Category: police terrorism
worker |
February 16, 2015 |
9:21 pm | African American Culture, African American history, International, National, Paul Robeson, police terrorism, Struggle for African American equality |
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worker |
February 6, 2015 |
9:29 pm | humor, International, police terrorism, political struggle |
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worker |
January 25, 2015 |
9:31 pm | Anarchism, Frederick Engels, Karl Marx, police terrorism, political struggle, V.I. Lenin |
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By James Thompson
Karl Marx writes in the sixth paragraph of the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859):
“In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.â€
Marx teaches us that “The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life.”
In a previous post on this website “Frederick Engels on Bukunin’s School of Anarchy”, A. Shaw notes that Engels made the case that Anarchists view the state as the ultimate evil and routinely abstain from the political struggle in any meaningful way. In short, Anarchists have a phobia of political struggle. They are extremely successful in persuading people on the left, people of conscience and progressives generally from participating fully in the political struggle in the United States. This is easily confirmed by the pathetic numbers of people who vote.
According to Time magazine, the 2014 midterm elections voter turnout reached a 72 year low and only 36.4% of eligible voters actually voted. Researchers Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page maintained that the US political system has transformed from a democracy into an oligarchy where wealthy elites control most political power. The researchers maintain
“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy,” they write, “while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
If this is true, then it is obvious that those people who control the means of production in the United States control the political process as well. The people who control the means of production in the United States, obviously, are the capitalist class, commonly referred to as the 1%.
Marx taught us and examination of the current mode of production easily reveals that market economies are anarchistic in form and content. In other words, market economies are ideologically anarchistic.
Dictionary definitions of anarchism include components such as “rejection of authority” and “absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal.” Synonyms of anarchy include “lawlessness, nihilism, disorder, chaos, mayhem, tumult, turmoil.†It should be pointed out that nihilism, particularly that form of nihilism expressed by Friedrich Nietzsche, was the dominant ideology of Nazi Germany.
Few would argue that there is no worship of the “absolute freedom of the individual” in the US today.
Few would argue that the distribution of wealth in the USA is not uneven and that the market economy of the US is not chaotic.
An examination of current social relations in the USA reveals absolute anarchy in social, intellectual and political life. Mainstream media conceals the reality of the conduct of the US government every day. Low voter turnout hands elections over to the 1% without a fight. Movies, video games and the Internet have produced a culture based on violence and chaos never before seen in the history of mankind.
Lawlessness, including police terrorism, is rampant across the nation.
The US military violates international law and terrorizes working people around the globe.
Economic warfare waged by the US ruling class creates chaos, anarchy, terror and psychological dysfunction domestically and internationally.
Bizarre behavior among humans in the USA has become the new norm. All of this is a reflection of the chaos and anarchy of the mode of production, i.e. the market economy.
In his “Letters on Tactics”, Lenin defined revolution as the passing of state power from one class to another.
People on the left in the United States give a lot of lip service to “revolution.” However, all too often people on the left equate revolution with anarchy. They don’t seem to have a clue about how to acquire state power. Of course, by playing into the hands of the anarchists, people on the left play into the hands of the capitalists.
Anarchists, because of their phobia of political struggle, routinely abstain from meaningful political activity. Abstention from political activity is abstention from the struggle to acquire state power. Abstention from political activity is therefore abstention from revolution. Abstention from revolution means a free ride for the 1%. Anarchy is therefore antithetical to revolutionary struggle.
People in the US have a choice in front of them. They can continue to worship individualism and anarchy and abdicate their political power to the 1% or they can unite, organize and fight for the interests of working people which include accessible education, healthcare, housing, legal justice and freedom from oppression, exploitation and racism in all its forms. So, working people must choose between anarchy or revolution.
Tue Jan 06, 2015 at 09:28 AM PST
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/06/1355899/-NAACP-Legal-Defense-Fund-files-a-potential-game-changer?showAll=yes
At a time when most people have given up on any semblance of justice for slain Ferguson teenager Mike Brown, Sherrilyn Ifill and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund have made what may be the biggest game changing request in the case yet.According to Missouri law, a Missouri Circuit Court Judge has the power to appoint a Special Prosecutor in any case in which a citizen has not yet been indicted and prosecutorial misconduct is alleged. The judge with jurisdiction in the case against former Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson is Maura McShane.
The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, in their open letter to McShane, makes an extremely compelling case for misconduct by St. Louis Prosecutor Bob McCullough and his staff. In the nine-page letter, Ifill and the NAACP LDF thoroughly detail three instances of misconduct. One is enough to appoint a special prosecutor.
In summary the letter details the following:
1. How prosecutors violated Missouri law and professional ethics for calling a witness they’ve since admitted they knew did not witness the shooting and was not at the scene. They not only called her once, but twice, and encouraged her to bring physical evidence on her second visit. This witness, Sandy McElroy, perjured herself over 100 times.
