Since 1970, $350 billion in oil revenue has flowed to Nigeria, yet 75% of Nigerians live on less than $1 a day. Niger Delta communities continue to live in abject poverty, without schools, hospitals, or basic infrastructure, as oil profits fill the bank accounts of multinational oil companies and the Nigerian elite. Nigerian governments have negotiated joint ventures with multinational companies for unregulated oil production since 1958. Over 50 years of exploitation in the Niger Delta has resulted in systematic human rights abuses and environmental devastation.
(...) According to an independent 2006 report by environmental experts from the U.K, U.S and Nigeria, and convened by the Nigerian Conservation Foundation, the Niger Delta is "one of the world's most severely petroleum-impacted ecosystems and one of the top five most polluted places on the face of the Earth. More than 1.5 million tons of oil, equivalent to one Exxon-Valdez disaster every year for 50 years, have spilled into the delta, poisoning delicate mangrove and rain forest ecosystems and destroying fishing and farming livelihoods. Constant gas flaring releases toxic chemicals into the atmosphere, causing cancer, birth defects, respiratory diseases, and acid rain so toxic it corrodes metal roofs.

a sudden change of state:
The IPCC predicts that sea levels could rise by as much as 59cm this century(2). Hansen’s paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets the panel expects doesn’t fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees above today’s level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 centimetres but by 25 metres. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature(3).
(...) Rather than taking thousands of years to melt, as the IPCC predicts, Hansen and his team find it “implausible” that the expected warming before 2100 “would permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive even for a century.” As well as drowning most of the world’s centres of population, a sudden disintegration could lead to much higher rises in global temperature, because less ice means less heat reflected back into space. The new paper suggests that the temperature could therefore be twice as sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than the IPCC assumes. “Civilization developed,” Hansen writes, “during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end.”(4)
(...) I looked up from the paper, almost expecting to see crowds stampeding through the streets. I saw people chatting outside a riverside pub. The other passengers on the train snoozed over their newspapers or played on their mobile phones. Unaware of the causes of our good fortune, blissfully detached from their likely termination, we drift into catastrophe.
(...) Or we are led there. A good source tells me that the British government is well aware that its target for cutting carbon emissions – 60% by 2050 – is too little, too late, but that it will go no further for one reason: it fears losing the support of the Confederation of British Industry. Why this body is allowed to keep holding a gun to our heads has never been explained, but Gordon Brown has just appointed Digby Jones, its former director-general, as a minister in the department responsible for energy policy. I don’t remember voting for him. There could be no clearer signal that the public interest is being drowned by corporate power.
(...) If Hansen is correct, to avert the meltdown that brings the Holocene to an end we require a response on this scale: a sort of political “albedo flip”. The government must immediately commission studies to discover how much of our energy could be produced without fossil fuels, set that as its target then turn the economy round to meet it. But a power shift like this cannot take place without a power shift of another kind: we need a government which fears planetary meltdown more than it fears the CBI.

parenti on globalization, free trade:
The goal of the transnational corporation is to become truly transnational, poised above the sovereign power of any particu­lar nation, while being served by the sovereign powers of all nations. Cyril Siewert, chief financial officer of Colgate Palmol­ive Company, could have been speaking for all transnationals when he remarked, “The United States doesn’t have an automatic call on our [corporation’s] resources. There is no mindset that puts this country first.”[i]
(...) Not one of GATT’s five hundred pages of rules and restrictions are directed against private corporations; all are against govern­ments. Signatory governments must lower tariffs, end farm subsidi­es, treat foreign companies the same as domestic ones, honor all corporate patent claims, and obey the rulings of a permanent elite bureaucracy, the WTO. Should a country refuse to change its laws when a WTO panel so dictates, the WTO can impose fines or international trade sanctions, depriving the resistant country of needed markets and materials.[ii]
(...) It has forced Japan to accept greater pesticide residues in imported food. It has kept Guatemala from outlawing deceptive advertising of baby fo
od. It has eliminated the ban in various countries on asbestos, and on fuel-economy and emission stan­dards for motor vehicles. And it has ruled against marine-life protection laws and the ban on endangered-species products. The European Union’s prohibition on the importation of hormone-ridden U.S. beef had overwhelming popular support throughout Europe, but a three-member WTO panel decided the ban was an illegal restraint on trade. The decision on beef put in jeopardy a host of other food import regulations based on health concerns. The WTO overturned a portion of the U.S. Clean Air Act banning certain additives in gasoline because it interfered with imports from foreign refineries. And the WTO overturned that portion of the U.S. Endangered Species Act forbidding the import of shrimp caught with nets that failed to protect sea turtles.[iii] [the cha-ching of democracy!]
