Image by Barbara Zandoval.
The Democratic Party – for those of us paying attention – has become a shadow of the Republican Party, a miniature MAGA image impaled on the adjacent ground if you will. The Democrats now aspire to package and market an incrementally less offensive, but equally lethal brand of MAGA cruelty. The empty mimicry of Republican perspectives could not have been more blatantly obvious if Donald Trump had plopped a Kamala Harris wig atop his own fake hair and delivered her September 27th speech on “border security.” Admittedly, Harris cannot duplicate Trump’s second grade vocabulary, but her disagreement with Trump on border policy boils down to a single point – Trump refused to allow the Democrats to capitulate to Republican border rhetoric.
He connivingly rejected the Democratic white flag. He ordered his acolytes, his zombies, to reject Biden’s so called bi-partisan border bill. This bill – The Emergency National Security Supplemental Appropriations Act – explicitly agreed, in its unwieldy title, with the entire Republican ruse. Harris assured us the other night that she gazes upon the same border that Trump does – a place threatened with gangs, violence, lawlessness and fentanyl. Harris allayed the fears of anyone who worried that the “war on drugs” might have come to a whimpering halt.
There is, indeed, a terrible crisis on our southern border, but it is not one of national security, but rather a crisis involving our collective soul. Are we, as Harris’ obligatory recitation of our most insincere platitude asserts, a nation of immigrants, or are we a country crumbling and rotting, unable to restrain our racism, intolerance and stinginess? Do both US parties eagerly placate the cruel impulses of the worst members of the electorate? We can see that Kamala Harris, in her continued fidelity to Biden’s border bill gambit, understands that harsh rejection of humanitarian policies has become her central pitch to the voting public. She is good student, and Trump has instructed her well.
This Democratic pandering to the notion of a bigoted and selfish electorate comes at a bad time. Climate overheating drives a gathering flood of refugees – a contingent of rootless victims expected to reach the ungodly number of a billion people globally in a mere two decades. The US is one of the planet’s most spacious, underpopulated nations. We are also a nation that has committed unspeakable imperial crimes and owes an incalculable backlog of reparations to exploited sufferers in the global south. As an added incentive, the US also has a labor shortage. There will never be another opportunity to so dramatically role model climate driven altruism. Unfortunately, It is as if we came upon the final scene from The Titanic, and drove our huge empty ship blithely past the drowning victims.
Harris may occasionally recognize the value of performative compassion, but her public veneer favors the tough cop – Kopmala. Harris, the pro police, pro-military, pro prison industrial complex champion of law and order assured us that she will be a pit bull for border security. Lamenting the Republican Party rejection of Biden’s border legislation, Harris complained:
“That bill would have hired 1,500 more border agents and officers. It would have paid for 100 inspection machines to detect fentanyl that is killing tens of thousands of Americans every year. It would have allowed us to more quickly and effectively remove those who come here illegally.”
Here is what “The Center For Constitutional Rights” alleged in a June press release, regarding the Biden/Harris right leaning shift on border policy:
“Lagging in the polls, President Biden is resorting to a depressingly familiar tactic: trying to score political points on the backs of vulnerable people. The executive order he announced yesterday – which effectively closes the U.S.-Mexico border and suspends the right to seek asylum – is both illegal and immoral. It will inflict suffering on people who have already suffered greatly. It will get people killed. And it will fuel a race to the racist bottom with Donald Trump.”
Harris has adopted a strategy of offering a feast to the reactionary right while cunningly spreading crumbs for progressive voters. She told us, effectively, that the vast majority of people desperately attempting to seek safety on US soil will be sent back to the starvation, death squads, cartels and paramilitary forces that chased them to the US border. These people, often undertaking perilous journeys across nearly impenetrable jungles, mountains and deserts, flee for their lives. They come to the US to be rejected and maligned by those guarding the borders of one of the most underpopulated nations on earth.
If you shoved the entire population of Latin America into the continental US, and, for good measure tossed in all the people of India, we would still remain less densely settled than Japan. But Harris offered no sweeping humanitarian commitment, but only a path forward for “dreamers.” Harris appears to be quite confident in her ability to conceal a Trumpesque policy of heartless intent behind a few kindly seeming gestures. It is not clear how many US residents will benefit from DACA, but most so called undocumented residents will be vulnerable to future expulsion. Harris offered little hope for those newly arriving at the border.
