| June
21, 2006
Security, Temp Workers and, Yes,
Oil
Elite Logic at the
Border
By GREG
MOSES
Just
as PNAC or the Project for the New American Century helped us to
think about underlying motives for the public shams of the war on
terrorism, so might CNAC or the Compact for North American Competitiveness
help us to think about drama at the border between Mexico and the
USA. Already CNAC's preferences for “border security”
and “temporary workers” have attracted friends with
clout, but did you know that Mexican oil is also on the agenda?
Shortly
after last year's Waco Summit brought together three North American
heads of state, Bush, Fox, and Martin, a CNAC proposal was released
by the US Council of the Mexico-US Business Committee (MEXUS), an
organization which predates the Council of the Americas (COA) to
which it now belongs.
The
April 2005 report is signed by COA heavyweights Robert Mosbacher
and James Jones, backed by a leadership team composed of ChevronTexaco,
Eastman Kodak, First Data, Ford Motor, Kissinger McLarty, Manatt
Jones Global Strategies, Merck, MetLife, Miller and Chevalier, Nextel,
and Proctor and Gamble.
In
a preface to the report, MEXUS takes a lot of credit for creating
NAFTA or the North American Free Trade Agreement; brags about publishing
“NAFTA Works”; and promises to maintain leadership for
“increasing competitiveness” in the unified North American
bloc.
The
fact that seems to irritate this report more than any other is that
despite NAFTA the maquiladora sector of the Mexican economy had
managed to lose 250,000 jobs to China in the first five years of
the new American century. This fact also locates the area that CNAC
authors are most interested to address: how to fix the problems
of Mexico so that the NAFTA alliance can steal back those maquiladora
jobs. One key task is "free and secure” trade through
borders which commodities can speed quickly, but which must do a
better job screening people.
Concurrent
with release of this report last April, the Minutemen were quietly
fading into the margins of the media when their profile was rescued
by terminator Governor Schwarzenegger of California. At that time,
remember, Schwarzenegger miscued himself by talking about “closing
the border”, a line he later delivered closer to script.
"Yesterday
was a total screw-up in the words I used," the governor said
at a press conference. "Because instead of closing, I meant
securing." With those words, pieces of the border puzzle had
actually locked into place last April, soon followed last May by
a caucus report from Congress calling for 36,000 national guard
at the border. At the time, the idea seemed far-fetched, like the
idea of full-scale invasions had sounded a few years before that.
As
we now know, the President has fulfilled the 2005 prophesies by
sending thousands of troops to replace the function modeled by the
Minutemen, just as Schwarzenegger and the Congressional Immigration
Reform Caucus had suggested in the first place.
Besides
“border security” the CNAC report is clear in its preference
for a second darling policy favored by Bush and Companies: an “enforceable
temporary worker program that will match willing workers with willing
employers, bringing order and increased security to current haphazard
patterns of immigration.” We haven't heard the end of this
idea this year. Having a global temp service is really too tempting
for Mexico's continental partners to ignore.
Given
the momentum that security and temp work are having in the real
world today, it is worth noting a third area of prime concern for
CNAC, and that is reform of Mexico's oil and gas industry. In the
near term, says the CNAC report, the Mexican government has to improve
opportunities for private investment and in the long term Mexico
has to find “cost-effective means to raise production.”
Unless this is done, says the CNAC report, “security and competitiveness
within North America will be impacted.”
This
past weekend in its coverage of the Mexican presidential race, scheduled
for July 2, the Associated Press clearly outlined the positions
of each major candidate on reforming the Mexican oil and gas sector.
While reading those news reports online I got the queasy feeling
that CNAC was beginning to look like PNAC all over again.
Greg
Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author
of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy
of Nonviolence. He can be reached at gmosesx@prodigy.net
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