What Do Subsidized Corn, A Militarized Border, and Finance Reform Have To Do With It?
The following remarks were offered at a Democracy for America gathering in Manchester, New Hampshire on Saturday morning, June 9th, 2007:
It is normally expected that, when given an opportunity to speak, I will talk about campaign finance reform and, more specifically, about how the public financing of campaigns can cut the threads of the big- money puppet show.
But today I would like to talk about unauthorized immigration, which has nothing to do with the big money corruption of our political system, except for everything.
Unauthorized immigration seems to be a big issue right now with our Republican candidates, as they are well-known to be the “law and order party.” That, after all, is why they are insisting that Scooter Libby pay the full price for his perjuries and obstructions of justice. They are for law and order, with the normal exceptions of the Geneva Convention and the U.S. Constitution, especially its Bill of Rights. But we know what they mean: When they say they are for law and order, they are talking mostly about keeping down the uppity poor folk. They are certainly not talking about the big corporations, hotel companies, agribusiness giants, retailers who employ millions of unauthorized immigrants but who make up for that sin many times over with their large campaign donations.
But I do not come here to talk about corrupting campaign donations and the need for public campaign financing. I come to talk of unauthorized immigration and a little about corn and something about tortillas. I call it unauthorized immigration, not illegal, because I don’t want to use words that confuse my Republican friends.
By the way, in saying that Republicans are very interested in the immigration issue, I do not mean to imply that it is less important for any of us.
If you will look around the grocery store check-out lines and notice the widening measurements of our fellow citizens, we can certainly see for ourselves the problem of having too much cheap labor around to do all our yardwork and housework for us. By my calculations, the roughly 3 billion pounds of extra weight now being carried on the hips of working-age American citizens is roughly equivalent to the combined weight of the unauthorized immigrants now in our communities. The math is clear and persuasive. Cheap labor is bad for everybody.
But why are so many people risking their lives to come into our country now? When did this big rush begin?
It began when Mr. Clinton approved NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement, and when he militarized our southern border at the same time. Prior to these combined actions, families crossed the border very commonly and casually, especially during harvest seasons. After harvest, they would go home to Mexico or Central America because that’s where they lived with their families in quite happy communities.
When the border was militarized, it became too risky to go back and forth. So they stayed.
Why did Mr. Clinton militarize the border? He did so because NAFTA was about to pull the rug out from under Mexico’s small family farms. We flooded Mexico with cheap corn–exports that we now subsidize to the tune of some $25 billion dollars a year. Congress gives that money of ours to a handful of agribusiness giants. Of course, I am not here to tell you why Congress does that, and what might be done to stop it, such as with the public financing of campaigns. But they do it, and Mexican family farmers cannot compete. In the years since NAFTA was signed, half of Mexico’s small farms have failed. The only kind of farming that can now compete in Mexico is big agribusiness, which does not employ as many people. Tortillas in Mexico now contain two-thirds imported corn, and they are three times as expensive at retail level than before NAFTA. The people have less money, and the cost of food is rising. We have done that. Our precious Senators and Congressmen and their corporate cronies have enforced that raw and cruel exploitation in our names.
The result of undermining Mexican farms, as Clinton expected, was a rising flood of poor people moving from rural areas into Mexico’s big cities, which have become so poor and overcrowded that all one can do is dream of going north across the border.
Now, if any Democratic candidates for President would like to show a little courage and intelligence, let them address the real cause of our flood of unauthorized immigrants. Will Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama or Mr. Edwards or any of the other candidates face down the agri- gangsters that are behind this problem? Probably they will not, so long as Iowa has a major primary.
Let me say that I am not ranting and raving in the least about these new Americans. When Mexico owned Texas and everything west of Texas, and when Mexico cut off migration across their borders into Texas, our people kept coming anyway –crossing illegally in search of opportunities for their families. When Mexico got upset by this, we trumped-up false reasons for a war, and we illegally took those lands. If that wasn’t enough law and order for you, we also conducted unfettered genocide against the region’s native people. So let’s not stand on any moral high ground regarding that southern border.
