Tuesday

Mexifornia, Five Years Later

Mexifornia, Five Years Later

Victor Davis Hanson

The flood of illegal immigrants into California has made things worse than I foresaw.

In the Spring 2002 issue of City Journal, I wrote an essay about growing up in the central San Joaquin Valley and witnessing firsthand, especially over the last 20 years, the ill effects of illegal immigration (City Journal’s editors chose the title of the piece: “Do We Want Mexifornia?”). Controversy over my blunt assessment of the disaster of illegal immigration from Mexico led to an expanded memoir, Mexifornia, published the following year by Encounter Press.

Mexifornia came out during the ultimately successful campaign to recall California governor Gray Davis in autumn 2003. A popular public gripe was that the embattled governor had appeased both employers and the more radical Hispanic politicians of the California legislature on illegal immigration. And indeed Davis had signed legislation allowing driver’s licenses for illegal aliens that both houses of state government had passed. So it was no wonder that the book sometimes found its way into both the low and high forms of the political debate. On the Internet, a close facsimile of a California driver’s license circulated, with a picture of a Mexican bandit (the gifted actor Alfonso Bedoya of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), together with a demeaning height (5’4”), weight (“too much”), and sex (“mucho”) given. “Mexifornia” was emblazoned across the top where “California” usually is stamped on the license.

In such a polarized climate, heated debates and several radio interviews followed, often with the query, “Why did you have to write this book?” The Left saw the book’s arguments and its title—Mexifornia was originally a term of approbation used by activists buoyed by California’s changing demography—as unduly harsh to newcomers from Mexico. The Right saw the book as long-overdue attention to a scandal ignored by the mainstream Republican Party.

Fast-forward nearly five years, and the national climate has radically changed, so much so that the arguments of Mexifornia—close the borders, return to the melting pot, offer earned citizenship to most aliens of long residence in exchange for acceptance of English and American culture—seem tame today, if not passé. In 2002, when I wrote the original City Journal essay, no one thought that the U.S. Congress would vote to erect a wall. Today there is rumbling that the signed legislation entails only 700 miles of fencing instead of spanning the entire 1,950-mile border.

Deportation was once an unimaginable response to the problem of the 11 million here illegally. Now its practicality, rather than its morality, appears the keener point of contention. And the concerted effort by Chicano activists to drive from popular parlance the descriptive term “illegal alien” in favor of the politically correct, but imprecise and often misleading “undocumented worker” has largely failed. Similar efforts to demonize opponents of open borders as “anti-immigrant” or “nativist” have had only a marginal effect in stifling debate, as has the deliberate effort to blur illegal and legal immigration. The old utopian talk of a new borderless zone of dual cultures, spreading on both sides of a disappearing boundary, has given way to a reexamination of NAFTA and its facilitation of greater cross-border flows of goods, services—and illegal aliens and drugs.

So why has the controversy over illegal immigration moved so markedly to the right?

We return always to the question of numbers. While it is true that no one knows exactly how many are here illegally from Mexico and Latin America, both sides in the debate often accept as reasonable estimates of 11 to 12 million illegals—with an additional 500,000 to 1 million arriving per year. Given porous borders, such guesses about the number of illegal aliens in the United States are outdated almost as soon as they are published. It is plausible, then, that there may be an additional 3 to 4 million illegal aliens here who were not here when the City Journal “Mexifornia” piece appeared.

The result of such staggering numbers is that aliens now don’t just cluster in the American Southwest but frequently appear at Home Depot parking lots in the Midwest, emergency rooms in New England, and construction sites in the Carolinas, making illegal immigration an American, rather than a mere Californian or Arizonan, concern.

Indeed, we forget how numbers are at the crux of the entire debate over illegal immigration. In the 1970s, perhaps a few million illegals resided in the United States, and their unassimilated presence went largely unnoticed. Most Americans felt that the formidable powers of integration and popular culture would continue to incorporate any distinctive ethnic enclave, as they had so successfully done with the past generations that arrived en masse from Europe, Asia, and Latin America. But when more than 10 million fled Mexico in little over a decade—the great majority poor, without English, job skills, a high school education, and legality—entire apartheid communities in the American Southwest began springing up.

During the heyday of multiculturalism and political correctness in the 1980s, the response of us, the hosts, to this novel challenge was not to insist upon the traditional assimilation of the newcomer but rather to accommodate the illegal alien with official Spanish-language documents, bilingual education, and ethnic boosterism in our media, politics, and education. These responses only encouraged more illegals to come, on the guarantee that their material life could be better and yet their culture unchanged in the United States. We now see the results. Los Angeles is today the second-largest Mexican city in the world; one out of every ten Mexican nationals resides in the United States, the vast majority illegally.

Since Mexifornia appeared, the debate also no longer splits along liberal/conservative, Republican/Democrat, or even white/brown fault lines. Instead, class considerations more often divide Americans on the issue. The majority of middle-class and poor whites, Asians, African-Americans, and Hispanics wish to close the borders. They see few advantages to cheap service labor, since they are not so likely to need it to mow their lawns, watch their kids, or clean their houses. Because the less well-off eat out less often, use hotels infrequently, and don’t periodically remodel their homes, the advantages to the economy of inexpensive, off-the-books illegal-alien labor again are not so apparent.

But the downside surely is apparent. Truck drivers, carpenters, janitors, and gardeners— unlike lawyers, doctors, actors, writers, and professors—correctly feel that their jobs are threatened, or at least their wages lowered, by cheaper rival workers from Oaxaca or Jalisco. And Americans who live in communities where thousands of illegal aliens have arrived en masse more likely lack the money to move when Spanish-speaking students flood the schools and gangs proliferate. Poorer Americans of all ethnic backgrounds take for granted that poverty provides no exemption from mastering English, so they wonder why the same is not true for incoming Mexican nationals. Less than a mile from my home is a former farmhouse whose new owner moved in several stationary Winnebagos, propane tanks, and outdoor cooking facilities—and apparently four or five entire families rent such facilities right outside his back door. Dozens live where a single family used to—a common sight in rural California that reifies illegal immigration in a way that books and essays do not.

