Posts
The News: The wisdom floating on the pond of public discourse is that "Clinton has the Hispanic Vote." As surface sheen goes, the wisdom is true enough. The more important question is: why? Why would any self respecting, non-Cuban Hispanic slurp up to Clinton?
The Note: I recently copied an old news-clip video of Clinton to DVD. The clip was shot shortly after NAFTA had been approved and while Poison Pete Wilson was whipping his jingoid base into an anti-immigrant fervor. Currying favor with the rabble that passes for the California electorate, Clinton came to town -- San Diego to be precise -- stood on the border, wagged his finger and said in all piety that we had to do something "to stop these illegals from coming here and taking jobs away from Americans."
Gag.
More than anyone else, Clinton can take the shameful credit for dismantling the U.S. industrial infrastructure and shipping jobs out to Mexico, San Salvador, Thailand and China. For this pious panderer to blame hungry Mexican campesinos for stealing our jobs, is an hypocritical outrage .... surely sufficient to earn him an English knighthood but not one iota of approval from any self-respecting Ibero-American.
Doubtless, those who acquire their consciousness from the US mudia will scratch their heads, call me nuts and think that Clinton's Big Handout of Good Paying Jops to Mexicans explains why they love the Clintons. It's all a question of lick yer chops jops. Actually not.
Yankee Americans stuck into their self-righteousness that most of them haven't a glimmer of a notion as to what the neo-liberal agenda has done to Mexico and other Hispanic American countries. The general opinion in the US is that them illegals are overcome with near-religious adoration of our way of life and that's why they are coming here to steal our goodpayingjops. What these folks are oblivious to is that NAFTA has actually destroyed towns, families and sustainable jobs in Mexico.
Huh?
Huh?
Well... it might not be found in "All the News that's Fit to Print" but the "other part" of NAFTA is that the US gets to dump agri-industrial maize on the Mexican market, prohibiting Mexico from providing agricultural supports for its peasantry while allowing the same (under another name of course) for Big Food. The result? US Big Food has destroyed the economy of countless villages. When the economy of villages is destroyed so too are "family values." Demoralized men, turn to drink or wander the continent away from their families looking for same piece-of-scrabble-job to survive. The Mexican countryside is fast acquiring the spectre of the deserted panorama of the 16th century.
No doubt, Mr. Cheez-O, will munch his petroleum based snax, and "think" to himself that, the destruction of the Mexican peasantry is no doubt the result of good-honest-market-forces in that Big Food can provide Lots of Corn on the Mega Cheap and therefore "the average Mexican" comes out ahead. Yuk Yuk. What else more could they want aside from cheap tortillas? Crunch munch. Again, actually not.
Big Food does not provide Lots of Corn on the cheap... quite the contrary. NAFTized market forces being they are, the price of tortillas has soared.
Nor did NAFTA provide such "goodpayingjops" to Mexicans as would make up the difference. The plague-like effect of NAFTA is not limited to the countryside. It has wrought devastation on the entire economia politica of Mexico. It has done so, because trashing labor laws, skirting environmental protections, forcing reductions in government subsidies to people while mandating them for business is the entire rotten core of so-called "free-trade." (See e.g., the linked articles by David Bacon, at end). The entire maquiladora regime was nothing but a government paid bonus to Big Business allowing them they can set up shop on the other side of the border, getting all sorts of tax breaks while paying hapless workers some pathetic sub-survival pittance.
The only beneficiary of this satanic scheme, is Big Plunder ... and if Monica was sucking off Bill, we know whose dick Bill had in his mouth.
The neo-liberal regime has been a disaster for the ordinary people of Ibero-America. It was that disaster which was the subject of protest and condemnation from presidents Daniel Ortega (Nicaragua), Rafael Correa (Ecuador), Evo Morales (Bolivia) and Hugo Chavez, at the Ibero American Summit late last summer. Of course, what the US mudia reported on was the King's Short Fuse... The dismal reality of so-called "free market" plunder was buried under a ton of titillation.
The New York Times intones loftily that Hugo Chavez's reforms lack transparency. But when it comes to reporting transparently on the effects of NAFTA on Mexico, the Times suddenly acquires a penchant for black cloth shrouds, and now reports (matter of factly and as if it were obvious why) that Hispanics Luv Hillary.
Putting aside the Elian-obsessed, there is absolutely no reason why any Hispanic should react to the Clintons with anything other than nausea. They are subservients to am economic regime which has brought misery on a macro-scale to ordinary people on both sides of the border.
But the Clintons are not alone, proving that in politics, at least, every whore has her own minions -- like the Hispanic DNC party leadership in California... the Art Torreses, Fabian Nuñezes, Villraigosas, and host of other crypto-Republican Taco Bell Chicanos that support insurance company withheld health "care" . . . and Hillary.
On the issues, Obama is not that much better than Clinton. His main advantage is that he might be do whereas we know how little a Clinton will do for ordinary people. But whatever Obama's defects might be, they are not sufficient to warrant affirmative support for the Clintons who have done nothing for Hispanics north or south of the border.
©WCG, 2008
Links to article by David Bacon
www.truthout.org/docs_2006/080806P.shtml
www.pacificnews.org/jinn/stories/5.09/990429-miners.html
www.thenation.com/doc/20080211/bacon
.