2. Prosecutors consistently made documented mistakes in the essential instructions they gave to the grand jurors. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell masterfully details one such mistake here.
3. Legal analysts and now an actual member of the grand jury felt strongly that Bob McCulloch and his team acted as de facto defense attorneys for Darren Wilson and that it often appeared as if Mike Brown was on trial instead of Darren Wilson.
Please read the full letter from Sherrilyn Ifill below.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/01/06/1355899/-NAACP-Legal-Defense-Fund-files-a-potential-game-changer?showAll=yes
 http://nymetrocommunistparty.org/?p=815
by Jessica Coco, PCUSA Women’s Commission
The “Broken Windows†theory of policing has shaped New York City since the 1990’s, with police under tons of pressure to make arrests and issue summonses for nonviolent offenses that aren’t even against the law – anything to get poor people and people of color out of public view, and make the city safe for business and real estate to jack up the rents and make middle- and upper-class New Yorkers feel safer.
Until now. This week, as a political ploy to put pressure on a mayor they say is their enemy, the NYPD has called off business as usual. The leading police union issued a memo telling all officers that “NO enforcement action in the form of arrests and/or summonses†is to be taken “unless absolutely necessary.â€
The result? Arrests have dropped by 90%.
Think about that. The NYPD has just let us know that 90% of the arrests they make are unnecessary. “The reported offenses they aren’t enforcing as much are [mostly] not criminal offenses: parking violations, urination in public, public intoxication, as well as some marijuana possession. Do we really want over 4,000 people a week locked up for peeing behind a dumpster?â€Â asked Marc Krupanski, a program officer at the Open Society Justice Initiative, in an article in Vice Magazine.
Our members are the people who have been hit the hardest by broken windows policing. Homeless people face harassment and ticketing and arrest on a daily basis by the NYPD. The city spends billions of dollars to criminalize and persecute and arrest and try and incarcerate the poorest of the poor – but won’t spend a dime of that on getting people housing.
So we asked our members – what should New Yorkers learn from this work stoppage?
Chris: This NYPD scare tactic is idiotic. They’ve basically just said to us “90% of the work that we do is unnecessary.†All this taxpayer money being wasted to lock someone up for a bag of weed or someone peeing behind a dumpster?
Dave: So all that crap with Broken Windows was unnecessary. That was overkill. The PBA is not the Policemen’s Benevolent Association. It’s PMA – the Policemen’s Malevolent Association.
Thirteen: I talk to cops. I talk to the brass, even. Police are not down with making bogus arrests. That’s why top cops have been quitting. Unnecessary arrests just make people mad at cops. That’s why people hate cops. When I was a kid the police knew everyone in the neighborhood. We need to get back to that model of community policing.
Scott: They can do a lot with the money they save with this. A 90% reduction in the amount taxpayers spend on incarceration could pay for a lot of public restrooms… to say nothing of housing.
Maria: They need to listen to what we have to say. They’re wasting our time in courtrooms, making us miss work, getting us logged out of shelters, and now we see how unnecessary that was.
Sidat: We need to drive home that they’re not supposed to be arresting people in the first place. This is going to end – they’re going to return to business as usual. They don’t . So we need to get the public behind us to say “OK, you’ve admitted how little of what you do is about protecting people, let’s do things differently.�
Andres: We need to hit the streets with cameras. Cop Watch. Keep them behind the law. Let them know someone is watching.
Dave: They need to apply Broken Windows to Wall Street. Everyone who steals a stapler, every banker who gets a bonus for kicking someone out of their home. Send some lawyers to jail, let some rich people feel what it feels like, and you’ll see things change pretty fast. The PBA, and individual officers, should be the ones held financially responsible for settlements of lawsuits. Having taxpayers pick up the bill for cops violating people’s rights creates no incentive on cops to behave.
Nikita: Our communities are missing so many resources. Housing, education – they need to take this money and use it in the neighborhoods they’re systematically depleting through gentrification and overpolicing, so that we can uplift ourselves.
worker |
December 27, 2014 |
11:11 pm | Action, Analysis, Cuba, Cuban Five, Economy, International, National, police terrorism |
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◠Congratulations to the Cuban patriots (the Cuban Five), the remaining three of whom were finally released from US jails for the “crime†of making the world a safer place from US imperialism (How extensive and racially and economically selective must a prison system be before we can refer to the installations as concentration camps?) All fair-minded people should rejoice at the moving reunion of these internationalists with their families and their countrymen and women!
