-- Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist Paper 22” --
Curious event: Two videos hit the internet almost simultaneously.
We start with this latest Bernie Sanders campaign ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m8Ijm4J6_s. It puts on an intimate basis the bad facts we not only experience in the daily world where we live and work, but also which are shown in statistics:
Millions of Americans are barely surviving, not living. That means existing by whatever means will get them through to the end of the day. 58% of them have less than $1,000 in savings to cover emergencies. “´It’s always concerning when a large part of the population is seemingly living paycheck to paycheck because when unexpected personal or financial hardships occur, it can be challenging to recover without adequate savings,´ Jason Thacker, head of consumer deposits and payments at TD Bank, said." As Kelly Osborne, Bernie´s ad person, notes, she is perpetually a shadow away from homelessness.
Next, please watch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez´ congressional testimony: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=55&v=JdAslQPYQtI.
To recapulate:
(i) Low/lower/lowest paychecks for millions of American workers;
(ii) Undocumented emigrants and their families held in detention centers in conditions that would make the hardiest Marine feel his breakfast start to warm.
Both bad facts are connected in a way you will never see truly, really, seriously discussed in the mainstream media or on Capitol Hill. Their interdependence is as unchallenged as it is unbreakable. Dangerous, too -- and not just for the people who die in the desert or drown in the Rio Grande.
The connection: illegal emigrants form an excess labor pool that keeps wages low all over America. Wages are calculated with the minimum wage as the base figure. Anything that pulls that wage downward effects all wages negatively up and down the line.
That downward pressure is exerted in an unanticipated -- perhaps unprecedented -- manner. To wit:
Undocumented workers are often said to be slaves. That statement is not true. They are in a worse condition than slaves. If a slave breaks his arm, he cannot work. His owner will take him to a doctor. If an undocumented worker breaks his arm, he is thrown onto the street.
We identified the low wages-illegal emigrant connection as America´s deep dirty secret in our previous post,"How to Fix America´s Immigration Mess."
* * *
I wish the issue were as simple as ill-will on the part of rich people.
If that were the case you could talk to them, maybe convince them to stop exploiting their workers and abusing illegal emigrants. Maybe their wives or kids would overhear your plea, talk some sense into Daddy. Maybe the government could run a public awareness campaign a la "Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires" or "Don´t be a Litterbug."
The truth is elsewhere.
I have known many wealthy people. I never once heard one of them say: we can´t let Latin America develop economically. If it does we won´t have enough illegal aliens to form a surplus labor pool to keep wages low. If you pushed Donald Trump into a chair, strapped a lie detector on him, and asked him if he wanted economic development in Latin America, his "yes" would pass with flying colors. Ditto those of his friends, family, colleagues. Which is why when it comes to this issue, you are wasting your time talking to him or other mega-rich Americans.
You would also be wasting your time searching through billions of emails and tapped telephone conversations among American oligarchs; you will never find a hint of a conspiracy anywhere.
Again, the solution lies outside intentions.
Try, for a change,looking at consequences which exist in, around and in spite of good intentions.
Capitalism got off the ground in the 1600s-1800s in extremely dubious ways. Slavery was a major source of initial capital accumulation. Crime, too.
Add to those sources the ruthless exploitation of workers. You can see the same process of primitive capital formation -- and of workers living in subhuman conditions -- today in China.
I do not know if that exploitation was ever necessary in the United States and other Western countries. I do know that it is not necessary now.
Capitalism in developed nations does not create a large enough consumption fund to buy the goods it produces at the prices they are sold. Those prices of course include rates of profit. And so, to overcome the consumption deficit, a myriad of techniques and gimmicks are used, notably sales and credit cards which enable people to buy things they cannot otherwise afford.
Those methods work, but not permanently. In 2018, consumer debt hit record levels. If you push down here, something equally bad or worse pops up there.
One thing is certain: no satisfactory solution to inadequate consumption is possible without higher wages. That is why, today, keeping wages low and the concomitant excess labor pool of illegal immigrants is an anachronism. A living fossil.
If capitalists do not personally favor the excess labor pool, who does? What is keeping the anachronism afloat?
To answer that question, ask another question:
Qui bono? -- who benefits?
* * *
Based on insider information, I wrote a series of articles, "How to Fix a Horse Race."
Time after time, it was not the wealthy horse owners who were doing the fixing; it was the trainers. Ditto professional athletes. Although they get all the publicity and most of the punishment, they may or may not know they are being drugged. Their trainers, to the contrary, always know.
The equivalent trainer role in politics is played by lobbyists. Based on nine years experience working for a governor and as chief of staff to the leadership of a house of representatives, I assure you that wealthy employers of lobbyists (i) may or may not know what their lobbyist is really doing, and (ii) most of the time, they do not know.
Here is a case study you won’t find in any political science textbook:
Every year without fail in the legislature where I worked somebody would introduce a “Right to Work” (RTW) bill. In right-to-work states, you do not have to join a union to get or keep a job.
Seconds after the bill was dropped in the hopper, the same old battle lines formed. The “shocked” and “horrified” union leaders and lobbyists actually loved it. The RTW menace instantly justified their jobs and expense accounts; it also gave them the excuse to “remind” thousands of dues-paying members who their “friends” were in the legislature. Nod, wink.
Their enemies, too. Anti-union conservatives of course loved the RTW bill, but not for the reason you expect.
