Dec. 20: About Trump and more
The writer is Workers World Party’s 2016 candidate for president and a managing editor of Workers World newspaper. Lamont Lilly is the party’s candidate for vice president.
The anti-Trump demonstration in New York City planned for Dec. 20 could not come at a more crucial time, not only for the movement and the workers in the U.S. but also globally. Initiated by the International Action Center, this demonstration is being embraced and endorsed by a growing number of progressive, anti-racist and anti-imperialist groups, including Muslims.
The demonstration is a response to the call by the neofascist Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in early December to ban all Muslims from entry to the U.S. The demands for this unified demonstration are “NO to TRUMP and his media megaphone! NO to racism, Muslim and immigrant bashing! NO to police violence and war! NO to a fascist movement!”
These demands represent the political interests of billions of poor, oppressed and working people worldwide. Why? Because Trump is speaking not just as an individual billionaire but as the representative of a billionaire class of bosses and bankers.
And their system, the capitalist system — that puts profits before the needs of the people — is in the midst of a permanent global crisis of overproduction. In other words, capitalism is at a dead end in terms of recovering from its 2007-08 crisis, notwithstanding the government bailing out Wall Street with an unimaginable $7.7 trillion stolen from the workers.
Has this bailout created prosperity for the workers and oppressed? Hell, no. In fact, it has created increased poverty in the form of lower wages, speed-ups, loss of pensions and other forms of austerity. Simply put, a desperate ruling class is seeking to solve the crisis of their system through a social war against the workers and oppressed, at home and abroad.
Hands off Syria!
The various factions in the U.S. ruling class have been united in giving top priority to the domination of the so-called Middle East for over a century, due to its tremendous concentration of oil. This has come in various forms of war and occupation, including the creation of the brutal garrison state of Israel in 1948, which was turned into the apartheid-like occupation of Palestine. While the heroic Palestinian people continue to resist Zionist apartheid rule, the U.S. and its European allies in the form of NATO continue to seek regime change in Syria.
Their attempts to overthrow the democratically elected Assad government by arming so-called Syrian rebels and carrying out terrorist bombings have created an unprecedented forced migration of millions of Syrian refugees, the majority of whom are Muslims. U.S. politicians such as Trump are using the excuse of the Paris attacks by the Islamic State group in November to target Syrian refugees and Muslims in general as scapegoats for their global crisis. Isn’t this reminiscent of the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany in the 1930s?
The scapegoating of Muslim people abroad cannot be separated from the main objectives of U.S. imperialism — to control and exploit the vast resources and peoples of that region for lucrative profits, similar to the motivation for the overthrow of the Moammar Gadhafi regime in the oil-rich North African country of Libya in 2011.
Fight white supremacy at home
The police and vigilante killings that have led to the Black Lives Matter movement, combined with Muslim bashing, show that white supremacy is alive and well in the U.S. Whether it’s the brutal police executions of Laquan McDonald, Mario Woods, Tamir Rice and countless other Black and Brown youth; the rapes of 13 Black women by a predator cop in Oklahoma; mass incarceration and torture of prisoners by KKK guards; the attacks on mosques and Black churches and more, racism and national oppression are at the heart of class oppression. White supremacy coming from the ruling class is the biggest obstacle keeping the multinational working class from uniting to fight a common enemy — class rule. This white supremacy is rooted in the theft of Indigenous lands, the enslavement of African peoples and the exploitation of workers. All this and more gave rise to the expand-or-die system of U.S. imperialism.
As a Black woman born in Alabama, this writer has experienced first-hand the horrors and degradation of Jim Crow racism. Now a resident of Jersey City, N.J., a largely immigrant city populated with South Asians, Arabs, Koreans and many more, it is clear to me that building unity among the immigrants, Black people and working-class whites is so crucial in light of the neofascist rhetoric of Trump. In fact, just recently Trump publicly launched an attack on Jersey City, falsely accusing immigrants here of supporting the 9/11 attacks.
My running mate, Lamont Lilly and I, are proud as revolutionary socialist candidates to be supporting the Dec. 20 mass protest, along with endorsing the shutdown of Trump wherever he raises his ugly head — as in Raleigh, N.C., on Dec. 4, where his speech was disrupted at least 10 times by activists. We stand in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, from New York to Minneapolis to Chicago to Oakland.
We also stand in solidarity with our Muslim sisters and brothers, no matter their origin, because we understand that we have much more in common with them than with the greedy capitalists who treat the workers — especially those of color — as less than human. The workers must fight and organize in their own name, independent of the big-business Republican and Democratic parties.
All out for Dec. 20!!!
