BroadSnark

Bolivian president Evo Morales says that exports to the U.S. have decreased 8% due to Bolivia’s decertification under The Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA).  However, Morales expects that agreements with Venezuela, along with demand from Arab countries, will make up for the loss.  (Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been strengthening his ties with Bolivia and Venezuela.)

Supposedly, the U.S. government frowns on the increasing influence of Chavez in Latin America.  Supposedly, the U.S. government is worried about Iranian power around the world.  Supposedly, the Obama administration is trying to turn over a new leaf with Latin America.  So why would the U.S. government do something that alienates Latin American countries and sends them into the warm embrace of the very people they are trying to isolate?

It’s inexplicable, at least to any rational person, but U.S. drug policy has never been rational.

The United States is the leading consumer of cocaine.  Rather than dealing with U.S. addiction and its related problems, our policy has been to go after the “source.”  Now it takes many ingredients to make cocaine – sulfuric acid, kerosene, lime, sodium carbonate – but we have focused on going after the coca leaf.

Going after coca leaves may seem to make some sense, as the coca leaf is where the alkaloids that make you high are found.  But coca is a bush grown by subsistence farmers, campesinos, who often have no other viable cash crop.  And the coca leaf is an integral part of Andean culture and has been since at least 1800 B.C.

Unfortunately for Andeans and their traditions, a German chemist named Friedrich Gaedcke isolated the alkaloids in coca leaves.  Andean coca growers were everyone’s best friend when coca was used in legal products like Coca Cola and cocaine laced wine.  But once a handful of U.S. drug warriors decided that cocaine had to be stopped, we expected Andean people to turn their backs on thousands of years of culture and to just give up an integral part of their economy.

As the drug war ratcheted up, Andean people in Bolivia and elsewhere suffered the consequences.  Bolivia was pressured to eradicate coca crops using herbicides and fungicides that damaged food crops, contaminated water sources, and made people sick.  Human rights abuses escalated as pressure was put on Bolivia to militarize their anti-drug efforts and to impose increasingly draconian penalties on people involved in the coca and cocaine trades.

In addition to interdiction and eradication, drug warriors from the U.S. promoted crop substitution programs.  Loans were provided to farmers to grow crops other than coca and special trade deals were arranged to help open up U.S. markets to legal Andean goods.  The ATPDEA was part of that effort.

All of our efforts to stop drugs at the “source” have been an abysmal failure.  Substitute crops were no replacement for coca bushes which need little care and bring in far more money.  The only things U.S. imposed drug policies were effective at was alienating Andean people.  Nobody knows that better than Evo Morales, former head of the Chapare coca growers union.

Morales has taken the position that Bolivia should say no to cocaine, but yes to coca.  His refusal to acquiesce to all U.S. demands when it comes to drug policy has contributed to a testy relationship with the U.S. and to Bolivia’s continued decertification.

Now the decertification doesn’t really matter much.  It effects only a small amount of trade.  And the U.S. officials know damned well that, even if Morales did everything they want, it wouldn’t do anything to resolve the drug problem in the United States.  So it makes absolutely no sense that we would take action to piss off Bolivians (and their allies) and drive a further wedge between the U.S. and other countries of the Americas.

But sense and drug policy don’t seem to go together in the United States.

Once people find out I’m an anarchist (and get over the shock that I am not a fifteen year old punk rock white boy who likes to smash windows), they want to know what anarchy is (if not violence and mayhem).  I explain to them that anarchy means “without rulers” and that I am against all forms of domination.

Now, of course, they want to know how we are going to live without domination.  They tell me that, without police, we will have no protection from violent criminals.  They tell me that, without bosses, nobody would do anything and we’d all starve.  They tell me that, without coercion, people would just argue forever and nothing would ever get resolved.  They tell me that, if you remove coercive institutions tomorrow, someone would just go about trying to recreate them.

They think anarchy is a utopian dream.

They’re right.  It is a utopian dream.  And there is nothing wrong with utopian dreams.  Whenever humans have made progress, it has been because of people who had seemingly unrealistic dreams about human possibility.  Mother Jones, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King had utopian visions for the world.  Their visions may not have been fully realized, but they changed things radically for the better.

I don’t believe I will ever see a society that is completely free of coercion and violence.  But that doesn’t mean that I’m just going to roll over and accept coercion and violence.  I don’t believe I will ever see a society where hierarchies don’t exist.  But that doesn’t mean I’m just going to roll over and accept man over woman, white over black, straight over gay, rich over poor, owner over worker.

When they tell me that, without police, we will have no protection from violent criminals; I tell them that half the people who are languishing in prison are not violent criminals.  I tell them that “17.6 % of women in the United States have survived a completed or attempted rape.”  I tell them that most rapes go unreported and most rapists unpunished.  I tell them that, in many cases, the police are the rapists and not protecting us at all.  I tell them that I don’t think I’m protected now.

When they tell me that, without bosses, nobody would do anything and we’d all starve; I tell them that people are starving now.  I tell them that “almost one person in six does not get enough food to be healthy and lead an active life.” And I tell them that there are alternatives to hierarchy.  I tell them about the FASINPAT in Argentina and Arizmendi bakeries in California.  I tell them about AK Press and Mondragon (soon coming to a U.S. town near you).

