A ‘liberal’ blogger claims TTC worry is part of conspiracy thinking

Pale Rider, recycling, an old Nation article by Christopher Hayes, without distinguishing between the “NAFTA superhighway” and the Trans Texas Corridor, claims that anybody worried about the Trans Texas Corridor potentially being part of something bigger, the “’NAFTA Superhighway’ that actually doesn't exist, except in the imagination of wingnuts everywhere,” is a wingnut. It’s black and white.

Mr. Pale Rider refuses to admit he might be even partially wrong, even though I told him that Hayes had pulled in his horns somewhat after he wrote his Nation piece and even admitted he didn’t know a lot about the TTC.

And, I have now told him that Christopher Hayes himself refutes him:

I plead guilty to the charge that my glancing coverage of the Security and Prosperity Partnership was overly credulous. In subsequent correspondence primarily with Canadian progressives, I’ve become convinced that the SPP is far more ambitious and more nefarious than its architects claim. It seems its two primary objectives are deregulation by stealth and the imposition of US-style “war on terror” security measures on Canada and Mexico. As a general matter, I share nearly all of Judy Ancel’s concerns about corporate globalization and the neoliberal agenda for the United States and its immediate neighbors. The point of the piece wasn’t to imply that anyone who shares those concerns is paranoid; rather, I was attempting to show that when the mainstream political and media establishment ignore ordinary citizens’ very real and legitimate concerns about the direction of transnational capitalism, their anxieties are easily directed away from the underlying causes and toward mythical threats.

I told Mr. Pale Rider that if he didn’t want to listen to me, there were plenty of other liberal Texas bloggers who would tell him more.

If you’d like to be one of those liberal Texas bloggers giving Pale Rider a little cyber noogie, here’s his e-mail addy.

If you know of any other “liberals” who claim TTC worries about being something bigger are all tinfoil hat stuff, give them a cyber-noogie too.