Anyone have info on latest meeting between Bush, Calduron and Harper??-relative to SPP

nancy,  I haven't even heard any rumors.  I've been thinking that things must have really been secret this time because I have heard nothing.

I found this...

Happy May Day, amigos! New threats to working people renew relevance of unions. Dateline: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 by Ish Theilheimer One of the things people have been taught to say about unions is something like this: "We needed them in the old days when things were really bad..." This statement implies that the big battles have been won on things like unemployment insurance, workplace safety, security, work hours and vacation pay, and everything else can be tweaked. Unions, these people say, have no business in politics. This line might have been true for some people in some workplaces for a while. It's probably true for a few today. But for billions around the world, these are the bad old days, with dangerous new twists.   New Orleans could serve as a monument for the victims of governments shrinking in their roles and bailing out on working people. The recent "Three Amigos" Canada-USA-Mexico summit in New Orleans should serve as a warning. It was ironic to hold it in New Orleans in the first place. Naomi Klein's 2007 book The Shock Doctrine describes how the city, its schools, and its services have been parcelled up, privatized, sold off and turned into a kind of corporate theme park in the wake of the 2005 Hurricane Katrina disaster — which could have been much less catastrophic had public safety not been sabotaged by public service cuts. Hundreds of thousands of working people have been displaced permanently from this historic and cosmopolitan city. New Orleans could serve as a monument for the victims of governments shrinking in their roles and bailing out on working people. Coincidentally those are the main objectives of what the conference was about, the Security Prosperity Partnership (SPP). Most people have no idea what the SPP is, which is politically advantageous for the right-wing political leaders of the three nations and their corporate allies. The lack of public knowledge hurts working people though. While corporations are well represented at SPP meetings, citizens' groups and unions have no voice at all. In New Orleans, a group called the North American Competitiveness Council was on the guest list. The NACC is made up of the top 30 corporations and CEOs in Mexico, the US and Canada, including corporate giants Walmart, Haliburton, Lockheed Martin and Bell. Its people told the political leaders exactly the regulatory agenda they want to see for all three countries. The public has no idea what was decided, but the objective was to change as much as possible of trade and regulatory policy without letting anyone know. ******"Under the SPP, these heads of state advised solely by a body of thirty-five, elite corporate CEOs have committed Mexico, Canada and the US to a series of regulations, rule changes and other executive decrees that are not subject to the scrutiny and oversight of the three countries' nationally elected legislative bodies," wrote Peter Julian, MP, Representative Marcy Kaptur (US), and Senator Yeidckol Polevnsky (Mexico) in PublicValues.ca. "The SPP affects over 300 areas of government responsibility, from energy production and environmental protection to national security and public health." SPP, an extension of NAFTA, can be expected to have a similar effect as its parent. Under corporate trade deals like NAFTA, countries are forced to offer less protection for the environment and workers, with production going where wages and environmental protection are lowest. "For Canada, this will mean an increased loss of sovereignty over our oil, our environment and even the workers who rely on those jobs," says an editorial on the Canadian Labour Congress website. "In all three countries, deregulated and/or privatized energy has been a failure. Privatized energy has lead to increased cost of energy, making it increasingly unaffordable for working families. Moreover, privatized energy systems have led to a failure of national and provincial governments to invest in public infrastructures." May Day became International Workers' Day to commemorate the fight for the eight-hour day and the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago. During the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s, May Day was officially discontinued in the US and Canada, although elsewhere in the world, the tradition lives on. Today, the world faces challenges we have never before imagined. Billions face famine and starvation. Other billions slave away in conditions Canadians would find intolerable. Economic disruptions seem a certainty, what with climate change, oil prices, and the corporate-manufactured global food crisis. The SPP, like the biofuels disaster, like the sub-prime mortgage disaster, like Mulroney's and Chrétien's and Martin's and Harper's selling off Canada and its public services piece by piece to the biggest corporations, demonstrates why working people need voices of their own, including unions and political parties. A mentor of mine — Charley Bunting, a former steelworker union activist — used to tell me "There are only two things in life that matter: people and money. We don't have money, but we've got the people." I hope Charley was right. If working people don't work together, the bad old days will look like a church picnic. Canada's labour movement faces many challenges. One is to inform its 3.2 million members of the threat represented by deals like SPP. Another is to rally support against these threats to what working people have fought for more than a century to achieve. Happy May Day! Ish Theilheimer has been Publisher of the leading, and oldest, independent Canadian online newsmagazine, StraightGoods.ca, since founding it in September 1999. He is Managing Editor of PublicValues.ca. He lives in Golden Lake, ON, in the Ottawa Valley. Email: ish@straightgoods.com. *******---This concerns me--this is part of the grisly rumors I heard!!!!

And they're changing the name.."North American Leaders Summit"..to confuse us peons!!

