Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez justifiably condemned the Latino migrant concentration camps run by the United States when Donald Trump was President. Now, as the federal government continues to operate these inhumane camps for the victims of our despotic foreign policy, the Democrat has gone out of her way to say that the concentration camps run by new President Joe Biden are “different” than the ones run by Trump.
“What is happening here is not the same as what happened during the Trump administration where they took babies out of the arms of their mothers and deported their families and permanently traumatized these children,” she recently said.
“Which is a level of human rights violation that is simply not the same. Both of these things are barbaric and they’re wrong but when you rip a baby out of the hands of a mother you cannot draw the same comparison. And anyone who is trying to do that is doing a profound disservice to the cause of justice.”
As reports have clearly shown, however, Ocasio-Cortez is lying. Children are indeed still being ripped out of the arms of their parents and guardians, and experts say that any minor differences between Trump and Biden’s concentration camp protocols are not, contrary to Ocasio-Cortez’s claims, stopping children from continuing to be traumatized.
Children continue to be separated by the U.S. federal government from their families at the border under Biden, for months on end, which migrant advocates like Lisa Koop of the National Immigrant Justice Center say traumatizes children the same way Trump’s family separations did.
"It really does look and feel in many ways like a parent-child separation," Koop said. "The trauma of the separation is very similar."
Ocasio-Cortez’s deceitful rhetoric downplaying our concentration camps under Democratic rule comes not too long after she said that criticism that President Joe Biden (who literally promised wealthy donors during his campaign that nothing would fundamentally change under his charge) has not worked to fundamentally and positively change anything thus far is a “really privileged critique” that somehow insults people of color.
Well, other women of color are tired of Ocasio-Cortez’s gaslighting in her attempt to be a minority firewall for the Democratic party and the corporate interests it serves. Labor reporter Monica Cruz of Breakthrough News recently rejected Ocasio-Cortez’s shaming of those who would deign to criticize Biden’s policies at this historic moment in time.
“It’s all the same thing on the ground. Now all of the sudden that Biden is in the White House, we’re just supposed to sit down and be quiet? I think not. Especially as things have not gotten better for our people anywhere,” Cruz said in a video essay.
She continued to make the argument on the Katie Halper Show recently against Ocasio-Cortez’s implicit suggestion that critics of Biden and the Democratic party are in the wrong or, enemies of the “cause of justice,” as the Representative put it.
“We’re living in a time where one in three Americans are struggling to pay their bills or put food on their table every single week. We’re talking about record homelessness, record hunger, record unemployment while not a dime has been dented in the military and police budget of this country,” Cruz continued.
“Of all times, for this to be the time for us to sit back is such a lie and such a fallacious message to send.”
Editor and labor organizer Esperanza Fonseca went on to point out, also on Halper’s show, that while Ocasio-Cortez is careful to use compelling language, her actions are often not in accordance with those expressed values. That divide of hypocrisy makes it all the more important to criticize not just the Biden administration, for Fonseca, but also the so-called socialists and progressives like Ocasio-Cortez who are serving as ideological and minority firewalls for it against legitimate and timely criticism.
“I think it’s so important to critique AOC and the rest of the squad because I think they run on the promise of moving Congress Left and moving Biden Left but the only thing they really do is move us to the Right…I actually don’t believe [AOC] was ever really that well-intentioned. I think that she is a careerist and an opportunist. She ran on this narrative of being this normal working-class girl, bartender. She was a professional consultant, she was a business incubator, she was a professional organizer, she was not just this every day, normal bartender,” she began.
While Ocasio-Cortez calls out U.S. Empire by name in interviews and on social media, Fonseca correctly observes that her official actions as a member of Congress are all too often in material support of our pernicious imperial system.
“[She’s] Repeating U.S. imperial lies about the U.S.S.R. and other countries. She met with the fascist coup leaders in Bolivia…then she stages this performance in front of one of the immigrant detention centers where she purposefully dresses in all-white and leans over and cries yet you have our own people sleeping on the dirt under a bridge with foil blankets on top of each other like cattle and where are her fake tears?” Fonseca asked.
