Mother of Exile

[Above: South Korea Trade Protests]



From Emma Lazarus’ sonnet from the Statue of Liberty:

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp! cries she
With silent lips. Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Agamben says we live in the “Age of Refugees,” noting that we are witnessing the “inexorable decline of the nation-state and the general corrosion of traditional legal-political categories”—and as such, “the refugee is perhaps the only imaginable figure of the people in our day.”

According to a 2006 report by the International Labor Organization, 191 million people migrated from their homes in 2005 due to poverty and conflicts, which is up from 81 million only five years earlier. War and free trade drive the forced migration of millions of refugees every year.

For instance, the recent free trade deal signed with South Korea repeats the same promises that consistently fail across the globe: While thousands protest in the streets of Seoul—many of whom are farmers who fear losing their farms with the new flood of cheap American imports from our massive agriculture-industry—the politicians and corporate executives assert the same failed assurances that these new policies will in the end benefit the people, despite the fact that such agreements bring only more misery, hunger, and poverty.

Of course, by comparison, NAFTA never accomplished what it promised, and according to Research Director Raul Hinojosa of the North American Integration and Development Center at UCLA, 3 million Mexican farmers have already been displaced from their farms since NAFTA was signed, and Hinojosa predicts that that figure will eventually reach nearly 10 million displaced farmers. As state utilities are opened for investment by international corporations, as forests are opened for private development (thus displacing many more), and as cheap subsidized American products are dumped into Mexico, the drive for open markets and profitability has driven the real wages of Mexicans down 20%, thus further contributing to the disparity between the rich and the poor. Driven from their homes and farms into the urban centers, a cheap pool of surplus labor opens the conditions for radical exploitation: As it stands now, the number one private employer in Mexico today is Wal-Mart (Wal-Mex).

Let us not forget how in Jamaica, after the opening of trade policies with their IMF loan, it became cheaper for the poor to buy powdered milk imported from USA than to buy their own neighbor's goat milk; when the farms collapsed, they had no choice but to go assemble clothes in the "Free Zone"--an isolated part of the island cordoned off by concrete and barbed wire and totally free of any legal protections.

[see "Life and Debt" trailer]

War and poverty. Nearly 200 million immigrants, or refugees.

Certainly, Agamben has a critical eye to finding those zones of indistinction were real cultural violences are justified and played out, and he has famously asserted that the model of the Western city is not the polis, but the camp—not Athens, but Auschwitz.

Indeed, new devices such as high-power microwave weapons are being developed for the stated purposes of crowd-control; even Air Force officials suggested that these new weapons be tested as crowd-control devices in America before being deployed on the battlefield. Of course, as we have seen with Blackwater USA’s recent domestic work in New Orleans, it won’t be long until private mercenary armies are carrying their own crowd-control devices to fight the millions of poor, displaced workers around the world fighting for a sustainable life.

WE NEED MASS REFUSAL!

Like all my posts so far, the scarcity of hope against the radically oppressive and exploitative conditions that millions of the world’s poor seems dire: Corporations with their own armies, governments, and secretive organizations (IMF, World Bank, &c.) dominate the globe and bring with their policies and machinations untold poverty, ecological devastation, and war. Against the rise of a militarized police presence in our cities of America and around the world, the hope of revolution, of qualitative change, seems impossible.

But what the police cannot control, and what the corporate politicians cannot legislate, and what the ideology cannot media-te is our mass refusal to take part in the continued oppression and invisibility of the poor!

They cannot control our refusal—our will to withdraw from the whole damn economy!

Don’t buy genetically modified food from the agriculture-industry. Don’t buy from Wal-Mart. Don’t buy from Exxon. Don’t watch CNN, MSNBC, Fox News. Don’t buy the sweat-shop brands like Nike, Hollister, &c.

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And in the meantime, someone should climb to the top of the Statue of Liberty, saw off her crown, and drape a Zapatista ski-mask over her head. YA BASTA!