Rick Galeener's Chicken

Today on NOVA, I heard the usual outrage. Asked if an American would work a 12-hour day in a [dangerous, highly exploitative, blood-slick, bone-chilling, puke-inducing] meat packing plant for $6.25 an hour, the caller yelled, irate: “No! Americans won’t work for that! ‘Illegals’ are holding down the wages at these places!”

Whoever he was, he doesn’t know whether to wind his watch or run.

He could be any Anglo camped outside the Macehualli worker’s center at 25th St. and Bell Road. We may even have seen him pounding his flagpole, screaming curses through his bullhorn at the (obviously legal) immigrants waiting inside the chain link fence for somebody like us to give them a day job. He might have been Rick Galeener himself, that wrinkled, publicly urinating racist old rattlesnake who, probably, was the guy videotaping my license plate and my face as I got out to make arrangements with Sal Reza, beloved de facto leader of pro-migrant Phoenicians.

I wanted to say to him, “So Rick. You’re saying you “Christian patriots” do want to pay $15 a pound for raw, uncut chicken, right?”

Guys like Galeener can’t have it both ways. No undocumented, exploited immigrants, no $1.99/lb roasters. No $4.95 Church’s fried, either.

This is the bottom line that American racist-nativists happy to have cheap chicken as long as they don’t have to see who makes it aren’t willing to talk about. The self-limited choice, the sublimely short-sighted and settle-for-nothing choice they offer is this: Grow your own or tolerate “illegals.” Which will it be?

For those of us with considerably higher self esteem and a much more wholesome vision for tomorrow, there’s a way better way. We don’t advocate exploiting anybody. Read on.

American haven’t really thought through what it means to us to kick out undocumented workers, although here in Phoenix, watching the tax base erode and the For Sale signs sprout like stink weeds, we’re beginning to get a glimmer. We’re gradually catching on that no real “Christian patriot” capitalist worth his salt would run large numbers of hard-working good consumers out of town just pretty much for the hell of it.

I’m saying that Nativist America needs to rub one of its two brain cells against the other in hopes of igniting a spark of recognition.

Immigrant workers sustain this country’s economy. Its lowest-wage earners, they are the floor on which the rest of us stand. If they aren’t able to report for work, either we must or the businesses and the economy that depends on them will fall. Alternatively, the fact is, if the floor rises, so will everybody on it. That’s what Roosevelt understood, and so must we. Fast.

This is a window on the life of one meat packer in Sholom Rubashkin’s Agriprocessors, Inc., the meat processing plant in Postville, IA much in the news. This is about a 21-year -old Guatemalan woman named Emilsa Monzon Gutierrez, why she came here, how she got here, and what she does at Agriprocesors, Inc. It is provided by Tony Leys at the Des Moines Register:

Guatemala is still recovering from a 36-year civil war that ended in 1996. Average income there is only 12 percent of income in the United States, and 43 percent of the average income in neighboring Mexico. Income inequality is starker in Guatemala, with the richest 10 percent of people controlling 43 percent of the wealth, compared with 37 percent in Mexico and 30 percent in the United States.
That is why so many poor Guatemalans risk robbery, arrest and heat exhaustion to make the trek to the United States.

Emilsa Monzon Gutierrez, a Guatemalan immigrant who worked at the Postville plant, made the journey last winter.

Monzon is the daughter of a farmhand in rural Guatemala. She is a soft-spoken woman who wears braces and looks younger than her 21 years. She sat at a picnic table outside the Postville church on Friday and described her homeland and her life.
She said her hometown is a place of tiny wooden houses with metal roofs and dirt floors. Food costs are rising, she said, and jobs are scarce. Violence, which is tied to the drug trade, keeps getting worse.

Monzon's family borrowed money so she could try to make it to the United States. She took a bus for nearly a thousand miles from her hometown in southern Guatemala to the U.S. border. Most of the trip was through Mexico, where she saw people with nicer clothes and better houses than most Guatemalans she knew. The roads were in much better condition, she said, and more people had cars.

Despite being better off than Guatemala, Mexico is a poor place with few opportunities. So after reaching northern Mexico, Monzon walked across a desert border area with four other people and made it into the United States. Then she took buses for more than 1,300 miles to Postville, where she joined her brother. The total journey took 27 days.

12-hour shift, 30-minute break

Monzon said she had no trouble landing a job at Agriprocessors, where she worked from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., with a half hour break for lunch. She spent her nights in a cold, refrigerated room, always rushing to cut feathers off chickens and slap labels on them. She said the work was more grueling than she expected, but it was the only job available.

Yo, that fried chicken there. Want some fries with that?

According to Leys, Agriprocessor workers like Monzon make $6.25 to $7.50 an hour at jobs many of them borrowed thousands of dollars just to reach. When they are deported, they will lose their homes and farms in Guatemala that served as collateral, and the money they sent back home to stave off starvation for their families will be no more. What then?