The problem with all this is that our now-spurned laws were originally intended to ensure an (admittedly thin) veneer of civilization over innate chaos—roads full of drivers who have passed a minimum test to ensure that they are not a threat to others; single-family residence zoning to ensure that there are adequate sewer, garbage, and water services for all; periodic county inspections to ensure that untethered dogs are licensed and free of disease and that housing is wired and plumbed properly to prevent mayhem; and a consensus on school taxes to ensure that there are enough teachers and classrooms for such sudden spikes in student populations.

All these now-neglected or forgotten rules proved costly to the taxpayer. In my own experience, the slow progress made in rural California since the 1950s of my youth—in which the county inspected our farm’s rural dwellings, eliminated the once-ubiquitous rural outhouse, shut down substandard housing, and fined violators in hopes of providing a uniform humane standard of residence for all rural residents—has been abandoned in just a few years of laissez-faire policy toward illegal aliens. My own neighborhood is reverting to conditions common about 1950, but with the insult of far higher tax rates added to the injury of nonexistent enforcement of once-comprehensive statutes. The government’s attitude at all levels is to punish the dutiful citizen’s misdemeanors while ignoring the alien’s felony, on the logic that the former will at least comply while the latter either cannot or will not.

Fairness about who is allowed into the United States is another issue that reflects class divides—especially when almost 70 percent of all immigrants, legal and illegal, arrive from Mexico alone. Asians, for example, are puzzled as to why their relatives wait years for official approval to enter the United States, while Mexican nationals come across the border illegally, counting on serial amnesties to obtain citizenship.

These class divisions cut both ways, and they help explain the anomaly of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page mandarins echoing the arguments of the elite Chicano studies professors. Both tend to ridicule the far less affluent Minutemen and English-only activists, in part because they do not experience firsthand the problems associated with illegal immigration but instead find millions of aliens grist for their own contrasting agendas. Indeed, every time an alien crosses the border legally, fluent in English and with a high school diploma, the La Raza industry and the corporate farm or construction company alike most likely lose a constituent.

The ripples of September 11—whether seen in the arrests of dozens of potential saboteurs here in America or the terrorist bombings abroad in Madrid and London—remind Americans that their present enemies can do us harm only if they can first somehow enter the United States. Again, it makes little sense to screen tourists, inspect cargo containers, and check the passenger lists of incoming flights, when our border with an untrustworthy Mexico remains porous. While it may be true that the opponents of illegal immigration have used the post–September 11 fear of terrorism to further their own agenda of closing the border with Mexico, they are absolutely correct that presently the best way for jihadist cells to cross into the United States is overland from the south.

Other foreign developments have also steered the debate ever more rightward. In the last decade, the United States has clearly seen the wages of sectarianism and ethnic chauvinism abroad. The unraveling of Yugoslavia into Croatian, Serbian, and Albanian sects followed the Hutu-Tutsi bloodbath in Rwanda. And now almost daily we hear of Pashtun-Tajik-Uzbek hatred among the multiplicity of warring clans in Afghanistan and the daily mayhem among Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis in Iraq. Why—when we are spending blood and treasure abroad to encourage the melting pot and national unity—would anyone wish to contribute to tribalism or foster the roots of such ethnic separatism here in the United States?

Moreover, all during the 1990s, blue-state America offered up the European Union as the proper postmodern antidote to the United States. But just as we have recoiled from the EU’s statist and undemocratic tendencies—which have resulted in popular dissatisfaction, sluggish economic growth, high unemployment, falling demography, and unsustainable entitlement commitments—so, too, have its unassimilated Muslim minorities served as another canary in the mine. The riots in France, the support for jihadism among Pakistanis in London, and the demands of Islamists in Scandinavia, Germany, and the Netherlands do not encourage Americans to let in more poor Mexican illegal immigrants with loud agendas, or to embrace the multicultural salad bowl over their own distinctive melting pot.

Then there were the April–May 2006 demonstrations here in the United States, when nearly half a million protesters took to the streets of our largest cities, from Chicago to Los Angeles. Previously, naive Americans had considered that their own discussions over border security and immigration were in their own hands. And while Chicano-rights organizations and employer lobbyists were often vehement in their efforts to keep the border open, illegal aliens themselves used to be mostly quiet about our internal legal debates.

In contrast, this spring Americans witnessed millions of illegal aliens who not only were unapologetic about their illegal status but were demanding that their hosts accommodate their own political grievances, from providing driver’s licenses to full amnesty. The largest demonstrations—held on May Day, with thousands of protesters waving Mexican flags and bearing placards depicting the communist insurrectionist Che Guevara—only confirmed to most Americans that illegal immigration was out of control and beginning to become politicized along the lines of Latin American radicalism. I chronicled in Mexifornia the anomaly of angry protesters waving the flag of the country they vehemently did not wish to return to, but now the evening news beamed these images to millions. In short, the radical socialism of Latin America, seething in the angry millions who flocked to support Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, and Mexico’s Andrés López Obrador, had now seemingly been imported into our own largest cities.

Turmoil in areas of Mexico that send many illegal aliens to the United States is especially worrisome. Recently, for example, almost the entire state of Oaxaca was in near-open revolt over efforts to force the resignation of provincial governor Ulises Ruiz. There was widespread lawlessness, vigilantism, and at times the complete breakdown of order. All this feeds the growing perception that illegal aliens increasingly are arriving not merely as economic refugees but as political dissidents who don’t hesitate to take to the streets here to demand social justice, as they did back home.

