U.S. to merge with Mexico and Canada?

In his new bestseller, Jerome "Swift boat" Corsi explains how immigration will destroy American sovereignty and the "amero" will replace the dollar.

By Alex Koppelman

Read more: George W. Bush, Politics, European Union, Mexico, Canada, News, Immigration, Alex Koppelman

Jerome Corsi

July 16, 2007 | Three years ago, as the co-author of "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry," the book that launched the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign, Jerome Corsi was arguably one of the 2004 presidential election's single most influential people. Though Corsi denies that the book and the movement were specifically intended to aid the reelection efforts of President George W. Bush, and says the only intention was to oppose Kerry, there's little doubt that he played a significant role in winning Bush a second term. But now Corsi has turned against the administration, accusing it of being part of a conspiracy to destroy the sovereignty of the United States as we know it.

In his new book, "The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger With Mexico and Canada," Corsi weaves a sprawling theory in which multinational companies, the Bush administration, the Council on Foreign Relations, Democratic-leaning college professors and the governments of Mexico and Canada, among others, are all working -- not necessarily together, but in harmony -- to create a "North American Union." This NAU, Corsi says, will be similar to the European Union, breaking down national boundaries, establishing a single North American currency and potentially even leading to a rewriting of the Bill of Rights.

Already a controversial figure -- he's been accused of plagiarism, and the liberal press watchdog Media Matters has compiled a list of some of the inflammatory remarks he made while he was posting at FreeRepublic.com -- Corsi recycles some old boogeymen for "The Late Great USA." For example, he makes the Council on Foreign Relations, once a favorite target of the radical right-wing John Birch Society, a key player in his tale. But that doesn't mean his book won't find a huge audience; released July 10, as of this article's press time it had already reached as high as the No. 1 spot in Amazon.com's rankings of both nonfiction and politics books.

Salon spoke with Corsi the day before the book's release about his theory, the problems he sees in joining an EU-type organization and the split between the corporatist and anti-immigration wings of the Republican Party.

What's the book about?

It's about the coming merger with Mexico and Canada. I make the argument that just as in Europe, it was a 50-year stealth plan by the intellectual elites and government officials planning to create a European Union, to go from originally a trade agreement, the coal and steel agreement, the original agreement, step by step incrementally building an argument and getting the votes needed to end up with the European Union. They went through a European common market, a European customs union, European community, finally European Union with its own currency, the euro. I'm saying the plan here is the same. Multinational corporations and elites pushing to have NAFTA advance into what it is now, the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, ultimately a North American community, and if we don't stop it it will end up as a North American Union with its own currency, the "amero," the a-m-e-r-o, replacing the dollar and the other currencies in Canada and Mexico.

What you seem to foresee, however, is something that would go further than the European Union and actually dissolve the United States.

The United States could remain as a country in a North American Union the same way Italy, France and Germany remain as countries in the European Union, but there's a significant loss of sovereignty so that now the European Union dictates from the nameless bureaucrats in the working groups in Brussels, in Luxembourg, the laws which the legislatures in the various countries -- Germany, France, Italy, etc. -- can pass. And if it's not approved they can't pass the law. So you basically have a European Union regional government becoming supreme and the governments of the individual countries becoming secondary in sovereignty to the regional government's dictates and rulings.

So what's the motive on the part of the American government and American corporations in forming this North American Union? That wasn't much discussed in your book.

I pointed out very clearly that the motive here is a multinational corporate model, that our multinational corporations largely are beyond borders already. I pointed this out extensively when I discussed how the North American Competitiveness Council, which is an advisory group under the Security and Prosperity Partnership, was constituted almost entirely of multinational business groups that are constituted to advise SPP. The agenda there is that, you know, American labor is too expensive for the multinational corporations. Our manufacturing jobs are increasingly going to China and our high-skill jobs -- I mean take a look at Bill Gates and Microsoft: He's one of the top billionaires in the world, yet evidently he does not have enough billions. Rather than being thankful to U.S. citizens for buying Microsoft products over decades ... he's pushing for another billion dollars. He wants unlimited H-1B visas to get computer scientists in an unlimited capacity from India and he's threatening that if he can't get that here in the United States, he'll form a subsidiary in Canada and get his Indian computer scientists through Canada. As opposed to -- evidently the sons and daughters of American citizens graduating from colleges in computer science are too expensive for Bill Gates. And it's that type of an agenda that is already beyond borders, which is pushing for global profits at the expense of the U.S. manufacturing or the U.S. middle class.

You also allege, though, that the Bush administration is actively doing this. What's its motive to want to break down the United States?

Well, I say it's been bipartisan. It's both George H.W. Bush, who openly talked about a new world order; Bill Clinton, who advanced the NAFTA agenda by getting NAFTA passed; and George W. Bush, who's now advanced NAFTA into the Security and Prosperity Partnership. I'm saying that all three of these presidents and our Congress have been willing to erase borders to the extent that illegal immigration has been openly allowed and encouraged in a bipartisan effort. We got a Kennedy-McCain bill twice being jammed in the Senate, even though the American people overwhelmingly rejected it; it's a bipartisan effort. And the politicians of both parties are equally paid campaign contributions by the multinational corporations that advance this agenda.

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