(...) Free trade is not fair trade; it benefits strong nations at the expense of weaker ones, and rich interests at the expense of the rest of us. Globalization means turning the clock back on many twentieth-century reforms: no freedom to boycott products, no prohibitions against child labor, no guaranteed living wage or benefits, no public services that might conceivably compete with private services, no health and safety protections that might cut into corporate profits.[iv]
(...) In this way agribusiness can better penetrate locally self-sufficient communities and monopolize their resources. Ralph Nader gives the example of the neem tree, whose extracts contain natural pesti­cidal and medicinal proper­ties. Cultivat­ed for centuries in India, the tree attracted the attention of vari­ous pharmaceutical companies, who filed monopoly patents, causing mass protests by Indian farmers. As dictated by the WTO, the pharmaceuticals now have exclusive control over the marketing of neem tree products, a ruling that is being reluctantly enforced in India. Tens of thousands of erstwhile independent farmers must now work for the powerful pharmaceuticals on profit-gorging terms set by the companies.
(...) If the current behavior of the rich countries is anything to go by, globalization simply means the breaking down of the borders of countries so that those with the capital and the goods will be free to dominate the markets.[vi]
(...) Under free-trade agreements like General Agreements on Trade and Services (GATS) and Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), all public services are put at risk. A public service can be charged with causing “lost market opportunities” for business, or creating an unfair subsidy. To offer one in­stance: the single-payer automobile insurance program proposed by the province of Ontario, Canada, was declared “unfair competi­tion.” Ontario could have its public auto insurance only if it paid U.S. insurance companies what they estimated would be their present and future losses in Ontario auto insurance sales, a prohibitive cost for the province. Thus the citizens of Ontario were not allowed to exercise their democratic sovereign right to institute an alterna­tive not-for-profit auto insurance system. In another case, United Postal Service charged the Canadian Post Office for “lost market opportunities,” which means that under free trade accords, the Canadian Post Office would have to compensate UPS for all the business that UPS thinks it would have had if there were no public postal service. The Canadian postal workers union has challenged the case in court, arguing that the agreement violates the Canadian Constitution.
(...) International free trade agreements like GATT and NAFTA have hastened the corporate acquisition of local markets, squeezing out smaller businesses and worker collectives. Under NAFTA better-paying U.S. jobs were lost as firms closed shop and contracted out to the cheaper Mexican labor market. At the same time thousands of Mexican small companies were forced out of business. Mexico was flooded with cheap, high-tech, mass produced corn and dairy products from giant U.S. agribusiness firms (themselves heavily subsidized by the U.S. government), driving small Mexican farmers and distributors into bankruptcy, displacing large numbers of poor peasants. The lately arrived U.S. companies in Mexico have offered extremely low-paying jobs, and unsafe work conditions. Generally free trade has brought a dramatic increase in poverty south of the border.[viii]
(...) We North Americans are told that to remain competitive in the new era of globalization, we will have to increase our output while reducing our labor and production costs, in other words, work harder for less. This in fact is happening as the work-week has lengthened by as much as twenty percent (from forty hours to forty-six and even forty-eight hours) and real wages have flattened or declined during the reign of George W. Bush. Less is being spent on social services, and we are enduring more wage conces­sions, more restructuring, deregula­tion, and privat­ization.
