Shocked and Amazed over CAFTA vote

[Fovea]

Here is my letter to Dennis Moore...

Dear Congressman Moore,

I need to take serious exception to the CAFTA vote. It seems to be the very sort of bill that will destroy jobs in Kansas, and elsewhere in order to do what? All I can see is a victory lap in the race to the bottom for American labor standards. I usually see eye to eye with you, but wow. Please explain this vote.

[atommom]

1. He probably will send us an explanation ... I got two detailed letters

justifying his support of the bankruptcy bill ... but I still disagree with him completely on these business issues. That's how he gets elected (by winning the moderate Republican vote), and his Republican opponents would be worse, but still. Damn. :banghead:

[Fovea]

2. I can't help but think

that this will not help Wyandotte county at all,
NAFTA helped Johnson County's rail workers some, I think.
But all CAFTA does is further derail the protections of worker's rights.

While we don't have a sugar, or textile component here, I think that every time we kneecap workers in one industry, all workers bleed.

[Mabus]

3. That's not even all of it

You think NAFTA was a problem for employment? You aren't even considering all the consequences (or should I say, collateral damage) it caused. Now it looks like NAFTA was just the beginning. CAFTA will just compound the problems associated with every facet of our lives and most people don't even see it.

As background, I worked on the response to the environmental impact statement (EIS) issued for the South Lawrence Trafficway for the Wetlands Preservation Organization (I've worked and consulted on several since then). It was the first time that I was made acutely aware of how a highway expansion affected the environment. It made me an environomentalist and a Gore fan.

But back to the "unseen" consequences of NAFTA. What do you know about the I-35 NAFTA Superhighway? Haven't heard of it? Don't worry, it's one of those things that isn't on the media's radar. "As with NAFTA, CAFTA is a trade agreement that brings together countries with vastly different labor and environmental standards and enforcement methods," Harman said. http://www.whattheysaid.net/issues/show/27


source: http://www.itds.treas.gov/i35news.html

So what? I-35 gets expanded and upgraded. What harm could that do? Well consider these things:

What are the environmental standards for trucks from Central America as compared to the USA? What about their regulations for trucks on things things like mandatory downtime for drivers or equipment/tire upkeep? Who is to say the foreign registered trucks have to stay on I-35? What if they increase their terrority? We could end up with an inland/off-shoring scenario where American companies start using trucks with foreign registrations to bypass American regulations? What happens if one of the foreign registered trucks gets a contract to move nuclear waste but the country that the truck is registered in has little or no regulations concerning the movement of such materials? Maybe that's too :tinfoilhat:

How many farmers will lose their land to highways and right-of-ways?
Farmers take great pains to practice conservation methods, now imagine losing years of conservation efforts because the state/feds want to put a highway through it? Don't think it can happen? Ask the farmers and dairy people who are losing their land as I-35 expands and reroutes its off-ramps in Ottawa, KS. I worked some of them in the Franklin-Douglas County Coalition of Concerned Citizens which pushed to keep US-59 on its current alignment instead of building a whole new road one mile east of its current alignment. Building a new road would give each county an additional $17K per mile - yes, per mile - cost to its respective road budgets as they were given the decommissioned old US-59. The $17K figure includes mowing, maintenance, painting, signs, snow removal, upkeep of highway equipment, access maintenance, etc.

US-59 upgrades are part of the I-35 expansion of NAFTA. It is considered a reliever/connector. Its purpose is to relieve traffic on I-35 by giving it a bypass through Lawrence to I-70. This means, that some truck traffic will be dumped on Lawrence streets (first Iowa then 23rd) hence the need for another reliver route in the form of the South Lawrence Trafficway which will cut through the Baker-Haskell Wetlands.

What effect will the increased truck traffic (air pollution) have on crops and human health? How will it affect the water supply?

Doesn't building more roads decrease the incentive towards mass transit?

Then there's developers. For some reason they always seem to know where roads are going (I wonder how they do that?). Wherever an off-ramp is planned they have the uncanny ability to buy up first refusal options on the farmland then they make little islands of Kwik Shops and mini-malls. They make money off new housing, not helping to maintain/rehab established homes.

New developments also spring up around the little islands. As the city gets hotter (a lot of it from the road's concrete/asphalt) more people want to move to the burbs or the country. This eventually means some city will annex the new development and end up subsidizing the new developments with more loads on the sewage, police, school systems, etc. As populations push outward the cities start to feel the neglect, schools are often the first things to suffer.

More roads = more highway patrol officers needed. Where does the money come from?

More roads = more costs for maintaining highway system. This includes more off-ramps, more frontage roads, lights, mowing, repairing, more concrete and more asphalt.

