Category: Uncategorized

by Greg Moses

OpEdNews / CounterPunch / DissidentVoice / IndyBay

Just as PNAC or the Project for the New American Century helped us to think about underlying motives for the public shams of the war on terrorism, so might CNAC or the Compact for North American Competitiveness help us to think about drama at the border between Mexico and the USA. Already CNAC’s preferences for “border security” and “temporary workers” have attracted friends with clout, but did you know that Mexican oil is also on the agenda?
Shortly after last year’s Waco Summit brought together three North American heads of state, Bush, Fox, and Martin, a CNAC proposal was released by the US Council of the Mexico-US Business Committee (MEXUS), an organization which predates the Council of the Americas (COA) to which it now belongs.

The April 2005 report is signed by COA heavyweights Robert Mosbacher and James Jones, backed by a leadership team composed of ChevronTexaco, Eastman Kodak, First Data, Ford Motor, Kissinger McLarty, Manatt Jones Global Strategies, Merck, MetLife, Miller and Chevalier, Nextel, and Proctor and Gamble.

In a preface to the report, MEXUS takes a lot of credit for creating NAFTA or the North American Free Trade Agreement; brags about publishing “NAFTA Works”; and promises to maintain leadership for “increasing competitiveness” in the unified North American bloc.

The fact that seems to irritate this report more than any other is that despite NAFTA the maquiladora sector of the Mexican economy had managed to lose 250,000 jobs to China in the first five years of the new American century. This fact also locates the area that CNAC authors are most interested to address: how to fix the problems of Mexico so that the NAFTA alliance can steal back those maquiladora jobs. One key task is “free and secure” trade through borders which commodities can speed quickly, but which must do a better job screening people.

Concurrent with release of this report last April, the Minutemen were quietly fading into the margins of the media when their profile was rescued by terminator Governor Schwarzenegger of California. At that time, remember, Schwarzenegger miscued himself by talking about “closing the border”, a line he later delivered closer to script.

“Yesterday was a total screw-up in the words I used,” the governor said at a press conference. “Because instead of closing, I meant securing.” With those words, pieces of the border puzzle had actually locked into place last April, soon followed last May by a caucus report from Congress calling for 36,000 national guard at the border. At the time, the idea seemed far-fetched, like the idea of full-scale invasions had sounded a few years before that.

As we now know, the President has fulfilled the 2005 prophesies by sending thousands of troops to replace the function modeled by the Minutemen, just as Schwarzenegger and the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus had suggested in the first place.

Besides “border security” the CNAC report is clear in its preference for a second darling policy favored by Bush and Companies: an “enforceable temporary worker program that will match willing workers with willing employers, bringing order and increased security to current haphazard patterns of immigration.” We haven’t heard the end of this idea this year. Having a global temp service is really too tempting for Mexico’s continental partners to ignore.

Given the momentum that security and temp work are having in the real world today, it is worth noting a third area of prime concern for CNAC, and that is reform of Mexico’s oil and gas industry. In the near term, says the CNAC report, the Mexican government has to improve opportunities for private investment and in the long term Mexico has to find “cost-effective means to raise production.” Unless this is done, says the CNAC report, “security and competitiveness within North America will be impacted.”

This past weekend in its coverage of the Mexican presidential race, scheduled for July 2, the Associated Press clearly outlined the positions of each major candidate on reforming the Mexican oil and gas sector. While reading those news reports online I got the queasy feeling that CNAC was beginning to look like PNAC all over again. Get the CNAC report in pdf

(May 18, 2006) This morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along partisan lines to send the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) to the full Senate for consideration. The proposed constitutional amendment restricts marriage to a [partnership] between a man and a woman. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has committed to bring the FMA up for a full Senate vote in early June.

In the first 24 hours of our advocacy campaign, [Texas] Senators Hutchison and Cornyn each received 700 letters from their constituents letting them know they do NOT support writing discrimination into the United States Constitution.

To join the campaign for partnership rights, go to:

Equality Texas

Three press releases yesterday from the Geo Group show which way the world drifts. First, the company secured a contract from Florida to manage an existing detention camp while it builds an expanded one. Second, the company announced plans to expand a Texas detention camp in Del Rio. And third, the company reported that sales of common stock would be used to pay for the Texas construction. Does this mean that Geo Group stockholders now have a vested interest in filling the borderland jails?
Get tomorrow’s headlines today at the Geo Group press room.

“My own feeling about private prisons is that the biggest issue with private prisons, for me, is that when you introduce that kind of private capital into this field, what private prisons do, either directly or indirectly, is mitigate toward more and more prisons, because what they’re interested in is market share. That’s what they do. This is a business. So the more prisoners they have, the more money they make.”–Michael Jacobson speaking on Democracy Now (June 13, 2006)

4/26/2006 6:51 PM
By: Allie Rasmus
News 8 Austin

Manuel Mendez was working at a construction site Wednesday morning in Round Rock with dozens of others when two immigration enforcement cars pulled up. People have heard stories about it, but until now there have been few eyewitness accounts of immigration raids taking place in Central Texas.

Mendez said the officers asked him for proof of U.S. citizenship.

“I told them no, because I had left it in my wife’s car this morning when she dropped me off,” he said.

That’s when Mendez said the uniformed men told him he’d have to leave his work site — in handcuffs. But there’s one problem. Mendez is a U.S. citizen born and raised in Austin.

“They told me to put my hands behind my back because they didn’t have proof I was a citizen. But then I gave them my Social Security number,” he said.

A U.S. citizen says he was questioned and suspected of being an undocumented worker.

Mendez said the officers cleared him once they double checked his Social Security number. The incident comes on the heels of dozens of unconfirmed reports of immigration raids in Central Texas. But Mendez said he can’t believe he was questioned simply because of his ethnicity.

“They singled me out because I was Hispanic, and they thought I was not from here, they thought I was from Mexico,” he said.

Barbara Hines of UT’s Immigration Law Clinic said stopping someone solely on race is illegal, but others say it’s legal for immigration officers to stop and question someone based on their race and other factors, such as where they work, their manner of dress and language ability.

While immigration officers have the right to approach you, everyone has the right to refuse to answer questions. Hines said it’s difficult to get people to understand that.

“It’s very hard to teach people that you have the right to say, ‘no,’ because the general instinct is that if someone comes up to you you’re going to answer those questions,” she said.

It was clear the encounter had a chilling effect on workers at the Round Rock site. By the afternoon only a handful were still there. Mendez said he can’t blame them; he’s just surprised it happened at all.

The U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Department will not return calls to confirm or deny they’re responsible for the immigration raids.

But a press release issued last week on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Web site said the agency has launched a “comprehensive immigration enforcement strategy” that includes enforcement on worksites.

http://www.news8austin.com/content/top_stories/default.asp?ArID=160728