Border Lords

Written by Chris Floyd
Thursday, 18 May 2006
My, my, my, isn't this a surprise! It turns out that George W. Bush's "Secure Border Initiative" to "control illegal immigration" is actually just a great big pork trough for his cronies and benefactors in the weapons biz to cash in big-time off the suffering and poverty of dusky foreigners. Now where have we seen that before?

The NYT reports that Bush is limbering up the federal checkbook to funnel even more millions to masters of war like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman, still feasting sumptuously off the bloated corpse of conquered Iraq. These fine purveyors of contemporary "defense" (who says irony is dead?) will soon string the border with all manner of hugely expensive high-tech gizmonics designed to keep the hemisphere's most desperate and vulnerable people from crossing over to take the slave-wage, no-benefit, no-protection jobs offered to them by, well, Bush's cronies and benefactors in big business and among the wealthy elite (whom he has recently larded with more tax-cut largess). It's a neat scam, really, a win-win situation: your corporate cronies get even more loot from the public treasury – and they still get the cheap Latino labor that keeps them in clover.

Because everyone knows that this new Maginot Line won't stop the influx of immigrants: it will just harry the desperate job-seekers a bit -- and no doubt give the "coyote" gangs even more power, as "professional" expertise will be more needed to avoid the new obstacles. And Bush will never make a genuine move against the employers and fat cats whose insatiable demands for profits and luxury are the main instigators and enablers of illegal immigration. Thus desperation and greed will continue their grim dynamic – with politically-stoked racial paranoia thrown into the increasingly volatile mix.

But who cares? No matter what happens – if the border explodes in violent conflict and repression, if American politics is even further degraded and coarsened by hate and fearmongering – or if things just muddle along more or less as they are, with the occasional PR stunt to gull the rubes or stoke the base – the Bush Faction's cronies and ruling class comrades will contine to make out like bandits. It's precisely the same situation, the same scam, now operating in Iraq: hundreds of billions of public dollars are being transferred into the private coffers of the Bush Faction and its allies, a gargantuan windfall that will give them the money and power to dominate American society and politics for generations to come. ***