would naturally accrue with creation of a larger internal North American market, harmonization of cross-border business practices and regulations, and a reduction in both risk and the cost
of capital. Labor must also be seen increasingly as the irreplaceable input in global economic production and knowledge-based economies, and trained and utilized fully at its most effective potential use. Doing so will bring economic benefits to all three North American nations.

But this paradigm requires increased development in Mexico. Put another way, Mexico’s development directly impacts US national strategic objectives. Both nation

al security and economic security—which is itself a national strategic imperative—require
our southern neighbor to be democratic and politically stable, economically healthy, and increasingly to see its own interests aligned more fully with ours. Canada faces similar realities with Mexico, if less intensively.

It is in each of our interests to find ways to work
more fully together so that, in the global economy, we will be able not just to survive, but to flourish. We cannot succeed absent greater North American integration, or without more rapid Mexican development, which, as a consequence, is in our strategic interests to promote.

MEXUS is committed to improving North American competitiveness as a strategic imperative for the United States. The time to begin is now.

We’re scrolling through the MEXUS Compact on Competitiveness, when zingo, up comes the subhead “Energy Security”. Oh boy, here we go again. Don’t forget to check out the “leadership” list at the end:

With the fourth largest crude oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere, Mexico nonetheless imported $2.4 billion of gasoline and $1.5 billion of natural gas in 2003. This staggering reality, the result of Constitutional requirements that restrict foreign investment in the hydrocarbons sector, was exacerbated in 2004 by higher import volumes and
international prices.
As a result, Mexico’s energy sector, central to the country’s economy and a legitimate source of national pride, faces the challenge within the framework of its Constitution of drawing substantial foreign investment flows to modernize, expand, and improve production.

Increased production would help Mexico meet its growing domestic demand for energy, while allowing increased exports to augment the inflow of revenues
and to realize corresponding benefits. Without making conditions more attractive for private investors in the near term, PEMEX, Mexico’s national oil company will be unable to sustain its role as the primary underwriter of Mexico’s annual budgetary needs over
time.

Additionally, unless Mexico finds cost-effective means to raise production, overall security and competitiveness within North America will be impacted.

From the MEXUS “Compact on Competitiveness”

The business community respects and deeply appreciates the political sensitivities toward private investment in the Mexican state-owned energy sector, even as we believe that Mexico would greatly benefit by liberalizing its energy sector.

By partnering with US and Canadian energy companies, Mexico can position itself to meet domestic demand as well as increase its reserves and revenues while contributing to growth in energy dependent sectors.

US and Canadian energy companies are interested in becoming actively engaged in Mexico’s energy market and are willing to invest much needed financial, management, and technological resources to increase energy availability and efficiency in North America.

Specifically, recent claims to vast deepwater oil reserves in the Gulf of Mexico could be a boost to the country’s total energy output and national income. Tapping into these new sources, however, will require Mexican Congressional
approval and increased cooperation with foreign companies that have the technical and financial strength required to undergo such complicated explorations. Without such cooperation, Mexico will be unable to reap the full benefits of deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

As well, US and Canadian companies tend to promote a culture of philanthropy including support for schools, hospitals, and the arts that would bring benefits to Mexico beyond sector-specific investments. The first step would be to create an appropriate investment framework to allow for such foreign investment on market terms.

Appendix I
US-Council, MEXUS Leadership Team

ChevronTexaco Corporation
Eastman Kodak Company
First Data Corporation
Ford Motor Company
Kissinger McLarty Associates
Manatt Jones Global Strategies
Merck & Company
MetLife
Miller & Chevalier Chartered
Nextel International/NII Holdings
The Procter & Gamble Company

The views expressed in this report are the collective opinions of individuals representing companies
associated with the US-Mexico Business Committee and/or the Council of the Americas. They are not
necessarily the views of the companies themselves.

By Greg Moses

CounterPunch / OpEdNews

These three sentences prove why Generals are not paid to determine political policy:

“The border should not be militarized,” said National Guard Chief Steven Blum at Thursday’s press conference in Austin. “We made a conscious choice not to use the National Guard as a police force. We should intervene to save lives, not to take them.”

If the plain speaking General were paid to make policy, we would stop at the first sentence and scrap the deployment of National Guard to the border. But there’s more.

In the logical transition that Blum makes from police to military between sentences two and three, his propositions make it seem like the real function of a police force is to take lives not save them. Again, this kind of plain speaking would have policy consequences quite different from the ones being made by politicos. Especially if we add to the consequences of police work the entire network of jails and prisons, we could ask, are the police saving lives or taking them?

The third sentence on its own terms suggests sending the Guard to rescue people from the border desert, preventing the summer death toll from climbing with the heat. But as if to interrupt the startling revolution inaugurated by his logic, the General gives us three more sentences to hear.

“This is not a military mission,” Blum said. “This is not militarizing. This is not an invasion.”

Here, with his thrice repeated invocation of the great Hegelian “this”, the General switches his propositions from universals to existentials, proving Hegel’s thesis that “this” can be anything, anywhere, anytime.

In “this” the General speaks just the facts: he is not commanding a military mission, his troops are not militarizing anything, and (presumably since the Guard will keep to this side of the Rio Bravo, etc.) this is not an invasion.

Is it the general’s fault that he is speaking exactly from where he has no real business being? And isn’t it only a matter of time before this happens to any other general in the USA?

