Here Comes The Security and Prosperity Partnership

Which is closer to your vision of North America?

Vision A: Three interdependent countries with vibrant social movements, respect for labor rights, and environmentally sustainable economies anchored in provision of social needs and respect for cultural autonomy?

Or Vision B: An unequal alliance dominated by the United States, complete with pumped up oil and gas production, increasing militarization, corporate transnational planning groups, and guest worker programs to ensure cheap, vulnerable labor?

If your answer is Vision A, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that this past August at a summit of the leaders of the United States, Canada, and Mexico in Montebello, Quebec, labor, environmental and globalization activists braved riot police and tear gas to demand democratic input into North American decision-making. The bad news is that the summit was about the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP)—the real-world name of Vision B.

While left activists and researchers in Canada and Mexico have been spreading the word about the SPP for several years, so far in the United States the SPP, which was officially launched in March 2005, has mainly caught the attention of the right wing, which sees it as a stealth plan to impose a European Union-style government on the continent.

The SPP is not a North American version of the European Union. But it is a stealth plan—one aimed at bypassing the kind of international solidarity that halted the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas and the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. The European Union emerged after years of public debate and a treaty ratified by member states. By contrast, the SPP is not a treaty and will never be submitted to the U.S., Mexican, or Canadian legislatures. Instead it attempts to reshape the North American political economy by direct use of executive authority. And while the European Union maintains an explicit role for government in addressing inequality within and between countries, the SPP’s foundation is an unequal alliance where the United States retains the political and economic trump cards.

Designed to shore up the United States’ weakening position as a global hegemon, the SPP’s primary goals are to link economic integration of the three countries to U.S. security needs; deepen U.S. access to oil, gas, electricity, and water resources throughout the continent; and to provide a privileged—and institutionalized—role for transnational corporations in continental deregulation. The stakes for labor, the environment, and civil liberties in all three countries couldn’t be higher. Yet because of the SPP’s reliance on executive authority to push the agenda, many of the SPP’s initiatives remain virtually invisible, even to many activists.

SPP Basics

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which went into effect in 1994, was designed to enhance the access of transnational capital from the United States to cheap Mexican labor and Canadian natural resources. The SPP deepens these relations and harnesses the so-called war on terror to an expanded U.S.-Mexican-Canadian trade agenda and a lopsided energy grab to secure U.S. access to dwindling continental oil and gas reserves.

As its name implies, the SPP has two basic parts: the Security Agenda and the Prosperity Agenda. Both are rooted in the United States’ deteriorating global position, particularly its increased competition for access to global oil and gas reserves and worsening trade balance with China.

With the explicit aim of securing North America from “internal” as well as external threats, the Security Agenda coordinates intelligence activities among the three countries and streamlines the movement of “low risk” goods and people (especially so-called “NAFTA professionals”) across borders. It also involves extensive military coordination, much of it focused on protecting energy and transportation infrastructure. (Consolidating a North American military structure no doubt also serves as an offensive hedge against Venezuela’s attempt to shape an independent South American energy policy.)

The Right and the SPP

So far in the United States, the most vocal opposition to the SPP has come from the right. The New American, a glossy magazine published by a subsidiary of the John Birch Society, recently dedicated an entire issue to the “North American Union,” featuring shadowy images of a unified North America and of people pledging allegiance to a Photoshopped combination of the U.S., Canadian, and Mexican flags.

In that issue, Howard Phillips, chairman of the Coalition to Block the North American Union, predicts that under the SPP, “new transnational bodies would gain authority over our economy, our judiciary, and our lawmaking institutions.” Other commentators complain that the SPP’s working groups operate behind closed doors, “without any participation or authorization from Congress” to propose “continental ‘integration’ on a wide range of political, economic, and social issues,” and point out that SPP will benefit elites: “NAFTA has greatly benefited the corporate and financial elites in all three countries”; “its contemplated successor the SPP, if allowed to go forward, will inflict more of the same.”

On these points right-wing critiques appear to share some common ground with the left, but lack an alternative economic vision and analysis of deeper democratic deficits in the three countries. Instead, economic nationalism and extreme nativism are the hallmarks of critiques of SPP from the right, from the John Birch Society to Ron Paul to Lou Dobbs. Hence anti-immigration rhetoric and fear-mongering about a loss of U.S. sovereignty are staples of right-wing discussions of the SPP. One of the articles in The New American, entitled “The North American Union Invasion,” warns: “Despite the great harm that Americans face from rampant illegal immigration—crime, terrorism, economic devastation—our political and business elitists push for more amnesties.”

There is a danger that if the right dominates discussion of the SPP, legitimate left critiques will be drowned out. “As in the immigration debate, these people’s framing and rhetoric make it almost impossible for the left to do anything but recoil in horror,” Judy Ancel of Cross Border Network told D&S. Indeed, some on the left, including Christopher Hayes, in a Nation cover story, have dismissed concerns about the SPP, which Hayes calls “a relatively mundane formal bureaucratic dialogue.” Hayes quotes a Commerce Department official who said the SPP is “Simple stuff like, for instance, in the US we sell baby food in several different sizes; in Canada, it’s just two different sizes.” Online comments in response to Hayes’s article indicate that many on the left think otherwise.

In Canada and Mexico the opposition to SPP is better organized and hence less vulnerable to being thrown off balance by the right (or by government officials)—all the more reason for U.S. activists to make common cause with left activists to the north and south.

The Prosperity Agenda continues the Security Agenda’s focus on energy. World demand is growing as traditional sources from the Middle East, Russia, and South America are becoming less secure; and the resulting price increases and realignment of power threaten a redistribution of wealth and power in favor of the oil and gas producers, many of them in the Global South. The Prosperity Agenda aims first and foremost at consolidating U.S. control over North American energy supplies, first by expanding production in Canada and Mexico, and second by increasing U.S. access to that production by deregulating energy markets. In addition to expanding energy production, Prosperity Agenda activities include a tri-national framework for “minimizing” regulatory “barriers”; special committees on the auto and steel industries; removal of constraints on movement of capital and financial services; and expanded and streamlined cross-border transportation networks—networks that will facilitate not only trade within the continent, but more outsourcing to Asia.

The official SPP website posts official documents, but ongoing discussions are shrouded within tightly controlled annual summits, ministerial level meetings, and working groups that exclude civil society participation. Corporations, however, have a privileged view of the road ahead and provide guidance and direction through a specially-created North American Competitiveness Council. U.S. members of the NACC include Wal-Mart, Merck, GE, UPS, FedEx, and Kansas City Southern. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Council of the Americas—whose website brags that its blue-chip members represent the majority of private U.S. investment in Latin America—serve as the U.S. secretariat.

NACC advice is taken seriously. In February 2007, the NACC issued detailed recommendations for energy integration, streamlining regulatory processes, and the speedy resumption of trade after emergencies. Six months later at their August 2007 summit, the countries announced an energy cooperation agreement, an avian flu preparedness plan with emergency border-management procedures, and a regulatory cooperation framework. The regulatory framework—complete with goals and action plan—specifically incorporates NACC recommendations to increase reliance on voluntary standards and to analyze regulations for their cost to trade. Although the framework doesn’t say exactly how principles would be applied to different industries, the NACC’s 2007 report gives several telling examples, including regulations harmonizing “hours of service” for truck drivers that would expand permissible weekly driving hours, which safety advocates are already challenging in court. Canadian plans to “harmonize” pesticide use to U.S. levels—an action that will raise exposure levels for most regulated pesticides—also provide a glimpse at the kinds of regulatory changes we can expect from the SPP.

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