Each effort is about as symbolic and likely as futile as the other. And each is a symbol of how corporate power pushes - or, if it is truly efficient, just sits back and watches - as different factions among the powerless quarrel among themselves in ways that make them even more powerless.
The Minutemen, you may recall, were an ad hoc, self-appointed battalion of folks who gathered in the desert along a strip of the Arizona-Mexico border with cell phones and night-vision goggles to accomplish the great purpose of making sure illegal aliens went through New Mexico for a few weeks.
The cattlemen, organized as the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, or R-CALF, are not deployed along the Montana border watching for the arrival of Canadian cattle. But their lawyers have established a bridgehead in federal court, still blocking the import of Canadian live cattle on the grounds that the one animal in the United States previously shown to be infected with the brain-wasting mad cow disease had been imported from there.
For the Minutemen to stand watch on the border was ineffective, not just because they didn't have enough people to stop much of the human trafficking but because the decisions that cause that flow aren't really made there, or even, really, in Mexico.
Those decisions are made in Congress, the White House and in corporate suites across the nation. Those are the decisions based on a commonly held belief that American industry cannot function as efficiently as it does now without those illegal workers, and that consumers generally sit still for all of that because they share the belief that to actually restrict hiring to American citizens and legal aliens would cause higher costs to be passed along to consumers.
The cattlemen, by deploying real lawyers rather than phony border guards, picked a battlefield with more chance of success. But only in the short term.
Eventually, the U.S. beef processors who want to resume the import of Canadian cattle because they are cheaper will win. They will win because of the commonly held belief that an open border for cattle lowers the cost to the processor and thus, supposedly, to the consumer.
And because the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Friday, after much unsettling confusion, that the second known case of mad cow disease in the United States was apparently home-grown.
The beef processors have two arguments against the R-CALF crusade to keep the border closed. One is that, even though they are using laws intended to ensure the safety of the food supply, the ranchers are really only out to cut off a competing source of product and so raise the price they can command for their animals. That's almost certainly true.
The other industry argument is that the protectionist ranchers are really only shooting themselves in the hoof because, with fewer cattle around to process, smaller slaughterhouses are cutting back on hours, even closing down altogether. That means fewer customers for slaughter-weight cattle, which actually lowers the value of the animals.
That argument is probably true as well. But the reason it doesn't carry much weight with R-CALF, and shouldn't mean much to the rest of us, is that those small processors are on their way out anyway.
They are on their way out because nobody at the USDA or the Department of Justice is the least bit interested in enforcing general anti-trust laws, or agriculture-specific laws against the concentration of markets in the food chain.
That lack of anti-trust enforcement, which also allows concentration in everything from grain handling to grocery stores, means that retail price goes up due to bottlenecks in the system, not because of increased costs of production.
Like most farmers and ranchers in this industrialized world - including other ranchers who support the processing industry in this and almost every other cause - R-CALF is simply clinging to whatever straws it can find, hoping to boost ranchers' income and hang on another season until the industrialization and monopolization of agriculture magically stops.
That won't happen, of course. At least not until voters and consumers demand it, and realize that cows from Canada and cows from the United States are equally dangerous, not because of where they come from, but because of the unfair, unnatural, disease-promoting process they are run through on their way to our tables.
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George Pyle (gpyle@sltrib.com) is an editorial writer for The Salt Lake Tribune and the author of Raising Less Corn, More Hell: The Case for Independent Farms and Against Industrial Food.
