Joe Cobb

by Joe Cobb

I regret the need to post this note, but about a week ago a former friend of mine, Bruce Cohen, put up a comment on the “Gary Johnson 2012″ facebook page. He was mostly attacking Ron Paul for the congressman’s lack of support for foreign aid to Israel and because of the politically incorrect racial comments made in his political newsletter some decades ago (written either by Lew Rockwell or Murray Rothbard; Ron Paul never wrote his own newsletters).

But in the process of commenting against Ron Paul, Bruce Cohen made an incorrect statement or two that I want to address on the record. He then proceeded, in a second comment, to smear my late dear friend, David Nolan; I want to demand from him an apology for gratuitiously libelling David Nolan.

First, he identified me as a former staff director for Ron Paul. I was never in that job. Lew Rockwell was his staff director and John Robbins was his legislative director; I was on the Banking Committee staff, a different payroll. Hon. Chalmers Wylie, ranking Republican in 1983, hired me onto the Banking Committee staff because Ron Paul was the ranking Republican member of the subcommittee on Coinage. My ex-wife, Debbie Stover, worked in Ron Paul’s office and she told him I was looking for a job; he recommended me to congressman Wylie, who hired me as political patronage; I worked at the pleasure of Ron Paul, but Wylie could also have fired me anytime.

Ron Paul and I got along well, since I agree with him about the role of gold as a parallel currency in the domestic and international monetary system, and we agree the Federal Reserve should not be a government monopoly. [See Public Law 99-185 on this site for the story of the American Eagle Gold coinage. This is the only bill Ron Paul has introduced that ever became law, because I did it for him the year after he left Congress in 1985.]

I think Ron Paul is a fine gentleman, and I hope he and his wife, Carol, keep on enjoying a great life. He has done a lot to publicize the “libertarian” brand name, although he is a social conservative and now advocates many positions I strongly oppose (I think his “federalism” excuse on abortion is intellectually dishonest, for example).

The False Story

The story Bruce Cohen told was about an evening David Nolan and I spent visiting our friends Jim and Linda Rushing in Laguna Beach, California. Ron Paul was not among the group, as Bruce Cohen reported. After watching a TV program about the Middle East, Jim Rushing expressed his pro-Palestinean views. Bruce Cohen was there, and was horrified. We all entered into a discussion about Israel vs. Arabs and, as far as U.S. foreign policy, both David and I held to the non-interventionist view. I do not recall any comments from David Nolan that could be called racist, as Bruce Cohen seems to remember.

Since Bruce Cohen’s reference to David Nolan was a “P.S.” comment following his reference to the politically incorrect material in Ron Paul’s newsletters, the suggestion that David was also a “racist” is just part of his imagination, since anyone in his view who is not pro-Israel seems to be a “racist.” Bruce Cohen is a zealous supporter of Israel, which is curious since he is a non-religious guy who did not choose his parents – and as a libertarian, why should he care? But, again, many of us think Islam is anti-libertarian.

I am glad the comment on facebook is now so deeply buried it is probably impossible for anyone to find, but I wanted to write this demand that Bruce Cohen apologize to David, particularly since the comment is false, but also because nothing seems so sleazy as to libel a deceased man, who cannot reply.

I believe in the natural universe.

I believe in the weak and strong nuclear force.

I witness gravity and the electromagnetic force.

I understand the life-giving process of growth and evolution.

Although I walk among unfortunate victims of fear and superstition,

I will teach them how I understand natural laws reveal the glory of our world.

For surely peace and respect among all mankind is a good thing and

Only understanding our natural world can be a true path to success and happiness.

___________________________________
I have composed this poem in the style of a psalm or a creed, in the fashion of some ancient texts, to say simply what guides my life.

While I reject theories of mystery and magic, I do not want to describe my fundamental affirmation in negative terms, against others’ claims of supernatural personalities and commandments.

Mine is an epistemological statement of trust in an objective universe, with verifiable cause-and-effect behavioral rules to achieve personal happiness. Some philosophers call this “human flourishing,” and certainly it is a goal to aim for. That is what I am trying to attain as I approach the end of my life.

I titled this poem “Brights’ Creed” because I endorse the meme, “Bright,” suggested by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins as a label for people like me. See “Brights” in Wikipedia.

I suggested to the activists of the Brights movement they might want to endorse as a precursor the famous British classical Liberal, the Rt.Hon. John Bright, MP (1811-89). He is one of my heros not only because he opposed the established Church of England and its tax collections, but more importantly because he was consistently anti-war and anti-slavery; a supporter of individual human rights, universal suffrage, equality of women, better working conditions, and free trade. He was one of the most advanced moral leaders in his century.

He did not endorse any creed. The position of the possessive apostrophe absolves my historical hero from any responsibility for my ideas. His parents were religious Friends and like all children, he was reared in their personal faith and attended Friends’ meetings. Like all educated men of his day, he knew the Jewish and Christian wirtings and often cited their persuasive power. He was one of the most compelling public speakers in the 19th century.

John Bright is buried in the cemetary of the old Friends Meeting House in Rochedale, England. See his his memorial statue [photo link].

Calvin Coolidge speaking on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, in Philadelphia, Pa.:

“About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences, which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter.

“If all men are created equal, that is final.

“If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final.

“If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final.

“No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people.

“Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”

One Minute Video of Ron Paul (animation) with interesting graphics. This is a strong anti-war, anti-empire, pro-Constitution message. [ Click on it HERE now! ]

Background to the American Eagle
Gold Bullion Coin Act of 1985

by Joe Cobb

This is the only legislation Ron Paul has introduced that has become law. It was drafted and introduced initially in 1983, when I was serving as his aide on the Coinage Subcommittee of the Banking Committee, in the 98th Congress.