The people coming across the border today, with the usual exceptions, are family people with an incredible work ethic. Personally, I welcome them. I congratulate them for their courage and their dedication to their families. I want them to stay and become citizens, or, if some prefer, to return to their homeland at a time when there is international justice and a decent chance for their prosperity at home.
I regret what the political corruption of our system has done to their farms and their communities back home. It is not the peoples’ fault –it is the fault of corrupt leaders of both parties and both nations. We must speak this truth to these powerful people, even to those presidential candidates whom we otherwise admire.
So, candidates Clinton, Edwards, Obama and the rest: Do you understand the reasons why immigration numbers are growing? Are you smart enough to understand the situation? Are you brave enough to do something–to even say something–about it? Or is the truth too big for you?
All of us in this room have a duty to be good citizens and good Democrats. And that means we must ask the toughest questions so that the interests of the people –the people of our nation and of the world –will be served. Isn’t that what we’re here for?
And do you see why I do not need to harp on campaign finance reform, to cut the puppet strings that allow these cruelties to continue? I didn’t have to say a word about that, because you understand it. You understand what must be done in regard to the public financing of federal and state campaigns. And that only begins the reforms we require in this challenging new age.
Thank you.
Doris D. Haddock, known throughout the country as “Granny D,” walked across America in support of campaign reform at the age 90. She turned 97 on January 24, 2007.
I would have one quibble with the article. The author goes back to the old argument that Mexico “owned” Texas. Mexico inherited Texas when it broke off from Spain and the Spanish had “owned” Texas by claiming vast lands, sight unseen, for the crown. Mexico never really “owned” Texas any more than France or Spain “owned” Texas. To the extent anyone owned Texas, it was the Native American Indian tribes that resided there, and Texas was stolen from them just like the rest of what is now the US.
true enough kivals, true enough. “ownership” is really a non-starter, except to point out the massive hypocrisy of today’s “nativists”, and that the west has a long history of colonialism.
granny d has hit it right on the head (except for her naive faith in the democratic party). immigration is a HUGE issue in this country, and the amount of disinformation about the issue is mind-boggling. please, when thinking about immigration, remember that the “illegals” are the victims of the same economic forces destroying the working person’s economy in this country. no mainstream proposals for immigrants deal w/the fact that the US has been intentionally destroying the Mexican economy. anything that doesn’t address this fact is a smokescreen to divide workers from each other, and will only feed into anti-immigrant hysteria and chauvinism, of which the US has a long and sordid history.
remember: what we do to immigrants today, we’ll do to citizens tomorrow.
“Tortillas in Mexico now contain two-thirds imported corn, and they are three times as expensive at retail level than before NAFTA. The people have less money, and the cost of food is rising. We have done that.”
And to ourselves. When all the US authorized corn ethenol plants come on line they will consume the entire US corn crop. We are starting to see the impact at our own supermarkets.
Not hard to see what will happen when Mexico agribiz starts exporting corn to the US. Yes, more Yankee dollars will flow south but the damage has already been done to the small family farms. With higher food prices even more will look north for survival.
This article is a great rebuttal to the claim that ‘ethanol production is driving up the price of corn in Mexico’. The fact is that due to NAFTA, big US agribusiness concerns like Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland were able to institute a corn monopoly in Mexico. They used US taxpayer subsidies to artificially reduce the price of corn to the point where small Mexican farmers couldn’t compete - and once the farmers lost their land and their farms, they jacked up the prices.
It is true that ADM and Cargill are also involved in the US ethanol market, but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to produce ethanol in a sustainable manner that also gives an economic boost to small farmers in America. Right now, small farmers in the US are treated as sharecroppers - often they don’t even own their own land, and are forced to buy seeds at usurious rates from big agribusiness.