“All she does is go on Instagram and obscure the situation by saying, ‘oh it’s not a border crisis, it’s an imperialism crisis, it’s a carceral crisis.’ Well, of course we know it’s both of those things but why are you not holding Biden accountable in the same way you held Trump accountable? And it is because she is ultimately committed to the Democratic party more than she is committed to us.”
This, of course, is nothing new. We’ve all this before.
Long before Representative Nancy Pelosi, for example, became Speaker of the House, one of the wealthiest members of Congress, and opposed Medicare for All, she voiced militant support for providing universal healthcare. Observing the ways in which elected leaders like Pelosi, Ocasio-Cortez or anyone else change over time after gaining power, and/or act in ways markedly different than their words might have you believe they would isn’t about demonizing individuals.
This isn’t actually about individuals at all. It is about systems.
Experts tell us that the United States is currently a corporate oligarchy with mere democratic forms. Political Philosopher Sheldon Wolin aptly called it Inverted Totalitarianism.
In such a system, legislators’ true constituents are the corporations that fund their campaigns and increase their own wealth, not the voters who cast ballots for or against them. Indeed studies show that in recent decades, Congress’ acts are increasingly divorced from the policies that voters say they want and conversely in-line with those that their corporate backers favor.
In a corrupt sub-system of legalized bribery such as the United States Congress, institutional pressures, indeed considerations of employment and financial survival, weigh on any and all office holders. Supporting evil policies isn’t, then, about being an evil person, but rather about caving to pressures of the institutions you work in and depend on for your own security.
Someone being young, or of a certain ethnicity, or claiming a particular ideological lineage doesn’t usually end up counting for much once they achieve power and become a part of the systems of power that need to be torn down in order for justice to be served. Here in Chicago and Illinois my own generation has seen this up close and personal with Latino political leaders.
I was born into an age where Latinos were for the first time being voted into office in Illinois with regularity to represent areas of the state that were largely populated by Latino residents. There was palpable hope felt and pride invested in these leaders, based on the idea that our shared ethnic identity might mean they would more reliably take the community’s interests into consideration.
Some of them came from admirable community organizing or advocacy work and even used the language of revolution. One by one, year after year, decade after decade since the mid 1980’s, so many of these Latino politicians not only came to vote reliably with the capitalist White establishment which let them into the game to begin with, but also fell into wholesale criminality.
In some cases, the community work bonafides that some of these local politicians came into elected office with dwarfed anything that Ocasio-Cortez contributed prior to getting elected to Congress. Some of their fiery revolutionary language might have even made today’s Squad members blush.
Before they held seats of power these local Latino politicians here in Chicago organized massive voter drives, advocated for undocumented people, taught children, and took place in serious protests, yet many of them still ended up being consistent votes for the racist, classist establishment once they took office, carrying water for the local Democratic party. What’s more, many of them began preoccupied on simply cutting out a slice of the city, state, or county for themselves to pilfer.
The first Latino ever elected alderman of the ward I grew up in was arrested on cocaine possession charges after he left office. The man he lost his City Council seat to would end up going to federal prison after agreeing to take bribes in the Operation Silver Shovel FBI sting entrapment operation.
When he got out of prison, he ran against the man who replaced him, and almost unseated him. Years later, he was convicted of new bribery charges from a scheme and another Latino politician cooked up and sent to prison again.
The man who had replaced him served a long career in the City Council before getting nabbed by federal prosecutors himself, and then collecting evidence on his colleagues for several years before resigning in disgrace. My former longtime state representative has just been indicted on federal charges, along with his sons, including one who nearly won an aldermanic race in my ward.
People of color like myself from urban areas like mine have seen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez types, before. We’ve seen this trajectory of fire-spitting outsider to establishment apologist, and it isn’t good.
The betrayal of the people and principles that carried them into power by young politicians is as cynical as it is old. And, it’s happening all over again.