US Political News and Trump’s China visit
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Yommie
Elite Member
Biden pledges to shut down the border to gain Ukraine war funds
Biden is campaigning as the defender of democracy, but his priority is securing tens of billions more dollars for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. To get it he will destroy the rights of immigrants and witch-hunt workers and youth who oppose US/Israeli genocide against the Palestinians.
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Biden pledges to shut down the border to gain Ukraine war funds
Jacob Crosse
a day ago
In a statement issued from the White House Friday night, President Joe Biden pledged to his Republican “colleagues” that he would “shut down” the US-Mexico border if Republicans helped pass a $110 billion supplemental funding package. Biden’s statement was released two days after Texas Governor Greg Abbott declared that migrants seeking asylum constituted an “invasion” of his state and justified his usurpation of federal authority over the border.President Joe Biden speaks to the media before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House, Thursday, Jan. 18, 2024. [AP Photo/Yuri Gripas]
The supplemental war package has been languishing since October due to Republican objections that the bill, which includes over $61 billion in funding for the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, does not include sufficiently brutal attacks on immigrants, including reinstitution of Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy and virtual elimination of the right to asylum.
The supplemental funding bill also provides $14.5 billion for Israel, $14 billion for border security and billions more for military aid to Taiwan and other South Asian regimes aligned with the US against China.
In a bid for Republican support for the war package, Biden has already carried out more deportations in the last year than Trump did in 2019, and he has resumed building portions of Trump’s border wall.
In response to Trump’s opposition to any border deal with Biden and the Democrats, seconded by Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, Biden has now adopted the language of the fascist ex-president and declared that he will “shut down the border” the day his supplemental war funding bill is passed and signed into law.
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The White House statement repeated the Republican mantra that the “border is broken.” It noted that the supplemental funding bill would grant Biden “a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed.” It added that the new policies requested by Biden would represent the “toughest and fairest set of reforms to secure the border we’ve ever had in our country.”
News outlets are reporting that policy changes in the bill include detention of all single adults and mandatory closure of the US-Mexico border if migrant “encounters” reach an average of 5,000 per day. More than that number have been reported virtually every day for the last several months.
The 5,000 “encounter” limit includes 1,400 legal applications through the Customs and Border Protection application known as CBP One. This means that only 3,600 immigrants per day would have the opportunity to apply for asylum.
Federal officers in San Diego remove handcuffs from men before releasing them through a gate in a border wall to Tijuana, Mexico, Wednesday, March 15, 2023. [AP Photo/Gregory Bull]
Once the threshold is hit, the new law would allow the president to impose a shutdown, requiring Border Patrol agents to immediately expel, without processing, any and all immigrants crossing the border. During the shutdown, no immigrants who crossed would be able to file for asylum under Title 8.
The shutdown could only be lifted once “daily encounters” averaged less than 3,750 a day over a two-week span, something that has not happened in months. Furthermore, any migrant who attempted to cross the border twice during a “shutdown” would be banned from entering the US for one year.
Campaigning against Trump in 2020, Biden promised to institute more humane immigration polices. With his statement Friday, he and the Democratic Party are openly adopting the fascistic anti-immigrant policy of Trump and the Republicans.
The White House statement noted that the bill included funding for the border requested by Biden himself in October, providing for an “additional 1,300 Border Patrol agents, 375 immigration judges, 1,600 asylum officers, and over 100 cutting-edge inspection machines…”
Senator James Lankford, one of the lead negotiators for the Republicans on the supplemental package, touted the draconian changes on border policy in the proposed bipartisan Senate bill. He told “Fox News Sunday”:
“The bill focuses on getting us to zero illegal crossings a day. There’s no amnesty. It increases the number of Border Patrol agents, increases asylum officers. It increases detention beds so we can quickly detain and then deport individuals.”
Lankford added that the bill provides “additional deportation flights out” and “changes our asylum process so that people get a fast asylum screening at a higher standard and then get returned back their home country.”
More that 48 hours after Biden acceded to Republican demands that will put millions of immigrants, including over 2.5 million “dreamers” (undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US as minors), at risk of deportation, leading members of the Democratic Socialists of America have remained silent.
