Glad to see that some pro-immigrant protesters are now including NAFTA in their signs!! NAFTA and free trade globalization policies as the source problem of the increase in undocumented migrations (& resulting abuse of migrant workers) needs to be openly discussed both in the US and in Mexico, elsewhere..

The corporations (agribusiness, slaughterhouses, etc..) who profit from the labor of undocumented immigrants would prefer that they don't become U.S. citizens for as long as possible, thus ensuring the corporate plantation masters the longest time frame of virtual slavery as undocumented immigrants who cannot join or organize unions, ask for sick leave, health insurance or even minimum wage..

The recent decision by the GW bush/Cheney regime to grant undocumented immigrants amnesty was a result of pressure from the public (NOT because they care for immigrants!!); Mayday immigrant & supporters protesting the ICE raids and INS hostility to migrants at the US/MEX border.

Scapegoating the migrants while the corporations who create economic inequality are ignored will not get people any results!!

If anyone actually wants to help the people of Mexico and the US, my advice to Minutemen, SOS AND to leftists, anarchists, etc.. is to reframe their protests away from the migrants themselves and redirect their protest activities against NAFTA/WTO AND the agribusiness corporations (Cargill, ADM, Monsanto) who contribute to the loss of communal ejido farmland in Mexico and simultaneously profit from the recently landless status of undocumented migrant farmers who then work for slave wages on the plantation style agribusiness pesticide patches of el norte..

From "Plot Against Mexican Corn"

by John Ross

"But whatever the immediate causes, the dismantlement of government agricultural programs and the brutal impacts of the North American Free Trade Agreement have deepened the crisis in Mexican corn production.

Competing with highly subsidized U.S. farmers is driving their Mexican counterparts into bankruptcy. Whereas south of the border, guaranteed prices for farmers' crops is a thing of the past, corporate corn growers north of the Rio Bravo can receive up to ,000 an acre in subsidies from their government, enabling them to dump their corn over the border at 80% of cost. The impact of this inundation has been to force 6,000,000 farmers and their families here to abandon their plots and leap into the migration stream, according to a 2004 Carnegie Endowment study.

This assault on poor farmers down at the bottom of the food chain will be exacerbated at the end of 2007 when all tariffs on U.S. corn are abolished. Meanwhile President Calderon seeks to tamp down tortilla prices by importing up to 2,000,000 duty-free tons to augment what Mexican farmers can or cannot produce. Such a solution is guaranteed to drive more farmers off the land. Even worse is that much of the new influx of NAFTA corn will be transgenic."

article @;

http://www.counterpunch.org/ross02142007.html

For some reason neither side of the so-called "immigrant rights" debate is willing to take this needed step in exposing the root causes of poverty induced migrations. The biotech agribusiness corporations (Cargill, ADM, Monsanto, etc..) flood the Mexican market with subsidized maize (corn), that results in local Mexican maize farmers being driven out of business and eventually selling their land and adding themselves to the stream of migrants heading to el norte, not because of Disneyland, psuedo-democracy or the chance to scoot around LA in an SUV. Poverty, neccesity and landlessness are the primary reasons for this northward migration. In Guatemala similar land heists and construction of hydroelectric facilities by US corporations (IMF/World Bank Structural Adjustment Programs) also contribute to increased rates of poverty induced migrations..

Upon arrival in the US, many undocumented immigrants end up being conscripted into the farmworker lifestyle, often for agribusiness plantations who are owned by or contract out to these same corporations mentioned above. Only now the landless migrants become tenants charged rent (comes out of their below minimum wage paycheck), overworked, exposed to toxic pesticides and high temperatures, smoggy polluted air, etc..

