Voter conflict raises questions of priorities
‘Three Strikes,’ ‘Save Our State’ address repression, not
problems
By Kevork Madooglu
Two of the propositions on the November ballot, Proposition 184,
dubbed "Three Strikes," and Proposition 187, dubbed "Save Our
State," are asking California voters to sanction increased
repression against certain sections of the state’s population. And,
if one is to believe the polls, each of these initiatives will
receive about 60 percent of the vote.
What brings so many Americans to voice support for licensing
authorities to lock up petty thieves in their teens for life (as
the existing "Three Strikes" law is already doing) and to bar
children of undocumented immigrants from schools and hospitals (as
Proposition 187 would)?
Obviously, this tendency for increased intolerance against
certain groups of people has to do with worsening economic and
social conditions. Today, in the "Golden State," one worker out of
every 10 is unemployed, one child out of every four lives in
poverty and one resident out of every 200 is in prison.
Although we are now officially in the fourth year of the
"recovery," big corporations continue to lay off thousands of blue
and white collar workers practically every week in California. They
continue to break up unions, eliminate $18-an-hour positions, and
get the same job done through subcontractors for less than half the
wage.
As a result, many working-class Californians, who are used to
thinking of themselves as middle class, are seeing their jobs
disappearing and their standard of living fading away.
There are always people who, pressed to find answers to their
urgent problems, turn against others who are in the same situation
or even worse off. And this society contains enough seeds of
racist, sexist and classist prejudices to provide them with
convenient scapegoats.
So perhaps it is not so surprising that in hard times like
these, some individuals would go as far as suggesting that entire
social groups be denied social benefits and civil rights.
But such individual sentiments alone would not even be enough to
get Propositions 184 and 187 on the ballot. These propositions are
on the ballot because they have solid supporters, if not their very
initiators, within the political establishment.
Both the Republican and Democratic parties declare that the
causes of California’s problems are to be found in the "criminal"
and "foreign" elements of the state’s population. Under the guise
of "fighting crime," both parties call for more police officers and
prisons, while California already leads the rest of the United
States (and the world) in terms of the proportion of prisoners to
the population. How will crime go away when decent jobs continue to
disappear and these same politicians continue to cut down the
state’s education and welfare budget every year?
Politicians, republican and democrat alike, blame immigrant
workers and their children for draining the state’s coffers. It
doesn’t matter that even according to their own figures, the
spending on public services used by undocumented immigrants is but
a fraction of the money given to big corporations in the form of
tax breaks and all kinds of subsidies.
Pete Wilson and Kathleen Brown compete as to who is "tougher" on
immigration. While Wilson supports Proposition 187, Brown says she
opposes it because it is not "effective enough" to deal with the
so-called "problem" of immigration.
Anybody with a little common sense can see that immigrant
workers who often work for minimum wage cannot be held responsible
for the loss of hundreds of thousands of high-paying manufacturing
jobs. But we never hear Wilson, Brown or any other politician
talking about "getting tough" on the corporations that keep
eliminating these jobs while they continue to reap huge
profits.
And it is no surprise when you consider that their campaigns
 and, for that matter, their whole careers  are
financed by the same corporations.
For them to talk about "dealing with crime and immigration" is
just a demagogic way to play on the fears of working people and
thus to divert their attention from the real cause of the problems.
That is to say, this society is run by the interests of a small
number of big corporations, by politicians and bureaucrats tied to
them and without the slightest consideration for the rest of the
population.
As for those of us who may fall into the trap of attacking other
working people on the basis of race, being on welfare or being from
another country, I offer this insight.
We must understand that supporting the idea of the government
becoming more repressive against some sections of the population
will not solve our problems. It will only further divide and weaken
us. A decent future for all working people is possible only if
people get together  and fight together  for that
future.
Madooglu is a lecturer in engineering and a member of the UCLA
Emergency Coalition to Stop Proposition 187.