We will resist Trump’s takeover of New Orleans

It is not about crime, it’s about dictatorship for profit

Occupations of L.A. and D.C. are the first steps to martial law

Everything Trump and Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry do is designed to impoverish the people, strip us of our rights, destroy our lives and use force to suppress any struggle to stop them so that billionaires can extract maximum profits from our labor.

Trump and Landry are rapidly moving to impose a total dictatorship of the military corporations, banks, oil and gas, and tech companies over society. The billionaire owners of these corporations already take the vast majority of the wealth we sacrifice in the form of taxes. But they want the entire national budget for themselves.

The Trump presidency gets its marching orders from capitalist think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Pelican Institute, and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), all of which are funded by and for the benefit of billionaires. They are celebrating $3.4 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, Section 8, Education, Child Care, Medicare, and Social Security. Even if you do not currently use these programs, cutting them will force down the wages of everyone else.

Trump and his billionaire cronies want no minimum wage, no pensions, no civil rights laws, no unions or any other organizations that would stand in the way of their profit-making. They are gutting what is left of voting rights. It’s not enough that political candidates are bought and paid for by the rich. They are openly taking over all state machinery for elections.

Trump’s deployment of shock troops has nothing to do with crime. But because Trump and Landry can’t state their real motives, they scapegoat and brand as “criminals” immigrants, trans people, women and most especially Black and Brown communities. 

In Louisiana, the highest crime rate is in majority white rural areas, which also suffer from poverty and lack of opportunity. More than 1 in 5 of all people incarcerated around the planet are in U.S. jails and prisons. Prisons for citizens and immigrants are a profit-making industry, and corporations are using prison labor to get super-profits. Convict leasing, child labor, labor camps, debtors’ prisons are all about enslaving labor for maximum profit. This will inevitably drag down the wages of non-incarcerated workers as well.

Trump and Landry are preparing for resistance to their program of total impoverishment. On Aug. 25, Trump issued an executive order calling on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to designate Army and Air National Guard members in every state to “assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances.”

Resistance to occupation and dictatorship is inevitable. The people will not stand by as we lose our housing and homes and politicians rake in bribes. We will not stand by while seniors are in the streets and education becomes something that only the rich can afford. We will not be peacefully hungry. We have the right to good wages, healthcare, housing, equality, food, education, peace, and a livable planet. The handful of billionaires that are centralizing their control over our lives are the real criminals and parasites.

Repression Breeds Resistance. Trump and Landry smugly think they can lie about everything in order to enrich their pals. But while people may be temporarily stunned by the rapid rise of dictatorship, a reckoning is coming. They are few and we are many.