Since the US is basically a two party run CIA brainwash camp with plenty of useful idiots (no offense, we're all susceptible to US government mental conditioning attempts!) to go around, we have a psuedo-debate between the overtly "anti-immigrant" Minutemen/SOS platform of Eurocentric racism and the so-called "pro-immigrant" leftists (Democrats, socialists, etc..) who claim that the US economy depends on the labor of migrants. Their rally cry of "human rights" is a neo-liberal smokescreen for enabling US corporations to continue their abuses of farmworkers without understanding how people got to this position to begin with..

The Minutemen/SOS support the false belief that a border wall, police state ICE/INS tactics will actually prevent the migrants from entering in the US and attempting to find work. Of course the Mm/SOS leadership deliberitely ignores the many powerful agribusiness corporations who profit from the plantation style labor of undocumented migrants, thus rendering any so-called "protection" measures ineffective. By refusing to explore the source of poverty induced migrations, the Minutemen/SOS fail to get beyond an ineffective band-aid border wall and police state tactics (INS/ICE raids) to address the abuses suffered by undocumented immigrants. This is classic CIA mental conditioning, because the needed response of the "pro-immigrant" leftists to the Minutemen/SOS position then becomes one of "immigrant rights" and other futile efforts that do not address the source of the crisis, Mexican farmers losing their land under NAFTA/WTO policies. Some leftists have even gone so far to support the illegitimate government (stolen election from populist candidate Manuel Obrador) of Felipe "Lapdog Jr." Calderon as he claims to oppose the US/MEX border wall. Calderon's main objective is to keep on enabling US corporations to steal the land from under the feet of Mexican farmers, then send the landless farmers to el norte to make the same US corporations (given carte blanche 4 human rights abuses under his ally GW Bush) wealthier from the labor of the now landless undocumented migrants..

What we're dealing with is the polarized "anti-immigrants" vs. the "pro-immigrants" debates and protest/counter-protest actions over the last few years that consistantly avoid any honest dialogue about the source factors of undocumented immigrations, the role played by US agribusiness corporations who provoke the flood of landless campesino farmers. Neo-liberal vs. neo-conservative, English vs. Spanish are all distractions from the greatest corporate plunder of land, labor and loss of food sovereignty we've ever witnessed. Anyone attempting any honest dialogue without taking "sides" is quickly marginalized from the debate by excessive shouting from the polarized camps..

The only real friends that the Mexican people may have today are the guerillas of Guerrero, Zapatistas, APPO and other indigenous campesino farmers who resist their own government's corrupt policies of globalization, neo-liberal free trade agreements (NAFTA, WTO, PPP) and other mechanisms that enable US corporations to heist resources from out of Mexico..

This from US-Mexico Bi-National Family Farmer and Farmworker Congress

Final Declaration

Mexico City, September 28, 2006



"We demand a fair trade of agricultural products that respect the viability of neighboring national markets. That is why we oppose the free trade agreements that facilitate and legalize the invasion of products at prices below the cost of production and that prioritize transnational export and agribusiness corporations. In particular, we oppose the policies and agreements contained in the WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA-DR and other bilateral free-trade agreements. Given the profound crisis in the countryside, we demand that the WTO, NAFTA and all other trade agreements get out of agriculture, because they are an attack on peoples' well-being and democratic processes, and trump agricultural policies that support rural and family economies.

In 2008, the completion of the opening of the U.S., Canadian and Mexican markets under NAFTA is set occur, which would mean the deepening of the farm crisis in all three countries, and as a result, the displacement of thousands of campesino and indigenous peoples from their places of origin and, in the U.S., the near completion of the disappearance of family farms. For this reason, we demand that the agricultural chapter of NAFTA be eliminated, as a means of assuring the survival of producers from both sides of the border.

We think that among the principle causes of the high levels of migration is the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of large transnational corporations and the policies that favor them, especially in the agricultural sector. The massive exodus from the Mexican and Central American countryside is largely a result of the trade and agricultural policies already mentioned."

entire declaration @;

http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3629

"The Perfect Neoliberal Tree"

by Jason Ford



"Eucalyptus is the perfect neo-liberal tree. It's fast growing, kills everything near it, and makes a lot of money for a few people."