He hired me in 1983 because we shared a common idea about the future role of gold in the international monetary system. He still believes in this ideal, that gold – only gold (by weight) – can be the natural unit of “money.”

I want to tell you the story of how the coin bill became law, after Ron Paul departed from Congress (it was enacted the following year, because I was still there working in Congress).

Ron Paul had served on the U.S. Gold Commission, appointed by Secretary of Treasury Donald T. Regan in June 1981, to examine the role of gold in the national and international economy. The Report of that Commission was published in March 1982 and it basically said gold has no role to play in monetary policy.

No role for gold: This has been the orthodox British Neo-Classical School opinion, both Keynesians and Monetarists, for about 150 years. The majority of the Gold Commission believed they had driven a stake into the heart of gold standard advocacy, which was strong at the end of the 1970s due to high inflation under Jimmy Carter.

Senator Jesse Helms had gotten authorizing legislation to study the role of gold as part of a compromise to give more U.S. dollars to the International Monetary Fund in 1978. Carter had never bothered to appoint members of this temporary study group. The Reagan Administration responded to Helms’ request to move forward. (I was a close friend of Howard Segermark, who was Jesse Helms’ aide on gold and economic issues. Segermark was the person who drafted Helms’ amendment to the IMF funding legislation in 1978.)

The U.S. Gold Commission also reported, and
recommended, in favor of a different idea.

Milton Friedman had proposed: a real gold standard, in which gold actually circulated as money. This was published in The Journal of Law and Economics, vol.4 (1961), “Real and Pseudo Gold Standards.” This article by Friedman orginated as his half of a debate at the international society of classical liberals, the Mont Pelerin Society. Friedman favored floating exchange rates among currencies, and gold (by weight) was just another “currency” in his floating exchange rate system.

The gold commission recommended a non-legal tender gold bullion coinage. When the Gold Commission was announced by Secretary Regan, I saw an opportunity. The idea for a specific U.S. Mint coinage was my version of Milton Friedman’s idea, combined with F.A. Hayek’s writings on the denationalization of currency. I incorporated a 501(c)(3) educational group, which I named “U.S. Choice in Currency Commission,” playing on the name of the U.S. Gold Commission. My idea was to put a bullion coinage at the center of a Hayekian scheme for parallel currencies.

The example of the South African Krugerrand had been around since the early 1960s, when the parliament there created a legal tender bullion coin, denominated only by its weight: one troy ounce of gold in a 22 carat alloy. The paper monetary units of South Africa are known as “rand” (ZAR) but there has never been a fixed price of the gold coin in terms of those paper rand units. The Krugerrand had become in the 1970s the most popular and widely owned gold bullion coin on the market. Many other governments had also gotten into the bullion coin minting business. Canada’s Maple Leaf bullion coin was very popular because of its .999 purity. The United States Treasury bureaucrats were strongly opposed to any kind of gold coinage in the U.S. monetary system.

Creating the Gold Coin in Congress

One of the first things we needed, even before the Gold Commission had finished its report, was an example of what a new United States coinage would look like. The idea was to create a parallel monetary system for the United States – and for the U.S. government. A parallel montary system would provide a genuine monetary constitution, as the public could choose to hold gold bullion coins and credit instruments denominated in such coins, or the public could continue to use the traditional “dollar” units just as today. [ click here to see my proposal more fully ]

If you read the text of the bill as written (H.R.3789, 97th Congress) it is clear how the expansion of gold circulation was intended directly to reduce the circulation of the Federal Reserve. The U.S. Treasury would engage in “reverse open market” transactions, issuing gold coins to the public – just as the Federal Reserve issues bank reserves to the financial system. But as the Treasury expansion of gold coinage would occur, a direct reduction in the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet would also occur.

Here is an analysis of my first proposal in Congress, which was introduced by Rep. Dan Crane (R-IL). My good friend from Chicago, Bill Mencarow, was a principal staff aide to Congressman Crane, who introduced H.R.3789 in the 97th Congress. This analysis was written by Ernest Welker at the American Institute for Economic Research. [ click here to read a PDF copy of AIER 1981 (39) ]

It is not a new idea. Excellence is just the “distilled spirits” of any kind of human activity, other than sloth. I think the pursuit of excellence should be understood as a moral imperative. Aristotle developed his ethical system with the pursuit of excellence as a major concern, and it is a theme that runs through all of the world’s religions.

So, what is excellence? Beauty? Being the best that you can be? Doing things with the greatest economy and efficiency? The shortest distance between two points.

We all know what excellence means when we see it, even if there is not a ready formula in English. We certainly know the opposite of excellence. Some important concepts, for example “Truth,” are very hard to define but their antonyms, e.g. “Falsehood,” are easier to identify. This is the central process in testing hypotheses against empirical evidence, at the heart of the scientific method.

In social situations, excellence is harder to specify, but its opposite is often more clear. You might not know how to please someone, but you can guess what might offend them. We have a sense of what is orderly and what is disorderly. Whenever I see inefficiency, or litter on the ground, I feel an impulse to put it straight. I do pick up random litter in a parking lot or some common area, and police it to the trashcan.

I wonder if anyone who has proposed new religious or spiritual ideas has made the pursuit of excellence a prime directive? There are versions of social gospel that say you re supposed to work to change things for the better. In other words, “better” means the pursuit of excellence. Jesus would pursue excellence, wouldn’t he?

But Aristotle said it best: “If we are to

by Christopher Hayes

When completed, the highway will run from Mexico City to Toronto, slicing through the heartland like a dagger sunk into a heifer at the loins and pulled clean to the throat. It will be four football fields wide, an expansive gully of concrete, noise and exhaust, swelled with cars, trucks, trains and pipelines carrying water, wires and God knows what else. Through towns large and small it will run, plowing under family farms, subdevelopments, acres of wilderness. Equipped with high-tech electronic customs monitors, freight from China, offloaded into nonunionized Mexican ports, will travel north, crossing the border with nary a speed bump, bound for Kansas City, where the cheap goods manufactured in booming Far East factories will embark on the final leg of their journey into the nation’s Wal-Marts.

