War, Genocide, and Deportations Are Bipartisan Projects
My fellow Workers Strike Back members and I joined a protest in Downtown Seattle in solidarity with the Los Angeles protests against the ramped up arrests, abductions, and deportations by ICE under the Trump Administration.
The rally was called SEIU Local 775 union which represents over 55,000 homecare, nursing home, and residential care workers in Washington, Montana, and Alaska, and the MLK Labor Council which is the AFL-CIO labor organization in this area.
This rally was also in solidarity with David Huerta, President of the SEIU union in California who was arrested by ICE last week in the Los Angeles area.
The SEIU and MLK Labor Council leaders refused to let me speak at the rally even though multiple rank-and-file union members urged them to do so, and allow union members to hear from me.
This is nothing new unfortunately, most of the labor leaders are tied at the hip to the Democratic Party, most of these same leaders also refused to let me speak when I was campaigning for the first $15 minimum wage in a major city in 2013, and instead they supported my establishment, Democratic opponent who opposed $15/hr.
What I am about to share is the speech the labor leadership would not let me give:
Solidarity with immigrant community members and working and young people who are fighting back in Los Angeles and nationally against these vicious workplace raids, individual abductions, and mass deportations by ICE and the Trump administration.
Solidarity with brother David Huerta, the President of SEIU union in California, who was arrested when he and others from the labor movement were engaged in resisting ICE abductions of their fellow working people.
Workers Strike Back and I stand with union members and working people across the nation demanding that Trump immediately release Brother Huerta and all those arrested and detained by ICE.
Because of years of fightback by the immigrant rights movement and rank-and-file workers, sanctuary policies were put in place in the state of California in 2017, which prevent local police departments from cooperating with ICE agents. Less than a month ago, the Trump administration announced the plan to dismantle California’s sanctuary state status by launching the grotesquely named Operation Guardian Angel.
Republicans are ominously promising that the deportations we have seen so far are only the tip of the iceberg.
We need mass strikes and mass civil disobedience to defeat Trump's horrendous agenda of deportations. We need protests in the hundreds of thousands across the country, in every city, to stop the mass deportations. Trump says this is disorderly — he hasn’t seen anything yet.
Most urgently, the labor leadership should call for a general strike in the Los Angeles metro area, which is home to nearly six and a half million workers. Nothing will defeat Trump’s agenda like shutting down the bosses profits and a huge step towards that would be a Los Angeles general strike which would cost the bosses billions of dollars. This is the only language that Trump and the Billionaires understand.
We need to fight against ALL the attacks on working and oppressed people — they are all connected. And this kind of mass action is needed also to fight back against the shocking budget cuts, the attacks on Medicaid and Medicare, and tax breaks for the rich that Trump and the Republicans want to push through.
Trump has also renewed his abhorrent travel bans. Those travel bans go into effect today. Citizens of 12 countries — including Afghanistan, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen — will be barred from entering the United States.
It was civil disobedience by hundreds of thousands of ordinary working people at airports across the nation, from SeaTac to LA to NYC, that forced Trump to end his travel bans in 2017. The SeaTac Airport near Seattle was shut down through the leadership of my Socialist City Council office at the time alongside thousands of working people who joined us in the civil disobedience. We showed then that Trump CAN be defeated. We need the same now.
We need to unite the fight against ICE deportations and the antiwar movement to end the genocide in Gaza and to end the imperialist wars in Ukraine, Sudan and Yemen. Workers Strike Back stands in solidarity with Mahmoud Khalil, who was abducted by ICE for speaking up against the genocide in Gaza. We stand in solidarity with everyone fighting against the genocide, and with activist Greta Thunberg and others, who have just been abducted by the Israeli military.
But if we want to stop deportations and end the genocide in Gaza, working people simply cannot put any faith the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party is fully complicit with much of what is taking place. They have relentlessly backed the genocide in Gaza, and are still backing it even in the face of the majority of working people of the United States and internationally calling for an immediate End to the Genocide.
Union members have a critical role to play in pushing the labor leadership to take action, labor leaders who have long been closely tied to the Democratic Party, and who have so far refused to call for mass strikes.
The Democratic Party, especially through the Obama and Biden administrations, set the stage for Trump’s deportations. Biden deported more than four million people, far more than Trump in his first term. Under Biden, the GEO Group — one of the main private detention center corporations — got 40 contracts worth more than $2 billion.
Democrats like to try and confuse working people with empty gestures. It means very little for Democrats like Pramila Jayapal and Adam Smith to have brought a symbolic bill forward to shut down private detention centers like the ones owned by the GEO Group. It was totally performative, for one, because they did nothing to actually fight for it — it was never even brought for a vote. And such a bill meant little while they were also staunchly supporting Biden and then Harris as Presidential candidate, with Harris saying she would be the best builder of the border wall and that she would be more effective than Trump in going after immigrants.