Added Paul McHale, the Pentagon’s assistant defense secretary for Homeland Defense: “We would send the wrong message to our friends and neighbors to the south to have a large, visible buildup along the border.”

Back to universals. A border buildup would send the wrong signal. You have to supply what follows. Are we not sending troops to the border? Yes we are. Are they not visible or large? In this question lies the crossroads to our logical challenge.

If the military force is visible and large, it will send the wrong signal to “our friends to the south.” If we are not sending the wrong signal, “our friends” should try to see it as invisible and small (and there is a case to be made for this along a line that stretches a couple thousand miles.)

But the military deployment of 6,000 troops, half of whom will stand guard along the border, must be visible and large enough for something. Otherwise, why is the Pentagon’s man standing here? So let’s leave aside for now the likelihood that we are sending the wrong signals to our friends.

If the troops being deployed by the Pentagon are not police, and if they are not military, then what are they large and visible enough to accomplish? And however we answer the question, don’t we already have the marks of a demoralizing mission from a military point of view? Another nonmission with a nonpurpose that troops will be ordered to do?

In fact, the troops will be large and visible enough to stand as uniformed symbols of something. But what? What is being signified in this pure surface of a nonmission in uniform? Collective fear? State identity? Here we begin to see a psy-ops borderland where (in the language of Slavoj Zizek) the real meets reality right along the line where we make our existence into what we need to be.

To answer the question of what this mission is, one must ask the egos of the people for whom this signifying is taking place.

Which brings us to the saddest part nearly, because the saddest thing isn’t the need of millions to see this pure image of the uniform standing between self and the Other. One hardly expects to be free of “friends and neighbors” such as these, who know that they need it.

The saddest part is the indifference of millions for whom, even in times instructive as these, the haunting by this pure, uniformed symbol only serves to ask why we have failed to speak the truth: you’re dead, now go away! Thanks to Austin American-Statesman reporter Mark Lisheron for these quotes taken from the Friday paper. They echo KVUE’s live television report from Camp Mabry: the military is not militarizing.

by Greg Moses

OpEdNews / CounterPunch / DissidentVoice / IndyBay

Just as PNAC or the Project for the New American Century helped us to think about underlying motives for the public shams of the war on terrorism, so might CNAC or the Compact for North American Competitiveness help us to think about drama at the border between Mexico and the USA. Already CNAC’s preferences for “border security” and “temporary workers” have attracted friends with clout, but did you know that Mexican oil is also on the agenda?
Shortly after last year’s Waco Summit brought together three North American heads of state, Bush, Fox, and Martin, a CNAC proposal was released by the US Council of the Mexico-US Business Committee (MEXUS), an organization which predates the Council of the Americas (COA) to which it now belongs.

The April 2005 report is signed by COA heavyweights Robert Mosbacher and James Jones, backed by a leadership team composed of ChevronTexaco, Eastman Kodak, First Data, Ford Motor, Kissinger McLarty, Manatt Jones Global Strategies, Merck, MetLife, Miller and Chevalier, Nextel, and Proctor and Gamble.

In a preface to the report, MEXUS takes a lot of credit for creating NAFTA or the North American Free Trade Agreement; brags about publishing “NAFTA Works”; and promises to maintain leadership for “increasing competitiveness” in the unified North American bloc.

The fact that seems to irritate this report more than any other is that despite NAFTA the maquiladora sector of the Mexican economy had managed to lose 250,000 jobs to China in the first five years of the new American century. This fact also locates the area that CNAC authors are most interested to address: how to fix the problems of Mexico so that the NAFTA alliance can steal back those maquiladora jobs. One key task is “free and secure” trade through borders which commodities can speed quickly, but which must do a better job screening people.

Concurrent with release of this report last April, the Minutemen were quietly fading into the margins of the media when their profile was rescued by terminator Governor Schwarzenegger of California. At that time, remember, Schwarzenegger miscued himself by talking about “closing the border”, a line he later delivered closer to script.

“Yesterday was a total screw-up in the words I used,” the governor said at a press conference. “Because instead of closing, I meant securing.” With those words, pieces of the border puzzle had actually locked into place last April, soon followed last May by a caucus report from Congress calling for 36,000 national guard at the border. At the time, the idea seemed far-fetched, like the idea of full-scale invasions had sounded a few years before that.

As we now know, the President has fulfilled the 2005 prophesies by sending thousands of troops to replace the function modeled by the Minutemen, just as Schwarzenegger and the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus had suggested in the first place.

Besides “border security” the CNAC report is clear in its preference for a second darling policy favored by Bush and Companies: an “enforceable temporary worker program that will match willing workers with willing employers, bringing order and increased security to current haphazard patterns of immigration.” We haven’t heard the end of this idea this year. Having a global temp service is really too tempting for Mexico’s continental partners to ignore.

Given the momentum that security and temp work are having in the real world today, it is worth noting a third area of prime concern for CNAC, and that is reform of Mexico’s oil and gas industry. In the near term, says the CNAC report, the Mexican government has to improve opportunities for private investment and in the long term Mexico has to find “cost-effective means to raise production.” Unless this is done, says the CNAC report, “security and competitiveness within North America will be impacted.”

This past weekend in its coverage of the Mexican presidential race, scheduled for July 2, the Associated Press clearly outlined the positions of each major candidate on reforming the Mexican oil and gas sector. While reading those news reports online I got the queasy feeling that CNAC was beginning to look like PNAC all over again. Get the CNAC report in pdf