Despite having one of planet earth’s most sparsely settled landscapes, we, in the US, allow in fewer refugees per capita than (in no particular order) Germany, Bangladesh, Turkey, Iran, Sudan, Columbia, Jordan, Kenya, Niger, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Cameroon, Chile, Greece, Hungary and on and on.
While poor and middle income nations take in most of the world’s refugees, no nation on earth has ever remotely challenged the US for creating the global oppression and instability that currently drives refugees to search for places to survive. The US sells more arms, supplies more militaristic autocrats, and burns more fossil fuels per capita than any other nation. The US uses seven times more oil per person annually compared with China, and Americans (per person) use 18 times more oil than Indians.
Since the industrial revolution, the cumulative US greenhouse emissions are far greater than that of any other nation. Climate overheating is the biggest driver of refugees, and clearly, the nation contributing the most to global population instability also complains the loudest about refugees while doing the least to mitigate their suffering.
If we imagine that the neo-Nazi Republican fascist party sets down the rhythm track for Democratic Party tap dancers, Harris’ comments on the Fentanyl crises clearly illustrate the passion that Democrats have to placate Republican biases. Her remarks on Fentanyl lend no insight or context to America’s current misery. She simply trudges along with the same tired, useless fidelity to the so called “war on drugs” that has failed for the past 50 odd years – since Richard Nixon coined the phrase in support of his racist vision.
First of all, the Fentanyl trade, involving the cooperation of Chinese manufacturers, Mexican Cartels and American distributors has absolutely nothing to do with asylum seekers. It is an association that Trump has mendaciously pasted onto his migrant crime narrative – a tale that Harris dependably fails to confront. She told us while tap dancing to Donald Trump’s shaky back beat that she:
“will make it a top priority to disrupt the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States.”
Such pandering to bullshit would boggle our minds if we had not become numb to the medulla talk, the bot-speak of political leaders. No amount of antidrug border scrutiny will deter masses of people from acting out their deaths of despair. Fentanyl will inevitably be a major resource for those living out the emptiness of life in the collapsing imperial core – Harris’ 100 fentanyl detection devices be damned. The war on drugs is a war on us.
And while some 81 thousand souls use fentanyl to exit from the tedious and unrelenting conditions of America’s so called dream, three times that many choose alcohol as their means of annual escape. 27 thousand shoot themselves in the head each year, and some 57 thousand opt for cocaine or other stimulants as a chosen vehicle of departure – overeating, tobacco and lead poisoning gather hundreds of thousands of victims in the public health tsunami that defines America.
The fentanyl narrative clearly cannot rationally be pared down to a problem in law enforcement. How many US residents have no purpose, little family or community support, and a sense that sober contemplation of reality might be more excruciating than a migraine headache? Addictions occupy the epicenter of the American survival strategy, but Kamala Harris does not talk intelligently and respectfully to her constituents. Imagine Kamala Harris beginning her border security speech like this:
“Lately I have been thinking about the border and I have decided to scrap my entire speech and begin from scratch. Asylum seekers are not the problem, our psychopathic, power hungry rulers are the problem. Too many of you feel that you have lost your way and have no inclination to sign up for the rat race. Some of you would rather die and some of you nod off on opiates in the hope of buying time until an answer appears. Fentanyl is only a symptom of much more terrible things. We live in a world with trivial distractions on one horizon and terrible nightmares on the other. Most of us can’t imagine a better world, let alone act to bring it about. I want to be completely honest with my potential voters. I don’t know what to do to help you, but I am pretty sure that walls, deportations and increased border security have nothing to do with your worries.”
Trump has proven that there is a massive market for bluster, bullshit, impossible promises and dummied down, simplistic narratives. Harris and the Democrats have taken notes and want a piece of the action. There is no border crisis, but no end to ambitious politicians who want to scream for higher walls and more Draconian punishment for the most vulnerable people, those trapped between the rock and hard place of US power.
Is there a constituency for honest discourse, self-doubt and a willingness to measure the potential for our national compassion? Kamala Harris gave us her answer. Fuck no!
This piece first appeared on Znet.
