June 14, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

TRADE POLICY AND ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

Conventional wisdom is that globalization is here to stay. I haven't heard much discussion from the current crop of presidential candidates about the destructive effects of United States trade policy. I think NAFTA and GATT should be repealed. Globalization has been harmful to workers in the United States and has wrecked havoc on people in Central and South America. One of the things that fuels illegal immigration to the United States is the desperation of people in Mexico and Central America because their economies are being destroyed by globalization. The political and corporate class in the United States want it both ways. They love the cheap labor provided by illegal immigrants, but they gripe about the social costs of dealing with the immigrants. They love globalization, but they don't want to deal with the destructive effects of globalization. This article by David Bacon is at www.truthout.org:

The comprehensive immigration bill may have stalled in the Senate last week, but the debate over immigration policy will undoubtedly continue - especially over the status of the millions of undocumented workers presently in the United States, as well as those who will come in the next few years.

In fact, that continued flow of workers is inevitable, since Congress is also considering new trade legislation that is guaranteed to increase the number of undocumented workers in the United States. Our nation's trade and immigration policies have never been as closely connected as they are today. Four new agreements are currently being considered, while President Bush is pushing for "fast track" authority to negotiate even more of them. All will exacerbate our current immigration issues by displacing thousands of workers and farmers, most of whom will join the cross-border flow of migrant labor that already tops 200 million people worldwide.

Over the last two years, all of the immigration proposals considered by Congress have sought more openly than ever to channel that labor, making it available to the world's largest corporations at a price they want to pay. Welcome to the new world order.

US employers have always wanted the country's immigration policy to supply workers when needed and get rid of them when the need ended. At its logical extreme, this policy produced brutal results. In the 1930s, tens of thousands of Mexicans were deported in neighborhood sweeps around the country, when unemployment rose and threatened social unrest. Less than a decade later, the US government negotiated the return of those same people as braceros, or temporary contract workers.

June 13, 2007


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY

LIMBAUGH TAKE ON ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

I should point out that I don't listen to Rush Limbaugh. But today I had to get a shuttle ride home because my car is getting maintenance and, unfortunately, the shuttle driver had KKKMJ Radio on. Immigrants, Limbaugh says, are people Democrats "can control." He said that "Democrats are running out of victims." According to Limbaugh's skewed vision of the world, Democrats want low-paid people in the country who will vote for Democrats because Democrats support social programs that help poor people. Never mind that under Democratic administrations poverty decreases and more people rise into the middle class. It is people like Limbaugh who want a permanent underclass. Even more, people like Limbaugh don't want government to intervene to help the poor. The poor are victims of a predatory capitalist system. I like this article by Barbara Ehrenreich just because Limbaugh was trashing it. It's at www.thenation.com:

The punitive rage directed at illegal immigrants grows out of a larger blindness to the manual labor that makes our lives possible: The touching belief, in the class occupied by Rush Limbaugh among many others, that offices clean themselves at night and salad greens spring straight from the soil onto one's plate.

Native-born workers share in this invisibility, but it's far worse in the case of immigrant workers, who are often, for all practical purposes, nameless. In the recent book There's No José Here: Following the Lives of Mexican Immigrants, Gabriel Thompson cites a construction company manager who says things like, "I've got to get myself a couple of Josés for this job if we're going to have that roof patched up by Saturday." Forget the Juans, Diegos, and Eduardos - they're all interchangeable "Josés."

Hence no doubt the ease with which some prominent immigrant-bashers forget their own personal reliance on immigrant labor, like Nevada's Governor Jim Gibbons, who, it turns out, once employed an undocumented nanny. And as the Boston Globe revealed late last year, Mitt Romney's lawn in suburban Boston was maintained by illegal immigrants from Guatemala.

THE RICH: BY THE NUMBERS

The aforementioned Rush Limbaugh, like so many reactionaries, is aghast at the concept of the "redistribution of wealth." That's only a problem with Limbaugh if the "redistribution" goes to middle class and poor people. As long as the money is being vacuumed up by the very rich, there's no problem. It should outrage us that the Walton family, among the richest people who have ever lived on the planet, prosper at the expense of their underpaid employees. There is no excuse for people being hungry in this country, or homeless, or going without medical care. The system effectively blocks getting a world class education, that panacea for what ails us, because college is too expensive. This article by Clara Jeffery is at www.motherjones.com:

AMONG THE FORBES 400 who gave to a 2004 presidential campaign, 72% gave to Bush.

IN 2005, there were 9 million American millionaires, a 62% increase since 2002.

IN 2005, 25.7 million Americans received food stamps, a 49% increase since 2000.

ONLY ESTATES worth more than $1.5 million are taxed. That’s less than 1% of all estates. Still, repealing the estate tax will cost the government at least $55 billion a year.

ONLY 3% OF STUDENTS at the top 146 colleges come from families in the bottom income quartile; only 10% come from the bottom half.

BUSH’S TAX CUTS GIVE a 2-child family earning $1 million an extra $86,722—or Harvard tuition, room, board, and an iMac G5 for both kids.