Life at the Borders of Democracy  

Steve at Deconsumption has a good post up that looks at the the "Minute Man" project and the corporate takeover of governments and world organisations.

Some of this has been said before (see Chomsky and Joel Bakan, for example), but it is a subject that we need to keep in mind, given that oil companies are right at the top of the heap when it comes to influencing and controlling governments.

So what we find in the growing border patrol dispute which makes it so interesting is that, while there is an imperative need among the ownership class to allow the U.S. borders to leak like a sieve, there is simply no way to justify this situation as having any benefit for the larger working classes. The arguable exception is the "elephant in the room" justification (the thing which everyone knows about but no one can openly admit): that our fragile economy would crumble without this underground economy of cheap labor to build our homes, manicure our lawns and keep our streets pothole free. But like so many aspects of our modern economy, this is really nothing more than a temporary prop. In the medium- and long-term, we are gutting our own economic foundations by undermining the pay of our lower working-classes.

And we find this kind of immigration-hypocrisy on many levels. But most notably on the federal level, where we see that the incessant push toward tightening "security" and restricting personal rights--solely predicated on the suppression of terrorism--is in reality entirely invalidated when the government itself is simultaneously allowing, by most estimates, several thousands of illegal immigrants to invisibly enter the United States every single day.

What the Minutemen are trying to achieve as I see it, and as George Ure has pointed out in the past, is simply to take upon themselves a social responsibility that the government administration is supposed to be fulfilling but has refused to do so. The laws currently mandate that illegal immigrants be kept out. Of course, they also generally require that the ones who get through be deported again, a set of legislations which the Senate is at this very moment trying to circumvent.