Arbor Update

Ann Arbor Area Community News

Roadblock Tour protests I-69 plan

15. February 2005 • Murph
Email this article

An event this Saturday:

WCC AMNESTY PRESENTS

R O A D B L O C K

Winter 2005 Tour

This Saturday (Feb 19th) 7:00 @ 1510 Hill ST (behind Luther Co-op)

Please come to this Free Event focusing on how NAFTA and the Planned I-69 super Highway will be effecting our lives. for questions contact Ben Ayersock@yahoo.com

As they create global connections between their zones of production and consumption, we must create connections between the local and global struggles against neoliberalism, ecocide, and corporate globalization.

The emergence of multinational bodies (e.g. the World Trade Organization) and the creation of massive free trade zones (e.g. ASEAN, EU, or NAFTA), which have heralded the emergence of a new era of unfettered corporate domination of the earth, are not the only or even the most important aspects of globalization. Instead, we must also begin to examine and resist the gigantic infrastructure projects that are necessitated by the exponential expansion of trade across borders.

The purpose of the Roadblock tour is precisely this – to hopefully begin a discussion about roads, particularly new, international superhighway projects, and the role that they play in corporate globalization. We will examine, in particular, the Plan Puebla Panama that is being planned to open up Central America to new depths of exploitation, and I-69, the NAFTA superhighway that is intended to run through the Midwestern U.S. as a vital foundation for the Free Trade Area of the Americas and as a connection to the highways of the Plan Puebla Panama. More importantly, we will explore the history of resistance to road projects and the potentials that exist today to undermine these socially and environmentally devastating superhighways and with them, corporate globalization.

We will be travelling throughout the northern U.S. Please check out the tour website, www.geocities.com/theroadblocktour, to get updated information about our dates. We will also be carrying an extensive pamphlet and zine distro to offset gas
costs.

I-69 currently runs from Port Huron, MI, to Indianapolis, IN. The proposed extension project, which has been in the works since 1991, would run down to the Mexico border at Laredo or Brownsville. The route number does not appear to be intended as a metaphor for international trade.



  1. Man, the I-69 extension decrease the price of weed so much, dude…
       —js    Feb. 16 '05 - 12:40AM    #
  2. Whoa, it’s the Eisenhower era all over again. Bring on the fallout shelters and the Progress!
       —Brandon    Feb. 16 '05 - 03:21AM    #