New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who denounced socialist and left-wing critics of her support for Biden’s immigration policies as “privileged” in 2021, has yet to post a tweet on either of her X/Twitter social media accounts or make a post on Instagram opposing the measure. Appearing on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program Sunday, she was not asked about Biden’s pledge to shut down the border and did not raise the issue herself.
Three other current DSA members of the House—Cori Bush (Missouri), Greg Casar (Texas) and Rashida Tlaib (Michigan)—likewise have yet to issue any statement denouncing Biden for throwing immigrants under the bus in order to secure funding for war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza.
Their silence is not an oversight. The Democrats, including the fake socialists and self-declared “progressives,” will collaborate with the Republicans in enacting their fascistic domestic agenda in exchange for securing funding for the war in Ukraine and the widening war in the Middle East. No attacks on democratic rights are beyond the pale.
This was underscored by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union program. Pelosi called for the FBI to investigate anti-genocide protesters, some of whom, she claimed, without offering a shred of evidence, were “Russian plants.”
She said: “For them to call for a cease-fire is Mr. Putin’s message. Make no mistake, this is directly connected to what he would like to see. Same thing with Ukraine. It’s about Putin’s message.”
These developments demonstrate that a vote for “Genocide Joe” and the Democrats in November is not a means of fighting against Trump’s authoritarianism, but a guarantee that the attacks on the democratic rights and social conditions of the working class will be intensified.
The working class cannot defend its democratic rights, in America or anywhere else, by supporting any of the capitalist parties. The choice between Trump and Biden is no choice at all. There is no “lesser evil.” There are two parties representing rival reactionary factions of a crisis-ridden capitalist ruling class that is committed to world war, dictatorship and the impoverishment of the working class.
The war against immigrants—being waged by the ruling class in every country—is the spearhead of the assault on the democratic rights of the entire working class. It must be opposed by workers of all countries as part of the fight against the descent of capitalism into barbarism, through the revolutionary struggle for socialism.
Yommie
Elite Member
Pelosi accuses anti-genocide protesters of being agents of Putin
The revival of McCarthy-style slanders by a leading Democrat testifies to the isolation and desperation of the Biden administration.
www.wsws.org
Pelosi accuses anti-genocide protesters of being agents of Putin
Patrick Martin
2 hours ago
In toxic comments that combine equal parts political blindness and malicious slander, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared on national television Sunday morning to declare that the widespread protests against Israeli genocide in Gaza were actually financed and promoted by Russian President Vladimir Putin.Nancy Pelosi accuses Gaza protesters of delivering "Mr. Putin's message." January 28, 2024 [Photo: CNN News]
Pelosi was responding to a question by host Dana Bash on CNN’s interview program “State of the Union,” about whether young people, Arab Americans and “progressives” might stay home rather than vote for Biden in November, because of their hostility to US-Israeli actions in Gaza. This exchange followed, according to the transcript posted by the network:
Groups opposed to discrimination against Arabs and Muslims, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), denounced Pelosi’s comments. CAIR National Executive Director Nihad Awad said, “We are deeply disturbed by former House Speaker Pelosi’s comments. Rep. Pelosi’s claim that some of the Americans protesting for a Gaza ceasefire are working with Vladmir Putin sounds delusional and her call for the FBI to investigate those protesters without any evidence is downright authoritarian.
“Sadly, Rep. Pelosi’s comments echo a time in our nation when opponents of the Vietnam War were accused of being communist sympathizers and subjected to FBI harassment. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, including many young people, progressive activists, and Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian, and Black Americans, have been protesting to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Millions more Americans support a ceasefire, including the majority of Democrats, according to mainstream surveys.”
But there was little reaction to Pelosi’s McCarthyite smear in the major corporate media. The New York Times published a single brief news article, while the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal did not comment. Only CNN, the network where Pelosi had appeared, reported any negative reaction to her remarks, while the other broadcast and cable networks said nothing.
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Pelosi made similar remarks in October responding to protesters who were outside her house demonstrating against the Gaza slaughter, shouting “Stop the genocide! Stop the holocaust!” One woman spoke directly to Pelosi as she entered her car, saying, “Democrats want the ceasefire.” Pelosi can be heard yelling back, “Go back to China, where your headquarters is.” (The protesters appeared to be white, not Asian).