It is especially two-faced for anti-worker pro corporate Democrat Adam Smith to have proposed any type of bill in relation to ICE or to pretend that he is fighting Trump. Smith has received campaign donations from Elon Musk’s SpaceX PAC, not once or twice, but in every election cycle since 2010. He has already received the maximum donation for his campaign NEXT YEAR from Alexander Karp, the CEO of Palantir. In case you don’t know who Karp is, the Asian Times summed it up, “Karp is building the operating system for perpetual war.”
Palantir has been an ICE contractor under Obama, Biden, and Trump. In mid-April, ICE awarded Palantir a $30 million contract to deliver a new dystopian AI platform to track immigrants in real time. Recently, Karp called Elon Musk the most “qualified person in the world” to remake the US government.
It is because of Democrats like Smith that Trump got re-elected and Trumpism has been gaining ground. For nearly three decades Smith’s position has been that the Democratic Party needs to move further rightward and become more friendly to big business.
During the G.W. Bush presidency Smith’s advice to Democrats was to reduce the contrast between Democrats and Republicans. He thought that the Democratic Party should consider privatizing Medicare. He voted in favor of Bush’s shameful bailout of Big Banks in October 2008 while ordinary people were left to rot. He then supported continuing the funding for wall street under Obama.
As a right-wing commenter remarked on social media, “Smith sounds more like a Republican than a lot of Republicans.”
The current response of the Democratic Party to Trump's escalation in the LA area is also anything but an opposition to deportations. It is under Democratic Governor Newsom and Democratic Mayors that the LAPD are brutally repressing protestors, with arrests and inflicting weapons like tear gas, pepper spray, tasers, beanbag rounds and hard-foam projectiles on them.
Newsom’s objection to Trump's deployment of the National Guard was not that it was a shocking attack on working people and immigrant community members, but that it should have been coordinated with him and that it was unnecessary because local police have the situation under control. What he’s really saying is that the LAPD was fully capable of repressing the protests and cracking heads without Trump’s help.
Workers Strike Back and I were just fighting the Democrats at Seattle City Hall, in these past weeks against their attempts to dismantle the historic renters’ rights victories we won by trying to rewrite our cities Ethics Laws first.
Last Summer these same Democrats attempted to undermine the historic minimum wage victory that we won through my council office, a minimum wage that is now highest in the nation at $20.76. Workers Strike Back and I organized working people and defeated the Democrats both times. As the Seattle Times editorial board (which is unambiguously on the side of big business and the wealthy) was forced to admit last week
It Kshama Sawant - 2, Seattle City Council - nil
We showed, once again, that when we get organized and fight, we can win. And the Democrats showed, once again, that they viciously represent the interests of big business, not working people or the labor movement.
In fact these city council members, all of them Democrats, have just announced that they are still going to try and dismantle Seattle’s renter victories even though they were defeated less than two weeks ago.
Seattle’s Mayor Bruce Harrell, another thoroughly corporate Democrat, is going to be leading the charge on behalf of Corporate Landlords. It is shameful that the MLK Labor Council leadership has endorsed Harrell for his re-election and they invited him to speak at today’s protest.
If you live in or near Seattle join us in this upcoming fight against attacks on our Renter Rights victories, lets make sure the scorecard is:
Working People - 3, Seattle City Council - nil.
The genocide in Gaza began under Biden, with Democrat war hawks like Congressmember Adam Smith sending billions of dollars to the Israeli military and cheering on the genocide.
We need to bring down Trump, the billionaires, & both their warmongering parties. We need to begin building a new party for working people.
French & Italian dock workers are currently refusing to load ships with weapons for the Israeli military. This is exactly what American port workers & the ILWU longshore workers' union leadership should be organizing to end the genocide in Gaza.
The working class DOES have the power to end the genocide, and this is how. Through workers internationally shutting down the genocide machinery — by not allowing one more arms shipment to go to Israel.
This is also why I'm running against the warmonger Democratic Congressmember Adam Smith who has approved billions of dollars for the Israeli state's genocide of the Palestinian people & called antiwar protestors "left-wing fascists". My campaign is calling for an end to the genocide, to all U.S. military funding for Israel, and to Israeli occupation of Gaza & the West Bank. We’re calling for an end to the mass deportations being carried out by both parties of the billionaires.
Smith's #1 backer in his election last year was the Zionist Lobby organization AIPAC. For nearly three decades, Smith has been bankrolled by weapons industry profiteers such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Palantir, General Atomics, and Kymeta.
War, Genocide, and Deportations Are Bipartisan Projects. That's why I’m running as an independent Socialist. And if elected I will take home only the average workers wage and donate the rest of my 6-figure salary to social movements and workers movements.
War, genocide, and deportations are bipartisan projects. That’s why I’m running as an independent socialist.
I stand with the CGT, the French trade union confederation, who said this week:
"We will not participate in the ongoing genocide orchestrated by the Israeli government.
"We are for peace between peoples. We are opposed to all wars. We deplore all armed conflicts that cause death, misery, and the exodus of populations.
"For peace. For an end to wars in the world. For a society free from capitalist exploitation."
We say: workers of the world unite: against this genocide, against attacks on immigrants, against all attacks on working people and the oppressed, and against this genocidal system of capitalism.