––Jamie Aviles



"In his regular La Jornada column, "The Village Idiot," Mexican journalist Jaime Aviles delivers a humorous, yet accurate, sketch of the connections between the disastrous effects of monoculture eucalyptus plantations on native forest ecosystems and the neo-liberal agenda, more popularly known today as corporate globalization. In fact, monoculture plantations, along with the research and development of genetically engineered trees, are fast becoming a symbol of the international timber industry's refusal to deal with its unsustainable paradigm of industrial forestry."

article cont's @;

http://www.gene-watch.org/genewatch/articles/14-2neoliberal.html

So let's all resist this CIA mind control attempt by the so-called Minutemen/SOS and reframe the debate over immigration to resisting corporate land heists in Mexico, defending the campesino farmers from NAFTA/WTO tierra & resource theft!!

HIS UNHOLINESS (GEORGE WARMONGER BUSH) : "Sorry to Oil the Post 9-11 Bush Hijacking of Domestic Policy in Amerika, the Post 9-11 Bush Sponsored Shipping of High Paying Jobs Overseas, the Post 9-11 Bush Border AL CIADA Antics aka declaring Immigrants to be Terrorist, the Post 9-11 Railroading of Immigrants onto Bushco. Trucking Companies comming out of Mexico, the Post 9-11 Bush Sponsored Great Wall of Texas on the Mexican Border, and the Post 9-11 Bush Push for Cheap Labor in Amerika and Abroad but Oil comes First. READY TO REVEL WITH THE DEVIL ???????????"

Remember when Bill Clinton, with the assistance of Reaganite Republicans in Congress, shoved the NAFTA agreement down the country's throat? He promised that one of the "benefits" of this free pass for corporate bandits was that it would cut down the number of "illegal immigrants" crossing the border.

Instead, free trade had drastically increased the number of poverty-stricken and unemployed Mexicans who feel that crossing the border is their only chance for survival. Tis applies especially to small farmers who lost their livelihoods when cheap American imports bankrupted them.

You cannot blame the invasion of illegal aliens, on the corporations, USA or otherwise. You cannot blame the invasion of illegal aliens, only on the USA, Mexico, or otherwise. You cannot blame the invasion of illegal aliens, 100 percent on the poor who seek a better life or the greedy. You cannot blame the deaths of illegal aliens, 100 percent on the, USA, Mexico, the Minutemen or otherwise.

Blame is a complicated issue, and like a pie it gets served in unequal, but proportional pieces.

I cannot blame the poor immigrants who come here, but I wish they would come here through legal channels, and that both governments would make the path fair, and equal. Mexico, should not charge such high prices and require bribes and croniism to get a passport. The USA should allow an adequate number of legal immigrants to fill seasonal jobs. But, the Corporations should pay a decent wage, provide benefits, and also have adequate housing for their migrant workers. The migrant workers should come and go with the seasons, perferably to the employer of their choice.

In the USA, the laborers, working in manufacturing jobs suchas assembly trades, should unionize and demand, full-time employment, a living wage, and benefits.

what do you mean-

"You cannot blame the invasion of illegal aliens, on the corporations, USA or otherwise."

What are you going to blame the passage of NAFTA etc. on... men from Mars or what?

The people of the United States sure didn't want it passed.

Rule by corporations is the perfect definition of Fascism.

The terms more appropriate would be that U.S. corporations operating under NAFTA/WTO free trade agreements are found to be significantly responsible in the poverty, landlessness and frequent dehydration/heat stroke deaths of border crossing migrants..

Add to that the survivors of this border crossing are then coerced into virtual slavery for other (or the same) agribusiness corporations (or into other menial jobs) where toxic pesticide/herbicide exposure, dehydration, & heat stroke is the routine occurrence..

