Friends in high places

And now, let's take a break from religio-cultural Sturm und Drang to wail and gnash our teeth over what's happening with the economy.

Comes Robert Novak with a column about how the extraordinary federal Bear Stearns bailout was accomplished under dodgy circumstances:

The Washington office of the Independent Community Bankers of America was flooded this week by its members across the country complaining of discriminatory favoritism toward their big city brethren. If they had blundered into financial failure, the community banks complained, they would not be bailed out, but instead investigated and prosecuted. "Too big to fail," therefore, becomes "too big to be punished."

The expense of such an intervention is not a problem because the Fed, unlike the president and Congress, can print money. The Bear Stearns bailout, approved in private by unelected officials, contributes to paranoid grievances on the left and right that built support for Ron Paul's presidential candidacy. A Fed official conceded privately this week that "we may have crossed a line" in jumping into Bear Stearns -- and that is an understatement. There is no doubt the American economy is in uncharted territory, with reverberations that cannot be forecast.

You know the Ron Paul paranoids, the ones who fear that economic elites are determined to operate in their own class interest, heedless of what that does to undermine popular and national sovereignty. They have no basis whatsoever for their paranoia -- or do they? Here is what Tom Fleming is saying in Chronicles:

Ron Paul’s most flamboyant gesture in defense of the republic (one in which he is joined by the estimable Duncan Hunter) has been the denunciation of what is sometimes called the North American Union. The NAU is an alleged plot to merge the three countries of North America—the United States, Canada, and Mexico—into a union that will function something like the European Union. If the first step toward unification is represented by the “NAFTA Superhighway”—a free-trade hole in the American border stretching from Mexico to Canada—the apogee will be the issuance of a new common currency, the Amero.

World government has been a treasured bugbear of the fringe right since the heyday of the John Birch Society, and the current conspiracy has supposedly been cooked up by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bush administration, and the usual globalist suspects. In 2005, the CFR issued a report, “Building a North American Community,” whose aspirations were echoed in the Bush administration’s plan “Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America” (SPP), released after a meeting among George W. Bush, Vicente Fox, and Paul Martin. The plan, which is predicated on the idea that “our security and prosperity are mutually dependent and complementary,” calls for a joint task force to implement the goals: common security and a common market.

Representative Paul has denounced the SPP as “an unholy alliance of foreign consortiums and officials from several governments” that does not even enjoy the legal fig leaf of an official treaty. The more general conclusion he draws is that “decisions that affect millions of Americans are not being made by those Americans themselves, or even by their elected representatives in Congress,” but by “a handful of elites [who] use their government connections to bypass national legislatures and ignore our Constitution.”

Not so, says the government, which takes on the allegations directly here. To be sure, one should be very reluctant to believe in conspiracy theory (though as Maximos says, there's nothing conspiratorial about this at all; it's all taking place in the open). True, when I hear conspiratorial talk about the North American Union and all that, my b.s. detectors lock into place. Nevertheless, columns like Novak's undermine my confidence in the elites (I've blogged before about what a journalist friend of mine told me about learning to cover the international currency markets: that it totally upended her view of who really was in control of world events -- the world of finance, not politics). And, what makes it hard (for me, at least) to believe anything the federal government says about such things is the lies it has told about securing the US-Mexico border. Pass a law calling for the building of a fence ... then don't fund the fence. That kind of thing. I do not believe that most Republicans or Democrats in government have the slightest intention of enforcing the rule of law at the border, and in fact my belief is that they think of people who believe in such old-fashioned concepts as national sovereignty to be hopelessly behind the times. I believe they agree in private with what the libertarian Will Wilkinson says in public (quoted here by Fleming):

There are some who believe a grave threat to American sovereignty looms over the horizon. A shadowy cabal, they say, is planning a massive “NAFTA superhighway,” a new North American currency, and a common market in goods and labor. It will all culminate in an E.U.-like North American Union. It turns out this is mostly fantasy. But the fantasy is more dream than nightmare. Because some aspects of a North American Union would leave Americans and our neighbors both richer and freer. Those who do come now are more likely to stay. And this has increased the permanent population of undocumented Mexicans. The best solution to America’s immigration problem is not a wall or a new crackdown on the hiring of undocumented workers. It’s NAFTA’s unfinished business: a common North American labor market.

Or, you could read the complete 2005 Council on Foreign Relations report, "Building a North American Community." CFR is not a governmental organization, but its members are leaders in the national policy establishment. A sample of the report:

The three governments should commit themselves to the long-term goal of dramatically diminishing the need for the current intensity of the governments’ physical control of cross-border traffic, travel, and trade within North America. A long-term goal for a North American border action plan should be joint screening of travelers from third countries at their first point of entry into North America and the elimination of most controls over the temporary movement of these travelers within North America.

IOW, effectively dissolve the borders. Ideas have consequences.

My worry is that our leaders -- political and financial -- envision taking us the way of the European Union, which has stolen in plain sight popular sovereignty from European nations in exchange for greater material prosperity. This worry is exacerbated by my conviction that the American people would go along with it unblinkingly, as long as the cheap consumer goods keep flowing. Am I being, you know, paranoid?