More important still, Oaxaca’s troubles cast doubt on the conventional wisdom that illegal immigration is a safety valve that allows Mexico critical time to get its house in order. Perhaps the opposite is true: some of the areas, like Oaxaca, that send the most illegal aliens to the United States, still experience the greatest social tensions—in part because of the familial disruption and social chaos that results when adult males flee and depopulated communities consequently become captive to foreign remittances.

Two further issues have persuaded Americans to close the borders: the attitude of the Mexican government and the problems with first-generation native-born children of illegal aliens.

Worker remittances sent back to Mexico now earn it precious American dollars equal to the revenue from 500,000 barrels of daily exported oil. In short, Mexico cannot afford to lose its second-largest source of hard currency and will do almost anything to ensure its continuance. When Mexico City publishes comic books advising its own citizens how best to cross the Rio Grande, Americans take offense. Not only does Mexico brazenly wish to undermine American law to subsidize its own failures, but it also assumes that those who flee northward are among its least educated, departing without much ability to read beyond the comic-book level.

We are also learning not only that Mexico wants its expatriates’ cash—and its nationals lobbying for Mexican interests—once they are safely away from their motherland; we are also discovering that Mexico doesn’t have much concern about the welfare of its citizens abroad in America. The conservative estimate of $15 billion sent home comes always at the expense of low-paid Mexicans toiling here, who must live in impoverished circumstances if they are to send substantial portions of their wages home to Mexico. (And it comes as well at the expense of American taxpayers, providing health-care and food subsidies in efforts to offer a safety net to cash-strapped illegal aliens.) So it is not just that Mexico exports its own citizens, but it does so on the expectation that they are serfs of a sort, who, like the helots of old, surrender much of the earnings of their toil to their distant masters.

But even more grotesquely, in the last five years, the Mexican real-estate market has boomed on the Baja California peninsula. Once Mexico grasped that its own unspoiled coast was highly desirable for wealthy expatriate Americans as a continuation of the prized but crowded Santa Barbara–San Diego seaside corridor, it began to reform its real-estate market, making the necessary changes in property and title law, and it welcomed with open arms cash-laden subdividers looking to come south. This is sound economics, but examine the ethical message: Mexico City will send the United States millions of its own illiterate and poor whom it will neither feed nor provide with even modest housing, but at the same time it welcomes thousands of Americans with cash to build expensive seaside second homes.

Of course, the ultimate solution to the illegal immigration debacle is for Mexican society to bring itself up to the levels of affluence found in the United States by embracing market reforms of the sort we have seen in South Korea, Taiwan, and China. But rarely do Mexican supporters of such globalization, or their sympathetic counterparts in the United States, see the proliferation of a Wal-Mart or Starbucks down south in such terms. Rather, to them American consumerism and investment in Mexico suggest only an owed reciprocity of sentiment: Why should Americans get mad about Mexican illegals coming north when our own crass culture, with its blaring neon signs in English, spreads southward? In such morally equivalent arguments, it is never mentioned that Americanization occurs legally and brings capital, while Mexicanization comes about by illegal means and is driven by poverty.

At the same time, focus has turned more to the U.S.-born children of Mexican illegal immigrants, in whom illegitimacy, school dropout rates, and criminal activity have risen to such levels that no longer can we simply dismiss Mexican immigration as resembling the more problematic but eventually successful Italian model of a century ago. Then, large numbers of southern European Catholics, most without capital and education, arrived en masse from Italy and Sicily, lived in ethnic enclaves, and for decades lagged behind the majority population in educational achievement, income, and avoidance of crime—before achieving financial parity as well as full assimilation and intermarriage. Since 1990, the number of poor Mexican-Americans has climbed 52 percent, a figure that skewed U.S. poverty rates. Billions of dollars spent on our own poor will not improve our poverty statistics when 1 million of the world’s poorest cross our border each year. The number of impoverished black children has dropped 17 percent in the last 16 years, but the number of Hispanic poor has gone up 43 percent. We don’t like to talk of illegitimacy, but here again the ripples of illegal immigration reach the U.S.-born generation. Half of births to Hispanic-Americans were illegitimate, 42 percent higher than the general rate of the American population. Illegitimacy is higher in general in Mexico than in the United States, but the force multiplier of illegal status, lack of English, and an absence of higher education means that the children of Mexican immigrants have illegitimacy rates even higher than those found in either Mexico or the United States.

Education levels reveal the same dismal pattern—nearly half of all Hispanics are not graduating from high school in four years. And the more Hispanic a school district becomes, the greater level of failure for Hispanic students. In the Los Angeles district, 73 percent Hispanic, 60 percent of the students are not graduating. But the real tragedy is that, of those Hispanics who do graduate, only about one in five will have completed a high school curriculum that qualifies for college enrollment. That partly helps to explain why at many campuses of the California State University system, almost half of the incoming class must first take remedial education. Less than 10 percent of those who identify themselves as Hispanic have graduated from college with a bachelor’s degree. I found that teaching Latin to first-generation Mexican-Americans and illegal aliens was valuable not so much as an introduction to the ancient world but as their first experience with remedial English grammar.

Meanwhile, almost one in three Mexican-American males between the ages of 18 and 24 recently reported being arrested, one in five has been jailed, and 15,000 illegal aliens are currently in the California penal system.

