Dems Need More Voices of Working People

By JIM VAN DER POL

To succeed in the 2020 election and in the long run, Democrats will need to add a voice. The Republicans are the voice of the incredibly wealthy and the corporations. They have become wise to the need for a wink in the direction of their evangelical base and a quiet chuckle as they and their wealthy patrons take the religious to the cleaners along with everyone else. The Democrats need the voice of working people, something not heard in Washington for a very long time. By this, of course, I mean all working people, male and female, white, brown and black. Everyone.

The working people currently have a voice in the “squad,” that intrepid group of non white ladies in the House who are decidedly non-ladylike in their intensity. To this I would add others. US Rep. Katie Porter, a white woman from California, jumps to mind as well as Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio and other hard-working representative voices, blavck and white, male and female. These working-class voices must overwhelm the Democratic party and bring it to its senses.

When that happens, and it must happen, the Democrats must decide, with the leadership of these working people, what they will say about immigration, the issue on which the demagogue in chief will be running for re-election. The Democrats have not been truthful about immigration.

When is the last time any Democrat has pointed out that the driving force for immigration is always the need of the wealthy and the corporations for cheap and easily intimidated labor for their slaughter houses, their construction companies, their spinach and strawberry ponderosas and now dairy factories and even, as individuals, to tend their gardens, clean their pools and mind their children? I haven’t heard such talk in a very long time. Instead we get a bromide about immigrants only taking jobs citizens don’t want.

The revolution currently going on in the dairy industry is instructive. I know a bit about milking cows and I have five of these 10,000-cow establishments within 10 miles of my farm, where the state allows the manure to be pooled in open lagoons and no one seems to have a problem with cows never seeing the light of day or the flood of unneeded corporate milk. These are staffed exclusively by foreign nationals here on work permits. Presumably this means they will be sent home and a new batch of people hired on a regular basis. But we know that overstaying work permits is one of the ways in which the population of non citizens grows, so there is some reason to be suspicious.

Now what of the argument that citizens do not want these jobs? If the wages were increased and the intimidation taken out of the job, leaving the worker some sense of agency, maybe citizens would. And we must ask the question about the industry itself. Is it expanding as it is because of the easy availability of fearful labor? And what might a dairy job be like in the absence of fear and with the possibility of a good salary? In what ways has the work been formed and the occupation changed to suit the reality of readily available cheap and fearful labor? Shouldn’t someone ask the employees of the larger more traditional dairies about their pay and what their work entails and how satisfying it is? Or if a bit of management is asked of them along with their labor?

And how does the idea of Medicare for All, a decent shot at public higher education and the rest of the social support net fit with the idea of a steady and uncontrolled stream of new labor coming across the border? What nation is rich enough to do this, even if it is so inclined?

It is without doubt that a certain level of immigration is good for our country and our economy. Immigration should be amenable to management such that it benefits the economy without holding working people down. But that is most definitely not the conversation we are having. This can only come from the Democrats. Currently, any Democrat who raises a question about uncontrolled immigration is immediately labeled a racist. This while the Republicans are content to use immigrants to further increase their wealth while getting themselves elected by treating them in the most vile and inhuman manner imaginable.

Refugees, which seem to be most of the folks at our border currently, are a different question. Here Democrats should be reminding the white evangelicals who are consistently voting on the Republican side, of what the Bible actually has to say about refugees. To do this, we need to be reading the Bible once in a while. Even the ancient Mosaic law governing a desert tribe living on the edge instructs in Leviticus, “…the stranger that dwells among you shall be unto you as one born among you and you shall love him as thyself…” Jesus himself was about welcoming the stranger and the outcast. And our refugee problem should never be discussed separately from the cause of it which is our corporate elite stealing resources from Central and South America, enabled by our State Department and CIA. Much of the misery at our southern border was set into motion decades ago by these powerful forces and there is undoubtedly more coming.

It is sometimes difficult to sort out who is a refugee and who an immigrant. The line gets blurry. But it is not difficult to see that the wealthy benefit and the immigrants and refugees suffer. Calling out those forces that cause misery both abroad and here at home is essential. It won’t be done by the corporate news media. It must be taken up by progressives and reformers on behalf of all working people. Democrats need to be connecting the dots.

Jim Van Der Pol farms near Kerkhoven, Minn. A collection of his columns, “Conversations with the Land,” was published by No Bull Press (nobullpressonline.com).

From The Progressive Populist, November 15, 2019

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