Instead of looking busy.  Instead of pretending to address the problem of illegal immigration with their phony solutions such as border fences which are in fact nothing but more government welfare handouts to large rich corporations who are already draining our nation dry, our elected officials could actually start addressing a few of the root causes of the problem of illegal immigration.  But of course, many of them are on the government dole themselves as professional politicians who have held their offices for 20 or 30 years.  There is often little daylight between them and the corporate government welfare recipients who have been sucking hard on the government teat for 40 years or more.

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FIRST STEP:  Eliminate Farm subsidies to the rich and to Corporate Agribusinesses. Limit farm subsidies to the less than 2% of Americans who still live on their land and try to scratch out a living by farming.

These  farm  subsidies, government welfare to the rich, distort the market prices.  The billions that we give in farm subsidies to corporate agribusinesses like ADM and Cargill enable them to overproduce a commodity like corn, for example.  Then we taxpayers say–Oh aren’t we lucky! The price for corn is so low. But what happens is that this government welfare for the rich enables the big boys to drive the smaller farmers out of business and this  has happened all across American for the past 30 years.

What most of us taxpayers forget that this is OUR MONEY, OUR TAX DOLLARS, that is funding these Wall Street predators and their investors. AND THEY TREAT US LIKE WE ARE THE BEGGARS?  It is the money of ordinary tax-paying Americans like you and I that has enabled the rich to run the small farmers off their land.  It’s not that these corporate agribusinesses have so much “business savvy”, it’s because they have our hard-earned tax dollars that have been handed over to them by our elected officials in DC who are supposed to represent us.

Between 1996 and 2002, an average of $16 billion/year was paid by programs authorized by various U.S. farm bills dating back to the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, the Agricultural Act of 1949, and the Commodity Credit Corporation (created in 1933). Source: WIKI

Of the close to $1.4 Billion in subsidy payments to farms in Texas, roughly only 18% of the farms receive a portion of the payments. SOURCE

The Archer Daniels Midland Corporation (ADM) has been the most prominent recipient of corporate welfare in recent U.S. history. ADM and its chairman Dwayne Andreas have lavishly fertilized both political parties with millions of dollars in handouts and in return have reaped billion-dollar windfalls from taxpayers and consumers. ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and has indirectly cost Americans tens of billions of dollars in higher prices and higher taxes over that same period. At least 43 percent of ADM’s annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM’s corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30.  SOURCE

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SECOND STEP:  Renegotiate the NORTH AMERICAN “FREE” TRADE AGREEMENT (NAFTA)

NAFTA paved the way to the ruination of the Mexican corn farmers and some would say the ruination of the economies of all of North America.  Prior to the passage of NAFTA illegal immigration from Mexico was not a serious issue.  We had fewer than 2 million illegal immigrants in our country and that number had been stable for years.

It was only a year or two after NAFTA came into force on January 1, 1994 that there was a surge in illegal immigration from Mexico to the USA.   NAFTA benefited the large agribusinesses of the US and a few billionaires in Mexico and Canada.  It helped to demolish the economies of both the USA and Mexico for the poor and working classes of both nations.  Today, 16 years later it has even eroded the middle class in our nation.

Thus far the ordinary Mexican citizens  have borne the brunt of NAFTA, but we ordinary citizens in the USA are fast catching up.

What happened in Mexico was that the market for corn (a staple) was flooded with cheap, government subsidized US corn. Because of NAFTA, the US corporate agribusinesses did not have to pay the tariffs and other import duties that they would have normally been subject to.  It was a big free for all and those of you who owned stock in these big Wall Street Welfare recipients  such as ADM were rewarded with larger dividend payments.  What happened to the small Mexican farmers?  They could not sell their corn because they could not compete with the prices of the U.S. corporate government welfare recipients.  They were eventually forced off their land (over 1.3 million of them).  Many took a hike across the border.

There were and are many other impacts that NAFTA had an continues to have on the Mexican economy than to ravage its corn markets.

As for us in the USA? Most estimates that I find put the total job loss in the USA that can be attributed to NAFTA at 2 million job.  I personally would put that figure much higher because most of these sources only measure the direct loss such as a factory being dismantled and shipped overseas whereas there were many other losses of jobs and businesses that were in the community where the manufacturing plant was located–grocery stores and other retail stores in the area that went out of business because their customers moved away and those who remained did not have much money.

“It is clear that the costs to workers outweighed the benefits in all three nations. The process differed from country to country, and given the greater size and wealth of the United States, the impact there has not been as great as it was in Mexico and Canada. But the overall pattern was similar. In each nation, workers’ share of the gains from rising productivity fell and the proportion of income and wealth going to those at the very top of the economic pyramid grew.

Americans were promised that NAFTA would generate large numbers of net new good jobs. Instead, over a million jobs that would otherwise have been created were lost, and wages were pressured downward for a large number of workers with less than a college education.

Mexican employment did increase, but much of it in low-wage “maquiladora” industries, which the promoters of NAFTA promised would disappear. The agricultural sector was devastated and the share of jobs with no security, no benefits, and no future expanded. The continued willingness every year of hundreds of thousands of Mexican citizens to risk their lives crossing the border to the United States because they cannot make a living at home is in itself testimony to the failure of NAFTA to deliver on the promises of its promoters.”

SOURCE

Proclaim the Queen!

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