Statistics like these have changed the debate radically. While politicians and academics assured the public that illegal aliens came here only to work and would quickly assume an American identity, the public’s own ad hoc and empirical observations of vast problems with crime, illiteracy, and illegitimacy have now been confirmed by hard data. Ever since the influx of illegals into our quiet valley became a flood, I have had five drivers leave the road, plow into my vineyard, and abandon their cars, without evidence of either registration or insurance. On each occasion, I have seen them simply walk or run away from the scene of thousands of dollars in damage. Similarly, an intoxicated driver who ran a stop sign hit my car broadside and then fled the scene. Our farmhouse in the Central Valley has been broken into three times. We used to have an open yard; now it is walled, with steel gates on the driveway. Such anecdotes have become common currency in the American Southwest. Ridiculed by elites as evidence of prejudice, these stories, statistical studies now show, reflect hard fact.

The growing national discomfort over illegal immigration more than four years after “Mexifornia” first appeared in City Journal is not only apparent in the rightward shift of the debate but also in the absence of any new arguments for open borders—while the old arguments, Americans are finally concluding, really do erode the law, reward the cynical here and abroad, and needlessly divide Americans along class, political, and ethnic lines.

Friday

North American Union "Conspiracy" Exposed

The North American Union "Conspiracy" Exposed

By Cliff Kincaid

Ironically, however, he said that the development of a North American legal system might in some way assist in cleaning up the Mexican legal system.

A top Democratic Party foreign policy specialist said on Friday that a "very small group" of conservatives is unfairly accusing him of being at the center of a "vast conspiracy" to implement the idea of a "North American Union" by "stealth." He called the charges "absurd."

But Robert Pastor, a former official of the Carter Administration and director of the Center for North American Studies at American University (CNAS), made the remarks at an all-day February 16 conference devoted to the development of a North American legal system. The holding of the conference was itself evidence that a comprehensive process is underway to merge the economies, and perhaps the social and political systems, of the three countries.

Pastor said that he favors a "North American Community," not a formal union of the three countries, and several speakers at the conference ridiculed the idea of protecting America's borders and suggested that American citizenship was an outmoded concept.

Wearing a lapel pin featuring the flags of the U.S., Canada and Mexico, Pastor told AIM that he favors a $200-billion North American Investment Fund to pull Mexico out of poverty and a national biometric identity card for the purpose of controlling the movement of people in and out of the U.S.

So the "conspiracy" is now very much out in the open, if only the media would pay some attention to it.

Media Cover-Up

Accuracy in Media attended the conference in order to produce this report and shed light on a process that is being conducted largely beyond the scrutiny of the public or the Congress.

AIM has previously documented that Pastor's campaign for a North American Community has received precious little attention from the major media, except for the notable case of CNN's Lou Dobbs, who has called it "utterly mad." In fact, a survey of news coverage discloses that several high-profile mentions of the concept of a North American economic, social or political entity have come from Pastor himself, such as a Newsweek International article that he wrote.

The conference, conducted in cooperation with the American Society of International Law, an organization affiliated with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, was held at the American University Washington College of Law. A large number of speakers came from American University.

Overruling the U.S. Supreme Court

Academic literature distributed in advance to conference participants about a common legal framework for the U.S., Canada and Mexico included proposals for a North American Court of Justice (with the authority to overrule a decision of the U.S. Supreme Court), a North American Trade Tribunal, a North American Court of Justice, and a Charter of Fundamental Human Rights for North America, also dubbed the North American Social Charter.

Under the latter concept, according to Laura Spitz of the University of Colorado Law School, North Americans might be able to enjoy "new rights" essential to "human flourishing" such as gay marriage. She argues in one paper that U.S. economic integration with Canada will make it nearly impossible for the United States not to recognize same-sex marriage so long as it is lawful in Canada.

Pastor himself talked about new institutions, such as a "permanent tribunal" on trade issues, but emphasized that such ideas "take time" and have to "take root." He advised conference participants to "think about the horizon," in terms of what is possible, over the course of 5, 10 or even 20 years from now.

Conservative concerns about Pastor's agenda were not assuaged by conference literature disclosing that the CNAS is sponsoring an event in May in which students participate in a model "North American Parliament." The concept suggests creation of a regional body to supersede the U.S. Government itself.

Such talk does indeed raise the specter of a North American Union similar to the currently functioning European Union, a political and economic entity of 27 European states that includes a European Parliament and a European Court of Justice. The EU has been charged with usurping the sovereignty of member states and moving European nations in a left-wing direction on matters such as acceptance of abortion and gay rights and abolition of the death penalty.

Indeed, the academic literature distributed to conference participants alluded to how the three countries of North America are "polarized" on "sensitive" cultural issues such as the death penalty, abortion and gay marriage and that it might take a long time to "harmonize" their legal systems on such matters.

While Pastor, a foreign policy advisor to each of the Democratic presidential candidates since 1976, tried to dismiss talk of a North American Union, he did emphasize in his remarks to the conference that North America is "more than a geographical entity" and is in fact a "community." His 2001 book, Toward a North American Community, begins by emphasizing his status as a resident of North America, rather than just a U.S. citizen, and outlines a vision of the three countries taking their relationship "to a new level."

Rather than use the phrase "union," he described the creation of an "emerging entity called North America" growing out of the fact that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), passed in 1993, had brought about a "remarkable degree of economic integration" among the three countries. One panel was devoted to analyzing how NAFTA could be expanded into the areas of intellectual property and taxation and regulations.

Attacking Conservatives

One speaker, Stephen Zamora of the University of Houston Law School, denounced the idea of a wall separating Mexico and the U.S., in order to control illegal immigration, asking, "What does citizenship mean anymore?" He expressed pleasant surprise when a Mexican in the audience said she had dual citizenship in Mexico and the U.S. Later, he said he was just as concerned about people living in Mexico as people living in the U.S.

