Fairleft

My "big fundamental" is that being _left_ means working for a more egalitarian, democratic society, but also for fairness, not ethnic or other kinds of favoritism. Because the left has turned away from fairness it is lost and unpopular. I'm a small voice hoping to push the left back toward its basics and its natural popularity.

Tuesday, June 06, 2006

Are Minutemen Leaders the Real Left?


I thought the following was one of my best summaries of some of the problems the politically correct 'left' has with immigration. Give the provocative title a break, by the way, I'm not _really_ saying that about the Minutemen. Anyway, it's a response to a portion of "A Guided Tour of Class War" by Tom Engelhardt of Tomdispatch.com, an interview with Barbara Ehrenreich that I found on Alternet.org.

R Minutemen Leaders The Real Left?
Posted by: fairleft on Jun 6, 2006 8:48 AM
BE: ... the [Minutemen] leaders talked a very big anti-corporate line: The corporations are crushing us, we're the real Americans, and so forth. In their minds, the immigrants are part of the thing that's crushing them...

And the Minutemen leaders are right, illegal immigrants willing to put up with low-wages and terrible benefits and working conditions, causes a race to the bottom and forces the whole working class to accept those conditions or not have jobs. Besides the fact that mass immigration creates terrible over-supply-of-labor conditions for organizing unions. The simple solution: heavily fine and throw employers in jail for employing illegal immigrants. The _only_ reason it is impossible for BE to say this is because she knows it would damage her pseudo-left heroine career.

On the other hand it is very easy for her to say the following:

BE: "If you were going to take on the immigration issue seriously, you'd have to look at what NAFTA did to the economy and agriculture for working-class Mexicans. Much of the immigration stuff is standard scapegoating. I mean, we're not going to begin to get at the problem until we take a serious look at the economies of the countries that are exporting people."

Well, what business is it of the US left, which I would think is non-imperialist, to tell Mexico how to manage its economy? Mexico can pull out of NAFTA, and I hope it does, but that's _their_ business. We Americans can _easily_ protect our economy from a damaged Mexican economy by simply doing what I outlined in the previous paragraph. This is 2 + 2 = 4 stuff.

So why is it the Minutemen talk better economic sense than Barbara Ehrenreich and the best and brightest of the pseudo-left? We all had better learn in a hurry, or we're in for more of the same, more of the Clinton-era pro-NAFTA Democratic Party, more of the current anti-US-working-class, pro-illegal-immigration pseudo-left. The American working poor and working class need real help, and that stuff is only causing more pain.

1 Comments:

At 4:17 PM, Blogger ChanChanRight said...

hey, fairleft. Keep fighting the good fight.

Alternet has banned me, as I knew they would, but i am still able to post on tpmcafe....

 

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