International Human Rights Day

I HAVEN’T SLEPT SO WELL in the past few days as I’ve been both sick and also have helped deliver my newest hija, and I’d be conserving all my energy in bed now but for the fact that I really do want to highlight a couple things now. I’ll be uncharacteristically pithy and save what juice I have for writing this week’s TMC Immigration Wire post later on.

Firstly, today is the 60th anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights. What image opened your eyes to human rights?

Today is International Human Rights Day, and all my posts today will focus on the issue of human rights in Latin America and within the Latino community in the United States.

To kick things off, let’s look at Plan Mexico aka the Merida Initiative which would allow the U.S. intervention via so called “anti-drug” aid which really would, as shown in Colombia, serve to suppress and oppress grassroots movements, especially Indigenous movements.

—Vivirlatino.com, International Human Rights Day and Plan Mexico

Also definitely worth taking note of today is yet one more vile and sleazy move by the sickest imitation of a human being I’ve yet seen (Gorge W. Bush) as he attempts to slither out of his (illegitimate) White House role. Said sleazebag Bush administration attempts to tear an even bigger hole in our society by slashing worker protection and wages from farmworkers. You know, because who cares where we get our food, right?

The long anticipated regulation changes to slash wages and reduce worker protections under the H-2A agricultural guestworker program are out. The changes, proposed by the Department of Labor (DOL) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) were revealed on the DOL website late Monday evening but have not yet been officially published in the Federal Register.

The changes are horrible. At a time when the jobless rate is at a 15 year high, they reduce obligations for growers to effectively recruit U.S. workers before applying to bring in guestworkers for these jobs. They lower the wage rates for all farmworkers by changing the program’s wage formula and, in an industry known for labor abuses, they eliminate or reduce government oversight.

This parting gift on behalf of the Bush Administration to our nation’s farmworkers is irresponsible and completely unacceptable. The H-2A guestworker program is already rife with abuse. These changes will only make a bad program worse. That’s why today, Farmworker Justice is releasing a special report, [pdf] Litany of Abuses: Why more -not fewer-labor protections are needed in the H-2A program.

—Final Regulations Changes to H-2A Guestworker Program Are Out

As Farmworker Justice puts it, over at The Sanctuary,

These will be the most far-reaching changes in the laws regulating agricultural guestworker programs since 1942. They will return us to an era of agricultural labor exploitation that many thought ended decades ago.

The changes cut wage rates and wage protections for both domestic and foreign workers, minimize recruitment obligations inside the U.S. and curtail or eliminate much of the government oversight that is supposed to deter and remedy illegal employer conduct.

—bush’s midnight attack on farmworkers

That naïve part of my brain (and it is a persistent and not negligible sector) always demands to know why people would be so stupid…so cruel. Its tough to find an answer aside from the class war that people like Bush put so much energy into. (Although it still makes no sense to harm the agricultural process that feeds us all…) People like smeg-head Bush have the money and means to hop over all the chasms and spills that their greedy and heartless policies create; all the rifts that such “governing” rips open in the everyday terrain of life.

Eh. Either that, or he’s just evil incarnate. I don’t know. But I guess either way, it’s up to the rest of us to live sensibly and take care of each other.

Peace to you and yours this day.