Finding common ground

We’re in the middle of a divisive nationwide debate on immigration with no resolution that allows human genius to stand tall. Events move fast.

Now 6,000 troops comb the border, a move by the Bush administration to get the far right of the Republican Party off the president’s back so that he doesn’t appear soft on communism, oh, I mean immigration. We’ve always got to create threats and immigrants are the big one today.

More than 60 percent of people polled say the president did a good thing by sending more camouflage-dressed people to the border. The new specter that haunts folks today is those uprooted by structural situations wreaking havoc throughout the world, and even in our own country.

Sen. John Kerry advocates for more money to increase border patrol people by 1,000, and beef up a fleet of helicopters by 100, and then purchase 250 power boats.

Meanwhile, working people are scared out of their wits about their jobs. The Financial Times (FT) is the first-read paper for most of the billionaires of the planet who amount to 793 right now, up 100 since a year ago. In a long analysis piece titled, “Out on a limb: why blue-collar Americans see their future as precarious,” the paper illustrates that life isn’t getting any easier for workers. A growing number of them no longer have any safety net.

And meanwhile, CEOs see their wages skyrocket. More wealth than ever is concentrated in the hands of 1 percent of the population while the bottom hardly gets by. Martin Wolf, a pro market writer for the FT, quotes sources as saying “… corporate executives account for more than half of the incomes in the elite 0.01 percent of the U.S. income distribution.”

“One clear danger,” states Wolf, “is that people will increasingly cast around for scapegoats… Last December the House of Representatives passed a bill that would create felons out of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States and build a 700-mile wall along part of the Mexican border.”

The Economist reveals that Goldman Sachs profits keep executives smiling: “Even compared with leaders in other industries, Goldman makes spectacular returns. Among its latest record-busting yardsticks was a 40 percent quarterly return on equity. The average pay-packet of its 24,000 staff last year was $520,000-and that includes a lot of assistants and secretaries.”

The financial weekly gets to the core of why money is headed upward rather than being distributed: “At the heart of the change has been the development of huge markets in swaps, derivatives and other complex and often opaque instruments that allow the transfer of risk from one part to another. From small beginnings in 1987, the face value of contracts in interest-rate and currency derivatives is now more than $200 trillion – 16 times America’s GDP. A further $17 trillion [is] outstanding in (even newer) credit-default swaps, which allow bond investors to lay off the risk of issuers defaulting.”

Meanwhile, poverty creation moves full steam ahead with more than 35 million and growing, the majority of whom are children. At the same time one out of every 136 of our fellow citizens ends up in prison. We lack the language to tackle these knotty issues.

There is little attempt to popularize conversation about money while much of it leaves the country. Just last year $20 billion headed to South America to take advantage of high interest rates. The deck is stacked for the mega-rich who borrow cheap and invest high. They make out big time.

Investors can count on 45.1 percent return on their money when they dump it into emerging markets in Latin America, the Christian Science Monitor reported a few months ago.

There’s no control on capital which means that it moves anywhere it wants, foot-loose and fancy-free, without any controls. I always come back to a perspective that Ignacio Ellacuria, the Jesuit murdered in El Salvador by troops trained at the School of the Americas, shared when he urged a creation of a Civilization of Labor over against a Civilization of Capital. Capital rules right now with all the negative consequences that fall on the backs of the impoverished of the world.

Folks aren’t getting to the root causes as to why senators are at each other’s throats about protecting jobs, and for the most part there isn’t much job creation with huge chunks of money going into hedge funds which together manage more than a trillion and a half dollars and it doesn’t produce anything; most of it is invested in derivatives, making profit off of some asset like currency markets.

Derivatives don’t create jobs; in fact, this financial tool thrives when mergers take place and when 35,000 workers at General Motors will get axed by the year 2008. Investors love it when redundancy takes place. It’s great for the pocketbook, but not for workers.

Yet increased rage is taken out on the undocumented. There is little effort to refocus the debate and put the blame where blame needs to be put on the systemic pillaging not only of the United States but of the world by those who control financial capital. They have their fist in the GATS (General Agreement on Tariff and Services) agreement and knuckle countries that refuse to go along with it and lower barriers to capital.

It’s just one of the reasons why there is so much anger at Hugo Chavez because he refuses to go by the rules of GATS. Then just look at Mexico with a bullish stock market and millions without work headed to the states risking their lives; look at Colombia, considered the most bullish stock market on the planet last year because of privatizing banks and energy companies. Little is said about this kind of violence.

The FT had this to say about Mexico last year, and I think it holds the same today: “Record corporate earnings (my emphasis) for the second quarter have helped propel the Mexican stock market to historic highs, in spite of sluggish economic growth and growing worries about political risk.”

It just reconfirms the idea that little productivity comes out of capital markets. The poor don’t profit from this, or from NAFTA which basically caters to the service sector.

Multinationals wanted to expand the U.S. service sector which at the beginning of 1990s made up 65 percent of the economy, while internationally it only amounted to 20 percent. Thus, there was the urgency to expand this lucrative sector into Mexico and Canada. The Mexicans paid the price for NAFTA having to jump on board the nonbinding rules of GATT which subsequently turned in GATS, which are binding with the creation of the World Trade Organization.

Mexicans also had to ax its ejido system, communal land that came to the poor as a constitutional right. Once done away with, transnationals came in and bought up the land, pushing many farmers off it and into cities and then to the United States in search of work. Because of NAFTA, Citigroup could buy a controlling interest in Mexico’s privatized state bank.

The purchase helped in illustrating foreign direct investment (FDI) coming into the country. But it didn’t produce any jobs. Meanwhile, Mexicans in the United States will send back to their families some $24 billion at the end of this year, which tops by far FDI, second only to oil as a source of dollars.

The whole debate going on in Congress misses the structural violence behind the immigration issue: so troubling. No wonder The Nation (April 24) says “The comprehensive reform of immigration policy that the [immigration] movement wants is not going to come from this Congress, (d)riven as it is with splits among Republicans who want to keep the poor huddled masses out; Republicans who want to keep them in but keep them poor; and Democrats too weak and anxious to light the way down a better path.”

We need to focus on the “Davos Party,” as Jeff Faux calls the financial elite and transnationals who rule the world, and find common ground with those who risk their lives as they take the perilous trip to the United States in search of work.

We have more in common with these vulnerable human beings heading north to help their families than we’d like to think. And as that commonality unfolds we’ll be in a better place to articulate a bit of utopia: a new world is possible, and take the steps to create it.

Jim Harney is artist in residence for Posibilidad, a Bangor nonprofit dealing with issues of globalization and its impact on the poor. He can be reached at jimharney@posibilidad.org.