What do they all have in common? Well it’s not a fairy tale or a fantasy or a hope or a dream. It’s not about sitting around a cozy fire at the city club and sparring over the economic theories of Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes. It’s not about dissing opponents at a dinner party in Georgetown. What all these folks have in common is that the whole Americas has been screwed over since the Europeans first arrived and then again when Milton Friedman arrived in the 1950's with his flim flam feudalism. That bunch of baloney passed off as theory continued through every presidency and is rock and rolling today.
Naomi Klein maps the way Friedman, his Chicago School economists, and the C.I.A. brought free market fundamentalist capitalism to the Americas in the 1970’s thru shock and awe and are still trying to wield their wickedness there today. (Although they did manage to detour through Poland, South Africa, Russia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Baghdad and New Orleans).
So it is no surprise that this story hit this weekend.
Mexican Authorities Move to Crush Copper Strike by David Bacon Mexican Authorities Move to Crush Copper Strike
Mexican labor authorities seized on technicalities to order an end to the strike at the country's largest copper mine in Cananea, Sonora, on Friday. The Mexican press reports that over 700 heavily armed agents of the Sonora state police arrived in Cananea just hours before the decision was announced, and agents of the Federal Preventative Police were sent to this tiny mountain town as well. Strikers report that the streets were filled with rocks and teargas, and 20 miners have been injured - some seriously - in the ensuing conflict. The union says that five strikers are missing.
So who cares what happens in Mexico?
Smashing the strike in Cananea would have economic and political repercussions, not just in Mexico, but in the United States as well. In two previous strikes, at Cananea and its sister mine in Nacozari, in 1998 and 2005, respectively, over 2,000 miners lost their jobs. Most of them, unable to find other work in the tiny mining communities of northern Sonora, crossed the border into the US as undocumented workers in order to survive.
Duh. And duh again. Of course it’s all connected. There is no "immigration" problem. There’s a nasty business problem based on an economic theory which basically is a justification for pure selfishness and greed. Not really a "theory" at all.
Grupo Mexico has been at war with the Mexican miners union for over three years. In 2001, Napoleon Gomez Urrutia was elected as the union's president. He soon became a high-profile opponent of the Mexican government's conservative economic policy, successfully fighting its effort to weaken labor law and privatize its pension system. Taking advantage of high world copper prices, Gomez negotiated wage increases much higher than the limits the government sought to impose in its effort to attract foreign investment.
On February 19, 2005, 65 miners died in a huge explosion in the Pasta de Conchos coal mine in the northern state of Coahuila. That mine belonged to Grupo Mexico. The union found that workers on the second shift had complained of high concentrations of explosive methane gas in the shafts before the accident. "They told us that welding was still going on, even after the failure of some electrical equipment," Gomez charged.
Two days after the explosion, Gomez Urrutia accused the Secretary of Labor and Grupo Mexico of "industrial homicide." Then-President Vicente Fox filed corruption charges against Gomez less than a week later, and Labor Secretary Francisco Xavier Salazar Sáenz appointed Elias Morales to replace him as union president. Morales had been expelled from the union for his close relationship with the company. Gomez fled to Canada to avoid arrest, where the United Steel Workers gave him sanctuary, and where he remains. While in exile, he was twice reelected president of the union, although Grupo Mexico and the government refused to recognize him.
Thanks again to the United Steelworkers for coming to the aid of a brother in need. I had the privilege of working with the Steelworkers in Des Moines, Iowa and a better bunch of folks would be hard to find. (Thanks especially to Donnie from Texas for my T-Shirt.)
In the latest Hightower Lowdown, Jim Hightower connects the dots of what terrible consequences have come up upon the U.S. and Mexico because of NAFTA. Every time something happens in Mexico the ripples become tidal waves as they crash into the U.S.
- Economic Growth in Mexico has been anemic since ’94, and the benefits of any growth have gone overwhelmingly to the wealthiest families. (Like the owners of Grupo Mexico who own the largest house in the world.)
- Since NAFTA, Mexico has created less than a third of the millions of decent jobs it needs.
- Average factor wages in Mexico have dropped by more than 5% under NAFTA.
- Unemployment has jumped, and unskilled workers are paid only $5 a day.
- U.S. agribusiness corporations have more than doubled their shipment of subsidized crops into Mexico, busting the price that indigenous farmers got for their production and displacing some 2 million peasant farmers from their land.
- Huge agribusiness operations, many owned by U.S. investors, now control Mexican agricultural production and pay farmworkers under $2 an hour.
- Since NAFTA passed, there has been a flood of business bankruptcies and takeovers in Mexico as predatory U.S. chains have moved in. U.S. Corporations now control 40% of the country’s formal jobs, with Wal-Mart reigning as the #1 employer.
- 19 more million Mexicans live in poverty today than when NAFTA passed.
As our economy now plunges into recession and probably a depression, it is not the illegal workers that are the problem. Hightower makes the point that even if there were NO illegal workers – NONE-
"the fragility of the economy would remain, for poor Mexican laborers are not the ones who:
• Downsized and off shored our middle-class jobs;
• Perverted our bankruptcy laws to let corporations abrogate their union contracts;
• Stopped enforcement of America’s wage and hour laws;
• Perverted the National Labor Relations Board into an anti-worker tool for corporations;
• Illegally reclassified millions of employees as "independent contractors" leaving them with no benefits or labor rights;
• Subverted the right of workers to organize;
• Turned a blind eye to the re-emergence in America of sweatshops and child labor in everything from the clothing industry to Wal-Mart;
• Made good health care a luxury item;
• Let rich campaign donors take over both political parties;
• Passed by hook and crook a continuing series of global-trade scams to enrich the few and knock down the many.
Nope, don’t believe the smoke and mirrors of the "immigration" con. "Powerless immigrants didn’t do all these things to us," Hightower says. "The richest, most –powerful, best-connected corporate interests did them."
The most important point to remember is this; "Immigration reform cannot be separated from labor and trade reform."
David Bacon has another article on Truthout.org It’s about the Peru Free Trade Agreement. Lost Jobs and Migration He concludes that if the Democrats do not have strong positions on labor, trade and immigration, they are in deep trouble.
"Party strategists think Democrats can accept big contributions to support the Bush free trade program. They calculate that unions, workers, displaced immigrants and those hurt by the treaties have nowhere else to go in 2008. They're wrong. They could stay home - the Democrats certainly won't be giving them much reason to get out and vote."
You cannot be in bed with Wall Street and solve our problems above and below the border. You cannot hope that Grupo Mexico, Wal-Mart and IBP meat processing will just hammer out a lovely agreement with a compliant Democratic president. Come on people. They keep trying to divide us along race, gender, age, religion and nationality. The divide is between the aristocrats and the democrats, said Thomas Jefferson. It’s between the politics of exclusion and inclusion. It's rewarding work and seeing virtue in work. John Edwards himself said:
At the heart of the Working Society is the value of work. Work is not only a source of a paycheck but also a source of dignity and independence and self-respect.
We need to come together as the people who produce the wealth in this country and no longer want the fruits of our labor stolen from us. And our future is not being stolen by Mexican fruit pickers but by Wall Street scam artists.
(This is part of my "Connect the Dot Series" or what I refer to as "The Duh, Duh, Duh Series". For further connecting the dots read the story of how Africans are flooding Europe because Europeans are taking all of Africa's fish. Europe Takes Africa's Fish, and Boatloads of Migrants Follow The old "what goes around, comes around" adage that we saw at the end of "Charlie Wilson's War" which got beat out at the Golden Globe by a Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Is this an Omen?)