"Just enforce the law" or "No justice, no peace"

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

One of the most widely proposed indicators of fairness in our society is whether we "just enforce the law."...as though laws arrived engraved by lightning on stone tablets. The unfortunate side effect of this saying is that we're reduced to consumers of law, not citizens who say anything about the shape of the law,  whether it approximates justice, or even its sanity.

For just one of many possible examples, marijuana has killed so few--less than 100 in the last 15 years--while alcohol and tobacco have killed millions. The estimate for alcohol alone just last year was 88,000. Yet which are the drugs that are legal everywhere in the U.S? In fact, I've read that of 1,000 drug-related deaths in the U.S, only one stems from illegal drugs (source: Harpers' Index).

So the law we're supposed to "just enforce" is barely rational. It's crazy law.

This is even worse when one considers the context. Immigration is one of the areas where we hear "just enforce the law" parroted, but one cannot consider the problem of immigration without looking at the way the U.S. provokes it. Between 1798 and 1994 the U.S. is responsible for 41 changes of government south of its borders. This produces a constant stream of political and war refugees whom we greet by demonizing, caging and persecuting them. Herbert Hoover blamed the Great Depression on Mexican migrant workers, for one of many examples.

Even worse are the economic attacks by the U.S. The NAFTA treaty reduced capital controls, so money left Mexico at an alarming rate. The U.S. had to lend Mexico (and a lot of U.S. banks who were in trouble) about $20 billion to cure that problem.

And one might imagine shipping a bunch of subsidized Iowa corn to Mexico would impair Mexican corn farmers income--in fact the NAFTA treaty has bailouts for the big farmers.

Incidentally, corn is only arguably the most important food crop in the world, and the little subsistence corn farmers NAFTA bankrupted were only growing the obscure varieties of that crop that kept the disease resistance and diversity of the corn genome alive... But they weren't making any money for Monsanto, darn it! So bankrupt 'em!

Mexican real median income declined 34% in the wake of NAFTA, a decline not seen since the Great Depression in the U.S. The stream of Mexican economic refugees heading north parallels the stream of  Okies leaving the dust bowl. Only the U.S. thinks it is its right to cage these refugees, separate them from their families and send them back to economic oblivion, even though the U.S. had a lot to do with creating that oblivion.

This is a bipartisan project, too. Trump talks about the "bad hombres" headed north, and sends ICE to deport them, but Obama built the infrastructure that included cages, and tripled the deportations of his predecessor. 

And not just Mexico suffers from the iron fist of U.S. imperialism. Iran-Contra was Reagan's response to one of the poorest nations in the hemisphere (Nicaragua), when they tried to exercise popular sovereignty and elect a socialist government. The administration sold classified weapons to Iran, and used the money to fund a proxy war against the elected government of Nicaragua. The World Court convicted the U.S. of state sponsored terrorism for illegally mining Nicaragua's harbors.

Reagan asked the president of Mexico to bless his opposition to Nicaragua's government because they were such a threat to the U.S.--Nicaragua and Haiti being the two poorest nations in the hemisphere. The Mexican president replied he would be happy to go along with his friend Ronald if there was any way he could without being laughed out of office.

More recently, Hillary Clinton urged the Obama administration to bless a military coup in Honduras. The democratically-elected government had tried to raise Honduras' minimum wage from 60¢ an hour. Boy, the nerve of those people! U.S. law does not encourage supporting dictators, but it's apparently easy to ignore when the ensuing chaos adds to that stream of refugees. It was bad enough that the U.S. caged 30,000 unaccompanied minors who left their homes in Honduras to come north after this bit of public policy.

So...the next time someone tells you they want to "just enforce the law," tell them "no justice, no peace." It might make an impression.