(...) What is seldom remarked upon is that NAFTA and GATT are in violation of the U.S. Constitution, the preamble of which makes clear that sovereign power rests with the people: “We the People of the United States . . . do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution reads, “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” Article I, Section 7 gives the president (not some trade council) the power to veto a law, subject to being overridden by a two-thirds vote in Congress. And Article III gives adjudication and review powers to a Supreme Court and other federal courts as ordained by Congress. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” There is nothing in the entire Constitution that allows an international trade panel to preside as final arbiter exercising supreme review powers undermining the constitutionally mandated decisions of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
(...) What is being undermined is not only a lot of good laws dealing with environment, public services, labor standards, and consumer protection, but also the very right to legislate such laws. Our democratic sovereignty itself is being surrendered to a secretive plutocratic trade organization that presumes to exercise a power greater than that of the people and their courts and legislatures. What we have is an international coup d’état by big capital over the nations of the world.
(...) It is not only national sovereignty that is at stake, it is democratic sovereignty. Millions, of people all over the world have taken to the streets to protest free trade agreements. Among them are farmers, workers, students and intellectuals (including many Marxists who see things more clearly than the aforementioned ones), all of whom are keenly aware that something new is afoot and they want no part of it. As used today, the term globalization refers to a new stage of international expropriation, designed not to put an end to the nation-state but to undermine whatever democratic right exists to protect the social wage and restrain the power of transnational corporations.
(...) So the fight against free trade is a fight for the right to politico-economic democracy, public services, and a social wage, the right not to be completely at the mercy of big capital. It is a new and drastic phase of the class struggle that some Marxists–so immersed in classical theory and so ill-informed about present-day public policy–seem to have missed. As embodied in the free trade accords, globalization has little to do with trade and is anything but free. It benefits the rich nations over poor ones, and the rich classes within all nations at the expense of ordinary citizens. It is the new specter that haunts the same old world.

capital gone wild:
Previous Bolivian governments had signed a flurry of bilateral investment treaties that gave foreign investors the right to bypass domestic courts and file such lawsuits through international tribunals. Morales complained that these rules made him feel like a "prisoner" in the presidential palace.
(...) The Bolivian president's predicament is a common one for political leaders around the world. They are caught in an interlocking web of rules and institutions that promote and protect foreign investment -- with little regard for the costs to democracy, the environment, or the public welfare. These increasingly controversial investor protections have become the "get out of jail free" card for corporations in the global economy. They are promoted by the World Bank and other international financial institutions, codified by bilateral investment treaties and free trade agreements, and enforced through the World Bank's arbitration court and other international tribunals.
(...) Argentina has been socked by more than 30 such claims, many of them in retaliation for measures to alleviate the pain of the country's 2002 financial meltdown. A U.S.-based gas company, for example, sued over an emergency law that froze utility rates to protect consumers from runaway inflation. The company, CMS Gas, won $133 million in compensation, money that could have compensated Argentine consumers.
(...) Ecuador is facing a $1 billion suit by Occidental Petroleum, a company widely reviled in that country for alleged human rights and environmental abuses, including using child labor to clean toxic materials, failing to repair pipeline leakages, and operating in protected indigenous lands without authorization.
(...)
In another case with disturbing human rights implications, Italian investors are targeting post-apartheid affirmative action policies in South Africa. They are suing over a law designed to redress historic racism by requiring mining companies to have 26% black ownership and 40% black management by the year 2014. These policies, the investors claim, violate protections against expropriation and discrimination in the Italy-South Africa bilateral investment treaty.
(...) Currently, there are more than 100 cases pending before the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), which decides most investor-state disputes. More than 90% have been against developing countries. Meanwhile, these rules are not delivering increased foreign investment. Tufts University researchers recently found that signing bilateral investment treaties with the United States had no effect on Latin American and Caribbean investment flows. In fact, Brazil, which has refused to sign any such deal with the United States, is by far the region's biggest recipient of U.S. investment.