If the US is going to become a sustainable biofuel producer, the chokehold that agribusiness, petrochemical, and banking interests have over small farmers must be released. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we need land reform in the United States. That’s a phrase that normally applies to Third World post-colonial nations like Brazil or Venezuela, but thanks to decades of corporate control of the US government, the same situation has now taken place in the US.
Look at what’s going on - as ethanol becomes a viable substitute for petroleum, the banks that own the farmland are jacking up the land rental rates - meaning that the extra income farmers can earn from putting their excess crops into ethanol production is just being sucked up by the banks that own the land.
I always tell people that in the Old South, the cotton that was produced on slave plantations was “100% organic”. The current situation with ethanol / biodiesel production is somewhat similar - ethanol can indeed be a ‘green fuel’, especially if produced using the new cellulosic technology, and renewable energy for the fermentation and distillation process - but this will require fundamental reform of the agricultural system in the United States.
Willie Nelson has it right - we need to help the farmers out in their struggle against corporate control by banks, agribusiness and petrochemical corporations.
Yes, more Yankee dollars will flow south- to corporate owned agribusinesses that have allegiance to no country!
Granny D nailed it: The U.S. exports subsidized food forcing Mexican farmers to sell their land to agribusiness. Simple as that; enough said!
Except that corn came from Guatemala-History below!
http://www.ontariocorn.org/classroom/history.html
I believe that migrant workers started staying in the USA when the Reagan administration quit prosecuting companies for hiring undocumented workers. Employment opportunities for the undocumented increased. No reason to go home. Punish the employers, not the workers. Maybe if the workers would make larger campaign contributions….?
No!
The 1986 immigration law granted amnesty to about 3 million illegal aliens. That was in Reagan’s time - before Clinton.
Under other provisions of the law, the borders were supposed to be secured and employers punished for hiring illegals. The 1986 law was supposed to make an end to illegal immigration. Unfortunately, amnesty was granted but the security parts of the bill were ignored.
I’ll grant you that NAFTA increased the flow across the border but the problem existed before NAFTA.
Several years ago, after listening to a particularly beautiful bit of Shakespeare, my father commented, “I know all those words! Why can’t I put them together like that.” This was my reaction to reading Granny D’s article here. I know all these ideas, and I know all these words. But I could never have put it all together to make it clear as she has. Wonderful, informative, and concise. Thanks, Granny!
Farming is a considerable part of it. But not the whole. Industries moving south of the border take advantage of the lack of environmental protection for the communities and on the job worker safety. The adverse effects have leaked over the border to cause a rash of anacephalic (no brain) birth defects. One town in Mexico attempted to prevent a US firm from shipping toxic waste to a site close by. NAFTA was enforced and the town lost the fight. Where do those people go?
Nafta damage could have been much less had we not used Chinese jobs to undercut all the Mexican jobs that had been used to undercut American jobs.
Massive programs of economic stupidity supported by taxpayer subsidy of transportation and rampant energy wastefulness have produced the result that should have been expected.
People who sell clothes at Walmart get their clothes at thrift shops. People who make shoes are barefoot in the factory. (I have seen the video) People who make most of the cars and parts work in factories with a tiny parking lot because they can’t afford cars.
AND taxpayers and their families in the richest country in the world are one illness away from permanent financial ruin.
Why do we still have NAFTA as the majority of citizens in Mexico, Canada, and the US do NOT benefit from it? Can NAFTA be rescinded?
One would have thought that a country that is right next to the most prosperous country in history would benefit from trade with the US, like Canada does.
Thanks, Granny D, for getting this discussion started. We have NAFTA because giant corporations bought it for us. And they talked U.S. farmers into thinking they would have some benefit from it. Farmers do not. On either side of the border. Farm subsidies (which I do not support) do not really benefit farmers; they benefit the corporations who can then buy corn and cotton at below market prices.