Not one major figure in the Democratic Party has addressed these comments by someone who was the leading voice of the Democrats on Capitol Hill only 13 months ago. The Biden White House continues to reject appeals for a ceasefire while promoting attacks spearheaded by pro-Trump Republican fascists in the House against advocates of a ceasefire, particularly among college students, who have been branded antisemites because they oppose the mass murder in Gaza.
It would be wrong to dismiss these comments as the delusional ravings of an 83-year-old who was notorious for inarticulate “word salads” even in her days as Democratic leader and House Speaker. (Pelosi stepped down as Democratic leader after the 2022 election, when the party lost its narrow majority in the House).
Whatever her limitations in public speaking, Pelosi was a forceful and deeply reactionary figure behind the scenes, with the closest connections to the top levels of the American state machine and its military-intelligence network. She was a longtime member of the House Intelligence Committee before becoming leader of the Democratic caucus, where she was part of the “gang of eight” congressional leaders regularly briefed about secret US military operations.
During her two separate terms as Speaker of the House, 2006-2010 and 2018-2022, she was second in the line of succession to the presidency, behind only the vice president, and played a key role in bipartisan collaboration, first with President George W. Bush, then with President Donald Trump.
When she told Dana Bash, “I say that having looked at this for a long time now, as you know,” she was suggesting that her decades of working with the intelligence agencies had convinced her that the Russian government—and apparently the Chinese as well—were intervening actively in American politics and were exploiting or actually creating the political divisions within the United States.
The claim that those participating in the protests against Israeli genocide in Gaza are being financed and manipulated by Moscow and Beijing is a reactionary McCarthyite slander. Pelosi would have imbibed such tactics at an early age. She was the daughter of a Democratic congressman from Baltimore, Maryland, and spent much of the 1950s as a student in a Catholic girls high school and college.
Pelosi has been particularly associated with anti-Russian and anti-Chinese provocations on behalf of the military-intelligence apparatus in the aftermath of the collapse of Stalinism.
She was one of the most fervent advocates of the Democratic Party campaign portraying Donald Trump as a stooge of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and in 2019 gave the green light to the first impeachment of Trump for his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Trump was seeking compromising information on Democrat Joe Biden, and delayed US military aid to the Kiev regime briefly in order to put pressure on it. This threatened to undermine longstanding US plans, begun under the Obama administration, to turn Ukraine into a spearhead against Russia.
As for China, Pelosi has long backed right-wing Chinese émigré groups influential in San Francisco’s Chinatown, one of the largest in the US. In one of her final acts as House speaker, in August 2022, Pelosi traveled to Taiwan, the highest-ranking US official to visit the island in defiance of the Chinese-American One China policy recognizing that Taiwan is part of China, and not a separate country.
A spokesperson for the congresswoman referred to this record in indirect terms in explaining Pelosi’s comments: “Informed by three decades on the House Intelligence Committee, Speaker Pelosi is acutely aware of how foreign adversaries meddle in American politics to sow division and impact our elections, and she wants to see further investigation ahead of the 2024 election.”
As a political smear, the claim that anti-genocide protesters are financed by Moscow and doing Putin’s bidding is a particularly crude one. While the Russian government has endorsed a ceasefire, it is hardly alone. In December, 153 members of the United Nations General Assembly voted in favor of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. So have 67 members of the Democratic caucus in the House, including 13 members from California alone, as well as the City Council of San Francisco, where Pelosi lives.
In last week’s New Hampshire primary, 1,500 Democrats in New Hampshire wrote in “ceasefire” on their primary ballot, about 1.25 percent of the vote. This would equate, on a national scale, given 80 million Democratic voters, to about a million Democrats supposedly acting as agents of Putin.
The smear testifies to both the isolation of Pelosi, Biden and the rest of the Democratic leadership from the genuine feelings of millions of workers and youth, and to their mounting desperation over the clear unpopularity of the Biden administration’s actions, both in backing Israeli genocide in Gaza, and more broadly, in Ukraine and the Far East, wherever imperialist war is threatened.
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