The  as it is in direct conflict with one of our 10KV — Social Justice.  Check out our party platform on the issue at: http://www.gp.org/platform/2004/socjustice.html#1002510

The Green party’s position is a sad reflection of the same political pressures that the Dems and the Repugs succumb to.

The ever-growing Hispanic base has become an extremely powerful political force that is causing greens to abandon core values such as future focus, sustainability, and ecological wisdom so as to not alienate a growing political power. The Sierra club is still dealing with the political fallout as a result of internal squabbles about whether to appear more anti-human than ecologically wise as it relates to their position on immigration. The USGP needs to exhibit the type of leadership that does the right thing regardless of the political price.

A fair and equitable program to help these folks will provide equal access to working people of all nationalities, not tied to a specific employer or guest worker program. Programs involving temporary worker status must include the option of permanent residency for immigrants already in the U.S. and protection of migrant worker savings.

Another way of saying what was just said in the above statement is “Allow everyone who wants to come to the United States to just come on in. No process, no rules, no requirements, no thought to the social, cultural, economic, labor, or environmental effects of such a policy, just a loyal alliance to an ideal that in the end is neither humane or reasonable.

Telling the truth is often a lonely proposition.

The truth is that unfettered immigration, legal or illegal will only escalate the environmental apocalypse that is upon us.

It is cowardly to talk about human rights while shitting in the very mechanism that provides us life.

Some things on the left never change.

-Steve Geiger

—– Original Message —–

From: George B. Hutchinson

To: SteveGeiger@Freightliner.com ; pgp-cc@list.pacificgreens.org ; pgp-discuss@list.pacificgreens.org

Cc: Melinda McComb ; Connie Razmus ; Ginger Gouveia ; Rand Dawson ; Catherine Ryan ; Milica ; Bridget Wolfe ; Alice/Bruce McCain ; Dee Meyer ; andrew rodman ; Max Glenn ; Jeannette Hodges ; Joanna Camille ; Diane Eckstein ; Denise Ross ; Cheri Russell ; Richard Koehler ; Tom Gravon ; John Colman-Pinning ; Robert Fischer ; Tessa Green ; Carol DeLong ; Francis Menlove ; Warren G. Rennie Ferris ; Greg Jones ; Joanne Cvar ; Dorothy Stern-Kucha ; Dorothy Mack ; Herb Faber ; Ardis Letey ; Tony Ogden ; Susan Fischer ; Ann Aronson ; Amy Dudley

Sent: Saturday, June 16, 2007 12:11 AM

Subject: [discuss] Re: [cc] What should be the Green position on unfetteredimmigration?

This is a cogent and thoughtful line of thinking that has been considered by many since Malthus first wrote.  In the early Seventies I became an advocate of Zero Population Growth for the environmental reasons Steve mentions below.  Having ZPG become a value that all cultures adopt is difficult due to religious values and most obviously, economic values.

Free trade and the bracero programs which have existed in this country for decades need to be terminated.  One way to help bring that about is to insist on living wages being paid for all work in the United States.  The global corporatists say: “Immigrant laborers are doing work Americans don’t want to do.”  Correct–Americans don’t want to do that sort of work for the very low wages paid.  Pay a living wage, and Americans will flock to those jobs!   If Americans flock to those jobs, there will be no plethora of jobs for immigrants–legal or illegal.

Secondly, if we really wish to slow immigration to the US, then let’s begin rigorously enforcing those laws which penalize employers that hire illegal immigrants.  A huge bust just happened in Portland where scores of “illegal immigrants” were arrested by INS.  The entire story has been one of enforcing the law, splitting up families, and the harshness/righteousness of that action.  Were any employers arrested?  Will any go to court and be found guilty and receive a prison sentence?  Put the bosses in jail, and the jobs will begin to disappear for  those who come here primarily to support themselves and their families.

ZPG must go hand-in-hand with social justice, fair pay, and economic and environmental sustainability.  It is not an either/or choice.  No good will come of strictly enforcing the law against illegal immigrants unless wages paid in all countries become living wages, and unless employers who break the law are punished.  That will make the jobs illegals currently obtain disappear.  When that happens, the motivation to come to the US, legally or illegally, will be greatly diminished.  That is the focus, I think, which the Pacific Green Party needs to address.

—– Original Message —–

From: SteveGeiger@Freightliner.com

To: pgp-cc@list.pacificgreens.org ; pgp-discuss@list.pacificgreens.org

Sent: Friday, June 15, 2007 2:31 PM

Subject: [cc] What should be the Green position on unfettered immigration?

