The launch point for this essay is an article in the Washington Post http://tiny.cc/F0O2u about the immigration issue and American unions.
After reading the article, the thought occurred to me that the fundamental issue is supply/demand of labor. Obviously, in current capitalistic thinking, the greater the supply of labor, the lower the wages/benefits to the employer. To labor, the more limited the supply, the higher the negotiating strength of labor collectives. I suppose, in the capitalist imagination, unlimited supplies of desperate laborers would be an ideal world, assuming they could also control the political and social forces assembled to ameliorate those conditions. And, conversely, one supposes that the unions would dream of a world where labor collectively directed the fortunes of the organization.
The truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between. Thanks to political manipulation, sponsored by both sides, nothing has been done about the flood of illegal immigrants into the US. Construction, hospitality, landscaping and, above all, agriculture, have reaped huge profits by exploiting this population shift. Millions of oppressed Latinos, fleeing economic and political pressures at home, risk and sometimes lose their lives in a desperate attempt to find work. Ideal situation for corporations (see above); devastating to the union movement, whose out-reach to Latinos has been abysmal.
Strangely enough, there are tens of millions of Americans who view the immigration issue through different lenses: cultural, primarily; apocalyptic at the margins. Rather than blame the political influence of the multinational corporations that funnel hundreds of millions of dollars into politics, they blame 'the Left', or some malignant international conspiracy bent on destroying their particular ideas about the so-called "American Way of Life". Although these theories are patently false, Americans are extremely reticent to bite the hands that have provided them, until recently, anyway, with a consumption life-style unrivaled in human history. The average American apparently believes he/she is entitled to live like royalty of times gone by...in fact, better, since they have access to luxuries undreamed of in the past, like sanitation, effective medicine, education, etc. There are those who, feeling this life to be threatened, are grimly determined that they will, in the face of growing planetary pressures, take on all comers in a mano-a-mano to the death.
And all because of a simple misunderstanding of the real forces that produce wealth, public benefit and progress.
What are these real forces? In a nutshell: cooperation; education; democratic principles; free expression; basic human needs being met, or at least addressed.
Over the next few weeks, we can explore these forces for economic progress and how they can be applied to every human society. I want to document that humans are capable of reason, capable of learning from past mistakes, capable of reaching for our highest qualities and suppressing the beasts that lurk within us. To do this will be painful for billions of humanity, and will take generations to realize. Perhaps we don't have time, in which case we will, no doubt, destroy the planet and ourselves. As far as the Universe goes, this will be an insignificant event, but to us, it will be everything.
It just might be possible that this worldwide web of thought humanity has conceived will prove to be the engine that drives our social, political, cultural, religious and economic evolution forward, saving the species.
Or not.