The notion that these same workers will just turn around come back to Agriprocessors is a fantasy. They can’t afford to in any sense, and as word spreads across Central America about our terrorizing chicken-shit raids on the least of the least, nobody else will come, either. It may be desperate at home, but at least it’s not desperate and grotesque.

When they’re run out of Postville and Agriprocessor is forced to hire the locals, the price of chicken will hit the stars.

What Tancredo and Dobbs and Galeener and the rest don’t want to get into is that this and every other capitalist country has made a devil’s bargain to exploit anybody who’s vulnerable and has no leverage, in exchange for a decent, affordable standard of living for everyone else. Slaves, immigrants, refugees, poor people, women (what is it now? $.79 on the $1.00?) and old people, but especially poor immigrants: It’s a deal pretty much bred in the bone of capitalism itself, because capitalism is about profits, not about people.

So long as the people and the profits can peacefully co-exist—as they did during the country’s New Deal glory days—guys like Galeener can pretend that they're on the winning end. But when, as now, profit lust has slimed the country, gas is $4 a gallon and food prices are getting scary high, they can either question their priorities or blame the “illegals.”

Their choice is foolish. It’s like voting for a Republican if you're not Dick. It’s circling the wagons and firing.

No, Virginia. It’s not the “illegals” who are holding meat-processing and re-bar workers’ wages down. It’s Ronald Reagan and the rest of the GOP, then and since, who collaborated both to block sane immigration policies and to impose “free trade” and globalization on the rest of us. With the help of the Clintons and a whole bunch of craven, complicit, sell-out congressional Democrats.

Here's a clue. “Free trade” and NAFTA and its spawn amount to a wholesale declaration of war on American labor, domestic and imported. It started when the Idol of the Right broke the Air Traffic Controllers strike in 1980 and shot labor unions in the chest.

That wound has festered and grown these 28 years. Now the economy created by Roosevelt’s high-wage/pro-union policies—you know, the one that gave your parents cheap university degrees, two cars, fine houses for 6% fixed 30-year mortgages, and employer-paid health insurance and pensions, weekends, and overtime pay--has gone, gone away.

Because tell me: What, if not unions and government enforced workplace regulation, stands between exploitative bosses like heavy GOP contributor Sholom Rubashkin and Monzon and, well, Linda Green, Bobby Ray Lee, and Tyrone Washington? It isn’t corporate ethics and it isn't Bush's "free trade."

Galeener either doesn’t know this or he doesn’t see what it has to do with him. He also doesn’t know that “free trade” means no unions and no workers’ comp or minimum wage enforcement and no benefits and all the investment safeguards of Enron, just as it means no regulation of predatory mortgage lenders and a flood of people like Monzon across our borders, fleeing from the wreckage of carnivorous multinationals.

He doesn’t even get that the same low-wage/no regulation conditions that drove Monzon to the United States are being replicated here by George Bush’s low-wage, anti-union, pro-corporate, anti-middle-class, tax-only-wage-earners policies.

But he’s about to get a clue.

So, either he can recognize that his half of the boat rises with Monzon’s and stand with her for higher wages, good benefits, a path to citizenship, and decent working conditions, or he and she and all the rest of us can all fall together. That’s the deal, locally and globally.

The choice is not between continuing to exploit immigrants and other vulnerable people or being wrung out and hung out. It’s not between an unacceptable status quo + an unacceptable (exploitative) guest worker program.

It’s between global workplace fairness and decency, and profits redirected into research, innovation, clean production, and real value, or global decline for 99% of us and immeasurably obscene profits for the rest.

Yes, propers for Monzon will mean higher food prices for you and me, but with a global New Deal and priorities re-centered on people and the planet that sustains us, we can afford it. If you don’t believe me, quit drinking the Kool Aid.

It’s just a question of will.

Free Trade, Sex/Slave Trade, and Immigration

Naomi Klein's explosive book about US global economic policy explains everything from the Iraq catastrophe and the Gulf Coast/New Orleans fiasco to Bush's near-wrecking of the national economy. The diabolical practice misleadingly called "free trade" or "globalism" is actually about how, over more than three decades, the wealthy have tested and perfected ways to dispossess the middle classes and the poor. Klein's work is painstakingly documented. There are more than a dozen examples involving Latin American, Asian, Pacific Rim, Middle Eastern, and European countries, as well as a close look at New Orleans. It's all there, and in my opinion, nobody who hopes to understand the main currents of contemporary life can afford not to read it.

The connections are deep and wide. When multinational corporations and their political, academic, and military allies conspire to create or capitalize (literally) on the conditions Klein explains--distracting disasters--the result is that the middle class is destroyed and the poor are abandoned, left to starve or drown.

It doesn't take much imagination to see how this practice--"free trade"--is, then, also fundamentally responsible for creating the conditions that lead to global worker migrations and to the international sex trade.