Another speaker, Tom Farer, Dean of the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Denver, made a point of saying that his representative in Congress, Tom Tancredo (R-Col.), a staunch advocate of U.S. border security, was a backward thinker. Tancredo could be seen "dragging his knuckles along the ground," Farer said, trying to crack a joke.

No Border Control

Pastor acknowledged that the U.S. Government doesn't want to enforce its immigration laws. He said, however, that the solution is not a fence, except in some isolated high-crime areas along the border, and it's not to punish companies for hiring illegal aliens, since identity documents can be too easily forged. He said the solution is a national biometric and fraud-proof identification card that identifies national origin and legal status.

Another part of his solution, a $200-billion North American Investment Fund, is for the purpose of narrowing the income disparity between Mexico, on the one hand, and the U.S. and Canada, on the other. "You need a lot of money to do it and do it effectively," he said. He said Mexico would be required to put up half of the money, with the U.S. contributing 40 percent and Canada 10 percent. It would be done over 10 years.

The fund, he said, would focus on economic development in the southern and middle parts of Mexico, which haven't been touched to any significant degree by NAFTA. This, he indicated, would go a long way toward stemming illegal immigration to the U.S.

So the failures of NAFTA are now being used not to repeal the measure but to expand it and increase foreign aid to Mexico.

Pastor said Senator John Cornyn, known as a conservative Republican, had introduced his North American Investment Fund as a bill in Congress but had backed away from it under conservative fire.

The Nature of NAFTA

An important moment in the conference occurred when Alan Tarr, director of the Center for State Constitutional Studies at Rutgers University, was challenged about glossing over President Clinton's submission of NAFTA as an agreement, requiring only a majority of votes in both Houses of Congress for passage, and not a treaty, requiring a two-thirds vote in favor in the Senate. NAFTA passed by votes of 234-200 in the House and 61-38 in the Senate. Tarr said he had not intended to be uncritical of what Clinton did. Pastor quickly interjected that there was nothing improper in submitting NAFTA as an agreement rather than a treaty.

But Clinton's move was seen at the time as an effort to bypass constitutional processes, and the United Steelworkers challenged NAFTA's constitutionality in court. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court in 2001, after lower courts had thrown the case out, saying it was a political matter between the president and Congress. The Bush Administration sided with Clinton and the Supreme Court declined to get involved.

The history of NAFTA is one reason why so many conservatives are concerned that a North American Community could be transformed into a North American Union that runs roughshod over U.S. constitutional processes and guarantees.

One of the main concerns of conservatives, who have formed a "Coalition to Block the North American Union," has been the lack of congressional interest and oversight. They are backing a bill introduced by Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Va.) to put Congress on record against a North American Union.

The Secretive SPP

Another major concern is that the Bush Administration has facilitated the creation of this new North American "entity" through an initiative known as the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), based on a memorandum signed by President Bush and the leaders of Canada and Mexico in March 2005. It is described as "a trilateral effort to increase security and enhance prosperity among the United States, Canada and Mexico through greater cooperation and information sharing," but its "working groups" have been operating in secret and many of the members are not even known.

Judicial Watch, a conservative public-interest law firm, had to go through the Freedom of Information Act to obtain documents naming the members of some of the mysterious working groups.

Officially, on the U.S. side, the SPP is coordinated by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, and Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez.

The Clinton Connection

Pastor's luncheon speaker, Eric Farnsworth, the Vice-President of the Council of the Americas, provided some valuable insight into this process. Saying NAFTA is "no longer enough," he described the SPP as designed to help North America meet the economic challenges posed by such countries as China and India.

Farnsworth said that the Council of the Americas, which advises the SPP, would shortly issue 300 recommendations designed to improve business conditions in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. He was unclear as to whether the U.S. Government would try to implement these initiatives on its own, through the administrative or regulatory process, or whether they would be submitted to Congress for approval.

The Council's honorary chairman is David Rockefeller and its board members come from such major corporations as Merck, PepsiCo, McDonald's, Ford, Citibank, IBM, Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil, GE (which owns NBC News and MSNBC) and Time Warner (which owns CNN and Time Inc.).

One of the key board members is Thomas F. McLarty III, President of Kissinger McLarty Associates, who served as Clinton's White House counselor and chief of staff during the time that NAFTA was signed and passed by Congress. McLarty, who also functioned as Special Envoy to the Americas under Clinton, is an adviser to the Carlyle Group, focusing on "buyout investment opportunities in Mexico."

Farnsworth mentioned the possible creation of a "super-national Supreme Court" governing business and trade issues in North America, but was ambiguous about whether it would ever come to pass.

A self-described Democrat who served as policy director in the Clinton White House Office of the Special Envoy for the Americas from 1995-98, he also said that he was optimistic that Bush would strike a deal with the new Democratic-controlled Congress on immigration. He said Bush was "at odds with his own party" on immigration and that legislation to create a so-called "guest worker" program could pass now that Republicans have lost control of Congress.

The Panama Canal Giveaway

For his part, Pastor, a friendly and engaging fellow who talks about his ideas at length with critics, has a history that goes far beyond deep personal involvement in the Democratic Party.

Pastor is associated by conservatives with President Jimmy Carter's treaty, opposed by then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, which transferred control of the Panama Canal away from the U.S. to the Panamanian government. Pastor was National Security Advisor for Latin America under Carter. His nomination as U.S. Ambassador to Panama was withdrawn in 1995 after conservative Senator Jesse Helms, then-chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, threatened to block a vote on his nomination. Helms accused Pastor of aiding radical forces and undermining U.S. interests in the region.

The founding director of the Latin American and Caribbean Program of the [Jimmy] Carter Center, Pastor became Vice President of International Affairs and Professor of International Relations at American University on September 1, 2002, when he created his Center for North American Studies. Pastor also served as vice chair of a Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on the Future of North America, which issued a report in May 2005. Lately, Pastor's Center for North American Studies has received funding from the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean to address "regulatory convergence" issues.

