Public and private interests are joining forces to build a massive transportation “corridor” through the middle of Texas—threatening property rights, wildlife, and the historic landscape of the Lone Star State.  The Trans-Texas Corridor (TTC) would be the initial U.S. portion of a complex of highways and rail lines from the interior of Mexico to the Great White North that would eventually cut a huge path through the Plains states and Upper Midwest before following on to cities in Canada.

While Texas officials were beginning to plan and choose routes for the TTC project, Evan Moore of the Bosque County News wrote that “two powerful if little known groups” are watching “from afar”: the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (headed by President George W. Bush, Mexico’s outgoing president Vicente Fox, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper) and something called the North American SuperCorridor Coalition (NASCO).  Alongside these groups stand the North Central Texas Council of Governments and Ross Perot, Jr.’s Alliance Airport, a North Texas inland port.  As Mr. Moore noted, these powerful interest groups are not playing a public role in the development of the TTC, but their influence will be significant nonetheless.

As planned by the Texas Department of Transportation (TDOT), the TTC will be routed roughly parallel to I-35, with a branch line through East Texas.  The TTC-35 route would be some 1,200 feet wide, including a toll road to be built and leased by a Spanish firm, Cintra-Zachry (which currently operates the Indiana Toll Road and Chicago’s Skyway).  The corridor would be a network of highways, railways, and utility right of ways, with separate lanes for passenger vehicles and trucks.  The TTC would have six rail lines, including lines for passenger and freight transportation.  It would include a 200-foot-wide utility zone.

In April, TDOT released a map of a “narrowed” area ten-miles wide, revealing the parameters of a TTC development zone, which may be targeted for condemnation by the state.  The state would then lease the land to Cintra, as well as to other private developers, who have piled on contributions to key political figures, including Texas Gov. Rick Perry.  According to anti-TTC groups, possible corridor paths include over 1.5 million acres of farm and ranch land; one million residents; three aquifers; 8,000 acres of park land; and more than 100 acres of historic sites.

The plans for the TTC and the connections among the interest groups behind it and the politicians backing it have been obscured from public view.  The private interests who would profit from this massive boondoggle have produced “studies” allegedly showing the need for the “supercorridor.”  As information about the plans has seeped out, however, public resistance is mounting.

In July, TDOT began holding hearings across Central Texas on the TTC plans, and TDOT officials were greeted by an angry public.  As of July, 30 counties, 12 cities, 8 utilities organizations, and 4 school districts have passed resolutions condemning the TTC, according to the Blackland Coalition, a group dedicated to combating the supercorridor.  One of the proposed TTC routes would destroy about 5,800 acres in Bosque County alone.  County Judge Cole Word told the Clifton Record, “Our court represents probably close to five hundred years of family values in this county . . . You have the Smiths and the Words and the Schmidts and the Koonsmans,” whose families have been in Bosque County since the 1800’s.  “This is who we are,” explained the judge, “[and] where we’re from.  We’ve stayed here to raise our families just like our predecessors, and we want to continue that.”

According to Judge Word, an “alternative” TTC route would enter Bosque County on the path of the old Chisholm Trail, obliterating a piece of Texan—and American—folklore as vital as the Alamo.  The Texas Farm Bureau opposes the TTC, and TFB Secretary-Treasurer Albert Thompson has noted that the TTC would devastate rural communities, endanger wildlife, and consume 146 acres of Texas land for every road mile.

What is at stake, however, is even larger than that.  Jerome Corsi, writing in Human Events, has connected the dots.  Corsi has dubbed the supercorridor a “NAFTA Super Highway” that will be an important part of a larger plan to integrate the United States with Mexico and Canada into a North American Union.  He argues that the transportation system will help to move goods produced in the Far East to the American heartland and on to Canada.  To make this a reality, U.S. border posts must be “reduced to an electronic speed bump” for the Mexican trucks delivering the goods.  The Bush administration cannot secure the borders if it is trying to “create express lanes for Mexican trucks to bring containers with cheap Far East goods into the heart of the U.S.”

Which brings us back to the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP).  Following the SPP’s creation in March 2005, the Council on Foreign Relations released a set of recommendations made by an “independent” task force on further development of the SPP, including

the creation by 2010 of a North American community to enhance security, prosperity, and opportunity.  We propose a community based on the principle affirmed in the March 2005 Joint Statement of the three leaders that “our security and prosperity are mutually dependent and complementary.”  Its boundaries will be defined by a common external tariff and an outer security perimeter within which the movement of people, products, and capital will be legal, orderly and safe.  Its goal will be to guarantee a free, secure, just, and prosperous North America.

The statement elaborated on the open-borders aspect of the plan:

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.

In recent years, the globalist elites in Europe and the Americas have sought to erase borders and immigration controls as a means of facilitating the movement of money, factories, and labor, maximizing the profits of their corporate sponsors.  Small wonder, then, that they have refused to take serious steps to control immigration, combat radical Islam (which would mean curtailing immigration and travel from Islamic states—so there could be no thought of “diminishing the need for the current intensity of governments’ physical control of cross-border traffic, travel, and trade”), and prevent the de-industrialization of their countries.  It also makes sense, then, that even “conservative” U.S. politicians have embraced multiculturalism and the demographic, religious, and linguistic transformation of America.

The battle over the TTC is just a foretaste of what is coming as the citizens of Texas and the United States are faced with losing any control over their fate and the fate of their children.  Since moving back to my native state five years ago, I’ve been stunned and saddened by the amount of destruction I see around me.  Every inch of Texas soil that is paved over, every acre of prairie and plain lost, every family driven off their land represents the slow death of something I love very much.  The land, the people, the tall tales, the history are all part of a whole.  Should the globalist traitors have their way, America’s population will explode, and the destruction will continue.  Texas—and America—will exist in name only.  Judging by the backlash the TTC has provoked, I know I am not alone.