When discussing the initial cause of the migrations, we need only to watch the recent events in Oaxaca where the Mexican military police state again attacks the people of Oaxaca as today. Not too long ago last year the Oaxacan state police attacked Oaxacan schoolteachers and the APPO group. Indigenous Oaxacans are being threatened and attacked by the police state for a reason, the people's resistance to neo-liberal WTO/NAFTA plans for resource heist by US corporations under Plan Puebla Panama. Corporate dominance under WTO/NAFTA is of course not limited to Oaxaca, it is far reaching across the Earth...

From Via Campesina;

"Wednesday, 13 December 2006

"Nowadays, no one can deny that there is a global crisis affecting agricultural and small farmers as the result of neoliberal policies. The aggressive market liberalization of the food and agricultural products is the main cause of this global crisis. That is one of the conclusions that came out from a public debate that held by COAG Andalucía with the Counselor of the Presidency of Andalucía, Gasar Zarrías, and some farmer leaders from India, Chile, USA, Brazil, Mexico, and Spain.

When he opened the debate, the Agriculture Councerlor of Andalucía said that the Doha Round had created conflicts between rich and poor countries and had led to imbalances in the world trade system. Globalization has increased technological advances, but it has inflicted suffering on millions of peoples. It has increased rural poverty and migrations. In agriculture, multinational corporations control seeds, which destroy local varities.

India with its 700 million farmers is a concrete evidence of the impacts of neoliberal policies: no less than 100 thousand farmers committed suicide in the last 13 years (5 farmers averyday!) because of the difficult livelihood in rural areas. Yudvir Sigh, leader of the BKU farmers movement, said that most of those who committed to suicide are coming from the areas where genetic modified seeds, especially Bt cotton, is grown. "

article @;

http://www.viacampesina.org/main_en/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=264&Itemid=1

Free trade agreements of the WTO/NAFTA/PPP sort that allow corporations to steal resources (forests, biodiversity, agua, maiz, etc..) from under the people's land are one of the reasons for these frequent public uprisings throughout Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guerrero, etc. Lack of dignity, respect and concern for Oaxacans from the Mexican government under Fox & now Calderon (GW bush's Lapdogs #1 & #2) is another...

What people in the US can do to help the people of Mexico is to reverse this trend by denouncing NAFTA/WTO and demanding that they be repealed. If the various countries that signed NAFTA/WTO are in agreement, the population would vote to have these unfair "free trade" agreements scrapped, and anti-trust laws initialed against the industrial agribusiness corporations (Cargill, ADM, Monsanto) who drive Mexican maize farmers AND US/Canadian farmers out of business..

Politicians who endorse NAFTA/WTO need to be aware that they work for the people, and need to listen to our demands to repeal these damaging free trade agreements..

So far Dennis Kucinich has stepped up to demand a repeal of WTO/NAFTA;

"If the United States is to be free to negotiate fair trade agreements that protect jobs, the rights of workers, and the environment, then there is no alternative but to repeal NAFTA and withdraw from the WTO. I have sworn to repeal NAFTA and the WTO, and I will unalterably continue to work toward these goals.

For a decade, we have been subjected to a grand experiment called NAFTA. When that agreement was signed in 1993, it was enthusiastically supported by big business, Republicans, and all too many Democrats. Now it is clear that this experiment has failed. We've lost over 3 million manufacturing jobs since July 2000. Over a half million of these are directly attributable to NAFTA. Our trade deficit grew to 8 billion last year and continues to climb. And, because of the WTO, corporations have been granted unprecedented powers to sue the government in closed trade courts anytime laws designed to protect workers or the environment are deemed to infringe on corporate "rights."

This is called "free trade." But where is freedom when jobs are lost? Where is freedom when industries threaten to move out of the country unless wages are cut? Where is freedom when the right to bargain collectively is crushed? Where is freedom when a union is broken? Where is freedom when you can't make a mortgage payment? Where is freedom when you can't send your children to college? An economic democracy is a precondition of a political democracy. Where is freedom?

