Sunday, May 21, 2006

Slave Power

W has made an attempt to address the immigration issue and in the process he's done us a favor by reminding us of the Northerners who feared slavery prior to the Civil War. Much could be said about the causes of the greatest conflict in our nation's history, but one thing I rarely hear is just how the racist northern fear of slave power was one of the main causes of the fatal animosity between the states. The Minutemen who volunteer to police the southern border are of a direct lineage to those northerners who cared little about "the Negroes" and a lot about what slave labor would do to their free labor economic system.

The Minutemen are right when they suggest that immigrants place downward pressure on the wage system but that hardly covers their xenophobic souls. Nafta basically destroyed our protected labor market and keeping every immigrant out of America isn't going to amount to a hill of beans even if it could be pulled off. Refusing to trade with countries that allow their workers to be exploited and their enviroments to be polluted needs to be our central trading dogma, but given our oily addiction, we are in no position to be curtailing trade with the Chinas of the world. Without their infusion of capital, essentially financing our buying frenzy with loans taken out by our Treasury, we'd be in a world of hurt. Actually, we are in a world of hurt. We just have really good drugs. Eventually, we are going to have to come down. That's the truth the conservative debt dealers are blocking. It seems that we are slaves to their power.

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