And this NAFTA Superhighway, as it is called, is just the beginning, the first stage of a long, silent coup aimed at supplanting the sovereign United States with a multinational North American Union.

Even as this plot unfolds in slow motion, the mainstream media are silent; politicians are in denial. Yet word is getting out. Like samizdat, info about the highway has circulated in niche media platforms old and new, on right-wing websites like WorldNetDaily, in the pages of low-circulation magazines like the John Birch Society’s The New American and increasingly on the letters to the editor page of local newspapers.

“Construction of the NAFTA highway from Laredo, Texas to Canada is now underway,” read a letter in the February 13 San Gabriel Valley Tribune. “Spain will own most of the toll roads that connect to the superhighway. Mexico will own and operate the Kansas City Smart Port. And NAFTA tribunal, not the U.S. Supreme Court, will have the final word in trade disputes. Will the last person please take down the flag?” There are many more where that came from. “The superhighway has the potential to cripple the West Coast economy, as well as posing an enormous security breach at our border,” read a letter from the January 7 San Francisco Chronicle. “So far, there has been no public participation or debate on this important issue. Public participation and debate must begin now.”

In some senses it has. Prompted by angry phone calls and e-mail from their constituents, local legislators are beginning to take action. In February the Montana state legislature voted 95 to 5 for a resolution opposing “the North American Free Trade Agreement Superhighway System” as well as “any effort to implement a trinational political, government entity among the United States, Canada, and Mexico.” Similar resolutions have been introduced in eighteen other states as well as the House of Representatives, where H. Con Res. 40 has attracted, as of this writing, twenty-seven co-sponsors. Republican presidential candidates in Iowa and New Hampshire now routinely face hostile questions about the highway at candidate forums. Citing a spokesperson for the Romney campaign, the Concord Monitor reports that “the road comes up at town meetings second only to immigration policy.”

Grassroots movement exposes elite conspiracy and forces politicians to respond: It would be a heartening story but for one small detail.

There’s no such thing as a proposed NAFTA Superhighway.

Though opposition to the nonexistent highway is the cause célèbre of many a paranoiac, the myth upon which it rests was not fabricated out of whole cloth. Rather, it has been sewn together from scraps of fact.

Take, for instance, North America’s SuperCorridor Organization (NASCO), a trinational coalition of businesses and state and local transportation agencies that, in its own words, focuses “on maximizing the efficiency of our existing transportation infrastructure to support international trade.” Headquartered in borrowed office space in a Dallas law firm, the organization, which has a full-time staff of three, advocates for increased public expenditure along the main north-south Interstate routes, including new high-tech freight-tracking technology and expedited border crossings. It has had some success, landing federal money to pilot cargo management technologies and winning praise from the Bush Administration. Speaking at a NASCO conference in Texas in 2004, then-Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta congratulated the organization for its efforts. “The people in this room have vision,” Mineta said. “Thinking ahead, thinking long term, you began to make aggressive plans to develop . . . this vital artery in our national transportation system through which so much of the NAFTA traffic flows. It flows across our nation’s busiest southern border crossing in Laredo; over North America’s busiest commercial crossing, the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit; and through Duluth and Pembina, North Dakota, and all the places in between.”

A few years ago NASCO put on its home page a map of the United States that more or less traced the flow that Mineta describes: Drawn in bright blue, the trade route begins in Monterrey, Mexico, runs up I-35 and branches out after Kansas City, along I-29 toward Winnipeg and I-94 toward Detroit and Toronto. The colorful, cartoonlike image seemed to show right out in the open just where NASCO and its confederates planned to build the NAFTA Superhighway. It began zipping around the Internet.

The organization soon found itself besieged with angry phone calls and letters. “I think the rumor going around was that this map was a blueprint and it was drawn to scale,” says NASCO executive director Tiffany Melvin. (Given the size of the route markings, that would have heralded highways fifty miles wide.) Ever since the map went live, NASCO has spent a considerable amount of time attempting to refute charges like those made by right-wing nationalist Jerome Corsi, whose recent book The Late Great USA devotes several pages to excoriating NASCO for being part of the vanguard of the highway and the coming North American Union. Until recently, NASCO’s website contained the following FAQs:

Is NASCO a part of a secret conspiracy?

• Absolutely not . . . We welcome the opportunity to share information about our organization. . . .
• Will the NAFTA Superhighway be four football fields wide?
• There is no new, proposed NAFTA Superhighway. . . .
• Is the map on the website an approved plan for the proposed NAFTA Superhighway?
• There is no proposed NAFTA Superhighway. . . . The map is not a plan or blueprint of any kind. . . . They are EXISTING highways.
• The Trans Texas Corridor is the first section of the proposed, new NAFTA Superhighway. . . .
• There is no proposed, new NAFTA Superhighway.

But NASCO is just one part of what Corsi and his ilk view as a grand conspiracy. There’s also a federal initiative called the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), which they portray as a Trojan horse packed with globalists scheming to form a European Union-style governing body to manage the entire continent. The reactions of those in SPP to this characterization seem to range from bemusement to alarm. “There is no NAFTA Superhighway,” Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Market Access and Compliance David Bohigian told me emphatically over the phone. Initiated in 2005, the SPP is a relatively mundane formal bureaucratic dialogue, he says. Working groups, staffed by midlevel officials from all three countries, figure out how to better synchronize customs enforcement, security protocols and regulatory frameworks among the countries. “Simple stuff like, for instance, in the US we sell baby food in several different sizes; in Canada, it’s just two different sizes.”