Before we are overwhelmed by adulation for President Obama’s role in the release of the remaining Cuban Five, a fawning process that has begun in earnest, we should remind the adulators that it is bad form to praise someone for doing what he or she should have done long before. Nothing has really happened to precipitate a change in US-Cuban relations at this moment except the passing of Obama’s final national election cycle– a fact that suggests that Obama’s welcome moves are more political expediency than any serious change of heart. Those who sense faux-liberal stroking in anticipation of the forthcoming election season are probably on solid ground. The U-turn regarding policy towards Cuba demonstrated recently on the editorial pages of the New York Times also point to a strategic shift in the thinking of key elements of the US ruling class.
â— John Pilger, by way of Michael Munk’s always interesting blog, lastmarx, asks what became of Malaysian flight MH17, which crashed in the Eastern Ukraine. After the July disaster, the Western media proceeded to blame Eastern Ukrainian resistance fighters and Russia without a shred of hard evidence beyond “unnamed†Western intelligence “sources†(How do journalists acquire access to intelligence sources yet remain uncompromised?).
Despite recovering black boxes, debris and bodies, the Western investigators have been strangely silent since August. No evidence has come forth apart from Russian sources. No indictments from the notorious International Court of Justice (from which the US refused to honor its jurisdiction in 1986 despite having a permanent judge and frequently imposing jurisdiction on others). Compare this to the Western-induced hysteria surrounding earlier incidents like Korean Airlines 007, a media frenzy that demonized the Soviets for years. Even the crazed General Breedlove– Pilger calls him NATO’s “Dr. Strangelove‖ has remained relatively silent. Could it be that the facts are pointing the wrong way?
â— The 2014 Brazen Hypocrisy award goes to President Barack Obama for his two-faced appeal to the right of self defense. Esteemed Cuban blogger Manuel A. Yepe lauds research by Brandon Turbeville that recovers a statement from November 2012 by the self-righteous Peace Prize Winner. President Obama, in defense of Israeli aggression, argued: “… there is no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.†Of course this is unabashed hypocrisy for a leader who daily signs off on drone, cruise missile, and bomb attacks on Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Somalia, or Yemen, a glaring contradiction that Yepe credits Turbeville for exposing.
Certainly there are plenty of candidates for the Hypocrisy Award, most of whom nest in US seats of power: the recent sanctions imposed by a serial human rights violator (the US) against Venezuela for imaginary “human rights†violations count as first degree hypocrisy. Imagine a government that spies on ALL of its citizens, tortures foreigners, and allows militarized police forces to kill unarmed citizens punishing Venezuela and lecturing the rest of the world about good behavior.
Or consider the hypocrisy of ferreting out other countries deficient in democracy– a favorite activity of US media pundits– while never mentioning Japan, a country ruled by one party, the Liberal Democratic Party, since 1955 with less than four years of respite. Many of those dubbed “dictators†would be jealous.
And then there’s the shameless Henry Blodget, the blue-blood, consummate Wall Street insider, who has been banned for life from the securities industry for fraud. Addicted to the celebrity spotlight, Blodget regarded the claim that the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea hacked a US entertainment company as a sufficient basis for declaring the alleged hack “effectively an act of war….†Blodget’s panic arises from his concerns that the DPRK might “get into the moneyâ€: “’It’s not just they get some credit card numbers which we’ve been seeing forever. But they actually get into the money’ at large corporations and banks†(Yahoo Finance, 12-19-14).
Truly, we swim in a sea of hypocrisy.
◠But hypocrisy is only tolerated because we refuse to hold public figures and the media accountable for their statements; as Gore Vidal put it, we reside in the “United States of Amnesia.†He drew attention to an adult population narcotized by shallow entertainments and denied any sense of history or continuity. Actually, Martha Gellhorn said it much earlier (1953) when she noted the “consensual amnesia†rampant in the US.
It is wrong, however, to blame the US people for the cowardice and lack of accountability of the media and academia. We cannot blame collective ignorance on the victims when it is the product of the massive, suffocating machinery of capitalist disinformation and vulgar culture.
Imagine if we could hold all of the opinion makers and policy pundits accountable for their slavish promotion of the unprovoked invasion of Iraq and the subsequent destabilization of the entire Middle East. Imagine if we could exile them to write for the Metropolis Daily Planet until they reclaimed their integrity. Soon, we would forget the names Friedman, Krauthammer, and the other cheerleaders of imperialism, maybe even the loudmouth, Cheney. Exactly what journalistic crimes must they commit, what disasters must they endorse before their bosses and colleagues turn them out?
Similarly, the economic collapse of 2007-2008, unpredicted and unsolved by the “wise men†of the economics profession, has spawned no new thinking or rejection of the old.
Sadly, most of our public intellectuals have become courtiers and not truth seekers.