Year after year, I watched the AFL-CIO trade away 95% of its action just to kill RTW. “Tell me what somebody wants,” one RTW sponsor told me, laughing, twisting an invisible stiletto, “and I’ll tell you their weakness.” Pro-business conservatives got the trade-offs, and the unions were housebroken until the next legislative session.
As for the union leaders, having “defeated” RTW they jubilantly went home and made scores of self-serving phone calls to Washington; they held back-patting sessions up and down the state; they appeared on TV at the drop of a hat, and sent puff pieces to newspapers, which indolent editors in the boonies published verbatim; they gave spirited parties in which their rank-and-file members screamed “Victory!” among other things.
Everybody knows about chain letters. What they don’t realize is that they are predicated on failure. After all, if chain letters really worked, they would travel around the world and back again, multiplying faster than clothes hangers in a closet. As the initiator of a chain letter, you would be sitting at home and suddenly receive millions of letters from China, India, Bangladesh, Croatia, Zimbabwe, all demanding a free bottle of booze (or whatever). In short, if chain letters really worked, there would be no point in doing them.
Likewise, the RTW bill´s success was predicated on its failure. It was in reality a Full Employment Act for legions of lawyers and lobbyists. Actual passage of the bill and its signature into law would have brought down the curtain on this perennial and predictable lucrative bit of stagecraft.
The same successful failure syndrome holds for emigration legislation. Nod, wink.
I witnessed many other bills, e.g., allowing interstate banking, fall into the same category of legislation which mysteriously, constantly, irredeemably failed. Year after year, wealthy people who ponied up and showered down were royally had by their lobbyists. I am not saying all lobbyists are bad. I estimate 10% of them were honest, dedicated professionals; it was a pleasure to work with them. Those 10% by the way, passed 90% of the legislation which otherwise wouldn´t have gone anywhere.
The other 90% of the lobbyists were bottom-feeders.
The word "passed" was not used gratuitously.
All large groups have a formal and informal organizations. You already know about the formal organization of government into the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Only insiders know that lobbyists constitute a Fourth Branch where it counts: informally.
* * *
Our "Dirty Secret" post identified the solution to America´s undocumented emigrant mess:
" Let me for a moment belabor the obvious. The excess labor pool in the U.S. is
(i) overwhelmingly a result of underdevelopment in Latin America. 92% of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are from Latin America/Caribbean. That means if you want to reduce the pool and raise U.S. wages, the necessary condition is
(ii) economically develop Latin America.
Here a major problem rears its ugly head...
As with Trump´s wall, the traditional responses -- foreign aid and private charity -- are like most laws dealing with power and politics: they are written to be evaded.
Giving aid and charity only perpetuates the relationship between donor and recipient. How?
The giveaway is in the giveaway: usually, no opportunity to reciprocate is offered to the receiver.
A gift is an enormously complex thing. The giver of a gift is in a superior position because the receiver owes him something. In many societies, notably in the Pacific, the receiver is even obligated to give a superior gift in return...
In short, if foreign aid and charity could solve economic underdevelopment in Latin America, they would have done it by now. Which means, they exist for another purpose:
Power -- how to get it; how to maintain it.
* * *
If foreign aid and charity don´t work, what will?
As is common knowledge, a big dream throughout Latin America is to immigrate to the United States. To the point: is there an alternative dream and reality?
The people of the village of Salinas de Guaranda in Ecuador showed in concrete terms what is possible.
Antonio Polo, an Italian Salesian priest, starting in 1970 organized a dirt-poor rural village -- 85% illiteracy, 45% infant mortality -- into a prosperous community by making manifest something that was latent.
That something was Pre-Columbian collectivist norms and values.
Salinas created an organization-production-commercialization-savings model based on what Father Polo called “esfuerzo comunitario” (community effort).
The impact of Salinas-style community development throughout Latin America would be colossal -- a change of, not in, the prevailing system.
But Latin America would not be the only beneficiary:
There is a catastrophic trend in the United States which is not being attended to. Rich richer, poor poorer and middle class smaller. A necessary (but not sufficient) precondition for redressing that trend is to minimize the surplus labor pool.
To significantly reduce it, however, is not possible without going to the source of the problem as Salinas did -- not by tinkering with legislation in Washington; not by foreign aid; not by Dr. Feelgood charity. They say there are no absolute truths; however, it is absolutely true that only economic development in Latin America will suffice."
* * *
Back to the present:
The vicious and unsound system Founding Father Alexander Hamilton was denouncing was the Articles of Confederation which governed America after it won independence.
You doubt he was seeking a change of, not in that system?
Had Hamilton´s position not carried the day and had the Constitution not been adopted, today the "United States" would be functionally exactly that -- an area of 50 different countries.
In reality, that situation would not exist. A foreign power would have spotted the chaos, marched in and taken over long ago. Which leads me ask: what language would Americans be speaking today? German? Japanese? Russian?
* * *
Foreign aid and private charity seek changes, to be sure. However, those changes are always in, never of, the prevailing system. When it comes to America´s illegal immigration mess, that amounts to shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic.
Hamilton-inspired people and policies are what are needed to get rid of the anachronism, the living fossil -- the low wage-illegal alien connection.
A change of, not in, that vicious and unsound system will not happen until its existence is recognized by the people most harmed by it: the Kelly Osbornes of America and Latin America.