Another star in the constellation of North American Union conspiracies is the Mexican deep-water port of Lázaro Cárdenas. Located on the Pacific coast of the state of Michoacan, the port is undergoing a bonanza of investment and upgrades. According to a 2005 article in Latin Trade, the port is adding a terminal that could provide enough capacity to process nearly all of the cargo that comes into Mexico, making it “the logical trade route connecting the United States and Asia,” in the words of the Mexican officials overseeing its overhaul. Since it’s the only Mexican port deep enough to handle Super Panamax container ships from China – the most efficient means of shipping products across the Pacific – it’s an attractive alternative to the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which are unionized and increasingly congested. (More than 80 percent of Asian imports come in through these two ports.)

Of course, if cargo switches from Los Angeles to Lázaro Cárdenas, more and more manufactured goods will have to travel through Mexico to reach their US destination, and there will be a significant uptick in the northbound overland traffic. The Kansas City Southern Railroad company is already betting on that eventuality, spending millions of dollars to purchase the rail routes that run from the port up to Kansas City. At the same time, a business improvement group called Kansas City SmartPort, whose members include the local chamber of commerce, is pushing for Kansas City, which is already a transportation hub, to transform itself fully into a “smart port,” a kind of intermodal transportation and cargo center. The group recently advocated a pilot program that would place a Mexican customs official in Kansas City to inspect Mexico-bound freight, relieving bottlenecks at the border. The notion of a Mexican customs official on American soil fired the imaginations of those already disposed to see a North American Union on the horizon, and SmartPort staff have been fending off angry inquiries ever since.

In his essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Richard Hofstadter famously sketched the contours of the American tradition of folk conspiracy – a tradition that has, at different times, seen its enemy in Masons, Jesuits, immigrants, Jews and Eastern bankers. There’s certainly a strong continuity between that tradition and the populist/nationalist ire that drives the NAFTA highway myth. Hofstadter’s original essay was motivated in part by the activities of the John Birch Society, which today is one of the leading purveyors of the highway myth.

But there’s something more.

The myth of the NAFTA Superhighway persists and grows because it taps into deeply felt anxieties about the dizzying dislocations of twenty-first-century global capitalism: a nativist suspicion of Mexico’s designs on US sovereignty, a longing for national identity, the fear of terrorism and porous borders, a growing distrust of the privatizing agenda of a government happy to sell off the people’s assets to the highest bidder and a contempt for the postnational agenda of Davos-style neoliberalism. Indeed, the image of the highway, with its Chinese goods whizzing across the border borne by Mexican truckers on a privatized, foreign-operated road, is almost mundane in its plausibility. If there was a NAFTA highway, you could bet that Tom Friedman would be for it – what could be more flattening than miles of concrete paved across the continent? – and Lou Dobbs would be zealously opposed. In fact, Dobbs has devoted a segment of his show to the highway, its nonexistence notwithstanding. “These three countries moving ahead their governments without authorization from the American people, without Congressional approval,” he said. “This is as straightforward an attack on national sovereignty as there could be outside of war.”

Though the story of the highway has been seeded and watered in the fertile soil of the nationalist right wing – promoted by Birchers and Corsi, co-author of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’s book about John Kerry – it also stretches across ideological and partisan lines. Like immigration and the Dubai ports deal, it divides the Republican coalition against itself, pitting the capitalists against the nationalists. And more than a few on the center-left have voiced criticisms as well: Teamsters president James Hoffa wrote in a column last year that “Bush is quietly moving forward with plans . . . for what’s known as a NAFTA superhighway – a combination of existing and new roads that would create a north-south corridor from Mexico to Canada. . . . It would allow global conglomerates to capitalize by exploiting cheap labor and nonexistent work rules and avoiding potential security enhancements at U.S. ports.” Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Boyda, from eastern Kansas, invoked its specter early and often in her improbably successful 2006 campaign against Republican incumbent Jim Ryun. A campaign circular inserted in local newspapers warned that “if built, this ‘Super Corridor’ would be a quarter-mile wide and longer than the Great Wall of China.” Boyda told me that her attacks on the highway “hit a real nerve because enough people had the same concerns.”

What might at first have been a niche obsession has bled, slowly but surely, toward the mainstream. “The biggest problem of these conspiracy theorists,” says Robert Pastor, a professor of international relations at American University and a leading proponent of increased North American integration, “is that they are having an effect on the entire debate.”

Add up all the above ingredients – NASCO, SPP, Lázaro Cárdenas, the Kansas City SmartPort, the planned pilot program allowing Mexican truckers to drive on US roads – and you still don’t have a superhighway four football fields wide connecting the entire continent. Which is why understanding the persistence of the NAFTA highway legend requires spending some time in Texas, where Governor Rick Perry and his longtime consigliere, Texas Department of Transportation commissioner Ric Williamson, are proposing the $185 billion Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC), 4,000 miles of highway, rail and freight corridors, the first of which would run up from the border through the heavily populated eastern part of the state. Plans for the TTC call for it to be up to four football fields wide at points, paving over as much as half a million acres of Texas countryside. The first section will be built and operated by a foreign enterprise, and when completed it would likely be the largest privatized toll road in the country.

And unlike the NAFTA highway, the Trans-Texas Corridor is very, very real.

In 2003, amid a dramatic drawn-out battle over a legally questionable GOP redistricting plan, the Texas state legislature passed House Bill 3588. At 311 pages, it’s unlikely that many of those who voted for the bill had actually read it (and many have come to regret their vote), but it received not a single opposing vote. The bill granted the Texas Transportation Commission wide latitude to pursue a long-term plan to build a series of corridors throughout the state that would carry passenger and commercial traffic and contain extra right-of-way for rail, pipelines and electric wires.