â— We must not ignore the amnesia of the US left. Forgotten is the mass euphoria over the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Virtually all of the liberal and soft left was swept away by the overwhelming Democratic Party victory, affording a two-year window to pass a whole laundry list of legislation benefiting labor, minorities, women, the elderly, undocumented and other components of the Democratic Party coalition. Except for a health care initiative that has failed to live up to anyone’s expectations other than insurance companies, none of these promises came to fruition, even to serious consideration. As the Democrats gin up for another Presidential campaign behind Hillary (after she disposes of the Quixote-like campaign of Elizabeth Warren), this miserable performance will be forgotten. With the Obama well running dry, liberal and the moderate left will drill a new Clinton well of hope. Memories are short.
â— While the signs of mass militancy are positive, most recently from the anger and activism springing from criminal police behavior, the left seems to find diversions and distractions that create speed bumps, if not detours, from clarity and united action.
The energy of the Occupy movement was welcome, but the embrace of the organizing principles of disorganization proved– once again– a damper on movement building. Seemingly, every generation must champion group therapy as an antidote to “hierarchies†and “leadership,†alleged features of the “old left,†“the establishment,†“elites†or other evils imagined by self-anointed ideological gurus.
The New Left of the sixties pioneered this posture, shattering enormous mass movements against racism and war into a thousand pieces. The shallow and idealistic emotions conjured by the words “participatory democracy†arise again and again with the same result.
◠The latest obstacle to ideological clarity and effective action is the amorphous and ideologically confounding “Sharing†Economy movement. The “New†or “Sharing†economy projects occupy two distinct poles.
At one pole are the liberal/left activists who have been shocked by the human carnage of economic crisis, but are afraid of or disillusioned with the socialist option. While many may see capitalism’s flaws, they are cowed by the enormous task of defeating and replacing it. Rather than joining Marxists, who are confident and determined to revive the fight for a world without exploitation and without rule by the rich and powerful, they propose that we simply drop out of the global economy, that we live and work outside of it. In collectively owned cooperatives, they propose an alternative to capitalism. But is it really an alternative?
Certainly there is nothing, in principle, wrong with cooperatives. Indeed, they are sometimes an answer for small-holders to improve their destiny against large capitalist enterprises. That is, they can postpone, but rarely derail the laws of capitalist development, the tendency for the large to devour the small.
But it is silly to believe that cooperatives in any way challenge capitalism as we know it today. State-monopoly capitalism– the merger of the power of the state with the largest, most economically dominant corporations– will not shudder in the face of the cooperative movement. Nor should it. If cooperatives posed any kind of threat, the mega-corporations would swat them like flies.
Instead, the New Economy (cooperative) movement does offer an alternative– an alternative to small businesses. Cooperatives, where they exist, compete against small businesses. They mesh a small-business mentality with an immature social consciousness, a program that only succeeds at the expense of those businesses marginally able to survive while leaving the rich and powerful untouched.
At best, the cooperative movement offers a safe haven for the few to hone their entrepreneurial skills in commercial combat against some of our potential allies in the anti-monopoly movement, the under-capitalized, marginal small business owner.
â— The other pole, however, is more insidious. The “sharing†economy, as exemplified by Uber and other creatively named Google-era projects, does not pretend to be anti-capitalist. While “sharing†poses as a kinder, gentler, freer capitalism, it really counts as a way for a new generation of entrepreneurs to pry open markets long dominated by well ensconced services. At the same time, this well-educated, supremely self-confident cabal have seduced many into believing that predation on these service industries is somehow “progressive.â€
In fact, Uber and the sharing model are a step back to proto-capitalism, a return to the putting-out”system, where providing the labor and resources is the responsibility of others and not the capitalist. Uber, for example, uses the human capital (drivers) and fixed capital (their cars) of its “employees†to undermine services that are capital intensive (taxis, insurance, benefits, maintenance, fuel, etc) and available to even the most disadvantaged (subsidized public transportation). Like charter schools and package-delivery services, they cherry-pick the most profitable, least risky, or least costly niches of a service and leave the rest for someone else (most often, the public sector). In that way, they most resemble the hyper-exploitative cottage industries of the pre-industrial era. Like those industries, they rely upon sweated labor and forgo all worker protections.
Of course not all those embracing the sharing model begin as predators. Many see the internet as creating new opportunities for matching people and services. But centuries of capitalism teach us that every entrepreneur afforded the opportunity of matching people with services has leaped at the opportunity to commercialize it. Elite universities and business schools have not purged that tendency from their students.
Whether it is cooperatives or the “sharing†model of entrepreneurship, those looking for answers to the rapaciousness and vulgarity of our society must look elsewhere.
We will come no closer to achieving social justice and democracy until we understand the malignancy of capitalism. There are no other diagnoses.
Zoltan Zigedy
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