Bill Ayers

There are so many horror stories, so many outrageous declarations coming out of the executive branch, that our heads are spinning. A lot of it is simply political theater, repression porn. And we make a mistake to let the barrage of bullshit blind us to fundamental realities. Every once in a while I am reminded to get back to some simple truths that might help us keep perspective on how to name the problem and where we will be going in the future. So here are a few:

Just sayin’ #1. The MAGA movement has pursued an anti-Black politics of white grievance (whining that white people are victims of reverse racism, parading fucking Boer racists as refugees) and sought to roll back seventy years of slow progress. And with so many distractions and manufactured crises, fighting the ongoing practice of racist police violence is off the agenda for most. The Trump judges and officials, along with local city councils (even Democratic Party ones), have beefed up police budgets and halted prosecutions of killer cops. In fact, the demand from 2020 to defund the police, while briefly powerful and seemingly on the agenda, was a project to redirect public funds to crisis intervention, mental health and addiction services, and restorative practices. The whole political establishment has turned away from this and violence against the Black community and other peoples of color has actually grown.

Just sayin’ #2. Tariffs are supposed to correct a problematic balance of trade — the US imports more than it exports. But the statistic “balance of trade” is just one arbitrary pairing of data in the constructed data game called economics. When the US was an industrial imperialist center, with raw materials shipped here, manufactured, and sent out — then the “balance of trade” meant that the US exported more than it imported. But it has been a conscious decision, since the 1980’s, to move production to the Third World, for cheap labor there and scant environmental laws. Now there are a thousand ships at sea bringing containers of products for Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, and the rest. That was not a mistake. That was a decision made by the capitalists as the US became more and more of a parasitic economy. Jobs here were in service and tech (deciding where all these products should be moved). It’s not a pretty picture but this is how the US economy functions. In reality Trump and his friends don’t have a master plan on the economy. They are simply trying to game the market to make tons of money for themselves. Oh, and the threat of tariffs only moves countries to trade more with each other instead of the U.S.

Just sayin’ #3. A lot of the push-back on Trump’s orgy of deportation raids argues that we won’t be able to get food on our shelves because it is the immigrant labor, undocumented and documented, that does the backbreaking work for low pay. We won’t have our blueberries! Hello? That is an opportunist argument. Progressives should not be celebrating backbreaking work for low pay. We need to demand more humane and safe working conditions and decent pay for those who do agricultural and food factory work. The ideal situation for the MAGA crowd, of course, is to expand the struggling lower class with more jobs taken by prisoners (slaves). This is part of fascism.

Just sayin’ #4. The anti-immigrant xenophobic cry to keep the country “American” is a call for white supremacy. This has a long history, going back to the beginning of the country and highlighted by the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Bracero deportations in the 1930’s. Both major parties are seriously anti-immigrant. But our perspective needs to go beyond “we are a nation of immigrants,” and “we should at least support those with refugee claims.” The truth is that people coming from south of the US border are largely, or in part, indigenous people, native to this land. They have the right to roam here and there, beyond the artificial construction of borders which is simply a structure for extraction of resources and labor. And, by the way, most immigrants don’t come because they are dying to be in the US. They are driven out because their homes are crushed by economic manipulation as well as wars caused by the US, what Juan Gonzalez calls the ”harvest of empire.” The immigrants I know from restaurant work are constantly homesick but working here in order to support their families.

Just sayin’ #5. I’m seeing a lot of excitement about the article by Israeli-American scholar Omer Bartov, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.” To me, this is pretty pathetic. Really, after almost two years of grizzly bombing and killing in Gaza, this guy has decided, “hey, I guess it is genocide!” And the Times, which supported the genocide in so many ways, is starting to see the light? It only took 70,000 — or is it 200,000? — deaths to make you see that. I’m sorry, but as for all these late-comers who decided something stinks here, I say, “fuck you!” And if you have supported the genocide up to now and now you would like to be remembered as “against all this” and “on the right side of history,” fuck you too. As my son Max pointed out, this is happening because we did not hold Nuremberg trials after the Vietnam War. See the book “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This” by Omar El Akkad.

Just sayin’ #6. As with refugee camps, we know that good-hearted people put a great deal of effort into supporting homeless (houseless) people. It is important and worthy work. But we should always keep in mind that the predicament these people are in is not normal and is not their fault. It is the inevitable result of massive income inequality, of trillions of dollars being hoarded by the one percent, and the practice of making houses commodities to be bought and sold on the marketplace. (The same is true, amazingly, with medicine.) Massive investment firms suck up thousands of houses and either hold them empty or jack up the prices. In cities like San Francisco, there are more housing units standing empty than there are homeless people. So yes, we should work on building shelters and other solutions for the homeless, but we should also critique the way the game is set up every day. Some will raise drug addiction as a confounding factor. But addiction is a disease and capitalism, not individual choices, are why we have the opium epidemic. In San Francisco, the reason people are rich and the reason people are shooting up on the sidewalk are the same.

Just sayin’ #7. The US empire is falling and well it should. We certainly hoped it would happen in a peaceful or even beautiful way — with revolutionary internationalism ascending, dismantling structures of oppression, paying reparations, becoming simply a nation among nations. But, as it happens, declining empires often turn to xenophobia, racism, violence. And that is what we have now. Trump is overseeing the decline of the empire in the most clumsy and cruel way. But decline it must. Let’s not say things like, “we need to go back to the world order that has been predominant in the years since World War II” — that’s the one of US intervention, wars, and propping up dictators. We don’t need to say, “save our democracy” — who had democracy? We don’t want to go back to that. Instead we should be picking up the pieces from this mess, supporting all those who have been brutalized by it. Let’s envision something much better, much more democratic and peaceful. We can do it.