A sour note about the prospect of further integration with Mexico was provided at the conference by Alberto Szekely, a career ambassador and advisor to the Mexican Minister of Foreign Affairs, who said that the rule of law simply does not exist in Mexico and that corruption permeates governmental institutions. He said reforms under the presidency of Vicente Fox went nowhere and that Mexico is one of the most corrupt countries in the world today.

Ironically, however, he said that the development of a North American legal system might in some way assist in cleaning up the Mexican legal system.

Pastor, an optimist about the prospect of developing the North American Community, told me that he didn't think the situation in Mexico was as bleak as Szekely made it out to be. He continues to be a proponent of "continental thinking."

Cliff Kincaid is editor of the Accuracy in Media (AIM) Report. This article may be reproduced if credit is given and a link provided to www.aim.org

Monday

Extraordinary Silver Pajamas

Al Korelin at kereport.com quizzically notes that the statistics show that the supply of silver has actually been higher than the demand. Instead of shrugging his shoulders at the anomaly and moving on (like I would have done to avoid the actual work of research), he takes positive action to solve the mystery, and calls David Morgan of The Morgan Report to remark upon the table of the historical supply/demand on the Kitco Silver site, and says to him, "I don't get it; Kitco is well-known for accurate statistics and this one makes no sense."

The explanation was obtained when Mr. Morgan revealed, "these statistics were obtained from Goldfield Mineral Services from the United Kingdom, and of the three components making up the supply numbers, government sales and scrap supply, often known as 'above ground supply' are somewhat open to conjecture. The only component, which cannot be questioned, is 'mine supply', and there is a deficit between mine supply and total demand. This fact, coupled with the growing medical and industrial demand for silver, is one of the reasons that the price of the commodity is increasing." Nice analysis, Mr. Morgan!

And perhaps one of the new "growing medical demands" for silver to which he alluded is reported by Mineweb.com, in that "Pioneering pajamas and bed linen made with silver cloth could prove the key to limiting MRSA (a bacteria which has caused a number of illnesses and deaths to patients in U.K. hospitals) infections if a multi-centre trial being run by St Bartholomews Hospital in London and The London NHS Trust proves successful. Dr Peter Wilson, a Consultant Microbiologist at the Trust,
believes there is strong anecdotal evidence to suggest that silver can be used to clear MRSA on the skin and therefore protect vulnerable patients."

Everybody concerned says that they are "excited" about the study, hopefully to verify the theory that they could actually eradicate the infection horror of almost-incurable MRSA by giving (oops, "selling at hugely obscene mark-ups") pajamas laced with silver to hospital patients.

And as a guy who owns some silver, I am likewise "excited" about this research, as this means a whole new, huge demand at the exact same time since the decades-long government selling of stockpiles of silver (and other things) into the market are almost gone! It's "perfect storm" time!

Suddenly, since demand already exceeds supply (and has for years), that old supply-versus-demand thing pops unbidden into my head, and the result is so compelling that, next thing I know I am screaming to the family to clean out their closets because I'm going to need the storage space for a lot more silver!

Predictably, because they are not "team players", I can hear them grumbling and cursing under their breath that they are already storing so much silver that the only closet space they have left is just big enough for a change of rags, which, according to my calculations (when I add the set of rags they are currently wearing), is two sets of rags apiece. What riches!

"Why do they dress in rags?" you ask. "Because," I patiently explain to you, like I patiently explain it them, and like I patiently explain it to those pesky, busybody social workers with their precious little court orders in their fat, greasy little hands, "they are just too damned lazy to beg or steal some clothes from the neighbors, much less get up off their lazy butts to go down to the Salvation Army, and get something nicer to wear! The clothes are free! I mean, I could have dropped them off, on my way to play golf, almost any morning of the week! So shut the hell up
and take those handcuffs off of me, you damned dirty apes!"

This was, of course, my clever way of trying to de-fuse the tense situation by adding some humorous allusion to Charleton Heston's famous line in Planet of the Apes, and which was, of course, not appreciated by the Gestapo apes, both onscreen and in my real life. Although I note with a dismissive sneer that Charleton Heston didn't have to pay bankrupting fines or attend stupid classes on "How to be a Good Father" and "Anger Management"; instead he got a nice, cozy cage to live in, free grub, free
medical care, and hot chicks half his age, dressed in hubba-hubba shortie outfits, brought to him for some XXX-rated Hot Monkey Love! I mean, where's the justice? I'm the freaking victim here!

But this is not about how the legal system isn't about "justice", or even about cheerless government goons. It is about how, if this study about silver pajamas preventing MRSA in hospitals proves effective, you can bet your sweet butteroo that this kind of clothing will soon be selling like hotcakes in Wal-Mart, to worried, germ-o-phobic mothers all over the world. And that kind of huge demand for silver, to meet the tidal wave of demand, means that silver (as I can not even fathom the remotest possibility otherwise) must be preparing to go to the moon in price!
Wheee!

Then, according to the Secret Mogambo Five-Year Plan (SMFYP), I'll take some of the silver from storage in their stupid closets (giving them back their stupid closet space), sell the silver, get rich with cash, give the wife and the kids a few bucks apiece, and tell them to, "Hit the road, ya hateful parasites, always dragging me down!" As Hannibal Smith (played by George Peppard) of the A-Team so famously said, "I love it when a plan comes together!"

The famous Daan Joubert sent me an email that did not actually contain the phrase, "you are the biggest idiot in the whole world", but I could tell that that was what he was really thinking when he replied to an item from last week's MoGu, in which Paul van Eeden proposed that "real interest rate equals nominal interest rate minus M3 growth minus inflation", which Mr. Joubert suggests "needs an adjustment."

