By Cristobal Cavazos, National Committee/Political Committee, Socialist Action
The extreme right-wing character of President Joe Biden’s immigration policy as well as the imperialist nature of his overall program was on stark display as he called on former “semi-fascist” President Donald Trump “to join me” on his attack on immigrant rights at the US-Mexican border on February 29, 2024. Need we call to mind Biden’s August 2022 Bethesda, Maryland Democratic Party fundraiser speech where he declared, “What we’re seeing now is the beginning or the death knell of an extreme MAGA [Make America Great Again] philosophy. It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire philosophy that underpins the — I’m going to say something, it’s like semi-fascism.” (NBC News, Decision 2022, August 26, 2022).
And this as Biden seeks the “semi-fascist” Trump’s support for an additional $80 billion in military funding – $60 billion for the US proxy war against Ukraine, with its fascistic and corrupt elements like the 2014 fascist-led coup parties, Svoboda and the Right Sector, and the fascist Azov and their associated battalions, today fully integrated into the US/NATO-funded Ukrainian Army.
Biden’s stalled $80 billion package, in addition to the already approved 2023 military budget of nearly $1 trillion, includes $60 billion for Ukraine and $14 billion more for “Genocide Joe’s” Gaza horror obliterating the Palestinian people. His pending House bill also bans money going to the main Gaza Palestine relief agency, UNRWA, as well as $billions for Taiwan and the Indo-Pacific region to beef up US threats against China.
Biden shifts to Trump’s politics
While Biden seeks to secure an agreement with the Republicans for the continuation the US-backed wars in Ukraine and Gaza he has simultaneously shifted away from attacking yesterday’s Biden-designated “semi-fascist” Trump on the issue of the “broken border.” Securing a perceived advantage to counter his diminishing electoral chances in November., Biden today brags that his revised immigration proposed legislation exceeds Trump’s in its rightwing character.
In his February 29 speech Biden made no mention of the close to 1000 migrants who have died attempting to cross the border since 2022, escaping poverty, collapsed economies and climate change, all fueled in large part by US militarized foreign policy along with intensified US economic imperialism in Latin America.
Neither did Biden mentioned the close to 100,000 Venezuelans who have died as a direct result of US economic sabotage of Venezuela’s economy, shattering it, relegating Venezuela from its ranking among the highest standards of living in South America in the 1990s to the 2010s to the very bottom today. No doubt, US imperialism found intolerable even the limited pursuit of self-determination and autonomy displayed in the Hugo Chavez presidency. US imperialism’s credo? Either Venezuela’s oil reserves, ranking first or second in the world, remain under the control of US corporations, or the US behemoth will take any and all measures to ban it from the world marketplace! Biden and Trump have enforced that US imperialist credo with a vengeance.
Biden’s Trump-imitation “border security” bill
Biden’s border security bill, which passed the Senate but has been stalled in the House of Representatives, is a frontal assault on the human right to seek asylum. It would also greatly expand the sprawling border-industrial complex and the wealth of its military contractors while increasing detention facilities, border patrol agents, and allowing the president the right to shut down ports of entry.
The right-wing Wall Street Journal called the legislation “the most restrictive migrant legislation in decades,” apparently blushing that it contained “nothing for nearly all of the Dreamers who were brought here… as children, with no general pathway to citizenship or green cards.”
Biden’s mad-dog pursuit of securing bipartisan support of his imperialist war aims at the expense of any kind of principled stance on immigrant rights, exposes the lie flaunted by Alejandra Ocasio-Cortez and other “left-liberals” who opportunistically declare that supporting Democrats is necessary to protect immigrant rights. Yesterday, they denounced any and all left opposition to Biden as “privileged.” Today, they are silent, content to leave over 12 million increasingly demonized immigrants workers in a state of limbo and terror via a continuing open season that leaves a money swollen border-industrial complex and other repressive agencies free to carry out frontal attacks on immigrants everywhere. This includes fostering the exploitation of their cheap labor when needed to enhance capitalist profits and/or utilizing massive deportations, incarceration, etc., all operating to ensure the perfect capitalist workforce!
Genocide Joe’s shifts his image
There have been outright lies in the past like President Obama’s infamous statement that there would be immigration reform within the “first 100 days of his presidency” only to assure that immigrant workers were met with the onslaught of three million deportations by Obama, who earned the title, “Deporter in Chief.”
Meanwhile, “Genocide Joe” Biden has taken off his grandfatherly mask to unveil a cold-blooded imperialist and racist figure at the wheel of the Empire, aiding and abetting the criminal slaughter by the racist, colonial, Israeli Zionist state of more than 30,000 precious Palestinian lives. Further, the Democrats and their milieu rae today carrying out a McCarthy-era like slander campaign of students, professors, and public figures for speaking out, Jewish and gentiles alike, daring to denounce the Zionist genocide. Biden’s Democrats joined with Republicans in approving new legislation establishing modern day congressional witchhunt committees charged with investigating anti-Semitism, which they formally designate as the equivalent to anti-Zionism.
No doubt, the Democratic Party’s opportunist shift to open reaction on immigrant rights has served to embolden the far right, as the erstwhile KKK ideology of “white replacement theory” has become mainstream on the right. Trump, speaking at the border on the same day as Biden, graphically recounted alleged rapes and murders committed by immigrant workers. He accused imnmigrants of carrying out an “invasion” while calling them “vermin” who were “poisoning the blood” of the US. For many unstable and alienated individuals, these are fighting words, that have contributed to endless shootings by rightwing white youth as the rightwing unites in the attack against immigrants, Jews, Muslims and Blacks while the Democrats dedicate themselves to imperialist war abroad and cynicism stateside.
It is little wonder that the Democratic Party with Biden has gone out of its way to extend an olive branch to their Republican “colleagues,” calling on them to “join him” even after these so-called colleagues carried out a would-be fascist-like coup to overturn the limited democracy as we know it. Support to the January 6, 2021 far-right-led Washington coup attempt to block Biden’s presidential election certification is today mainstream in the Republican Party.
Democrats as capitalism’s “A” team
Today’s Democrats are US capitalism’s “A” team in advancing reactionary US foreign policy interests. This includes unprecedented funding – more than the whole world combined – of the 1100 US military bases in 110 countries. Regime change imposed on unfriendly governments, dismemberment of Russia or preparing for intensified economic competition, if not nuclear war with China, are central to a declining US capitalism’s quest for domination of the global marketplace. The US ruling elite’s drive for unilateral US power threatens WWIII, a war that can only end all future wars and civilization itself.
Capitalism’s twin parties
The struggle for immigrant rights, and indeed the struggle for all democratic rights and liberties, is always viewed by the US corporate elite and their twin capitalist parties of war, racism and oppression as contrary to their interests. To challenge capitalism’s systemic racism, immigrant persecution and inherent drive to war and conquest, the coming struggles must be anchored in the spirit and practice of socialist internationalism, anti-racism, working class solidarity and a class conscious united front mass fightback strategy rooted in the simple principle that workers have no country. Revolution is our flag.
No human being is illegal! End all deportations!
Open the borders!
Ceasefire Now! Free Palestine From the River to the Sea!
Close all US military bases!
Bring All US Troops Home Now!
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