(...) Canada currently faces a case in retaliation for terminating a project to transport garbage from Toronto to an abandoned open pit mine 600 kilometers (370 miles) away. To protest the mega-dump, the nearby Algonquin indigenous community joined with farmers and other local citizens in a railroad blockade that was the largest act of civil disobedience in the history of Ontario province. When the government responding by dropping the plan, it offered some compensation to the mine owners. But one U.S. investor is still using NAFTA to sue for lost potential profits.
(...) Their demand to include sweeping investor protections in the Free Trade Area of the Americas was one factor in the collapse of those negotiations, after 11 years of talks involving 34 countries.
(...) However, over the past 14 years U.S. trade officials have managed to insert excessive investor protections in trade agreements with 14 countries and in pending deals with four additional nations (as of May 1, 2007). The only exception is a 2004 U.S.-Australian deal. That country's negotiators refused to accept investor-state dispute settlement. Worldwide, these rules have proliferated through more than 2,500 bilateral investment treaties.
(...) On April 29, 2007, the leaders of Bolivia, Venezuela, and Nicaragua announced plans to withdraw from the World Bank's arbitration court. Their joint declaration stated that "(We) emphatically reject the legal, media and diplomatic pressure of some multinationals that … resist the sovereign rulings of countries, making threats and initiating suits in international arbitration." This surprise announcement will not be enough, legally, to release the three Latin American countries from the interlocking web of rules and institutions designed to shield foreign investors. Bilateral investment treaties signed by Bolivia and Venezuela would still be in force, and getting out of them could take years. Nicaragua would still be bound by the investment rules of the Central American Free Trade Agreement. And ICSID is the dominant but not the only enforcement option. Foreign investors could instead demand that their cases be heard under similar United Nations arbitration rules.

walden bello on wsf:
Porto Alegre was meant to be a counterpoint to “Davos,” the annual event in a resort town in the Swiss Alps where the world’s most powerful business and political figures congregated annually to spot and assess the latest trends in global affairs. Indeed, the highlight of the first WSF was a televised transcontinental debate between George Soros and other figures in Davos with representatives of social movements gathered in Porto Alegre.
(...) Porto Alegre represented the transfer to the South of the center of gravity of that movement. Proclaimed as an “open space,” the WSF became a magnet for global networks focused on different issues, from war to globalization to communalism to racism to gender oppression to alternatives. Regional versions of the WSF were spun off, the most important being the European Social Forum and the African Social Forum; and in scores of cities throughout the world, local social fora were held and institutionalized.
(...) [3 reasons] First, it represents a space — both physical and temporal — for this diverse movement to meet, network, and, quite simply, to feel and affirm itself. Second, it is a retreat during which the movement gathers its energies and charts the directions of its continuing drive to confront and roll back the processes, institutions, and structures of global capitalism. Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, underlined this function when she told a Porto Alegre audience in January 2002 that the need of the moment was “less civil society and more civil disobedience.” Third, the WSF provides a site and space for the movement to elaborate, discuss, and debate the vision, values, and institutions of an alternative world order built on a real community of interests. The WSF is, indeed, a macrocosm of so many smaller but equally significant enterprises carried out throughout the world by millions who have told the reformists, the cynics, and the “realists” to move aside because, indeed, another world is possible…and necessary.
(...) The central principle of the organizing approach of the new movement is that getting to the desired objective is not worth it if the methods violate democratic process, if democratic goals are reached via authoritarian means. Perhaps Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas best expressed the organizing bias of the new movements: “The movement has no future if its future is military. If the EZLN [Zapatistas] perpetuates itself as an armed military structure, it is headed for failure. Failure as an alternative set of ideas, an alternative attitude to the world. The worst that could happen to it apart from that, would be for it to come to power and install itself there as a revolutionary army.” The WSF shares this perspective.