In the opinion of this green, at some point the health of our planet must supersede our desire for global social justice manifested through the support of unfettered illegal immigration.     I have never bought into the idea of scarcity, but the hard reality is that our planet is dieing and we need to begin to take measures to stop the suicidal track we are on.

Right now, the USGP has taken sides in the illegal immigration debate by siteing the fact that both major parties are operating out of the same framework to implement a massive cheap labor management program for the benefit of major and minor US corporations under the guise of immigration reform. They are correct of course, but what they fail to mention is the environmental impact of continued unfettered immigration. Does anyone else see this as odd coming from an environmental party?

The United States recently surpassed 300,000,000 people at the end of October. The current demographic predictions, based on accelerating growth levels, show America adding 100 million people by 2040. For those asleep at the wheel—that’s 34 years from now—a blink in time.

What does that mean to the land we live in? What about our overloaded cities? Overwhelmed schools? How about our water, farm land, energy, air quality, food sources, species habitat, and dozens of other critical environmental issues?

Do socially conscious Greens really understand the ominous consequences?

Can any Greens or others who care about humanity and social justice issues name one advantage to adding 3,000,000,000 more people to the globe? Is there some cosmic reason? Reasonable religious reason? Any rational reason? Any sane purpose? Already, eight million people starve to death annually. Over 35 percent of humanity does not have clean drinking water. Species extinction exceeds thousands annually. What is it that we hope to accomplish by adding another 3.0 billion people to the planet with the consequences already raining down on us with current population levels? In the next 50 years, you can expect 1,000,000 to as many as 3,000,000 more people added to your state depending on location. Once their numbers manifest, they won’t go away. Today, states like Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and California don’t possess enough water for their residents. Aquifers degrade as fast as diesel engines pump them dry. No matter how many reservoirs they build, it won’t rain or snow more because they add millions of people. Water shortages and rationing will become the norm.

While we exceed the land’s carrying capacity, we pack ourselves in like sardines with smart growth, slow growth and managed growth. We continue to expand urban sprawl by building suburbs for the vanishing middle class to escape from the crowded cities. It’s all growth that adds cars, trucks, homes, power plants, malls and smoke stacks. Have you noticed traffic in your city? Have you seen the Brown Cloud thicken in toxicity over your area? How about the bumper-to-bumper traffic? Can you imagine what it will be with an added 100 million people in 34 years? How about your quality of life? What about species extinction? Air pollution? Acid rain? Crowding of national parks? Lakes? Streams? How about soil erosion? The continued assault on what is left of our vanishing forests?

As Greens do we simply ignore the incredibly devastating environmental effects of allowing corporate America and their Democrat and Republican lackeys to utilize an illegal workforce that can’t vote at the expense of what is left of our fragile environment? Should our commitment to social justice for illegal immigrants trump our future focus? Should social justice for illegal immigrants trump sustainability? Does prioritizing social justice for illegal immigrants constitute ecological wisdom?

These are tough questions that most greens want to just go away so they don’t have to face the realities of unfettered illegal immigration.

I don’t want to be misunderstood and I stand in solidarity with my Latin American brothers and sisters and have advocated the elimination of Free trade agreements like NAFTA that have helped to create the horrific economic conditions in Mexico and central American countries. But as a Green who cares about the world I am leaving my granddaughter, I can not in good conscience support unfettered illegal immigration and I think it high time that the Green party stop playing politics with the future of the planet.

–Steve Geiger

Tags: immigration, trade, workplace
Categories: Commentary
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The crux of the thesis developed in this essay is extensible to most aspects of the behavioral sciences and the research practices they implement in order to generate their generalizations and specifications regarding human behavior and how it can be manipulated. Essentially, what is argued here comes down to the following: Every time we answer a survey or participate in qualitative interviews where we assume the role of a subject, from whom information is extracted during the course of the ensuing dialogue, we are contributing to the development of techniques, qualifying as social engineering technologies; or, as Foucault would have it, Biopower. In other words, we are aiding the very people who are involved - although, in most occasions, unwittingly- in fostering the technologies required to regulate the existing social structure by forging interdictive techniques utilized for purposes of restoring behaviors that are in sycn with the way things stand currently; a state of affairs that relatively few of us have a stake in preserving. With that said, the following essay is, for all practical purposes, a summation of some of the insights offered by Foucualt’s geneology and the understanding of power he develops in opposition to its preemptive understanding, as it has assumed form in the more conventional sociological ideology introduced by Weber.