It is time to reclaim state and local sovereignty, which NAFTA has usurped. No NAFTA, no Fast Track Authority. Fast track is a barrier. Fast track brought us NAFTA. It prohibits amending trade agreements. We could not amend NAFTA Chapter 11, which grants corporate investors in all NAFTA countries the right to challenge any local, state, or federal regulations, which, those corporations say, hurt their profits. No more back track on democracy. No more back track on workers' rights. No more back track on human rights. No back track on the Bill of Rights.

The Bush administration wants to extend NAFTA throughout the Western Hemisphere through the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA). This proposal is being pushed by the administration and its Republican allies in Congress and the corporate world, although it is opposed by many leaders throughout Latin America.

The only way to undo the damage these trade deals have caused is to end them. If the United States is to be free to negotiate fair trade agreements that protect jobs, the rights of workers, and the environment, then there is no alternative but to withdraw from the WTO. If our agriculture, textiles, and other industries are going to be able to help pull the world up, rather than being dragged down to the level of serfdom or exported abroad, we must put an end to the disaster known as the WTO."

onward to reclaim the commons @;

http://www.kucinichforcongress.com/issues/trade.php

A long term boicott of any products from Cargill, ADM and Monsanto is another, this may prove difficult as these powerful agribusiness monopolies are found nearly everywhere!!

This from Vandana Shiva, On reclaiming open space;

"I was recently in the Amazon, where the same companies that dumped soya on India–Cargill and ADM–are destroying the Amazon to grow soya. Millions of acres of the Amazon rainforest–the lung, liver and heart of the global climate system–are being burned to grow soya for export. Cargill has built an illegal port at Santarém in Brazil and is driving the expansion of soya in the Amazon rainforest. Armed gangs take over the forest and use slaves to cultivate soya. When people like Sister Dorothy Stang oppose the destruction of the forests and the violence against people, they are assassinated.

People in Brazil and India are being threatened to promote a monoculture that benefits agribusiness. A billion people are without food because industrial monocultures robbed them of their livelihoods in agriculture and their food entitlements. Another 1.7 billion are suffering from obesity and food-related diseases. Monocultures lead to malnutrition–for those who are underfed as well as those who are overfed. In depending on monocultures, the food system is being made increasingly dependent on fossil fuels–for synthetic fertilizers, for running giant machinery and for long-distance transport, which adds “food miles.”

Moving beyond monocultures has become an imperative for repairing the food system. Biodiverse small farms have higher productivity and generate higher incomes for farmers. And biodiverse diets provide more nutrition and better taste. Bringing back biodiversity to our farms goes hand in hand with bringing back small farmers on the land. Corporate control thrives on monocultures. Citizens’ food freedom depends on biodiversity."

article @;

http://peoplesgeography.com/2006/08/27/one-thing-to-do-about-food-a-forum/

There is also another factor involved in this, in my opinion, an engineered migration, reminiscent of the engineered-

( thank you Allen Dulles, via the CIA ) ***

[ read JFK by L Fletcher Prouty ]

-migration into the south, by Catholic Vietnamese which displaced the local peasant village culture to begin the foundation of the economic chaos that brought the 1954 beginnings of the South East Asia War. Thank you very much, you bastards.

Disrupting economic/social systems and * exploiting the results * in order to excuse a growing police state, is SOP.

I feel sorry for you Gerry Nance because of your igorance of what is capitialist. you should go learn capitalist 101. one of the best author of critizing capitalialist is karl marx. majority of his idea came true. the book i want you to read is the capital and compare it to this time and age.

I feel sorry for you Gerry Nance because of your igorance of what is capitialist. you should go learn capitalist 101. one of the best author of critizing capitalialist is karl marx. majority of his idea came true. the book i want you to read is the capital and compare it to this time and age.