nationwide general strike tomorrow
The new Democrat announcement proposing minor modifications to the ICE funding bill seems to me to be cleverly timed. If you were terrified of a general strike and wanted to discourage it, would this not be the usual way? Do not fall for it.
The corporate sector is apparently also terrified of a general strike. They're having the media they own report that the Democrats' proposal represents a "major overhaul" of ICE. It is nothing if the kind. This is an ICE funding increase. What we are seeing from our feeble ruling class "opposition" is not a critique of unaccountable murder or kidnapping, but simply a pathetic attempt to temporarily pacify the growing resistance to what is by any reasonable definition a declaration of war on the American population by its government.
Democrats now proposing that ICE adopt a "code of conduct" similar to that of the police are not just indulging in extraordinary vagueness. They are proposing to model ICE on the worst, most violent, most overfunded, most vehemently protested, least accountable entity imaginable. Democrats would apparently like ICE's 9 victims in 2026 to have a lot more company, since in this same time period the police have managed to murder 71.
Is it really that hard to imagine what another ICE funding increase will actually look like on the ground? Or to conjure mental pictures of all the atrocities this Democratic proposal will do nothing to prevent? It's not like world history has never seen state repression get escalated before. If this bill passes, it's fair to expect the level and frequency of legalized, normalized violence to rise, not fall. To expect already clown-like officials to become even more cavalier in their disregard for plausibility when they do their post-murder press conferences.
At what point do we expect tanks, battering rams and guided missiles to be brought into the mix? When will we start seeing AI-generated abduction lists? At what point can we expect rape to be legalized at our detention centers? At what point do mayors and governments begin crying for help from the military to quell angry demonstrators? When might the Democratic party remove objection to torture from their party platform? In fact this has all already happened. Or is happening. Such realities will simply be escalated.
Picture a month from now and there's been no systemic change to the way our country's police state operates. Picture a year from now. Two years. As violence escalates, Democrats and Republicans will call for more arbitrary rules governing the possession of weapons. The use of cameras. The uttering of certain dangerous phrases or languages. More arbitrary rules about what one can say on social media, or in private communications. More arbitrary rules about observing or reporting violence. More arbitrary clampdowns on public assemblies.
We're already seeing Democrats not only approve but celebrate the deployment of American "lethality" against what they call "terrorists." We're seeing the definition of this word expand to include such destroyers of society as doctors, nurses, teachers, press, and aid workers. The term is now applied to people who don't comply quickly enough with orders from agents pointing rifles in their face. It is applied to people who are present when agents become scared.
We're already seeing our population, hooked on capitalist escapism, turn again and again to billionaire-owned corporations to provide them with pre-packaged political opinions, while voices that speak truth to power get swallowed up, go out of business, go into hiding, or become victims of the police state. Truth becomes a low priority, compared to demonstration of naked power, and the creation of endless confusion and fatigue.
There's nothing in the Democrats' proposal that allows doctors on the scene to treat the people ICE has just shot. Suppose next week ICE agents tell a doctor that he's not authorized to save the life of a person bleeding to death from an ICE bullet, but the doctor tries anyway? I'm sure we can easily picture the probable result.
There is nothing in the language of the Democrats' proposal that will prevent the grounds for assassination to switch from resisting arrest to simply holding a camera. Nothing to prevent trigger-happy new hires from restraining themselves when they encounter languages, keffiyehs, haircuts or piercings that make them feel nervous. Nothing to prevent standard ICE operating procedure escalating from tackling persons and then shooting, to just becoming snipers and skip the tackling.
Democrats will continue to playact at opposing what they are now calling "Trump's ICE," while continuing to fill the coffers of what is truthfully a bipartisan creation. They will use the population's theoretically constitutionally protected protests as a pretext for beefing up police, National Guard, the FBI. Public opinion will be rechristened "unrest" and meet with coordinated attacks, just as it has under every president in my adult life.
If Republicans indulging in any level of racism and insanity that springs to their minds, under threat of government shutdown, being met halfway again and again by a party selling itself in press conferences and fundraising emails as the "resistance," is working for anyone out there, let that person opt out of tomorrow's general strike, and bring their cardboard Cory Booker signs to the next No Kings parade. For everyone else, let's continue the real resistance that's been started, and is beginning to damage the sustainability and profitability of ICE. No work, no shopping, no school tomorrow!