Matt Zeitlin

Chris Hayes writes in the Nation about the mythical NAFTA Superhighway that only exists in the minds of delusional Birchers (redundant, I know) and about the all too real “Trans-Texas Corridor” – a massive toll road to be built in Texas by a Spanish company to support their booming population. Hayes does a good job exploring and refuting the conspiratorial mindset and thoughts of those who fear a highway from Mexico City to Toronto that would violate our precious national sovereignty. He’s all too sympathetic to the small minded, borderline xenophobic grassroots efforts against the TTC. The opposition is based on the fact that it’s a toll road and it’s built by a Spanish company. I would be sympathetic to the first complain, but Texans aren’t huge fans of paying taxes, so Rick Perry is going to have to raise money somehow for this road. The second objection is just, how do I say this, absolutey stupid.

The reaction to a Spanish company – Cintra- is the same provincial mindset that torpedoed the Dubai Ports Deal – an irrational fear of foreign corporations. What people don’t seem to understand is that foreign companies aren’t working for their home nations interest, they’re just out to make a buck and are thus subject to all the same market forces as American companies. There’s functionally no difference between a Spanish company laying down road in Texas and an American one, except that stupid people have a fear of the “unknown.” What’ even odder is that a progressive magazine like the Nation would give a sympathetic review to these ignorant knaves – here’s what some of them think of the highway:

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.”

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.”…

. “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.”

That the Nation would be so sympathetic to this third rate Dobbsism is shameful. The governor is trying to build a highway, and yes, it’s the same mindset that’s welcoming to immigrants and supports NAFTA – the mindset of economic efficiency and not looking at trade and infrastructure issues through an anti-foreign lens. Hayes wraps up his piece by giving further aid and comfort to the nationalists:

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.”

What seems to escape these people is that the Texas legislature legitimatley voted the authorization for the TTC into law, just like congress passed NAFTA, China’s MFN status and every other major trade deal. This loss of “relevance of the national government as both the provider of public goods and the unified embodiment of a sovereign people.” is illusory – last time I checked the Texas government has a monopoly of violence in its state. More importantly, people always fear markets and especially foreign, globalizing markets. The fear of TTC are just Bircher nonsense, no different than saying that Dwight Eisenhower was s a communist. And this mindset will always be around – Hayes says so himself. That he skillfully explicates the relevance of Hofstader’s “Paranoid Style” to the Superhighway and then buys into that very style at the end of piece must be the mark of a great mind, if Fitzgerald is correct, or the mark of a confused progressive populist movement that finds itself in a uncomfortable alliance with the very regressive forces it’s so long opposed