What first triggered opposition was that under the plan, the new TTC roads would have tolls, something relatively novel in Texas. The state’s Department of Transportation–known as TxDot–pointed out that the state’s gasoline tax, which pays for road construction and maintenance, hadn’t been raised since 1991, while population and commercial traffic were growing at a dizzying pace. Tolls, the governor and his allies argued, were the only solution. (Many TTC opponents propose raising the gasoline tax and indexing it to inflation.)

But opposition quickly spread, from those in metro areas concerned about the cost of their daily commute to ranchers angry that their land might fall under the TTC hatchet. According to Chris Steinbach, chief of staff for rural Brenham’s Republican State Representative Lois Kolkhorst, when people in the district heard about the plan they responded by asking, “‘Why would you want to do that?’ It was a real front porch, rocking chair kind of question.”

Meanwhile David and Linda Stall, a Republican couple from Fayetteville, Texas, began actively organizing opposition to the proposal. As early as 2004, they started bringing friends out to local TxDot hearings and launched the website Corridor Watch. By the time the 2006 gubernatorial election rolled around, a wild four-way race with incumbent Rick Perry pitted against three challengers, the TTC had become one of the most controversial issues of the campaign. Perry was re-elected with 39 percent of the vote, but with all three of his opponents campaigning passionately against the TTC, it was hardly a popular endorsement of the plan.

What was once scattered resistance is now a full-fledged rebellion. The Stalls have pushed through a plank in the state’s GOP platform opposing the corridor, which means the governor is now at odds with the official position of his own party. In March thousands of Texans from across the state attended an anti-TTC rally on the Capitol steps, and liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans came together to co-sponsor a moratorium on the plan. It passed the House and Senate, only to be vetoed by Governor Perry. (A considerably weaker version was ultimately signed into law.)

Perry’s continued support of the TTC in the face of mounting opposition is more than just a political liability; it’s begun to resemble Bush’s Iraq policy in its obstinate indifference to public opinion. This, along with the fact that the federal government sent a letter to the state warning it not to pass a moratorium on the project, has fueled conspiracy speculations about what the real goal of the TTC is. Kelly Taylor, a John Birch Society member and Austin-based freelance contributor to its magazine, has been working hard to connect the dots between the TTC and the NAFTA Superhighway. “It first surfaced because it was a local toll issue,” she told me over coffee. “That, in and of itself, was alarming enough–all the corrupt politics that happened to make it come about. Then we thought, Wait a minute, something’s not right here, this is bigger than just a local toll issue.”

Taylor may represent a certain fringe of the anti-TTC efforts (her name prompted some eye-rolling among other activists), but there’s a whole lot of cross-pollination between local concerns about the TTC and the growing North American Union mythology. When I asked David McQuade Leibowitz, a Democratic State Representative from San Antonio, why the governor was so determined to build the TTC, he put his boots up on his desk, leaned back in his chair and said, “I think Texas is the first link in the highway to run from South America to Canada. One nation under God. We see bits and pieces of it. We don’t see it all. It makes us cringe and sick to our stomachs.”

Texas Transportation commissioner Ric Williamson is one of those Texas personalities who seem almost self-consciously to will themselves toward caricature. One Democratic staffer in the Capitol casually referred to him as Darth Vader; Texas Monthly recently called him “the most hated person in Texas.” Owner of a natural gas production company before becoming a state legislator in 1985, he has lately been reincarnated as a transit policy wonk, a role he plays as a cross between mid-twentieth-century road builder Robert Moses and J.R. Ewing from “Dallas”: the planner as good old boy. He does not suffer from a lack of confidence. “We’re the greatest state agency you’ll ever interview,” he told me at one point. With his good friend Governor Perry hemorrhaging political capital, it’s fallen to Williamson to advocate for the corridor and draw fire from its opponents.

At first the press contact for TxDot told me Williamson wouldn’t be available, but after I informed her I’d lined up dozens of interviews with TTC opponents, she called me back a week before my trip to Texas for this article to set up an interview. When I was ushered into Williamson’s office, he was in the midst of a discussion with one of the four staffers who flanked him. At my appearance in the doorway, he made no move to acknowledge my presence other than slightly pulling out the chair next to him, where, apparently, I was to sit.

Williamson’s case is straightforward: The state needs a whole lot of new roads it can’t pay for. The sheer population growth in Texas, particularly in the urbanized area in the eastern part of the state that contains San Antonio, Dallas, Houston and Austin, combined with the projected increase in commercial traffic, has precipitated what Williamson says is an impending crisis. The TTC would provide the necessary increase in capacity at the low, low price the state can afford. “Our view is, you can run from the corridor if you want to,” he told me, smiling, “but that’s eventually what we’ll build. Because that’s where the fricking people live!” At that he shot up to walk over to a map of the state hanging on one wall, patting my shoulder with paternal authority as he passed. “It’s so logical to me it drives me nuts.”

He’s right about the challenges the state faces, but it’s a long jump from the diagnosis to the cure. Opponents of the plan point out that, as conceived, the corridor will run parallel to the existing Interstate, possibly far from the same cities where it’s supposed to relieve congestion. (TxDot says state law will require the roads to connect to Interstates, which connect to cities.) On top of that, the current plan employs a novel privatized financing mechanism that has many crying foul.

Under a comprehensive development agreement (CDA) signed in March 2005, the Spanish concern Cintra (in partnership with Texas-based Zachry Corp.) will pay the state for the right to develop the roads along the corridor, where it will be able to collect tolls and establish facilities within the right-of-way for fifty years. This kind of road-building deal is commonplace in other parts of the world, often in places where government lacks the ready capital necessary to develop large infrastructure projects. It’s called a BOT, for build, operate, transfer. Until recently it was unheard of in the United States.

