Real Politiks

The Bush Administration and the elites that they represent are no strangers to class war but, because this is not an issue that is regularly discussed in the open, you might be unaware. Class war is the term used to describe a situation where the elite rich people in political office, and in business, use their power to give other rich people breaks while making sure that the poor don’t get those same breaks. Most of the poor people don’t pay any attention to this sort of collaboration by rich people, because they are usually distracted by issues that ignite extreme emotional reactions. Immigration for example!

Not many issues boil blood these days like discussing the idea of Spanish speaking people coming into the country. The reactions range from complete xenophobic hatred of having to hear the phrase “Dos para la prensa española” when they are navigating a call center labyrinth; to the more nuanced closeted discussion of why it would be better for everyone if they simply stayed in their home country.

Few people have really seen this issue as clearly as Jim Hightower. He writes in his recent article on The Hightower Lowdown:

…Why do these immigrants come? The answer is not that they are pulled by our jobs and government benefits, but that they are pushed by the abject poverty that their families face in Mexico…

…in the last 15 years, Mexico’s longstanding system of sustaining its huge population of poor citizens (including small self-sufficient farms, jobs in state-owned industries and subsidies for such essentials as tortillas) has been scuttled at the insistence of U.S. banks, corporations, government officials and “free market” ideologues. In the name of “modernizing” the Mexican economy, such giants as Citigroup, Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and GE — in cahoots with the plutocrats and oligarchs of Mexico — have laid waste to that country’s grass-roots economy, destroying the already-meager livelihoods of millions…

In simple terms, the reason that Mexican people “want” to come live here is because of the systematic class war waged by US based multi-national corporations against the people lead economy of Mexico in the name of Free Trade.

Literally millions of Mexican and Latino immigrants are being pushed up, out of their homes in the south, into the United States by a class war waged by some of the major businesses we deal with every day. For anyone who lives or lived in the old rust-belt, people that have been equally screwed over by Free Trade, being forced from your home region into another is nothing new. Yet, instead of finding common thread with the Mexican immigrants against the perpetrators of class war, the US working class supports a “Great Wall of America” to stop the Mexicans from getting into the old U.S.A, the land of immigrants!

Interesting facts have come to light through an article written by Melissa del Bosque, for the Texas Observer, showing that class war isn’t just something that is waged in other countries at the expense of other “kinds” of people. It is at its strongest right here in your backyard. That is, if you are a poor person living on any of the land where The Department of Homeland Security has decided to build “The Great Wall of America.”

In the article, del Bosque, discussing the land of Brownsville, TX resident Eloisa Tamez, writes:

While the border wall will go through her backyard and effectively destroy her home, it will stop at the edge of the River Bend Resort and golf course, a popular Winter Texan retreat two miles down the road. The wall starts up again on the other side of the resort…

…Along the border, preliminary plans for fencing seem to target landowners of modest means and cities and public institutions such as the University of Texas at Brownsville, which rely on the federal government to pay their bills….

Yet, the land owned by oil billionaire Ray L. Hunt, family friend and political contributor to the Bush Administration, will remain entirely untouched with wall construction stopping dead at his properly line. Meanwhile construction will drive the wall right through the living rooms of anyone who might not be able to lobby, sue, or buy their way out of the situation.

In one case, the plutocratic meandering of the wall may leave one family of U.S. citizens on the Mexican side of the border wall. You can see the pitiful attempt at news coverage perpetrated by local news by clicking here. According to the family their senators are unable to get them answers about how things will work, which makes me laugh, because they are also the people who funded the Iraq war, the wall, and the class war against their constituents. Apparently knowing what you are funding is not a requirement for senators.

So in the future, dear reader, when you look at the patchwork wall on the Mexican-U.S. border and see the unhappy Mexicans streaming away from their homes through the property of oil tycoons and green golf resorts in the middle of a desert. Remember that the real problem is rooted in the trade deals, and class war that favors the rich of the world over the poor, and not in the fact that you have to hear “Press Two for Spanish” in a language you’ll never bother to learn.