When they tell me that, without coercion, people would just argue forever and nothing would ever get resolved; I tell them that ordinary people, working together, can come up with solutions on their own.  And if they don’t believe me, they can ask nobel prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom.

I don’t disagree that there will always be people trying to rebuild the coercive institutions that we manage to tear down.  There are people out there who long for the antebellum south.  There are people who would like to bring back ruling monarchies.  And obscene amounts of people supported McCarthyism and the Patriot Act and every other rollback of civil rights some butthead has proposed.  That’s not an argument against anarchy.

I’m not naive.  I understand the challenges.  I understand how imperfect we all are.  But I also see the possibilities.  I see anarchy happening in little (and not so little) ways all over the world.  And I know that the people are wrong who think obtaining power, and using that power over others, is the only way to accomplish anything.  It isn’t the only way.  It isn’t the right way.

I do not believe that the world will ever be all peace, love, and cotton candy.  I do believe that the more people adopt anarchist principles, the better off we will be.

More than five million Americans could not vote in the last election because they were convicted of a felony. Only two states allow felons to vote. In many states, former felons are barred permanently from voting. In others, felons can get their voting rights back, but the process is so arduous that few do.

I doubt many people are losing sleep over whether Charles Manson can vote. I’m guessing many people would approve of the idea that criminals lose their rights as citizens after acting against the citizenry. But we aren’t talking about Charles Manson here. More than half of federal prisoners are in prison for drug crimes.

Let’s take a state like California. California has the nations largest prison population and an overcrowding problem so bad that federal judges have ordered the prison population decreased. While Prop 36 has caused a decrease in the percentage of prisoners incarcerated for nonviolent drug offenses, they still constitute more than 20% of the prison population in California.

Recent polling shows that more than 50% of California voters are in favor of marijuana legalization. A vote would be close. All those people barred from voting, the very people who lost their freedom and civil rights due to drug prohibition, could tip the scales.

Drug laws have been broken at least once by 40% of Americans. If that many people are breaking the law, there is something wrong with the law. Would we strip 40% of Americans of their voting rights? What kind of democracy is that?

Sheila Jackson Lee has introduced a House bill intended to restore voting rights to all ex felons within thirty days of being released from prison. The bill is languishing in committee right now. If your representative is on the House Committee on the Judiciary, call and tell them you want to see that bill move.

The email I have been responding to in my last couple posts blames immigrants for “bankrupting us.” The email then goes on to cite a litany of statistics used to perpetuate two of the biggest myths promulgated by anti-immigrant groups.

Myth #1 – Immigrants are Dangerous Criminals

Anti-immigration groups like to paint immigrants as dangerous criminals. They know that most people’s basic human decency would not allow other human beings to be treated the way they propose immigrants be treated. Most of us don’t feel much compassion for rapists and murderers, so they try to insinuate that immigrants are rapists and murderers.

The first article the author cites is titled “The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants in the United States.” First ask yourself – is that even possible? According to FBI crime statistics, there were 80,414 reported rapes and attempted rapes nationwide in the year 2006. There were 15,854 reported murders nationwide. That is a total of 96,268 rapes and murders in one year in the United States.

I could not locate any good, recent statistics on incidents of child molestation in the United States, but the last U.S. Children’s Bureau estimates for the number of children molested in 1993 was 217,700. In short, we don’t even reach 1 million murders, rapes, and molestations for the entire country in a year. Perhaps the person who wrote the article was guesstimating crimes from the beginning of time until doomsday?

The next claim is that “illegal aliens in the United States have a crime rate that’s two and a half times that of white non-illegal aliens (and that) their children are going to make a huge additional crime problem in the US.” The source for this information is Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation (speaking on Lou Dobbs). Rector does not say how he obtained that figure, nor does anyone ask him.

In fact, a study performed by the Public Policy Institute of California shows that U.S. born men have crime rates two and a half to ten times higher than immigrant men. They also found that cities with higher proportions of immigrants have seen crime rates fall faster than cities with less immigrants.

Follow a link from the “In Just One Year” email and it will take you to another Lou Dobbs transcript where CNN correspondent Christine Romans says that “30 percent of federal prisoners are not U.S. citizens” and that “taxpayers spend more than $3 million every day to house non-U.S. citizens.” It is true that there are non-U.S. citizens in prison. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, there were 1,595,034 people in federal and state prison as of June 30, 2007. Of those, 96,703 (or about 6%) were not U.S. citizens.

Not surprisingly, Lou Dobbs correspondent does not ask why the non-U.S. citizens are in prison. A large portion are in prison for crossing the border and for no other reason. Immigration related prosecutions have risen substantially since a 1996 law authorizing increased INS hiring, as has the amount of time each immigration offender has had to stay in prison. I can’t find evidence to back up the claim that it costs us $3 million every day to house non-U.S. citizens, but sending someone who crossed the border to prison for 20 months is bound to have a cost.