I believe the best way of revolting against the sexual identities that have been implanted into our bodies, such as homosexual, heterosexual and so forth, by the various medical community disciplines, such as psychiatrists, psychologists, demographers, and sociologists of the family, is to stop talking about sex as if it is a behavior serving as an indicator of some underlying psychic condition that, in turn, marks some deep and character defining identity; subsequently, coming to dominate the way we think about ourselves as well as the way - and these two dynamics are, of course, related to one another - others perceive us. All of this creates the context in which our actions; our abilities and penchants; our propensities; are interpreted. Consequentially, the ongoing undergoing of disciplinary treatment results in a condition where we come to defined ourselves in a modality that reflects the dispositions deposited in the discourse of disciplinarian institutions, which span through out all spheres of Modern society.

Essentially, what we can learn from Foucault - and what might be the most significant insight provided by Foucault - is the discourse we engage in regarding sex and the behaviors that we attempt to come to terms with by emitting descriptions of ourselves - consisting mostly of our private urges - and the associated behaviors and experiences that we have been taught to consider relevant to our sexual demeanors are not contributing to our sexual liberation; rather, the act of divulging intimacies of our selves, serves merely to proliferate the knowledge of disciplinarians who devise technologies - usually guised in the form of health-care - used to classify us and define us, as well as, to identify what courses of intervention enacted upon us can be used to normalize our conduct in society, so our existences conform to the established behavioral protocol, dictating the appropriate way for us to act.

If we attempt to reduce the ideology of which the preponderance of practitioners embody when correcting the social behaviors of those deemed to possess pathological perversions, we can probably use the following characterization quite felicitously: Individuals should be productive members of society, which entails working; sometimes having a family, according to the definition of a healthy family life developed by disciplinarians; we should avoid circumstances where we become dependencies of the state, such as welfare recipients; we should be prone to avoid criminal conduct; ect.; all of which can be understood - within the context of disciplinarian praxes - as the production of productive citizens.

However, such an existential transformation of our Selves into the standardized forms endorsed and implemented by disciplinarians, is by no means constitutive of a promotion of our own interests. Instead, we are simply re-tailored to conform with the expectations that have been developed and naturalized - into the realm of social knowledge that is taken-for-granted and rarely questioned - concerning the proper comportment of individuals belonging to society, which does not necessarily account for our own exploitations within the systemization of social relations comprising the society to which we contribute through our labors, (a term that expands to include most every aspect of our material beings; even child rearing and raising).

By means of our externalized expressions pertaining to, as subject matter, own behaviors and fetishes within the contours of the probing procedures that have been developed by practitioners of the behavioral sciences, we - inadvertently - contribute to our own regulation; a condition fostered by our own cooperation in the disciplinarian knowledge construction practices of those who make it their business to modify and, ‘correct,’ as well as appropriate the way we conduct our own businesses. In short, this compulsion to reveal the intimacies our of the private lives - a propensity that is undoubtedly, according to Foucault, a vestige of our Christian confessional tradition - is by no means an expression of a liberationist ideology; instead, it is symptomatic of our own cultural conditioning, which render us amenable to our own training by others; disciplinarians who seek to produce productive citizens.

Let us, after decades of subjugation by disciplinarian regimes such as psychology, acknowledge that sex is not the manifestation of a drive emanating from the invisible posit referred to as the psyche; rather, let us accept that the uses of our bodies to incite pleasures reflective of purely hedonistic calculations. There is no hidden logic to our sexual activities that needs to be teased out of us and rendered a spectacle for the appropriate quasi-health-care, behavioral specialists, who might treat us in order to correct what deviates from the established and entrenched normativity, which is associated in almost all respects to the Modern advent of Sexuality. How we should act as mothers and fathers - how we should conduct our sexual activities; not asking for compensation; nor providing compensation - the appropriate age we should be prior to inciting certain pleasures of the body through our own device or the devices of others - what sex should symbolically represent; and what it should not - and how much of our interests and pursuits should be driven by our sexual appetites - are all matters we can answer for ourselves without the interdiction of behavioral scientists, who implicitly premise all of their conclusions upon normative assumptions that represent values belonging to a social order to which they attempt to integrate the human objects of their practices.

However, to conclude that our indoctrination into the preemptive order of things is in our own interests speaks more of the interests that are vested in the way things stand now: An order that exploits some for the profit of others; an order that thrives off of the replication of the values with which we have been implanted - in order to be disposed toward a deferential posture in relation to the extant social structure - and those we are expected to instill in our children, in order to ensure progeny that will assume the same deferential attitude toward the complex of stratifications that organize our labors into a system of material production that benefit some while depriving others. Further this is a social structure that systematically identifies those who deviate from its prescriptions defining, ‘healthy behaviors;’ subsequently, labeling non-conformists with the encumbering baggage of social identities that are negatively interpreted and valued, according to the cultural codes that guide disciplinarians as they strive to identify social pathologies worthy of interdiction. This social intervention occurs in manifold forms, of which some salient examples come to mind: The dosing of children with Ritalin in order to adjust their modify and control their behaviors; The incursions made by social workers into the family affairs to private individuals, enforcing protocols for appropriate family interactions that the social workers deem as the, ‘Right,’ way to act. The positioning of these disciplinarian institutions in civil society makes them all the more deleterious to our personal sovereignty, because they fall outside the scope of our avenues for participating in policy formation; even though the activities conducted by the tribes of disciplinarians certainly have political consequences.