The arrangement has been heavily criticized for a number of reasons. The CDA includes a noncompete clause that could conceivably prevent the state from building necessary roads in the future because they would “compete” with a stretch of the privatized TTC. It’s also expensive. A recent state auditor’s report estimated the cost for just the first section of the corridor at $105 billion. TxDot portrays the deal as a clever way of getting the private sector to pay for public roads, but eventually the total cost of the project, plus a layer of profit for Cintra-Zachry, will be coming out of the pockets of Texas drivers. Finally, the timeline for development of the project, which will be constructed piecemeal, is based on which sections of the corridor Cintra has identified as “self-performing,” according to Williamson–in other words, those sections that contain a high enough volume of toll-paying passengers that they will turn a profit.

Williamson argues that the state simply has no choice. Or, as he put it to one reporter, “If you aggressively invite the private sector to be your partner, you can’t tell them where to build the road.” But this seems, to put it mildly, pretty ass-backward. The point of transportation planning is to provide the infrastructure for people to move efficiently, safely and quickly from point A to point B, not to maximize the profits of some conglomerate that managed to win a state contract. You wouldn’t want to place, say, fire stations across a city using the same logic that guides the placement of Starbucks. But that’s more or less the way the TTC is unfolding.

“I always think of the corridor as a payday loan,” said Kolkhorst’s chief of staff Chris Steinbach. “You’re going to get a little money up front, but you’re losing the long-term gain you’re charged by the people to oversee.” As he said this I noticed his computer’s screensaver, which featured an image of the Texas Capitol dome with a bright red banner Photoshopped in that read Everything Must Go!

The privatized nature of the road got folks the angriest

In my conversations with people in Texas, it seemed that the privatized nature of the road was what got folks the angriest. Bad enough that drivers would face tolls, that ranchers would have their land cut out from under them, but all for the financial gain of a foreign company? “If you liked the Dubai ports deal, you’ll love my TTC land grab,” taunts an animated Rick Perry on one anti-TTC website. The cartoon goes on to portray Cintra as conquistadors clad in armor riding in to steal Texans’ treasure.

“What really drives this is economic,” activist Terri Hall told me. “It’s about the money. We’re talking about obscene levels of profit, someone literally being like the robber barons of old. And this is one thing that government actually does well, build and maintain roads.”

Hall is an unlikely defender of the public sphere. A conservative Republican and an evangelical Christian who home-schools her six children, she first got interested in road policy when TxDot announced plans to toll the road near her house, which runs into San Antonio. Outraged, she brought it up with her local State Rep, and when that didn’t work, she began organizing. She founded the San Antonio Toll Party (like the Boston Tea Party, she notes) by pamphleting at intersections and calling friends. “It’s really like the old days, during the American Revolution . . . just fellow citizens trying together to effect change.”

Hall soon became part of the broader anti-TTC effort, and though she originally thought she was just fighting a corrupt local government, she’s come to view her battle in a much broader context. “There are big-time control issues,” she said. “Someone is really jockeying around to control some things here in America. It explains the open borders, it explains our immigration issues, it explains our free-trade issues, what it’s doing to the middle class.

“It really all started with NAFTA,” she continued. “There’ve been people like Robert Pastor and the Council on Foreign Relations. All these secretive groups.” She laughed nervously and apologetically. “It sounds like a conspiracy. But I do know there are people who have tried for a long time to go to this global governance. They see there’s a way to make it all happen by going to the heads of state and doing it in a secretive way so they can do it without a nasty little thing called accountability. So they won’t have to listen to what We the People want.”

Hall had arranged to meet me in the San Antonio exurbs, in a home design center that doubled as a cafe. Outside, a thunderstorm lashed the windows with rain. As she spoke, her newborn son propped next to her swaddled and napping, it occurred to me that she was living the twenty-first-century version of the American dream. She and her husband had moved to Texas from California in pursuit of cheap housing, open space and a place to raise their family. Their web-design business was successful; their children healthy. Why, I found myself thinking, was she so upset about a road?

Ric Williamson must often ask himself the same thing. Just as the White House was blindsided by the opposition to the Dubai ports deal, just as NASCO was shocked to find that a simple schematic map attracted angry phone calls, just as the Commerce Department was shocked to find a simple bureaucratic dialogue the subject of outrage, so too have Perry and Williamson seemed ambushed by the zealous opposition of people like Hall.

But what people like Williamson don’t seem to understand is how disempowered people feel in the face of a neoliberal order whose direction they cannot influence. For corporatists within both parties (Williamson, it should be noted, was a Democrat while in the Statehouse), selling port security or road concessions to a multinational is inevitable, logical, obvious. To thousands of average citizens in Texas and elsewhere, it’s madness or, worse, treason. Both the actual TTC and the mythical NAFTA Superhighway represent a certain kind of future for America, one in which the crony capitalism of oil-rich Texas expands to fill every last crevice of the public sector’s role, eclipsing the relevance of the national government as both the provider of public goods and the unified embodiment of a sovereign people.

For Williamson, this is progress; for Hall, it’s an outrage and a tragedy. “We have so little control over our own government,” she told me, the alienation audible in her voice, thunder punishing the air outside. “We are really the last beacon of freedom in the world – the land of the free and home of the brave – and we’re letting it slip away from under our noses.”

From The Nation, August 27, 2007
posted August 9, 2007

by Jarret Wollstein

Link to [ click here ] “Global Warming: Myths and Reality“

by Tibor R. Machan

From his book, The Passion for Liberty
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), chap.17

Abortion is not (necessarily) murder. It is not murder if a fetus – a.k.a. “unborn child,” as some would have it – is only potentially a human being, not yet actually a human being.[1] Killing such a fetus is thus no more homicide than destroying a seed is killing a plant or flower.

I wish to spell out a view on abortion that escapes the criticisms leveled at a similar treatment of the topic, namely, Ayn Rand’s. Though my own position is something of a departure from Rand’s, it argues in the same spirit.