(...) [criticism] The WSF has, however, not been exempt from criticism, even from its own ranks. One in particular appears to have merit. This is the charge that the WSF as an institution is unanchored in actual global political struggles, and this is turning it into an annual festival with limited social impact. There is, in my view, a not insignificant truth to this. Many of the founders of the WSF have interpreted the “open space” concept in a liberal fashion, that is, for the WSF not to explicit endorse any political position or particular struggle, though its constituent groups are free to do so. Others have disagreed, saying the idea of an “open space” should be interpreted in a partisan fashion, as explicitly promoting some views over others and as openly taking sides in key global struggles. In this view, the WSF is under an illusion that it can stand above the fray, and this will lead to its becoming some sort of neutral forum, where discussion will increasingly be isolated from action. The energy of civil society networks derives from their being engaged in political struggles, say proponents of this perspective. The reason that the WSF was so exciting in its early years was because of its affective impact: it provided an opportunity to recreate and reaffirm solidarity against injustice, against war, and for a world that was not subjected to the rule of empire and capital. The WSF’s not taking a stand on the Iraq War, on the Palestine issue, and on the WTO is said to be making it less relevant and less inspiring to many of the networks it had brought together.
(...) This is why the 6th WSF held in Caracas in January 2006 was so bracing and reinvigorating: it inserted some 50,000 delegates into the storm center of an ongoing struggle against empire, where they mingled with militant Venezuelans, mostly the poor, engaged in a process of social transformation, while observing other Venezuelans, mostly the elite and middle class, engaged in bitter opposition. Caracas was an exhilarating reality check. This is also the reason why the Seventh WSF held in Nairobi was so disappointing, since its politics was so diluted and big business interests linked to the Kenyan ruling elite were so brazen in commercializing it. Even Petrobras, the Brazilian state corporation that is a leading exploiter of the natural resource wealth of Latin America, was busy trumpeting itself as a friend of the Forum. There was a strong sense of going backward rather than forward in Nairobi.
(...) Hugo Chavez captured the essence of the conjuncture when he warned delegates in January 2006 about the danger of the WSF becoming simply a forum of ideas with no agenda for action. He told participants that they had no choice but to address the question of power: “We must have a strategy of ‘counter-power.’ We, the social movements and political movements, must be able to move into spaces of power at the local, national, and regional level.”
(...) Developing a strategy of counter-power or counter-hegemony need not mean lapsing back into the old hierarchical and centralized modes of organizing characteristic of the old left. Such a strategy can, in fact, be best advanced through the multilevel and horizontal networking that the movements and organizations represented in the WSF have excelled in advancing their particular struggles. Articulating their struggles in action will mean forging a common strategy while drawing strength from and respecting diversity.

1968:
Meanwhile in France, a revolutionary insurrection was erupting. What began as a demonstration against curfew rules in university dormitories in Nanterres spread across France, igniting universities and the streets of Paris. By the middle of May the workers of France had joined in and President DeGaulle was considering launching a military attack against the French people-something which had not occurred in France since the days of the Commune in 1870. Students spent their days holding open organizing meetings in the commons areas of their schools and spent the nights fighting the police. Workers throughout France took over their factories and ran them with workers' councils. Workers in one Renault plant in the hinterlands locked their managers in their office and ran the plant themselves. Their goal was to show how needless management really is. Then, just as they did at Columbia, the powers regrouped. The workers' political parties-the Communists and the Socialists-reneged on their support of the strike in favor of immediate pay raises and some changes in working conditions. In addition, the Socialists ended up with a substantial share of political power. Although the more conservative Gaullists and their allies did lose some ground and although it could be argued that the balance of power shifted in France after May 1968, one would be hard put to prove that now.
(...) When everything is branded it becomes considerably more difficult to separate one's existence from that reality. Heck, at the January 27th protest against the war in Iraq there were people holding signs opposed to the war that were distributed by Working Assets communications company and included their corporate logo.

the track record of the world bank:
The World Bank is thus seen in much of the world as a neo-colonial institution, and all its preaching about "governance" seems little more than a way for the Bank to cover for the failure of its own economic policy prescriptions. The Bank has little to show for its tens of billions of dollars of development lending. The vast majority of the countries that have followed its policies have suffered a sharp slowdown in economic growth over the last 25 years, and a resulting decline in progress on social indicators such as life expectancy and infant and child mortality.