The former is obvious. If Monsanto introduces genetically altered crops into a country, the natural, organic counterpart is overtaken, erased, as it were, by cross-pollination. In time, crop monopolization occurs, genetically. If aggressive lawsuits then carefully ensure that no one can grow and market Monsanto's trade-marked hybrid without paying royalties to the corporation, small farmers and local growers are forced out of business or driven off their lands to other parts of the country. Then it becomes a race against time.

In the end, wind pollinates, and Monsanto wins. Thus, without their permission, and often over their urgent protest, their fields have been filled with Monsanto's trade-marked corn, maize, rice, soy--whatever--which they are not allowed to grow or sell. Left with few if any alternatives, few skills, and no money, they are forced off their own lands and, ultimately, often out of their own countries.

The connection between "free trade" and the international sex/slave trade is perhaps not so obvious, and I am indebted to a good friend for bringing it to my attention this morning. The dynamics are essentially the same: Extreme poverty with no alternatives forces extreme actions. For instance, what happens to village peasants when post-tsunami developers seize their lands, raze what's left of their villages, and put up luxury tourist spots? Dispossessed of village, family, trade, market, and all means to survive, some of them sell their daughters into the sex/slave trade, not necessarily knowing that it is the sex/slave trade.

These desperate, illiterate people are easy prey to outsiders' promises that their daughters will have a better life, a good education, a fine marriage if only . . . . After all, it doesn't take much to abandon a girl child in a culture where girls are regarded as liabilities due to dowry customs and lower wage prospects (if outside work is permitted at all). All this and pending starvation is a mighty persuader.

The moral depravity of these economic practices is just boggling. Unfortunately, the moral responsibility for ending them extends to us. Pick your cause: Environmental degradation? Sex/slave trade? Immigration? Women's rights? The rights of people of color? Minimum wage? Elder rights? There's virtually nothing that "free trade"--privatization, demolished social safety nets, zero taxes for the wealthy and the corporations, and cuts in wages and benefits--doesn't make worse. So it's imperative to act. Pick your cause, get informed, and get busy. The earth itself is counting on you and me.

Change? Yeah, but What Kind of Change?

A cousin and good friend recently sent me a short op-ed piece that he wrote to sort out his own feelings about the current demand for change in Washington. He made several excellent points. One is that except for Bush I, the presidents of the recallable past have all been outsiders, and yet are the guys responsible for getting us here. (Responsible in hugely varying degrees, I might say.)

The other is that those who say experience isn't all that important in light of a president's bank of advisors, also overlook the part about how every President himself has to sort out the advice. At the end of the day, it's the President's call. And that's where experience comes in most. I surely hope the last seven years have gotten that much across to this nation.

Anyway, Jim got me thinking about this cry for change.

"Change" is one of those flirty words that promises everything and delivers nothing. That is, it's meaningless by itself. It has meaning only when we say what it means.

In order to elect the best candidate for President, we need first to know precisely what change we want. We need to think about that with sufficient focus that we can say to the person on the subway beside us exactly what we want to change. We have to be able to prioritize those wants, and, using that scale of values, plug in the candidates' positions to create a matrix, a grid, that helps us move away from "gut" and "personality" to reasonable decisionmaking. Not that gut and personality don't matter; I'm not saying that. I'm saying that gut and personality aren't the only touchstones.

My priorities? They haven't changed since I cast my first vote. I believe that it's a sign of severe mental illness to say, "Your half of the boat is sinking." Put another way, a rising tide floats every boat.

Regardless of issue, policies that reflect that world view are my priorities. I would rank action on issues by impact and by risk.

To my way of thinking, that puts global warming at the top. We haven't the luxury of waiting, delaying, dillydallying. We have the gravest moral responsibility to our children and grandchildren to demand responsible, immediate, creative, radical actions.

The very close second is ending the disastrous, cannibalistic, evil economics of "free trade," "globalism," and Reaganomics. A Keynesian economics, a radical recission of NAFTA and CAFTA, etc., coupled with a radical, aggressive alternative renewable energy policy--embracing several, not one, alternatives--will do a great deal about the economy, without which healthcare, education, infrastructure, and all the rest cannot be taken on.

Third comes ending the catastrophic war in Iraq--but responsibly: mindful of what the Iraq political, the Middle East political, the military logistical, and the human social realities are in January and beyond. It isn't about winning or losing when winning militarily isn't an option. It's about ending a disaster in the least destructive way, and that has a world of implications that I don't think can be fully enumerated now.

How odd it is that so few of the debates have addressed my top two priorities. The agenda is the responsibility of the debate anchor. How many of these debates has Wolf Blitzer anchored? Just askin'. It's curious, isn't it? Much more attention tonight went to encouraging conflict between Obama and Clinton. In fact, I don't recall a single syllable about the global environmental crisis, and only a passing reference to NAFTA and CAFTA. I need to find out who owns CNN. I should know that already. Duh. It matters.