Category: Uncategorized

By Jose Angel Gutierrez

Originally published en espanol in La Estrella newspaper of Fort Worth, reprinted by permission of author.

The idea of an economic boycott by immigrants in the US on May 1st is a good one. The economic might of immigrants, legal or not, in the United States is two-fold: labor power and consumer power. California Gov. Pete Wilson proposed and supported Proposition 187 which contained the basic anti-Mexican and anti-immigrant provisioins of the current James Sensenbrenner bill that passed the US House of Representatives last December 2005. In both cases persons of Mexican ancestry in the US rose in opposition and organized massive protests.
The idea of a national boycott was discussed by various leaders and attempted. I know some of us put up signs on our doors then: No Compro/No Trabajo. The media then like now said our boycott was ineffective. Employers then like now told employees they would be fired if they did not show up for work or participated in protests. Nothing much has changed.

If you want to change public policy and law, you must challenge it and be prepared to pay the consequences. In this case who is really needed? Is it our labor that is more important or is it that we have a job that is more important?

Several so called “leaders” are flying off to Mexico to discuss how to stop the boycott. President Fox is not interested in upsetting the dialogue and relations between him and Bush. Mexico is the largest trading partner of the US in the Americas.

Immigrants of all types, Cuban, Indian, Vietnamese, Dominican, Mexican, Salvadoran, Polish, Greek, etc. earn money in the US and send some to their homeland. These remittances save the US government lots of money in foreign assistance they do not have to send those governments. And these government get this money “free” without any effort. They enjoy the benefits of these immigrants working outside their country.

I do not know how effective the boycott will be but two things are sure. First, US workers will once again join the rest of the world in celebrating May 1st as the Day of the Worker internationally. The US government broke away from that tradition to split US workers from the international community and allows Labor Day on the first Monday in September. The US government shot and killed labor protestors during the Haymarket Riots in 1896. Thereafter, organized labor in the US chose to celebrate on another day not in May.

Second, economic boycotts work best when you have a specific target. A target in 1987 was Disney Corporation because they gave money to the advocates of Proposition 187. In 2006 the target some boycott organizers suggest ought to be is James Sensenbrenner. He is the heir to the Kimberly Clark fortune. They make Kleenex, Kotex, Depends, Scott tissue, Pull-ups, Huggies, Little Swimmers, Viva, and Cottonelle products. We all use them at sometime.

There is also Kimberly Clark de Mexico, SA. If Sensenbrenner does not want Mexicans in his midst then why should Mexicans buy his products?
Third, some of us will pay the price and boycott. I will not work that day. I will show a movie during a lunch hour at the university where I work about the greatest tennis player of all time, Pancho Gonzalez. Come visit, it is free on May 1, noon, University Hall Room 121 (University of Texas – Arlington).

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)