Reading between the lines, you can plainly see that he is calling me, like so many others have called me, "an insignificant little intellectual pygmy", all because I should have realized that "Broadly speaking, M3 growth should be in pace with the growth rate of GDP - nominal rate growth, or else inflation is brought twice into the calculation."

So now I am feeling embarrassed and my feelings are hurt, and I am already beginning to formulate a plan for revenge against the insult, maybe by using that new howitzer cannon that my wife disparaged by saying, "Why did you buy that monstrosity, you Stupid Mogambo Moron (SMM)? You'll never use it!"

But, as they say, "First things first." So let's re-calculate real inflation according to this new methodology! He apparently sees me fumbling with the calculator, stalling for time. And knowing that I will probably get the wrong answer half a dozen times before giving up by crying in despair, he sighs in exasperation and supplies the answer by saying, "the real interest rate is not the negative 7% as you had it, but 'only' say negative 4% to negative 5%."

But the point is that real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates are - wonder to behold! - still negative! Negative interest rates! Too, too weird!

And notice his use of the modifier "only", as in, "We originally thought a horrible disease was going to kill you in two weeks, and now we see that it is ONLY going to kill you in three weeks!" Hahaha!

I like my little joke so much that I have decided not to persecute Mr. Joubert, mostly because he has a very good point, but also because I am a wonderful peach of a guy, and only (again with the "only"!) partially because the enormous cost of shipping one lousy howitzer cannon would make you plotz. It sure did me!

But, being naturally argumentative, I like the idea (now that he has pointed it out) of double-counting some of the inflations by subtracting actual price inflation (which is inflation that has already happened to prices) from the nominal interest rate, and yet still subtracting the current monetary inflation growth in M3, as originally posited, because the future price inflation will certainly lag the current monetary inflation. And future price inflation ought to be relevant to
borrowing /investing plans!

Larry from MoneyandMarkets.com newsletter says he "tore apart the government's 2006 financial statements", and here's what he found: "The actual annual federal deficit for the fiscal year [ending] September 30, 2006 was $4.6 trillion, up from $3.5 trillion a year ago. That's an astounding $1.1 trillion increase, or a 31.4% jump in the deficit." Yow!

This is not to mention that it is more than a third of GDP!

As for the budget (a cash-accounting format), he notes, "The actual deficit is nearly nineteen times larger than the reported $248 billion deficit."

And last, but certainly not least, the accrual-system of accounting shows, "Total federal obligations at year-end were $54.6 trillion, up from $50 trillion in 2005...$46.4 trillion in 2004...and $32.7 trillion in 2002."

Did I say, "We're freaking doomed!" in the last ten minutes? If not, insert said comment here. Maybe with an exclamation point or two to add the emphasis it deserves!

Until next week,

The Mogambo Guru

**** Mogambo sez: Gold, silver and oil should do very well for a long, long time until their prices (and lots of other prices) go parabolic as the dollar finally loses its last remnants of value at a quickly accelerating pace. And this means that every time the price goes down, you should buy some more, or have a really good reason why not, because you will soon be asking yourself, "Why didn't I buy gold, silver and oil when I knew I should have? What am I, some kind of moron?"

The answer is, of course, "Yes, you are a moron", or else would not be reading this stupid Mogambo Guru article in the first place, doofus. Check and mate!

Sunday

Class War in Latin America


Since 1492 the people of Latin America have suffered massive oppression and poverty at the hands of imperialism and capitalism. The last few years, however, have opened up a new period of explosive resistance against the rule of big business.

Workers, youth and peasants throughout the region have been protesting on the streets and at the ballot boxes. The working class is stepping into struggle, and increasingly becoming more anti-capitalist. Even the dreaded “s word,” socialism, is now being discussed and debated in the streets, from Caracas to Mexico City.

In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez was recently swept into a third term with over 60% of the vote. Chavez has consistently been a thorn in the side of U.S. imperialism and Venezuelan capitalism since he was first elected in 1998. They have tried all sorts of dirty tricks to remove him: a recall referendum, massive funding of opposition candidates, and even a military coup. In each attempt the mass of Venezuela’s poor have rose to the occasion to defend Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution.

This latest election represents a further defeat for Washington and its right wing allies. Chavez’s victory will boost the confidence of the working class, and the revolution’s aim of building “socialism in the 21st century.” Already it seems Chavez is moving further to the left, and in early January he announced plans to nationalize Venezuela’s energy and telecommunications industries.

In Brazil, anger at Lula’s abandonment of his socialist principles has led to the development of a new party, the Socialism and Freedom Party (P-SOL). In the presidential elections P-SOL got over 6 million votes, nearly 7%. This starting point will help the development of this new socialist political movement.

Just south of the Rio Grande, in Mexico, the left wing mayor of Mexico City, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) was just barely defeated in the presidential elections. This defeat was widely considered as fraudulent, and mass protests erupted against the massive fraud initiated by the Mexican capitalist class and its candidate Felipe Calderon.

Directly after the electoral theft, AMLO’s supporters occupied Mexico City’s Zocalo Square for 48 days in protest. On November 20, 300,000 showed up in force to protest Calderon’s farcical inauguration. In the halls of the Mexican Congress, where the inauguration was to take place, fistfights broke out between opposition politicians supporting AMLO and those supporting Calderon.

This comes on top of the massive battles that took place in the Oaxaca region. These protests started with a teachers’ strike and culminated in a march of over one million in November. Before it was brutally crushed, the Oaxaca rebellion led to the formation of a popular assembly of workers and ordinary people that took effective control of the region.

