No Conspiracy, Just Greed

Big business wants Mexican truckers delivering goods here in this country. Why? For the same reason it supports illegal immigration: Businesses don’t want to pay a decent wage to the American worker. This isn’t a conspiracy, but it has spawned a hydra-headed monster of conspiracy theories.

Heard the one about the North American Union and that NAFTA Highway? Like all conspiracies, this one starts with a basis in fact then spirals off on a weird tangent, producing new twisted offshoots as it goes.

The NAFTA Superhighway is just a network of existing roads that are approved for the Mexican Truck Pilot Program. Here’s what the US Department of Transportation says about the program:

(The program is) designed to simplify a process that currently requires Mexican truckers to stop and wait for U.S. trucks to arrive and transfer cargo. … this process wastes money, drives up the cost of goods, and leaves trucks loaded with cargo idling inside U.S. borders.

All true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. This is not some dark conspiracy to rob us of our sovereignty; it’s an open plan to rob the American worker of his rightful wages.

Businesses make money selling us cheap imported goods. Highly paid dock workers in Los Angeles cut into their profits. Further cutting into those profits are the “overpaid” truckers (all truckers are rich, right?)

So big business has a simple solution: Bring the goods into Mexican ports, where dock workers are paid a tenth of what they are paid here, and let Mexican truckers haul it north, cutting out the higher-priced American trucker in the process.

No conspiracy, just our government openly helping business screw the Mexican worker by paying him below market-wages while also screwing the American worker by driving his wages down in the process.

Do you really want your government to put Americans out of work so you can pay 5 cents less for a piece of imported crap?

I don’t either. I am not anti-business: That’s where the jobs come from. But I believe in free-market capitalism, not exploitation. Sarah Palin said it best when she described how she stared down the energy companies in Alaska and negotiated a better deal for the people. She didn’t demonize Big Oil, she recognizes it as an important engine for economic growth. She said something like this:

“They (the oil companies) have their job to do and I (the government) have mine.”

So true. It is big business’s job to make money and power our economy, and it is government’s job to keep them from raping us and our land in the process. Unfortunately, our government is not doing its job, and the American worker is getting shafted. Businesses can’t outsource certain kinds of manual labor and transportation that must be done here, so instead they bring in cheap foreign labor with our government’s blessing.

Conspiracy theories act as a red herring, masking the real story. Nutty conjectures involving black helicopters and UN takeovers discredit all efforts to expose the legitimate facts. This leads to the press, strangely acting as big business’s lapdog, to paint any and all who try to address these issues as conspiracy nuts.

Finally, all conservatives need to note that this plan was advanced by the Bush administration. It’s time we grow up and drop the hero worship of our politicians. It is unwise to hug any politician or party too closely. The constitution and our sovereignty are more important than any person or movement.