(...) [corruption as cause?] While corruption is bad and "good governance" is by definition good, failed economic policies - the abandonment of development strategies, anti-growth monetary and fiscal policies, indiscriminate opening to trade and investment flows, the pressuring of governments to prioritize the needs of foreign corporations - are much more likely causes of this long-term economic development failure. After all, countries like South Korea managed to achieve some of the most rapid and successful economic growth and development in world history without cleaning up corruption. South Korea went from a per capita income level of Ghana in 1960 to that of Europe today, while two of its presidents during this successful development trajectory went to jail for corruption involving hundreds of millions of dollars. And the United States didn't exactly have good governance while the robber barons held sway during the latter part of the nineteenth century, when we were the fastest-growing developing country in the world.

on growth bringing poverty (parenti):
There is a “mystery” we must explain: How is it that as corporate investments and foreign aid and international loans to poor countries have increased dramatically throughout the world over the last half century, so has poverty? The number of people living in poverty is growing at a faster rate than the world’s population. What do we make of this?
(...) Over the last half century, U.S. industries and banks (and other western corporations) have invested heavily in those poorer regions of Asia, Africa, and Latin America known as the “Third World.” The transnationals are attracted by the rich natural resources, the high return that comes from low-paid labor, and the nearly complete absence of taxes, environmental regulations, worker benefits, and occupational safety costs.
(...) The transnationals push out local businesses in the Third World and preempt their markets. American agribusiness cartels, heavily subsidized by U.S. taxpayers, dump surplus products in other countries at below cost and undersell local farmers. As Christopher Cook describes it in his Diet for a Dead Planet, they expropriate the best land in these countries for cash-crop exports, usually monoculture crops requiring large amounts of pesticides, leaving less and less acreage for the hundreds of varieties of organically grown foods that feed the local populations.
(...) By displacing local populations from their lands and robbing them of their self-sufficiency, corporations create overcrowded labor markets of desperate people who are forced into shanty towns to toil for poverty wages (when they can get work), often in violation of the countries’ own minimum wage laws.
(...) The United States is one of the few countries that has refused to sign an international convention for the abolition of child labor and forced labor. This position stems from the child labor practices of U.S. corporations throughout the Third World and within the United States itself, where children as young as 12 suffer high rates of injuries and fatalities, and are often paid less than the minimum wage.
(...) The savings that big business reaps from cheap labor abroad are not passed on in lower prices to their customers elsewhere. Corporations do not outsource to far-off regions so that U.S. consumers can save money. They outsource in order to increase their margin of profit. In 1990, shoes made by Indonesian children working twelve-hour days for 13 cents an hour, cost only $2.60 but still sold for $100 or more in the United States.
(...) U.S. foreign aid usually works hand in hand with transnational investment. It subsidizes construction of the infrastructure needed by corporations in the Third World: ports, highways, and refineries.
(...) The aid given to Third World governments comes with strings attached. It often must be spent on U.S. products, and the recipient nation is required to give investment preferences to U.S. companies, shifting consumption away from home produced commodities and foods in favor of imported ones, creating more dependency, hunger, and debt.
(...) So it is that throughout the Third World, real wages have declined, and national debts have soared to the point where debt payments absorb almost all of the poorer countries’ export earnings---which creates further impoverishment as it leaves the debtor country even less able to provide the things its population needs.
(...) Why has poverty deepened while foreign aid and loans and investments have grown? Answer: Loans, investments, and most forms of aid are designed not to fight poverty but to augment the wealth of transnational investors at the expense of local populations.
(...) Isn’t it time that liberal critics stop thinking that the people who own so much of the world---and want to own it all---are “incompetent” or “misguided” or “failing to see the unintended consequences of their policies”? You are not being very smart when you think your enemies are not as smart as you. They know where their interests lie, and so should we.

the democratic compromise on immigration (davis):
[the situation] ONE YEAR after the mass marches for immigrant rights that challenged repressive legislation proposed by congressional Republicans, the Bush administration is set to unveil harsh new proposals to supply Corporate America with cheap and vulnerable immigrant labor, ratchet up enforcement, and make it extremely difficult for undocumented workers to become U.S. citizens.
