“Compromise” on Immigrants Proves Great Effectiveness of the Strategy of Electing Democrats to Stop Fascism!

July 1, 2019 | revcom.us

 

This week the world was shocked by the picture of the dead Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande.

But fortunately, millions of people had poured their time, energy, and hopes into electing Democrats last November. And the new Democratic majority in the House jumped into action—calling for a suspension of the functioning of government and its immigration enforcement till measures are taken so something like this never happens again!

Well, not exactly. But they did get SOMETHING. Which was:

In return for giving $4.6 billion to ICE, the agency responsible for this crime (and many others), the Democrats won a verbal promise from Mike Pence that every time ICE murders a child, ICE must notify Congress within 24 hours.¹ Wow!

Oh yeah, and every time ICE rips a child from their parents, and puts them in torture chambers where they are denied diapers and toilet paper and toothpaste and soap, and where the lights are kept on all night and they are subjected to the torture of sleep deprivation, and where eight-year-olds are told to take care of two-year-olds? Why, Pence promised Pelosi that ICE would let them go within 90 days. Again, wow!

So, this shit is working, right?

Of course, now with the Supreme Court decision on gerrymandering ²... which according to analysis by the New York Times means it’s “possible to imagine a future in which Republicans could effectively claim a monopoly on federal power despite continued weakness in the national vote,” well, that just means we should all work even harder, double down, at something that has proven to be so... effective.

Right?

But hey, we’ve got 24 Democratic presidential candidates to get excited about, don’t we? They’ll save the day, won’t they?

And in the meantime... well, 90 days in a concentration camp won’t hurt the kids too much, will it? And if more of them die in the Rio Grande, or in the desert, or wherever they die (maybe the Mexico-Guatemala border), soon it won’t be newsworthy and we won’t have to think about it too much... right?

Point being, it sure is good that millions of people who hate Trump, Pence, and the rest of these fascists decided to pour their energies, their money, and their hopes into electing Democrats. Just think what would have happened and what the situation would be today if those same millions had taken to the streets to demand the ouster of the whole regime, and refused to leave until that happened? And it sure is good that people are now turning their attentions to the BEB of the Democratic primaries.

EXCEPT THAT IT ISN’T

Faced with this horrific reality, Shaun King, who has been telling people to pour their energies into electing “progressive prosecutors” (take just one second to think about the contradiction bound up in that oxymoronic phrase!), wrote the following:

It seems like our game plan is to focus on defeating Trump, and in the meantime, sue the administration until it incrementally agrees to start allowing kids to brush their teeth or wash their hands with soap. It just doesn’t seem to be enough. What if Trump wins again? Is our game plan then to wait four more years to hope we end these monstrous camps? Even if a Democrat wins, pledging to improve conditions, how can we hold them to account and demand that migrants be freed?

I always wondered how concentration camps lasted for so many years during the Holocaust, but now that we have our own, I see how. It’s a mix of fear, indifference, and lack of political will. We see the consequences of doing nothing, but it seems as though we’ve put all of our eggs into the basket of a far-off election. And I just don’t feel good about it.

Not “feeling good” is a start—or it could be a start, Shaun. But the thing is, there IS something to do and you’ve known about it. And the idea that there is not, or not confronting what IS actually needed, is a cop-out of the worst sort, a justification for complicity—with fascism!

There are reasons why this whole strategy of channeling everything into elections and relying on Democrats has led to where it’s led... and there are reasons why it will continue to lead to the very same place. People need to get into the film of Bob Avakian’s speech THE TRUMP/PENCE REGIME MUST GO! In The Name of Humanity, We REFUSE To Accept A Fascist America. A Better World IS Possible, which laid out nearly two years ago why this electoral obsession is a disastrous dead-end, which got deeply into the roots and driving forces of this fascism in U.S. history and social structure, and which laid out a clear strategy as to HOW millions of people, with all kinds of differences, could unite around what humanity so urgently requires: driving out this regime, through mass, sustained nonviolent action (of the type most recently seen in Hong Kong).

Stepping back to a larger standpoint, this entire situation—not just the horror at the border, terrible as it is, but the outrage in Alabama around Marshae Jones, the vicious threats to “obliterate” Iran, the outrageous drumbeat of police murder after police murder, the attacks on the rights of LGBTQ and, especially right now, transgender people, the daily news of extinctions and climate disasters, and this very fascist regime—all these flow out of a system, capitalism-imperialism. Unless and until a revolution involving millions and millions overthrows that system and brings into being a new system and society, based on the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, humanity will continue to be ground up by the machinery of imperialism, whether in its liberal “democratic” form or the more extreme fascist form now being implanted.

And from that same larger standpoint it remains a crucial part of making that revolution to unite all who can be united, right now, to drive out this regime through massive sustained nonviolent mobilization.

 

---

1. On June 27, Congress passed a $4.6 billion “emergency border aid” bill that contains practically no protections for the migrant children it is supposedly aimed to rescue. Democrat Nancy Pelosi and the House first passed a bill that placed various restrictions on how the funds should be spent. Then in the Senate, Republican Mitch McConnell and Democrat Chuck Schumer engineered a “bipartisan” bill with basically no restrictions—in other words, Trump could spend the money on repressive measures in the name of “border emergency.” Pelosi then rammed through approval of the Senate version after a phone call with Vice President Mike Pence, who gave “private assurances” that the regime would “abide by some of the restrictions she had sought,” including notifying Congress within 24 hours after the death of a migrant child in government custody and placing a 90-day time limit on children held in custody in temporary intake facilities. [back]

2. On June 27, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that “partisan gerrymandering” is “beyond the reach of the federal courts.” In other words, they said that gerrymandering—the practice of drawing the boundaries of voting districts to favor the political party that controls the state legislature—is not unconstitutional. While gerrymandering is done by both Republicans and Democrats, it is particularly used by the Republicans (which control both legislative houses in 30 of the 50 states), and it is especially used to target Black and Latino people, who vote heavily Democratic. [back]

 

Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande. Photo: Screen grab from AP video

Clips and Q&A available here

Read excerpts on International Relations, Mexican-Americans, Immigrants, Citizenship and Asylum