Next we get CAFTA, a similar agreement to rob the poor farmers in Central America and fill the coffers of the same international corporations. Let’s stop pointing fingers - these corporations donate to the DEMs and the REPs alike, not to mention spouting their propaganda “in support of National Public Radio”.
Don’t worry about Mexicans taking over the country. They don’t have enough money to buy it from the American corporations that run it today!
Great piece. Granny D hit the heart of the target–the deliberate destruction of Mexico’s economy by the US.
Pay the price.
Learn Spanish.
In 50 years all of the half of Mexico that the US stole–with the collusion of Santa Anna–will be speaking the language again.
Gone will be the days when kids in Santa Fe, New Mexico, were beaten by the nuns for speaking Spanish on the playgrounds at recess.
Thank you Granny for your wonderful article!
Finally someone knows what they are talking about and I appreciate it so much, since I myself am of mexican heritage it is very difficult to live in this day and age with the hatred against the people of Mexico and Latin American countries that is pounded into all my fellow americans. THANK YOU AGAIN!
Granny D, some excellent insight.
But Granny, you should realize that by having only a choice between Republicans and Democrats enables those parties to control political discourse and the development and implementation of policy.
It’s a rigged game. It doesn’t matter how good your questions are.
You need to change the game.
America needs multiple political parties. It’s the only way that politicians will do the will of the people.
I hope I am as sharp and cogent in my thinking at 97 as Granny D is. What a great advertisement for growing older!
Poet: And she’s even MORE prescient about the hypocrisy of the right to life movement and the absurd paradoxes sacrosanct to believers of fundamentalist (or evangelical) christianity.
Granny D writes: “We flooded Mexico with cheap corn exports that we now subsidize to the tune of some $25 billion dollars a year. Congress gives that money of ours to a handful of agribusiness giants. Of course, I am not here to tell you why Congress does that.”
Remembering the Carville campaign slogan, I’m writing an imaginary sign in my mind right now and placing it over my desk – it reads: “It’s the grand chessboard stupid.”
As Mexico and other Latin American countries are undergoing an economic warfare that is turning them into refugees, Middle Eastern countries are undergoing a multi-faceted warfare that is displacing them also – primarily throughout Europe. Recent figures of Iraqi refugees alone are estimated as high as 3 million.
The goal of globalism is the destruction of sovereignty world wide as a stepping-stone to world governance.
I ahve a hard time identifying someone who has sold out to the ideologies of globalism as being a citizen of a particular country – nor can I identify those that have taken over the American government as being Americans.
It’s been said many ways, but many people, but historian Carroll Quigley stated the idea simply enough in his 1966 ‘Tragedy and Hope’: “The powers of financial capitalism had another far reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.”
If I were to ask myself “why congress does that”, I would look up at my imaginary sign and read, “It’s the grand chessboard stupid.”
Go to the United States Social Forum!
Yes, Granny. I am behind you 100% on the need for publicly financed campaigns.
Where does one go to support this drive?
Just wanted to express my appreciation for the one and only Granny D, who had my vote since she wore our her first pair of sneakers in 1990. Keep on truckin’.
peace
AG
Take the Pledge for Peace - www.NotOneMore.US
Think about this folks.
It happened for more than a hundred years.
Please, please, read up about the Corn Laws in Britain - the direct cause of massive Irish migration to the US in the 19th Century - the potato famine.
History repeats itself because most ordinary people fail to see that the interests of those who make and enforce the laws have no connection whatever with those who suffer the consequences.
This article reminded me of an excellent article I recently read about illegal immigration. It is called “Ignota nulla curatio morbi!” (Do not attempt to cure what you do not understand) at http://laura-knight-jadczyk.blogspot.com/
This article really enlightened me! It shows you what you really need to know. M
“It began when Mr. Clinton approved NAFTA – the North American Free Trade Agreement, and when he militarized our southern border at the same time.”
Along with a Democratic congress
“All of us in this room have a duty to be good citizens and good Democrats.”