Insider Report/Inside Track

SPP Moves Forward Under Different Name

By: JBS Staff
May 12, 2008

MORE...

Topic: Globalism
Help Ron Paul Stop the SPP

---

No conspiracy theory, the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America is quite real, and it is NOT government by the people! Join Ron Paul today in the battle against this sovereignty-robbing boondoggle!

---

by creator
(Libertarian)
Monday, April 28, 2008

♣ Security and Prosperity? For WHOM?

It seems that corporate and globalist interests are bent on merging the United States, Canada, and Mexico into a so-called "Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America."

Ron Paul warned us about this years ago in his Texas Straight Talk column titled "A North American United Nations?"

"In reality, this new "partnership" will likely make us far less secure and certainly less prosperous." - Ron Paul

In their regular blog today, Downsize DC points out that it is the security and prosperity of major corporations like Wal-Mart, General Motors, General Electric, Home Depot, and others that is at stake.

A key reason for this mess is that congress has abdicated their legislative responsibility to bureaucrats and lobbyists from corporations and other special interests.

"I hope my colleagues in Congress and American citizens will join me in opposing any "broad and ambitious" effort to undermine the security and sovereignty of the United States." - Ron Paul

I have done so. In mere minutes this morning, using Downsize DC's brilliant interface, I sent the following personalized message to Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and to Congressman Brian Bilbray:

"I want YOU, my representatives, to take responsibility by actually WRITING the laws you pass. If a law is important enough to affect me and all other Americans, it should be important enough for you to actually write.

If YOU wrote the laws and regulations, I wouldn't have to worry about irresponsible obscenities like the so-called "Security and Prosperity Partnership" that will line the pockets of the likes of Wal-Mart, GM, GE, Home Depot and others at the expense of MY safety, prosperity, and security."

You can fight the SPP too. Why not try the Downsize DC system like I just did? Invest five minutes today to sign up, and then from time to time you can help bombard congress and pressure them into doing the right thing.

And now, with their permission, I turn the floor over to Downsize DC:

This was what I was looking for--from "thewandererpress.com"

Bush, Calderon, Harper
  As FTM prepares this column on April 21, the “ three amigos” — U. S. President George Bush, Mexican President Felipe Calderon, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper — are in New Orleans to sign some more agreements to the Security and Prosperity Partnership ( SPP), a plan to “ integrate” the three economies into a North Ameri­can Union.
  As conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly wrote April 14 for Human Events, the SPP not only envisions common regulations governing every aspect of trade, agriculture, and manufacturing, but standard po­litical procedures.
  “ The [ Hudson Institute] white paper explains that SPP’s ‘ design’ is for the executive branch to exercise full ‘ authority’ to ‘ enforce and execute’ whatever is decided by a three- nation agreement of ‘ civil ser­vice professionals’ as though it were ‘ law.’ That means evading treaty ratification and even congressional legislation and oversight.
  “ Don’t forget the importance of the Wall Street Journal and its long­time, very influential editorial- page editor, the late Robert Bartley. When Mexico’s Fox called for NAFTA to evolve into something like the European Union, Bartley wrote: ‘ There is one voice north of the Rio Grande that supports his vision. To wit, this newspaper.’ “ In his book Post- Capitalist Society, influential business writer Pe­ter F. Drucker wrote, ‘ The economic integration of the three countries into one region is proceeding so fast that it will make little difference whether the marriage is sanctified legally or not.’ “ When Larry King asked Fox about plans for a ‘ Latin America unit­ed with one currency,’ Fox answered in the affirmative. He said that one currency was part of the ‘ vision’ of the Free Trade Area of the Americas that Bush agreed to in the Declaration of Quebec City in 2001. . . .
  “ Now we know why Bush thumbed his nose at the overwhelming congressional votes ( 411- 3 in the House and 75- 23 in the Senate) to exclude Mexican trucks from U. S. roads. Now we know why Bush has been more persistent in pursuing ‘ totalization’ to put illegal immi­grants into Social Security than to promote his proposal to privatize a small part of Social Security for U. S. citizens.
  “ This is no conspiracy. It’s all part of the ‘ economic integration’ of the North American countries that’s been openly talked about for years.”
  Wars are always, but always, diversions, and while the United States fought a “ war on terror” for its very survival, the United States sim­ply disappeared into the North American Union. Hopefully, as a re­sult, we’ll acquire some Canadian- style reasonableness.

Ron Paul is not the only one, reversing the SPP/NAU is one of the planks on the Constitution Party platform. Even though it is small, the Constitution Party is the third largest party in the U.S. At Rickey's Place I have several articles relevant to this thread, but I don't want to copy and paste them here. I emphasize the need for individual action too, if any changes are going to happen, we are going to have to make them happen.