The events in Mexico show the willingness of the Latin American working class to go beyond electoral struggles. Throughout the region there have been massive strikes and protests.

In Chile mass protests erupted in opposition to a scheme to privatize education. This attack on education came from a government headed by Michelle Bachelet, a supposed socialist. Mere months after her election over one million students, teachers, medical workers and others came out on strike to protest.

Political tensions have also erupted in Bolivia in recent months. The Bolivian working class has waged a heroic struggle over the last few years mainly around the demands to nationalize the country’s vast oil and natural gas resources. This culminated in the 2005 election of left wing president Evo Morales.

Morales has stoked the anger of Bolivia’s rich landlords and their right wing parties. The city of Cochabamba erupted in protest this November as workers and peasants fought to disrupt a meeting of right wing governors.

Thousands of peasants and indigenous people have been marching hundreds of miles from Santa Cruz to the capital of La Paz picking up people along the way. They are threatening to shut down the Senate if it does not approve modifications to the agrarian reform law that would allow the government to confiscate and redistribute land to indigenous groups.

This mood of struggle and growing class-consciousness has even penetrated the heart of capitalism and imperialism. The immigrant rights movement last year erupted into the biggest mass movement in recent U.S. history. Millions of Latin American immigrant workers chose to stand up to the right wing threats of the Republicans and for the right to live and work with dignity.

This movement culminated in the “day without an immigrant” last spring on May 1. This day of action pointed in the direction of a general strike, as millions of workers walked out of their jobs and shut down numerous businesses and industries in Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago and elsewhere. This movement forced the far right to step back and effectively blocked the vicious Sensenbrenner bill.

These historic struggles are a glimpse into the future, when the working class worldwide will move into struggle for a better world. They have put the idea of socialism back on the political map. They should serve as an inspiration to workers and youth around the globe. These movements show that it is possible to fight back against capitalism and imperialism.

But, socialist policies can not be fulfilled in the name of the working class by well meaning leaders. They are the task of the working class and require its full involvement and leadership. That’s why we support the Committee for a Workers’ International’s call for the creation of new mass workers’ parties. This is a necessary step to end the rule of capitalism and achieve the socialist transformation of society, which alone can transform the lives of workers and the poor across the region.

Thursday

Presidential Frontrunners Would Surrender America's Borders

By Pastor Chuck Baldwin | NewsWithViews.com

Looking at the potential presidential frontrunners for both the Democrat and Republican parties reveals that virtually everyone of them would surrender America's borders. Not one of the presidential frontrunners from either party would protect our borders against illegal immigration. Just the opposite. They would continue George Bush's policy of wide open borders, including his determination to grant amnesty to illegals. In other words, when it comes to protecting our borders, there is not a nickel's worth of difference between the two major parties' leading presidential contenders.

Democratic presidential frontrunners include John Edwards, Barak Obama, and Hillary Clinton. Republican frontrunners include John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani.

In fact, virtually every Democratic candidate, and even the vast majority of Republican candidates, would provide no relief to America's border problems. And, yes, that includes Sam Brownback and Newt Gingrich. Notable exceptions include Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul, and Tom Tancredo, with Tancredo at the head of the class.

Obviously, should Hunter, Paul, or Tancredo miraculously win the White House, the push for a North American Union (NAU) complete with a NAFTA superhighway and a trilateral, hemispheric government, would be stopped dead in its tracks. For this reason, the GOP machine (and the insiders who control it) will never allow someone such as Duncan Hunter, Ron Paul, or Tom Tancredo to obtain the nomination.

It's time the American people faced a hard, cold reality: no matter who the two major parties nominate in November 2008, the push for open borders, amnesty for illegal aliens, and the NAU will continue unabated. In other words, anyone one believes that unimpeded illegal immigration (and related issues) just might be the biggest threat to our national sovereignty and security (and count me as one who does) will not be able to vote for either the Republican or Democratic nominee in 2008. It's time to start preparing for that reality now.

Does that mean that Republicans should not do everything they can to help Tancredo, Paul, or Hunter gain the nomination? Of course not. If the vast majority of the GOP rank and file would get solidly behind these three men, one of them might have a chance of succeeding. However, the track record of the GOP faithful is not very reassuring.

Instead of supporting principled, uncompromising men of integrity, such as the three men named above, Republican voters will doubtless buy into the party mantra of pragmatism and help nominate another spineless globalist such as currently occupies the White House, which will leave us exactly where we are now.

So, here is the sixty-four million dollar question: What will principled conservative voters do in 2008? My hope and prayer is that after failing to receive their party's nomination, Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo, and Duncan Hunter (or at least one of them) will leave the party and bring their (his) followers to the Constitution Party (CP). In all likelihood, the CP will have ballot access in over 45 states. It is already the third largest political party in the country and is currently the fastest growing political party in the nation. A national leader such as Paul, Tancredo, or Hunter would provide the CP with a very attractive alternative to the globalist candidates being offered by the two major parties.

By nature, I am not a single issue voter. However, I am sensible enough to realize that there are currently a handful of issues that will literally make or break America's future. And right now, the illegal immigration and emerging North American Union issues are at the very top of the list. Further failure on these issues will mean the end of America as we know it. And I mean very soon.

Regardless of what Hunter, Paul, and Tancredo ultimately do, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents who believe we must protect America's borders, stop the burgeoning North American Union, and secure our national sovereignty must be prepared to abandon the two major parties' presidential nominees in 2008 and support an "America First" third party candidate. Even a virtually unknown candidate with limited experience, but someone who understands the issues and has the backbone to do what is right, would be head and shoulders above what the two major parties are currently shoving down our throats.

Better start preparing yourselves for it now, folks.

© 2007 Chuck Baldwin - All Rights Reserved