Now tell me, since a Democratic President and a Democratic congress were the ones to pass and implement Nafta, why it is that I need to be a good Democrat.
Lobo Gris
Right on, Granny D!
“Green fuel” is a fallacy anyway. There is nothing green about internal combustion engines. Two necessary by-products of combustion are carbon dioxide and water vapor, which are (as we all know) greenhouse gases. Biofuel is about making lots of money for agribusiness, and it is being marketed with the usual feel-good pseudo-environmentalism that is so commonly used by those who couldn’t care less.
Granny D is right on the money. No one within reach of the Presidency has what it takes to solve this problem, namely, repeal NAFTA. And no one within reach of the Presidency will ever get us out of Iraq — we’re there for the rest of our lives. No one within reach of the Presidency will rein in the health care industry, deal with the growing wealth gap, restore the Constitution, rebuild New Orleans for all its citizens, prosecute election fraud, dismantle the lending usurers, break up the Ministry of Information that our mass media has become, or any of the myriad other problems we all bitch about every day but for which no progress is ever made.
No one is going to do a damn thing except facilitate the status quo. Businesses don’t make investments unless they expect a payback.
So we’re in the same boat as the illegal immigrants. It’s every man and woman for themselves.
It’s so nice to find out that I am not alone in my beliefs. I keep telling people that the immigration is a symptom, not the real issue, and they tell me I am crazy. I tell them it’s NAFTA that is at the root of it, and they say “What’s that?”.
Thank you very much for showing me that what I thought the problem is really IS what the problem is. The thing is that I think it goes back even further, to Reagan and his turning our system on it’s ear and starting this whole destruction of our country. It was he who started his presidency but going union busting, following that with the bad mouthing of the American worker. During his presidency, working people gave back a decade’s worth of pay increases so that “business could be more profitable”. I remember it quite well, and I even remember asking people WHY business needed MORE money. I never got a decent reply. Now I ask the same thing: WHY does business need MORE money?
Granny is right, the ONLY way out of this is serious election reform, and it has to be public financing of ALL elections, with NO private money involved at all. Private money is nothing more than legalized bribery, and has to be done away with. Kind of the “deal you can’t refuse”, to use a Godfather quote (which seems quite appropriate now adays). But she is right, until the elections are honest, nothing else will change or make any difference.
What can we do to promote campaign finance overhaul and general election reform?
Where can we go?
The long and short of all this is real clear to me. The government that is for ‘We the People’ is nothing of the sort. Our Government as it stands today is for the Corporate rich…the rest of us are cannon fodder.
Publicampaign.org is one place you can go to help with election reform. Fairvote.org is another.
Whatever we do, it’s a fully little planet we live on. Our victories don’t last long, but neather do our defeats. The good fight itself is really what it’s all about, not the fleeting outcomes. So pitch in–again.
Granny D’s analysis is flawed. Very flawed. In fact, it’s so flawed it’s just plain wrong.
As Lobo Gris points out, it was Clinton and the Dems who sold us NAFTA in the first place. Since Granny D rightly points out how harmful NAFTA has been to Mexico’s farmers and working class, why does she claim “All of us in this room have a duty to be good citizens and good Democrats?”
And as RuthK points out, Granny D is also wrong when she blames the whole illegal migrant problem on NAFTA: “The 1986 immigration law granted amnesty to about 3 million illegal aliens. That was in Reagan’s time - before Clinton.”
Granny D derogates “our Republican candidates” who hypocritically claim to be for “law and order” but are “certainly not talking about the big corporations, hotel companies, agribusiness giants, [and] retailers who employ millions of unauthorized immigrants,” yet she says of these “unauthorized” people, “Personally, I welcome them. I congratulate them . . . ”
So Granny D is both against corporate insourcing, and for corporate insourcing. She is confused. Or, perhaps she is designing her rhetoric in support of her forgone conclusion that we should legalize and welcome all illegal migrants (low-wage replacement workers).