The main question involved in the abortion debate is: When does a human being, qua human being, come into existence? As Feinberg (1980, 184) poses the question: “At what stage, if any, in the development between conception and birth do fetuses acquire the characteristic (whatever it may be) that confers on them the appropriate status to be included in the scope of the moral rule against homicide – the rule ‘Thou shalt not kill’? Put more tersely, at what stage, if any, of their development do fetuses become people?”

The question involves many ancient, serious, and divisive philosophical topics, one for which the different schools of philosophy, religions and moral theories have suggested diverse answers. Hindus, Aristotelians, Kantians, utilitarians, Christians of one or another denomination and so forth identify different points of the development of the organism at which a human being comes into existence. Other disputes also arise, based on the clashing ontological and epistemological doctrines that are deployed in discussions of human nature.

In a predominantly Christian culture, the answer to questions of the sort identified by Feinberg are usually sought from the Bible. But the good book does not directly deal with this question. The Christian God commands that no one shall kill another human being, but he doesn’t bother to specify exactly when a human being comes into existence.

Nevertheless, many Christian denominations have committed themselves to the view that a human being emerges into full-fledged existence at conception – notwithstanding the biological fact that, at conception, no individual organism at all exists, but only a zygote. It takes about 14 days after conception before one or more individual embryos come into existence. And inasmuch as it is only at this point that ensoulment could occur, it is only at this point that the number of souls that can be carried in pregnancy could be determined (assuming that souls are indeed immediately awarded to the embryos once they do emerge). Theological thinking cannot resolve the issue definitively, and is not persuasive to the secular mind in any case.

Secular thinking on the issue has hardly presented a uniform alternative so far. Some believe that the human being comes into existence at birth because its identity is determined by social acknowledgement of that identity. Others believe that because of the difficulty of establishing the point of full development of the embryo, we should err on the side of caution and stipulate that a human being exists from the 14th day after conception. Yet others hold the view, implicit in the famous U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, that only after the cerebral cortex has fully developed, at about the 24th week of pregnancy, has a human being emerged. The distinctively human capacity to reason emerges as an actuality only with the development of the cerebral cortex. Prior to that point, the pregnancy involves only a potential, only an undeveloped human infant, like the caterpillar that is not yet a butterfly.

What is especially nettlesome for purposes of public policy in the United States is that the people to be governed by it hail from a great variety of traditions, cultures, and religions. By contrast, a nearly homogenous people populates many other countries, with a preponderance of specific ethnic, religious, or racial groups making up the citizenry. Israel, Iran, and Pakistan are reasonably good examples, although even here diversity exists.

When they spoke, in the Declaration of Independence, of “all men” having been created equal, the American Founders were at least implicitly aware that political communities must not be shaped so as to cater to a specific ethnic, racial or religious group at the expense of others.[2] The Framers, in turn, created a constitution with a Bill of Rights that speaks of the rights of the people as individuals. They drew heavily on both the secular and faith-based political ideas of humanists like Socrates, Aristotle, Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke, among others; and they wrote in broad enough terms so as to embrace both religious and secular interpretations of humanity’s “creation” and nature. (A “creator” may have or lack personhood, may or may not be divine. Arguably nature creates, perhaps even via the process of evolution!)

Now when it comes to identifying basic laws of human communities and to whom these apply, while there is a common core of agreement across traditions and religions, there are many differences as well. Borderline cases can be especially perplexing.

For some, for example, animals are owed the kind of protection of rights that nearly everyone recognizes human beings to possess.[3] For others, the health of their children may be attended to via prayer alone, and without resort to medical services. This raises questions of neglect when the child’s life is in danger and might be saved by standard medicine.

U.S. constitutional law has tended to deal with such issues on the basis of principles that can apply to all members of the population, regardless of specific cultural tradition, religion or ethnic origin. In any case, that would be how such laws ought to address these kinds of cases in a free society and the rule of law. Accordingly, for example, whatever one’s religion teaches, a child must receive the ordinary medical care from his parents or guardians. The killing of a cow is not a crime, regardless of the fact that one may believe very sincerely, on religious grounds, that it is.

There are many various and contradictory beliefs about the abortion issue too. Yet, we are in need of a reasonably stable approach to it that satisfies the requirement of being suitable to a diverse population in virtue of applying a few common premises based on our common humanity. I propose the following: that we ought not wait until a child has been born in the usual sense to consider killing it a homicide; nor ought we consider it homicide to kill someone who has not yet developed, even in the slightest, the familiar distinguishing capacity of a human being – i.e., the capacity (even if not yet exercised) to think or conceptualize.

Around the 24th week of pregnancy, the biological basis for the human capacity to think develops within the fetus. At this point, if one were to abort it, one could reasonably be regarded as killing an infant human being. Prior to this stage of pregnancy, it may well be immoral to abort the fetus, but apart from the strictures of a specific religious tradition, it could not reasonably be construed as homicide.

That seems to be a most sensible approach, whatever one’s own religious or philosophical orientation might be. In a society of objective law, it would be wrong to convict someone of killing a human being if by normally available means one simply cannot identify the victim to be a human being – but only an entity that may eventually become one. Under such circumstances, the pregnant woman’s rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness must be accorded full weight and legal protection. Similarly, one cannot convict a killer of a cow or a rhesus monkey of homicide just because a certain religious or philosophical tradition would classify it as such. Doing so would undermine due process, prejudge whether a charge of murder or manslaughter or even negligent homicide could be made to stick. (Indeed, one way to deal with the fact that many believe that even the earliest abortions are homicide and possibly one or another degree of murder is to test legal actions taken against such persons, see if the case can be made that they have murdered a human being!)

