by Scott Creighton
Now that the midterm “elections” are officially over, the real work of neo-liberalizing this country begins with a vengeance. We saw that two days ago when they tried to pass the Keystone Pipeline bill and the new CISPA, the USA “Freedom” Act.
This evening, Barack Obama is going to give a speech in which he will lay out his end-around plan to side-step congress in order to implement much of the George W. Bush Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 that failed back when he was in office.
It is expected to give amnesty to 5 million or so illegal immigrants.
Obama is going to explain why it is he has the authority to do an end-around the congressional process which, back in the day, would have inspired massive protests from the left. All we hear these days from that sector are crickets and petty bourgeoisie house-wives fingering themselves while moaning his name.
Don’t expect to see it on the MSM though. They decided they would keep this particular bit of inflammatory rhetoric out of the spotlight while Latino TV will actually break into their coverage of their Grammy Award show to broadcast it.
ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX have all indicated they won’t break their planned programming to cover Obama’s 8 p.m. ET speech. CNN’s Brian Stelter first reported that ABC, NBC and CBS were opting out, and an official with FOX confirmed the same with The Hill…
But the networks that cater to an audience who will be very interested in what the president has to say cleared the time for the address, CNN reported. The vice president of Univision, the nation’s leading Spanish-language network, announced plans to interrupt its airing of the Latin Grammy Awards for the president’s address. Telemundo, the other big Spanish-language network in the U.S. will also show the speech live. And the White House is expected to stream the event online. Huffington Post
How about that? Designer news for various racially selected audiences.
See what they did there? Let me repeat it:
“But the networks that cater to an audience who will be very interested in what the president has to say cleared the time for the address”
Do you really think the majority of working class Americans have no interest in this subject? Do you really think it has no effect on their lives at all? You should think again.
MK: You detail how the guest worker program, now known as visas H2A and H2B (to continue in the proposed immigration “reform” in another guise – formerly the large-scale bracero program) exploits basic human rights and formalizes the use of sub-livable wage workers from Mexico. I knew this continued feature of “immigration reform” was bad when George W. Bush fully supported it. Talk a little about the injustices of the various guest worker programs over time and who they have benefited.
DB (David Bacon): There are today work visa programs for agricultural workers (H2A), lower-skilled non-agricultural workers (H2B) and higher-skilled workers like nurses, teachers and high-tech workers (H1B). All of these visas require someone to work in order to stay, so losing a job means having to leave the country. And they all are based on employers recruiting workers in other countries.
Employers like these programs because they all allow them to hire workers at low wages, lower than what they’d have to pay if they hired people already living in the US, whether citizens or immigrants. And by paying low wages and keeping those workers insecure, they also put them into competition with workers already here. For the guest workers, there is a long history of employer abuse, including cheating on the terms they promise workers when they’re hired, and not paying legal wages or providing the legally required conditions. The Southern Poverty Law Center calls them close to slavery. Truthout
Obama is doing this for the major corporations that want it. It will save them billions per year in labor costs and set the stage for continued incremental amnesty programs in the future. It won’t do any good for the workers. In fact, once they are “on the books” and on the grid, they will be locked into what amounts to indentured servitude to those companies.
They wont face the threat of random deportation like they do now, kind of. They will face the threat that is even worse: piss off the boss, get sent back.
Now, they can come and go with various companies depending on how they feel they are treated. Once this goes into effect these 5 million suddenly half-legal illegals will be locked into contracts with one company and if they leave they’ll be blacklisted and deported when they try to go somewhere else.
Essentially, they’ll be slaves, forced to put up with even worse conditions than they have now.
That’s too say nothing of what this decree from Emperor Obama is going to do to the wage structure of America. Middle class and working class citizens will see their wage structure fall each and every time a new version of Bush’s 2007 bill is forced through by unconstitutional presidential dictate.
You know that. I know that. Saying it’s the case isn’t racist as my detractors will certainly claim. Hell, even Obama knew that:
“[T]here’s no denying that many blacks share the same anxieties as many whites about the wave of illegal immigration flooding our Southern border—a sense that what’s happening now is fundamentally different from what has gone on before,” then-Senator Obama wrote in his 2006 autobiography, “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.”
”Not all these fears are irrational,” he wrote.
“The number of immigrants added to the labor force every year is of a magnitude not seen in this country for over a century,” Obama noted. “If this huge influx of mostly low-skill workers provides some benefits to the economy as a whole—especially by keeping our workforce young, in contrast to an increasingly geriatric Europe and Japan—it also threatens to depress further the wages of blue-collar Americans and put strains on an already overburdened safety net.” Daily Caller
Displaced workers, creating displaced workers and then exploiting them for cheap labor, is a major component of neoliberalism.
When Big Agriculture is brought into a country, the subsidized cheaper food from outside the country destroys the agricultural base and drives local farmers off their land, they end up having to migrate into cities where they live in shantee towns and serve as labor fodder for Big Manufacturing in sweatshops for subsistence wages.
This is not a controversial statement. Bill Clinton recently apologized to the people of Haiti for doing just that when he was the God King in D.C. for a while. Of course he said that while he was setting up round two after the recent earthquake and typhoon that decimated the country.
Same holds true when nations are neoliberalized and have to move outside the country for meaningful work, the ability to provide for their families. They become a tool once again to help Big Business decimate the wage structure of neighboring nations, thus the virus of neoliberal economics spreads like Ebola (only, neoliberalism actually does spread)
MK: Beginning with corrupt Mexican President Carlos Salinas during the George Herbert Walker Bush presidency, just prior to the ratification of NAFTA under Clinton, Mexico started to move toward becoming part of the neoliberal global juggernaut. I define neoliberalism as creating a world consisting of four groups of people: consumers, low-wage workers, the ultra wealthy and the dispensables. The people profiled in your book appear to fall into the second and fourth categories. Is that right?
DB: The people are displaced in Mexico, and the book describes this process, then become migrants. Their need to work and the poverty of their families forces them to accept low wages, both in Mexico and in the US. The book then describes the way US immigration law is used against them. In many cases, like the union drive at Smithfield Foods in Tarheel, North Carolina, when the immigrants make common cause with workers here and try to organize unions or protest bad wages and conditions, employers then fired them with the cooperation, and sometimes at the orders of, the US government. So in that sense they become dispensable, at least to their employers. Truthout
So this evening our president is going to announce his plans to force a neoliberal agenda down the throats of the people of this country without bothering with the constitutional process of going through “the people’s house” and the corporate media doesn’t feel it’s of enough interest to “we the people” to break into their pathetic shows to cover it. I guess you have to be brown to give a shit about such things.
At least, that racist drivel is their story… and they’re sticking with it.
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