America Takes A Massive Dump

In the Gulf of Mexico that is. The oil currently spilling from a deep water well into the Gulf is a massive disaster--gigantic and profound, difficult to get one's head around. The main thing each of us needs to remember and understand though is that each gallon, each barrel, each poisoned fish or shrimp or other form of aquatic life, belongs to us--to each and everyone of us.

Sure we can blame BP, and the deregulatory frenzy of three decades of Reaganism (I predict that Ronald Reagan will go down as the worst president in history--worse even than GW Bush-- the anti-FDR.), and these were certainly factors, but the main factor rests in the heart and the hearth of each and every American: our insatiable desire for cheap energy. Sure, our politicians have been corrupted by the massive amounts of money that the energy industry has poured into Washington and state houses from Maine to California, but all the politicians were doing was enabling the addiction of the American people to cheap oil-based crap. Big cars? Gotta have 'em. McMansions? How could one do without all that closet space? Cheap food and plastic stuff and beauty products and worthless mall stuff? Absolutely essential to the lifestyles of the superficial and financially incontinent (i.e. to all Americans).

British Petroleum can and must be held accountable for the profound sin against the earth and all its people that it has committed. But such accountability does nothing to expiate the sin that stains the soul of each and every American. We are the ones who enabled these rat bastards. And this latest outrage is merely one of many, and mainly distinguished by the fact that it succeeded in getting our attention. The fouling of our planet has been going on for a long time and with our consent (if also with our willful blindness). We are small evil people who are only beginning to pay for our perfidy.

Even if the current oil disaster could be cleaned up (and it cannot be) our earth has already been ruined for future generations. Our love of petroleum has fundamentally changed our environment and our climate and it's too late to turn it around , though we might be able to affect it a bit at the margins if we were willing to alter our lifestyles, which we are not.

We had an opportunity to change, back in the '70s. After the oil shocks of that decade the president (Jimmy Carter, who may have lacked the charisma of Reagan but at least understood policy) and the congress actually invested in alternative energy in order to try and wean us off oil, Middle East oil in particular. The American people fixed all that though--we elected Reagan and voted for less regulation and cheaper stuff and the right to put ourselves in thrall to banks--we gave control of our economy and our politics to the oligarchs ('business') who understand how to get things done. And boy did they get some stuff done.

Our planet has been ruined, irrevocably so. Those of us alive today may not notice it so much, but two or three generations from now I promise you our grandchildren will look back on those who are alive today with dismay and disgust. Those to whom we will hand over control of the earth will never have the opportunity to live the cheap and easy lifestyles we live today. They will know the truth about us that we refuse to admit to ourselves: we are pigs, selfish stupid pigs, snouts deep in the trough of worthless material ephemera.

And what of the Tea Party? Where are the tea baggers now? All across the Gulf States of the South (Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas), land of the Tea Bagger, home of the extreme right, where are the cries of "get out of our bidness, big guv'ment!"? No, all one hears from the Republican governors who run the South is "we need mo' o' that big guv'ment! Help us clean this mess up--we didn't have nothin' to do with it!"

What utter and complete hypocrites. What selfish liars. What perfect Americans.

Only The Left Can Solve The Problem Of Illegal Immigration

When it comes to the illegal immigration conundrum, the right and the left dance around one another in a celebration of self-fulfilled prophecy. Both sides huff and puff and bloviate and protest but at base each side understands the deal they have made with the devil (i.e. each other), because of which deal nothing substantive will change regarding illegal immigration because ultimately neither side wants it to.

The right loves to demagogue the immigration issue because it stirs up its racist xenophobic base. Conservative politicians are full throated in their calls for a "secure" border (i.e., a Berlin wall across the bottom of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California). But the plutocrats who finance the right need a porous border. They want nothing so much as plenty of continued illegal immigration because it gives them cheap labor for their meat factories and construction sites and restaurants and mansions. The right wing elite can never admit this to is base, but it doesn't really matter because the base is too full of fear to really care--it just wants to be able to vent its anti-immigrant hate in as public a manner as possible.

The left does not want any substantive action on illegal immigration because it cares about human rights. If the border were truly closed or laws passed and enforced limiting the ability of illegal immigrants to maintain themselves in this country then millions of poor people throughout the Americas would lose their one chance of making their lives better by moving north.

Both sides know that if you really wanted to stop illegal immigration you could do it with one single action: criminalize not just illegal aliens but, more importantly, those who hire them. Make it absolutely illegal to hire someone who is not in the country legally, and enforce it with substantial criminal and civil penalties (rather than the tiny fines and lax enforcement that exist currently). Then all the work currently being done by illegals would soon dry up and with it the impetus to cross into the country without permission.

But of course this will never happen because big business needs cheap labor in order to continue the obscene profits that the plutocrats rely on to fund their lavish lifestyles. The politicos who run the Republican Party and enable the tea baggers need the racist resentment the issue stirs up in order to keep the old mean white people showing up at the polls. If there's going to be any real movement on the issue it's going to have to come from the left.

As progressives I don't think that it requires that we give up our committment to human rights to also acknowledge that we have to do something substantive about illegal immigration (and something that involves more than amnesty but which is also about the rule of law). Working American pay a price for illegal immigration, a price that is increasingly difficult for us to bear and for which progressives must acknowledge some responsibility.

A vast pool of easily accessible illegal (which means, among other things, without legal protection) labor works to suppress wages and benefits for all of us. Of course this is most acute for unskilled workers, but the overall effect of illegal wages puts a downward pressure on wages for the entire economy, including wages for the skilled. Enabling the plutocrats to exploit the status of illegal immigrants for the purpose of lining their own pockets--to siphon off wages that would go to working Americans so that the corporate fat cats can vacation in the south of France every year--insults and degrades the ability of working people everywhere to make a better life for ourselves. Illegals are exploited, and working Americans are oppressed: it's a lose-lose situation for everyone but Wall Street.

The USA has long acted as a safety valve for Central and South America--in particular for Mexico. I'm not so sure anymore that we should or could continue to do this. Mexico is approaching failed state status. It is increasingly a nation divided between oligarchs and everyone else. A significant portion of the nation's economy (a fourth or more according to some estimates) consists of remittances sent back to Mexico from family members living in our country illegally--money that props up Mexico but will never be spent in the USA (where our own economy needs it). The government of Mexico is corrupt and incompetent to the core. The military and police have been bought by the drug cartels. Mexico is collapsing in on itself and my personal prediction is that there will be a revolution there within the next ten years.

By allowing the poor and dispossessed of Mexico to pour across our border and work here illegally we allow the corrupt oligarchs of Mexico to escape the consequences of their own behavior. We delay the inevitable--social revolution--and we do so at enormous cost to our own working people: we suppress our own wages; we stoke the fires of racism and xenophobia; and we see our civil liberties eroded as they have recently been in Arizona.

The wingnuts of the right will never initiate true immigration reform--they prefer rage and racism to solutions. It is up to the left to push for reform that includes sensitivity to human rights but which also acknowledges that we can no longer allow those who hire illegal immigrants to go unpunished. We must push for economic development in Latin America that actually helps workers rather than just enriches oligarchs--and we must prepare for the coming revolution in Mexico. We must push back against the plutocrats and demagogues who pleasure themselves with hatred for "the other" while caring not one whit for the working people in their own community.

And we must do all of these things immediately, because the longer we wait the greater the costs and the consequences of the devil's deal between the left and the right.