Some have argued that the identity of a person remains constant from conception to death. They are in error. The reasons given vary but one is of some importance here since my own proposal rests on certain Aristotelian ideas, ideas also invoked by pro-life advocates. Gregory R. Johnson and David Rasmussen write, for example, that a “basically Aristotelian framework would seem an unlikely foundation for a defense of abortion on demand, for the simple reason that Catholic natural law moralists use essentially the same premises to argue that abortion on demand is murder” (Johnson and Rasmussen 2000, 246).

This assertion is misleading. After all, Thomas Aquinas, the quintessential Roman Catholic natural law moralist, believed that not until the 24th or so week does a human being come into existence. That is when “quickening” or the life of a human being begins.[4] So at least one major Roman Catholic Aristotelian–the one whose thought would matter significantly in this discussion–is closer to a pro-choice position than to the pro-life critics on this topic.[5]

Whether or not Aquinas or any particular Roman Catholic position is correct, my point here is simply that a broadly Aristotelian perspective does not place one ineluctably in either camp, sans more specific argumentation.

Certainly, the key for this issue depends on what constitutes a human identity. For some parties to the discussion, those animated by “identity politics,” personal identity consists primarily of one’s heritage – one is always most fundamentally a Welsh, Irish, Italian, Croatian or Serb individual.[6] For others, identity has much to do with gender or sex or even age. But all of these are relatively superficial features, as important as they may be. Most fundamentally, one’s identity consists in having in full measure those attributes that make one the kind of being that one is; and a human being is a rational animal, a being of volitional consciousness. This rational and moral capacity is the trait that most fundamentally distinguishes him from other animals, and in virtue of which it makes sense to speak of such moral concepts as “rights” which come into play when considering an issue such as abortion.

So let us consider human development from potentiality to actuality. At conception, only a “pre-embryo” exists. As biologist F. M. Sturtevant (1996, 16) points out, this pre-embryo “consists of the trophoblast, and a few cells comprising the embryoblast.” He notes that “before day 14, when the embryo can first be said to exist, the embryoblast can develop into an embryo proper, a tumor, a hydatidiform mole, a choriocarionoma (i.e., cancer), twins, or triplets, or, in at least two-thirds of the cases, nothing at all (due to genetic defects).” Sturtevant adds that “until the primitive streak appears at day 14, there is no human individual.” This means that no person with an identity can exist prior to day 14 after conception. But even after that point is reached, there is no human individual – in the sense of an organism possessing the distinctively human conceptual capacity – until much later in the embryo’s development.

Johnson and Rasmussen object that if one “wishes to maintain that an unborn child [!] is not an actual human being, but merely a potential one, then we are entitled ask: What kind of being is it actually?” (Johnson and Rasmussen 2000, 248)

The answer is that it is – has the identity of – a potential human being, or a human fetus (not an “unborn child,” a label which begs the question). Prior to the 24th week or so, the fetus does not yet possess the capacities in light of which we assign and protect rights; they are a potential. But it has the (actual) capacity to develop those capacities, the means to proceed further. Indeed, for Aristotle, eggs are potential chicken but do possess an identity: the identity of chicken eggs, which includes the potential to develop into chicken.

The killing of a human fetus is then arguably no more a case of homicide, let alone murder, than, say, the killing of a human tooth, appendix or kidney (unless the death of those parts results in the death of the entire human being). That is to say, being alive is not sufficient to confer upon a cell or an organism the rights-bearing status of a human being.

There is much that is implied by all this but what matters here is that any individual human being who lacks the capacity for generating at least rudimentary ideas (one manifestation of which is the ability to communicate by language) cannot be regarded as a “rational animal” in point of fact, even if there might be reason in a particular context to treat him as such. Of course, we are not talking about instances when one is asleep or under anesthesia. But if what seems to be a human individual is incapable of any manner of concept formation whatever, and simply lies around as a vegetable as his normal and unalterable state, then we may plausibly raise the issue of whether the person thus debilitated is actually a human being proper at all, or merely appears to be so upon first inspection.

Of course, these issues are widely debated and new light might be shed upon them at any time. It is the kind of issue we run across at the edges of typical instances of some kind of thing. These are “borderline cases” and it is unnecessary to pretend to some kind of finished theory here, although we do hve enough at hand to give what constitutes a decisive answer for the time being. The presumption, then, should be in favor of the pro-choice position, given that in the case of the right to freedom of choice of adult human beings, even though the choice may be wrong on other grounds, is well established, while that of zygotes and embryos is clearly not.

In a civilized country no one would think of allowing the killing of a ten year old child, nor would anyone debate (this side of a concentration camp or gulag) whether a healthy forty year old adult should be used for organ donation against his or her will. But we may legitimately debate whether a ten-week-old fetus might be killed, just as we may legitimately debate whether a brain-dead adult might be used as an organ donor or whether it is okay to help a terminally ill and suffering patient commit suicide or again whether a fifteen year old is a child or adult for various purposes. The unusual and borderline cases cannot be handled with the kind of confidence afforded typical cases. But it is by reference to the context established by the normal case that we can determine, first, what even constitutes a borderline case; and, second, what sorts of principles we must deploy to grapple with such borderline cases.

As best as we can tell so far, the distinctively human capacity to reason does not emerge until the 24th week of pregnancy. Thus, for purposes of law the pro-choice position should prevail until the 24th week of pregnancy, and the pro-life position thereafter. And this has the added advantage of keeping at bay yet another potential bureaucracy that would, given the hidden status of “unborn babies,” invade the private lives of millions of people who may even be required to report on whether they have engaged in intercourse, given that such engagement may produce a rights bearing baby who is owed effective police protection against, for example, careless miscarriages or other kinds of foul play.

In a free society the default position in a system of just laws must be that evidently rights bearing human individuals are free until it has been proven that they have freely chosen to become incarcerated by virtue of having violated others’ rights. This is a powerful obstacle to the abuse of governmental power and in the abortion controversy it would seem to favor the pro-choice and not the pro-life case.