Geoege Bush and Immigration

Tuesday May 16, 2006

To say that I am enthusiastic about the presidential address last night would have to be, in all honesty, a bald faced lie. The president managed to placate both the conservatives and liberals while, in reality, postulating nothing of substance. And, to make it worse, he deftly avoided all talk of the real problem and the real culprits...I guess by now we can just see that GWB is a natural at avoiding the truth.

To dissemble without addressing the corporatization of America is a lie. To completely neglect to address the abject failure of our trade agreements is downright criminal. Those two factors, in my estimation, are largely responsible for the immigration problems that confront us.

NAFTA, in particular, is one of those demons. We signed the trade agreement under the pretext of both helping American businesses and assisting Mexican and Central American workers to help to "lift themselves up by their own bootstraps". It was one of those "rather than bring them fish and let them eat tonight, we'll teach them to fish and they can have food forever" deals.

Well...that is not what happened. Instead, under the pretext of boosting the American economy and bringing higher dividends to the stockholders, these Machiavellian corporations have taken their industries south of the border where they pay wages SO LOW that Mexicans opt to cross the US/Mexico at great peril so that they can make sub-minimum wages picking fruit or making palates or some other slave labor type endeavor. If we combine corporate greed with the lust for cheap, sub-human slave labor wages...voila...corporate outsourcing and the erosion of our manufacturing base.

I have heard over and over again the same worn out and hackneyed phrase..."jobs Americans are unwilling to do". Well...let's translate that into reality...what they REALLY mean are jobs that Americans won't do for LESS THAN MINIMUM WAGE!!! So...we import a slave labor force...the new untouchables in the American corporate caste system and create a new class of individuals who will allow their human rights to be violated to line the pockets of these corporate farms or others of their ilk.

It's obvious what these corporate types are trying to accomplish in this shrunken world in which we live...it is an attempt to reduce US wages and bring them in line with the rest of the world, particularly of the recently developed and industrialized nations. The middle class is this country is one victim, the poor underpaid migrant another...and...the elite 10% that is actually heavily invested in the market or in financial services and speculation line their pockets while the rest of us live with the probable and rapidly approaching decline of the Middle Class while we work harder and make less money. It has reached survival proportions.

Oh what a tangled web we weave....

trickster108