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MY LAI VET SAYS: HERE IT
COMES AGAIN IN IRAQ
Tony Swindell
recalls "Butcher's Brigade" in '69; says "gooks"
have now become "ragheads", every adult male is an
"insurgent" ... atrocities against Iraqi civilians
are soon going to explode in America's face; US Government's courtroom jihads against terror
stumble. Alexander Cockburn on Lodi case where Feds paid $250,000
to man who "saw" world's three top terrorists at mosque.
As neocons
and Israel lobby howl for US to bomb Teheran, an Iranian outlines
simple path to peace. CounterPunch
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Recently, U.S. Department of Homeland
Security agents helped to arrest over a thousand undocumented
immigrant laborers in more than two dozen states. Some of them
were deported.
These immigrant laborers had
produced wealth for IFCO Systems North America, a firm that makes
and sells wooden crates and pallets. IFCO is part of the U.S.
manufacturing sector with over 14 million workers.
These employees produced $107
billion of wood products in 2004, according to Department of
Commerce data. Undocumented immigrant workers who earn low (non-union)
wages contributed to that output.
Companies and the politicians
they fund grasp that low wages create high profits. The lower
the wages of immigrant workers without documents the more their
bosses gain.
Officially, the DHS crackdown
was designed to make the U.S. public feel more safe and secure
from the threat posed by undocumented immigrant workers such
as those on the IFCO payroll. For that reason, DHS chief Michael
Chertoff called these laborers "criminal aliens."
This is a scare term. It is
crafted to link undocumented Mexican and Central American workers
in the U.S. with the mainly Saudi Arabian terrorists involved
in the crimes against humanity on September 11, 2001.
Days after the DHS cracked
down on IFCO's undocumented immigrant employees, Californians
learned they would get no federal funds for emergency repairs
to the state's levee system. An official under the homeland
security chief delivered the sour news to California Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger.
So it is too bad and so sad
for those who live near bodies of water that rise in winter and
spring behind the state's porous levees on the governor's watch.
Uncle Sam will only allocate emergency funds after a disaster,
not before.
And Californians in harm's
way from flooding? Presumably, they can take comfort from the
efforts of the DHS in securing the homeland from the menace of
"criminal aliens" laboring in the nation's durable
goods sector.
Pondering this logic might
be some of the two million-plus residents of the six-county Sacramento
region. Its suburban sprawl near levees at-risk from a melting
snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, a mountain range to the east,
is due partly to Phil Angelides, the Democratic state treasure
and former real estate developer turned gubernatorial candidate.
Add to that marriage of business
and politics the fact that such sprawl was made possible in part
by the low-wage labor of so-called "criminal aliens"
employed by construction companies in the Sacramento region.
This is one case concerning the many moving parts--commercial,
ideological and political--involved in the rhetoric of securing
the homeland since Sept. 11.
In the meantime, the nation's
employers will go on seeking low-wage labor in concert with political
circles of power. And the DHS will continue trying to add another
layer of fear to the psyche of the U.S. public.
How it will respond to these
overlapping processes is unclear. Much hangs in the balance.
Seth Sandronsky is a member of Sacramento Area Peace
Action and a co-editor of Because People Matter, Sacramento's
progressive paper. He can be reached at ssandron@hotmail.com
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