North America set to experience the greatest decline in economic activity since the days of the Great Depression. Because of declining manufacturing output, banking collapse, astronomical public debt, and an imbalanced world trade system, the world economy is predicted to enter into a depression that makes the last look like a walk in the park. The new adversary, however, is a potential swine influenza pandemic set to stifle world trade even further due to each countries’ respective containment attempts. To make things worse, the United States has initiated a new passport requirement that will cripple the North American economies.

A new passport requirement set by the United States Homeland Security department has been watched very closely by officials and interested laymen for the past few years that will likely make life extremely more difficult for the Canadian economy, but particularly those industries reliant on consumers and tourists from the United States spending their hard earned dollars in the Northern economy at places like Casinos and tourist venues. Indeed, these venues were primarily established to recoup declining revenues generated by a dwindling manufacturing sector.

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The other challenged that has recently presented itself has been the introduction of the Mexican Swine Flu that originated in that country and quickly spread to almost every country in the world. Many countries such as the United States are considering protectionist measures to contain the spread of the virus, and many politicians like Rep. Eric Massa (D-N.Y.) has called for closure of the US border until the outbreak is cessated.

“The public needs to be aware of the serious threat of swine flu, and we need to close our borders to Mexico immediately and completely until this is resolved,” Massa said in a statement. “I am making this announcement because I see this as a serious threat to the health of the American public and I do not believe this issue is receiving the attention it needs to have in the news,” Massa said.

The World Health Organisation has repeatedly said, however, that the newly mutated H1N1 virus is not found in pigs – although the animals can be the vessels for the “genetic reassortment” that produces new strains – and that pork meat is safe to eat. Joseph Domenech, chief veterinary office with the UN Food and Agriculture Officer in Rome, said the Egyptian order was “a real mistake”. “There is no reason to do that. It’s not a swine influenza, it’s a human influenza,” he said (WHO, 2009).

The new passport requirement is set to decimate these industries when it comes into effect in June, 2009. Since only 20 to 30 per cent of Americans have valid passports, it is likely that the people who do not have them will not be travelling to Canada or Mexico as previous until they obtain one. The industries currently reliant on Americans travelling to Canada and Mexico for business, tourism, and pleasure purposes will no longer be able to engage in these activities unless they have passports or risk law enforcement sanctions.

As the NY Times reports, the new passport rules brings worry to tourism areas such as Niagara Falls where they say the new rules could discourage millions of visitors from coming to one of the nation’s most majestic and romantic tourist attractions and result in billions of dollars a year in lost revenue (NY times, 2009). Other affected regions of the country going whose tourism industries will likely be decimated will be Windsor, Ontario, and Sarnia, Ontario.

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“I think there will be an impact,” John Winston, general manager of Tourism London, warned yesterday. “It is just another barrier for people to go through if they want to go back to the U.S.” Especially hard hit could be bus tours, which rely on people on moderate incomes and seniors for business, Winston said. The London region relies on the U.S. and other countries for about 12% of its tourism business, he added (Cnews, 2009).

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All signs are pointing to a total economic, political, and social collapse in the United States, but also in Canada once the full effects of the economic crisis spreads to its norther neighbor as the US economy slows to a halt. Since Canada depends mainly on the United States for its economic well being, any kind of economic collapse of the United States would immediately obliterate the Canadian economy. Indeed, during the Great Depression, Canada was affected more negatively than the United States. Canada was hit hard by the Great Depression. Between 1929 and 1939, the gross national product dropped 40% (compared to 37% in the US).

Unemployment reached 27% at the depth of the Depression in 1933. Many businesses closed, as corporate profits of $396 million in 1929 turned into losses of $98 million in 1933. Families saw most or all of their assets disappear, and their debts become heavier as prices fell. Canadian exports shrank by 50% from 1929 to 1933. Worst hit were areas dependent on primary industries such as farming, mining and logging, as prices fell and there were few alternative jobs (Wikipedia, 2009).

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Remiscent of proposed border amnesty changes that the Bush administration was trying to railroad down the throat of Congress, the Governor of California stated his opinion voicing opposition to increased immigration and lax border controls. Seeing Mexico is such a drastically different county in terms of social, health, environmental, and economic standards, it is unwise to further open the already porous border that the Amnesty Program would have done. The problem with the current situation is that NAFTA essentially makes the borders extremely porous in both economic and immigration facets.

In the economic area, corporations are allowed to take legal action – potentially overriding sovereign countries’ legal precendents — over their right to profit from that market. In the immigration front, NAFTA, by permitting heavily-subsidized US corn and other agri-business products to compete with small Mexican farmers, has driven the Mexican farmer off the land due to low-priced imports of US corn and other agricultural products. Some 2 million Mexicans have been forced out of agriculture, and many of those that remain are living in desperate poverty. These people are among those that cross the border to feed their families. (Meanwhile, corn-based tortilla prices climbed by 50%. No wonder many so Mexican peasants have called NAFTA their ‘death warrant (Common dreams, 2006).

In a nutshell, NAFTA, the ficticious free trade agreement once labelled as a “new international structure, not simply a trade agreement” by former Secretary of State and murderer, Henry Kissinger, is a method to force countries to lower their standards built up over decades of court and legal struggles. These countries signed up to NAFTA and the World Trade organization are indeed starting to realize the full effects of so called “free trade,” which is in fact a permit to allow countries to dump their slave labor goods on their markets.

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It seems that with all the financial debacles, swine flu pandemic worries, trade imbalances, and the banking failures, that each country is starting to collapse into protectionist measures designed to protect their respective interests. Indeed, as John Raulston Saul mentions in his book, the world is on its way to a collapse of globalism. The past three decades have been marked by unimpressive economic growth and sharply increasing economic inequality, and recent years have seen a marked rise in economic populism, nationalism, and conflict, much of it within states.

Why is this all happening?

To bring about the end to all industrialization and the production of nuclear generated electric power in what they call “the post-industrial zero-growth society”. Excepted are the computer- and service industries. US industries that remain will be exported to countries such as Mexico where abundant slave labor is available. As we saw in 1993, this has become a fact through the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, known as NAFTA. Unemployables in the US, in the wake of industrial destruction, will either become opium-heroin and/or cocaine addicts, or become statistics in the elimination of the “excess population” process we know of today as Global 2000 (John Coleman, 2002).

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