Therefore, there is nothing Authentic - a term meant to entail the connotative properties with which Heidegger endowed it - resulting from our introspective examinations of Self, in order to supply the data that become the property of behavioral scientists; to those who correct us and makes us conforming and docile; to those who make us deferential to the exploitation of our very selves.

Russell Cole

Tags: foucault, higher consciousness, labor, Modernity, psychology, sexaulity, workplace
Categories: Commentary
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Workplace ‘Flexibility’: Comment from Australia Relevant to Populist Perspectives on Labor and a Fair Wage Stateside

Here some strong commentary on ‘casual workers’ and the ‘enterprise culture’ from an anonymous hospitality industry worker down under. It can speak to the predicament faced by many workers across the American Middle West. As he says: “We can fight for a fair go, for a decent share of the profits of our employers and for decent working conditions, But we must do it together.” In Australia and Middle America, the struggle is one.  This is from the site http://www.workersforum. info/   Perhaps the Midwest Alliance needs a similar forum for contingent and low-paid workers.

As labor historian Stan Phipps noted:

“the legacy of the People’s Party to the modern workers’ movement and the struggle for independent political action is substantial. They demonstrated how the plain people in society could build upon the existing democratic forms in the U.S. to generate democratic aspirations capable of mounting a serious challenge to the business-oriented opinion leaders and policy makers. Farmers and workers showed by example how marginalized people could create for themselves the psychological space necessary to organize a first rate struggle for a level of social and economic change which opposed the existing unjust status quo through the creation of an independent political movement that put the interests of farmers and workers first” (“The People’s Party: An Insurgent Party of Farmers and Workers,” Socialist Organizer, http://www.theorganizer.org/LP/USHistory/peoplesparty.html

Maintaining the myth of flexibility: The enterprise culture and Australian Workers

On the surface it would appear that the Federal Government’s employment policies provide flexibility and choice to workers, enabling people to effectively balance work, leisure, family and educational commitments. The reality is that these policies create inequality. The myth of workplace ‘flexibility’ is a weapon of control that is used by employers and the Federal Government to serve the interests of business above those of workers. In an era of reduced union membership, our rights come under attack on a daily basis. The full-time job is no longer attainable for the majority of Australian workers and many of us are forced to work for poor pay and under appalling conditions, often in more than one job, just to make ends meet. I have worked in hospitality for almost ten years and too often have I generated thousands of dollars for an understaffed business in the space of a few hours; only to be rewarded with a wage that could barely buy a large round of drinks and a slap on the wrists for not working fast enough.

The Howard Government’s workplace policies are a result of an increasing global trend towards economic rationalism. Advocates of this neo-liberal thought advocate an “enterprise culture” that promotes:

“hard work, competition, motivation, self-reliance, flexibility, boldness, daringness, innovation and success…essential components of the entrepreneurial individual” (Kenny 1999 p. 54).

Great on the surface, but what of those people that don’t possess the education, skills and mindset to become entrepreneur’s? They get left behind! We are no longer creatures of the jungle where only the strong survive; we formed civilised society so that we could work together and help those that are weaker, slower and disadvantaged. Why? Because it is in our best interests and we will achieve a lot more together than alone!

This enterprise culture has manifested itself in Australian employment policies with the introduction of Australian Workplace Agreements (AWA’s), the promotion of contract labour, a decrease in collective bargaining and an increase in casual labour. These policies are articulated as “providing flexibility and choice to Australian workers”, “everyone can be their own boss, while promoting economic growth for the great nation that is Australia.”

However, there are a few things that stand in the way of this growth, mainly the liability that is paying workers unnecessary benefits such as holiday pay, sick pay and overtime. But the one thing that provides the greatest obstacle to the implementation of these policies is a unified force of workers; together, we would never accept policies that hurt us, but alone, there is not much we can do.

We have to start making our collective voice heard, whether it be by joining a union or taking part in this forum, or dobbing in a dodgy boss [informing on a tricky boss]; We can fight for a fair go, for a decent share of the profits of our employers and for decent working conditions, But we must do it together. CASUAL WORKERS. UNITE!

Tags: australia, economics, economy, fair wage, Farmers, federal government, labor, workplace
Categories: Commentary, Economics, Labor, Farmers
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