Furthermore, Granny D implies that NAFTA and globalization have benefited average Americans. You can see it in her comment about fat Americans in the grocery stores: “If you will look around the grocery store check-out lines and notice the widening measurements of our fellow citizens, we can certainly see for ourselves the problem of having too much cheap labor around to do all our yardwork and housework for us.”
Does she really believe that working-class Americans hire people to do their yardwork and housework? Does Granny D live in a gated, upscale neighborhood? Perhaps Beverly Hills? Where does she get such nonsense?
Americans are fat because the same Agribusiness corporate giants who sold us NAFTA are also selling us unhealthful, junk food tainted with high-fructose corn syrup and partially-hydrogenated vegetable oils. Agribusiness doesn’t concern itself with the harm it does to public health. It’s all about cutting costs and maximizing profits.
The truth is that NAFTA and globalization have made working people poorer, both in the U.S. and Mexico, and elsewhere. It’s not national or ethnic warfare, it’s class warfare. It’s about enriching the corporate oligarchs at the expense of working people.
Unfortunately, those who would “welcome” the low-wage replacement workers are shortsighted, at best. They are drinking the kool-aid that corporate PR machines and corporate media dolts are spewing.
Granny D, of all people, should know our corrupt political system has created corporate politicians in both parties. Witness corporate lackeys Reagan, Clinton and G.W. Bush. They brought us NAFTA, globalization, corporate outsourcing, corporate insourcing, and the 1986 amnesty bill. Now the corporate politicians are trying to bring us the 2007 amnesty bill.
We should oppose globalization, “free” trade, privatization, corporate profiteering, and corporate politicians. We should support good government policies. We should not support policies that further the corporate oligarchs’ goals and harm working Americans and their families. Let’s fight the real battle.
DennisMBurke -
Thanks for the two orgs Url’s.
Let’s get behind election reform and public campaigning of elections.
The real battle involves:
1- Getting our national voice back to control multinationals.
2- Helping people of other countries do the same.
Granny D, as always, is as elegant as she is to the point. As fpal mentions, we do need more choices in our political realm. Right now we have Polititians, some are red and some are blue, but they are ALL polititians.
Not mentioned, but so very disturbing, has been the introduction of GENETICALLY MODIFIED corn into Mexico which is wiping out the historically based crop.
The systematic destruction of life as we knew it growing up puts all humans at risk. We must have the resolve that out ‘elected’ leaders do not have. We must take our land, our government and our future back.
In the meantime, plant a garden, buy at local farmers’ markets, start coops, be responsible for yourself and your family.
Bob K:
Wrong again! NAFTA was the dead-brain child of George Bush PADRE and Carlos Salinas de Gortari–Clinton just supplied the pork to the resistant congresspeople in his first year of office to get it passed.
I believe Granny’s take on obesity in the US–folks sitting on their fat butts in front of the t.v. or in front of Internet porn instead of doing the labor of self-maintenance means those butts just get fatter–was particularly sound. Sure, shoving in thejunk food doesn´t help–but if folks exercised those calories would be burned.
So George Bush Sr. proposed NAFTA and Clinton made it law. So what? The point is, they’re both corporate politicians pressing the oligarchs’ agenda at the expense of the people.
As to Granny D’s claim that Americans are fat because they hire gardeners and maids to do their chores, that may be true with 1% of Americans. What about the other 99%?
moonraven, your problem is that you distinguish between the oligarchs and the people in Mexico, but you refuse to make the same distinction in the U.S.
Bob K:
Right–Get out there and weed your garden, mow your lawn with a push mower, wash your family’s clothes by hand, plant and harvest a graden, cook all your meals from scratch and then get back to me.
moonraven — Rather than responding to points made, you change the subject. That’s neither constructive nor honest.
It’s not worth mentioning that many poor Americans do just as you describe. (You’ll only ignore it.) Of course, many poor Americans have neither a lawn to mow nor Internet access. How nice for you that you have both in southern Mexico.