Stealth fighters

Only a conspiracy theorist crank could imagine that the leaders of the United States, Mexico, and Canada would get together to plan an "evolution by stealth" toward eliminating national borders and uniting them in one North American Union. The very idea is so flaming ridiculous that — oops.

OTTAWA - Canadian, U.S. and Mexican politicians discussed using "stealth" to overcome public resistance to the integration of the three countries at a confidential meeting last year, according to documents just released under U.S. Freedom of Information laws.

Top military brass, corporate executives and diplomats also attended the meeting in Banff, Alta., where participants discussed everything from the harmonization of food and drug standards, to common immigration policies, and the pooling of energy resources. …

Presentation outlines for the forum acknowledge that the concept of North American integration - which some call a "North American Union" - is unpopular, and note that it might be tough to sell as a concept. "While a vision is appealing, working on the infrastructure might yield more benefit and bring more people on board ('evolution by stealth')," the notes said.

"Evolution by stealth" means using regulatory changes, such as food- and drug-safety benchmarks, which don't require parliamentary approval, to lay the infrastructure for North American integration. This allows for change with little or no public debate, critics say.

This is what "the government of the people, by the people, and for the people" has come to in our time: a multi-national group of appointed officials and corporate heavyweights meeting secretly to plan ways to continually slice off bits of national sovereignty while keeping the chumps, er, citizens in the dark.

Maybe it's quixotic to make a stand in front of this charging elephant. An international politico-corporate elite, including some of the most powerful people on the planet, has no use for the history and traditions of particular countries. Countries? Subdivisions of a worldwide marketing target area. Citizens? What a nuisance with their petty loyalties to places and peoples. They must be taught their place as economic units of consumption and treadmill turners in the service economy.

When I read stories like this, I get that "Last of the Mohicans" feeling. Quite possibly the country I grew up in passed away, quietly, while I wasn't — we weren't — looking. Maybe today's "countries" are as unreal as most of those that made up the Soviet Union, except that rather than being tributaries of one empire state, they are sales divisions of global corporations.

"Safety, wealth and comfort have become the highest goals publicly conceivable," wrote Jim Kalb at his site Turnabout. "Consumer goods are king."

The principles behind the NWO [new world order] are thus enormously powerful. Much of that power results from the weakening of other principles of social organization. In spite of its innate corruption, the NWO will remain as long as there is nothing to replace it, and it is very good at subverting possible competitors. The destruction of ethnicity, religion and sexual distinctions as recognized legitimate grounds for action is universally praised today as a victory over bigotry, and it leaves little upon which social order might be based other than bureaucracy and markets. Nor is the comprehensive victory of bureaucracy and markets merely ideological. That victory has been practically entrenched by disruption of such fundamental principles as family, faith and nation, a disruption sufficiently radical to make them increasingly incapable of grounding social order.

I am sorry for it. One of the best principles of political philosophy ever devised, and largely an invention of the United States's founders, was — no, not democracy, or even the consent of the governed, but the federalist system. The basic idea was to have not one government over a country but lots of governments, each with its own role and jurisdiction. It is one reason the United States did not until recently fall to the European disease of the centralized bureaucratic state.

Federalism officially lingers, but in a terminal decline. Not only do we have an unchecked federal judiciary that strikes down any law (U.S., state, or local) that it disagrees with, but the public itself no longer cares enough to defend the rights of individuals or limited jurisdictions. Today, if most people identify with anyone at all outside their family or business, it's with their ethnic group. The nation-state has broken down into a culture of competing tribes, tenuously held together by a consumerist ethos.

So it's not surprising that the new ecclesia, the top political and corporate leaders, think it's time that the tribal, commercial society shed its old skin of nationhood. All ideals outside the self are irrelevant to Economic Man; all individuality outside race and ethnicity is irrelevant to the rationalist and the government vote hog. Both these groups of visionaries (for that is how they see themselves) know the way forward. And that a little "evolution by stealth" might be needed to speed things along.