Isn't the KC area already on the brink of ozone problems on hot days? I know Lawrence is in danger of being included in the KC environmental zone.

Then there are the simple things like infringing on wildlife habitat, not to mention habitat fragmentation. As populations push the city boundries and the state/feds increase the number of roads it becomes more likely that the incidents of car-deer accidents will increase. Birds, deer, skunk, opposums and other animals are displaced.

If you think I'm being alarmist, here's language from an Iowa act in 1996 concerning the NAFTA Superhighway. http://www.legis.state.ia.us/GA/76GA/Legislation/HCR/00100/HCR00108/Current.html
1 25 WHEREAS, I-35 has been designated as the
1 26 International NAFTA Superhighway by the United States
1 27 Congress; and
1 28 WHEREAS, this designation will lead to
1 29 identification and elimination of barriers to
1 30 international commerce and traffic, enhanced funding
2 1 for upgrading capacity and safety, and reduced
2 2 congestion; and

The language means waivers for foreign trucks (we have lower emission standards for automobiles/trucks than most CA countries. It means that imminent domain, especially as it was just enunciated by the Supreme Court, is more of a threat then you may have realized. The feds and state will use this court ruling to take land for highways and begin the erosion of the environmental protections afforded by NEPA. Enhanced funding means more tax dollars going for road upgreades, repairs, highway patrol, off-ramps, road signs, etc. It also means more air pollution, more water pollution, decrease & fragmentaion of wildlife habitat, less funding for schools, displacemnt of minority populations, harmful health effects associated with greater pollution, etc.



Here are some other links about NAFTA's superhighway
http://www.imaja.com/change/environment/cars/SuperhighwaysThreatenNA.html
http://www.culturechange.org/issue13/naftatour.html
http://www.modot.org/kansascity/major_projects/documents/MeetingSummary9-28-04.pdf
(Notes from Missouri Dept. of Transportation meeting summary - at this point proposing expansion to eight lanes of traffic. BTW, I called HNTB a few years ago when I was working on the response to US-59's EIS and asked about their plans for I-35 and the woman told me about plans for 32 lanes (16 north, 16 south) for the Dallas-Ft. Worth area. She said 8 lanes for the KC area beginning around the Ottawa exit, increasing to up to 10 or 12 (half north, half south) depending on whether trucks got their own lanes. This bit of information upset the KDOT people who insisted in their EIS that the purpose of upgrading US-59 and its new ramps to I-35 were strictly for local safety and were in no way related to the I-35 NAFTA Superhighway project using US-59 as a reliver/connector road.



:rant:


Sorry, I'll get off my soap box now. But there are so many things that are affected by legislation like this. There ought to be some sort of provision that requires something similar to NEPA's EIS process for trade legislation. Our congress people need to consider all the environmental, social and economic impacts on the country that trade legislation can cause before they are allowed to vote on it. More importantly, the press would do the world a service if they deigned to report this type of information rather than faux Amber Alerts. (Just for you proud2Blib, just for you!)

Maybe we ought to ask Dennis for EIS-type protection (asking what are the social, environmental, economic, health, etc.) on continental trade legislation. I'd feel better if I knew he was doing something other than voting with them.

[atommom]

4. Wow, thanks for the detail

(even though I'm now even more pissed off!) ;)

[proud2BlibKansan]

5. WOW!!

Thank You Mabus!! As I read this I am reminded of the constant construction on I-35 just a few miles from my house. I avoid it like the plague during rush hour and yes, I have noticed a jump in truck traffic since NAFTA was passed. I-35 is now being widened to 8 lanes close to downtown KC and despite the closure of the I-35 bridge over the MO river, the traffic all thru the city on this interstate is just horrendous.

An interesting environmental note is that while I-35 is being remodeled extensively on its NE Johnson County portion (plus a sliver of Wyandotte County), the creek that it follows is being dredged and widened. Basically, they are turning Turkey Creek into a river. This is the water that is responsible for many devastating floods along Southwest Blvd, which runs through both MO and KS. Since SW Blvd is the heart of the poor Hispanic community in KC, the flooding there has been largely ignored for years. You know, who cares if the best Mexican restaurants in the city are flooded every spring and fall? The growth of Johnson County is obviously responsible for the increased amount of water in Turkey Creek. For my entire life, no one has seemed to care about that. Now all of a sudden, they are fixing that problem. It is a WTF?

As for faux Amber alerts, we had another one this week. A family argument at a motel resulted in Dad grabbing the toddler and driving off. He didn't put him in a car seat so Mom called 911 and presto! Amber Alert. So we really must train these young dads to use those car seats.