(...) Many in the immigrant rights movement have looked to the new Democratic Congress to provide an alternative to Bush and the hardliners. Instead, the Democrats are seeking a compromise palatable to the ultra-conservatives in the Republican Party. The result is a bill--co-authored by two House members, liberal Democrat Luis Gutiérrez and conservative Republican Jeff Flake--known as the Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant Economy, or STRIVE Act.
(...) [myth: amnesty --> reality:] First, the majority of the nation’s 11-13 million undocumented people (those between ages 21 to 65, and not in the military, disabled or a single head of household) will have to leave the country within 90 days of the application process. Second, they must pay a minimum $2,000 fine and back taxes, and show proof of presence and consistent employment before and since June 1, 2006. Current law makes those who use fraudulent documents for employment (roughly 75 percent of all current undocumented workers) inadmissible for legalization.
Those able to satisfy the bill’s requirements would not get a green card (permanent residence). Instead, they would receive “conditional non-immigrant status,” a six-year waiting period during which time they would have to maintain consistent employment, learn fluent English and be placed in “the back of the line” behind millions of existing backlogged petitions (Waiting lists today are estimated at 5 to 7 years, although the STRIVE Act does contain clauses to expedite the process. Current law requires at least a five-year residency before attaining citizenship). If an undocumented immigrant worker does manage to complete all steps in the STRIVE Act, she or he can become a citizen only after at least 15 years--a fact that bill co-sponsor Jeff Flake has used as a selling point to conservatives. While some of the undocumented could gain legal status over time, many--perhaps millions--would fall by the wayside. Moreover, “conditional non-immigrant” status will make workers dependent on their jobs--and thus more compliant with poor working conditions and lower wages, as employers could hold the threat of termination over their heads.
(...) [myth: more protection for guest-workers --> reality:] Guest workers would be bound to a single employer and required to work for the duration of the contract. Any cessation of employment could be determined a breach of contract, allowing the employer to have the worker ejected from the country. While workers would be able to leave an abusive employer, they could do so only if they can secure another job in advance with another employer, who must officially offer them work and be registered with the government to participate in the program. If a worker were to leave a worksite without notification, they would be deemed “illegal” and subject to deportation if they are not reintegrated into a registered worksite within 60 days. All temporary workers would be tracked through an “Alien Employment Management System,” so they will be identifiable if they leave a worksite. Furthermore, the proposal doesn’t expressly guarantee the right to join a union or engage in collective bargaining. This, too, would leave workers vulnerable to employers that violate the provisions of the agreement. It is this denial of the freedom of movement and assembly, and the right to engage in genuine collective bargaining by immigrant guest workers that make this proposal so appealing for employers. Unlike the old bracero system and current guest-worker programs, the STRIVE Act would deliver workers into virtually every sector of the economy. Employers hope to leverage their control over guest workers to lower wages across the economy--and to reduce the presence of unions in their worksites.
(...) (myth: more humane, less enforcement --> reality:] The plan for external militarization includes doubling the number of Border Patrol agents (to about 24,000) by 2012, emphasizing the recruitment of former military personnel with experience in border enforcement in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill would further add 1,200 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to investigate “immigration crimes.” (...)The proposal includes the development of a national biometric database to track all immigrants, as well as an “Electronic Employment Verification System” to identify the undocumented. (...) Those who cross the border without papers will be criminalized and subject to six months in prison for a first offense; two years for a second offense, and five years for a third offense. The use of forged passports or false visas could result in 15 years in jail.
(...) [in sum:] The bipartisan support for the STRIVE Act reveals how central “comprehensive immigration reform” is to Corporate America’s goal of disempowering labor in the U.S. While the Republican Party was defeated by the mass immigrant rights movement last spring, the baton has since passed to a Democratic Congress to salvage Corporate America’s vision. For those committed to a different vision--one based on full legalization for all, democratization of society and the empowerment of working families--the struggle continues in the streets and workplaces across the U.S.