Category: Racism

JUSTICE FOR DREAMERS – PUNISH THE AUTHORS OF FORCED MIGRATION

By David Bacon

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – SEPT. 5, 2017 – Two thousand people demonstrate in front of San Francisco’s Federal Building, block intersections, and march through the streets to protest the announcement by Attorney General Jeff Sessions that the Trump administration will repeal the DACA order protecting young undocumented immigrants from deportation.Copyright David Bacon

The DACA youth, the “dreamers” are the true children of NAFTA – those who, more than anyone, paid the price for the agreement. Yet they are the ones now punished by the Trump administration as it takes away their legal status, their ability to work, and their right to live in this country without fearing arrest and deportation. At the same time, those responsible for the fact they grew up in the U.S. walk away unpunished – even better off.

We’re not talking about their parents. It’s common for liberal politicians (even Trump himself on occasion) to say these young people shouldn’t be punished for the “crime” of their parents – that they brought their children with them when they crossed the border without papers. But parents aren’t criminals anymore than their children are. They chose survival over hunger, and sought to keep their families together and give them a future.

The perpetrators of the “crime” are those who wrote the trade treaties and the economic reforms that made forced migration the only means for families to survive. The “crime” was NAFTA.

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Fight White Supremacy, Racism,and Fascism Everywhere!

CCDS Statement on Charlottesville

We condemn the white supremacist and neo-Nazi rally and violent assaults against anti-racist demonstrators which occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017, resulting in the murder of one anti-racist protestor and severe injury to over a dozen more.

We indict the Trump Administration for refusing to name and condemn the violence unleashed by the racist and neo-Nazi forces, while blaming both sides equally.

We believe Donald Trump and his key administrative advisors, such as Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, are directly responsible for the increase of white supremacist and Nazi violence. They emboldened the far right during the 2016 presidential campaign and have continued to promote white supremacy since Trump assumed office. Trump’s blaming both sides masks the reality of rising white supremacist and neo-Nazi violence across the country.

We mourn the loss of life and injuries suffered. Our deepest sympathy goes to the family and friends of the young woman killed and the families of the police officers who died in a helicopter crash while patrolling the area. We grieve with the 19 and possibly more anti-racist and anti-Nazi protestors who suffered injuries.

The white supremacist protestors in Charlottesville were not just Virginians. They came from cities and towns across the United States, reflecting the national scope of this right-wing threat to our people and democracy.

CCDS calls on all justice minded people everywhere to build a broad front against white supremacy, racism, and fascism and to build and fortify our organizations to fight the right.  There is no place for racism and fascism and in our country.

Paul Krehbiel
Rafael Pizarro
Harry Targ
Janet Tucker
Co-Chairs Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS)

Braceros Organize After One Worker Dies


Picking blueberries on a Washington State farm. Risking deportation, Washington state farmworkers protest dangerous conditions in the fields
By David Bacon
The American Prospect, 8/8/17

A farmworker’s death in the broiling fields of Washington state has prompted his fellow braceros to put their livelihoods in jeopardy by going on strike, joining a union, being discharged – and risking deportation.

Honesto Silva Ibarra died in Harborview hospital in Seattle on Sunday night, August 6. Silva, a married father of three, was a guest worker – in Spanish, a “contratado” – brought to the United States under the H2-A visa program, to work in the fields.

Miguel Angel Ramirez Salazar, another contratado, says Silva went to his supervisor at Sarbanand Farms last week, complaining that he was sick and couldn’t work. “They said if he didn’t keep working he’d be fired for ‘abandoning work.’ But after a while he couldn’t work at all.”

Silva finally went to the Bellingham Clinic, about an hour south of the farm where he was working, in Sumas, close to the Canadian border. By then it was too late, however. He was sent to Harborview, where he collapsed and died.

Silva’s death was the final shove that pushed the contratados into an action unprecedented in modern farm labor history. They organized and protested, and when they were fired for it, they joined Washington State’s new union for farmworkers, Familias Unidas por la Justicia. As this article is being written, 120 H2A workers are sitting in tents on a patch of land near the ranch where they worked, protesting their treatment and demanding rights for guest workers.

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