The New Triangle Trade

From Random Hipatia

I thought I would dedicate this article to the voiceless millions who work in this country as slaves under the new triangle trade. Some of you who come from more wealthy patrician families may have known them as the people who wiped your butt as a child, or that maybe cleaned your clothes. For those of you of more plebeian origins, these are the people who also are so called "invisible", those working to clean the walmarts or serve your poisonous fast food. However, what they all have in common is that they have been made into something less than you by exploiters who divides us by class and race to keep us disunified, and because they are treated as if they are the new slaves in our society today.

Guest workers is what corporations want to make them into. This is an attempt to use government to secure rights to property. After all, the Mexican worker, however teneous his or her status, still retains one basic right when faced with an intolerable slave master; the right to flee and find work with another. A guest worker program will eliminate this basic right, making sure the slave property of a corporate owner can no longer freely wonder off and find refuge with a kinder master, much like the H1B visa program is used to teather other forms of foreign workers into bondage.

"From Molasses to Rum to Slaves", the old "triangle trade" filled America's shores with a cheap and expendable commodity; African slaves. These were the people would would pick the fields of America's southern farm belt, who would work as nanies and other duties in the homes of the wealthy, who would do the dirty and dangerous jobs that most free workers would refuse at substandard wages.

Today, we have a new triangle trade. From Nafta to unemployment to undocumented worker. We ship the corn to Mexico, grown and picked in Illinois, by Mexican immigrants on corporate farms, and goods made in sweatshop labor, whether here or overseas. Other goods come from China. Through NAFTA, the trucks go south, products that indigenous industries cannot complete with.

The products flood the local markets. In Mexico it is now cheaper to find American corn than Mexican! Here in the home of Maize. And other goods also, that local producers cannot complete with against subsidised American mega-corporations. And so more are unemployed.

The "same" trucks (figuratively) head north again, not empty though. With cargo, human cargo. Undocumented workers. To sell to the agro-corps to pick corn and other produce on America's new plantations. Corporate-master held plantations. To be nannies and house servants for America's wealthy. To sweep the stores of our new Wal-marts. To do the jobs that are too expensive with free workers, free workers who expect minimum safety standards, free workers who expect health care, free workers who expect at least minimum wage.

And so the triangle trade is back. Can you hear the shouts of the new slave-auction, on the highways of Arizona and California, $1.50-hour they shout. The trucks are loaded, with their newly purchased cargo, and sent to the fields of the plantations in Florida, Illinois, to the wallmarts and mansions of the rich on the east coast, from Mexico City to the Jersey shore, all hail the new triangle trade.