Finally, the author tries to connect immigrants crossing the southern border with terrorists, saying that “as many as 19,500 illegal aliens from Terrorist Countries” crossed the border in 2005. The source is a Homeland Security report which does not say “Terrorist Countries” but “special interest countries.” And while it is certainly possible that a terrorist could come into the country illegally via the southern border, it is also true that the majority of the 9/11 hijackers had visas and were processed by U.S. immigration.

Myth #2 – Immigrants are a Drain on the Economy

When not made out to be violent criminals, immigrants are painted as parasites here to live off the hard work of U.S. citizens.

The email titled “In Just One Year” claims that “$11 Billion to $22 billion is spent on welfare to illegal aliens each year by state governments.” The link they provide leads to an article by FAIR. However, the article doesn’t claim that money is being spent to provide services to illegal aliens, but to legal immigrants. The article lists the benefits available to legal immigrants as “school lunch and breakfast programs, immunizations, emergency medical services, and disaster relief.”

So even if we believe the statistics in this article (and I do not), what these people are saying is that they want to deny school lunches to children of legal immigrants. They don’t think legal immigrants should be immunized against diseases. And they want to let legal immigrants die rather than receive emergency medical care? How heartless does a person have to be to deny nutrition to a child because their parent is an immigrant? What kind of person would let another human being die in an emergency room because they weren’t born here? And finally, even if you are completely heartless, how stupid is it to have un-immunized people living in the country, increasing all of our risk for disease?

Immigrants here without documents are not eligible for welfare programs like food stamps. And while it is true that there are costs associated with education, health care, roads, etc; an in depth study by the CATO Institute shows that immigrants (legal and illegal) pay significantly more in taxes than they receive in services. It is also important to remember that the vast majority of immigrants (80% according to the U.S. Census Bureau) are between 18 and 64. That means the majority had any schooling paid for by their home country and are too young to be participating in the most costly welfare programs, those meant for the elderly.

Next the author says that “illegal aliens sent home $45 billion in remittances back to their countries of origin.” The source for this information is dubious to say the least, but the figure could conceivably be correct. According to the World Bank, recorded remittances to developing countries totaled $251 billion in 2007. That figure is for the entire world. I might note that the top two receiving countries are actually India and China, not Mexico. And that, in fact, remittances to Mexico have been decreasing in recent years.

The implication is that this money should be staying within our borders. Does that mean that, conversely, U.S. citizens should not be benefiting from the human and natural resources of other countries? You’d be hard pressed to find something that you own that does not contain raw materials from another country or was not made by workers in another country. Those $5 T-Shirts you get from Walmart come courtesy of garment workers making pennies somewhere overseas. Are you ready to give up oil? To start paying the true price for your food and toys?

And what about U.S. companies working overseas. U.S. companies are operating around the globe and making enormous profits which they then bring back to the United States. Many extract natural resources, use the cheap labor, and take advantage of weak protections for workers. Dole was using banned pesticides in Guatemala which caused Guatemalan workers to become sterile. Coca Cola workers in Colombia were killed when they tried to unionize.

And to this day in Bhopal, where 5,000 people were killed and babies are still being born with birth defects twenty years later, the U.S. company behind the chemical disaster is yet to be held responsible. And that one company, Dow, grossed $49 billion in 2007 – well over the total amount of remittances claimed by the author. Yet if one of these Guatemalans or Colombians or Indians wants to come to the United States and send a little money back home, anti-immigrant hysterics ensue.

Finally, the author of “In Just One Year” claims that “$200 Billion Dollars a year in suppressed American wages are caused by the illegal aliens.” This statistic comes from Lou Dobbs himself who claimed the statistic came from “the most authoritative and recent study.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t actually name the study, making this claim impossible to verify. And although many other anti-immigrant groups on the internet cite this figure, none of them provide information about the actual research.

The truth is that it is almost impossible to know whether or not immigrants are keeping wages down and, if so, by how much. See this Washington Post article for a good summary. Many people who hire immigrant farmworkers or construction workers claim that only immigrants even apply for the jobs. Is it conceivable that, if you paid strawberry pickers $30 an hour, other people would apply? Sure. But how many strawberries do you think you could afford to buy if that’s what they made?

Personally, I think the minimum wage should be much higher than it is and that everyone (immigrant or no) should receive enough to live human. But the idea that we can obtain that goal by shutting our doors to new labor is naive. Our wages have stagnated because most businesses can relocate if they feel they can get cheaper labor elsewhere and because businesses are more interested in making money for their CEOs and stockholders than in treating their workers decently.

Besides, you have to look at why people are coming to work here to begin with. Since NAFTA, small farmers in Mexico have been losing their farms. Mexico, the birthplace of corn, is now importing corn from agribusiness in the United States. When these farmers lose their land, they often end up here, as farmworkers. Rather than demonizing these people, we need to recognize that the same trade deals that hurt people in the United States, also hurt people elsewhere. Many small farmers in the United States are beginning to recognize that fact, visiting with farmers in other parts of the world, and doing what they can to support better policies.

Corporations and capital are not constrained by national boundaries. Until we recognize that fact, we will never have a chance at better standards of living for workers.

To be continued…