If you happen to be in downtown Los Angeles and come across Skid Row, everywhere you look there is evidence of suffering from the humanitarian war crime of capitalism and homelessness. I’m reminded of the tens of thousands facing the same fate due to low wages, joblessness and rents driven up by perfectly legal exorbitant increases. If you’re not already homeless, you may be soon if this economic war against us continues to spread, like the unchecked virus enabled by capitalism.

The 7.9% inflation rate doesn’t help. The main culprits being food, rent and especially – thanks to the U.S.-NATO proxy war in Ukraine – gas. Not only that, the $16 billion COVID-relief fund was cut for this war.

But, no problem. Working-class folks, even those facing desperate circumstances, understand sacrifice for the sake of others, especially children’s lives.

The reality, however, is that our sacrifice for this war is not for children, but for the profits of those in the U.S. whose existence depends on the expansion of war and misery.

But, what about all the news reports of civilians being targeted by the Russians and that “crazy” Putin?

The first thing that occurs when plans for imperialist war are finally implemented (see Ukraine: It was all written in the Rand Corp plan 3 years ago) is the vilification of the latest targets of U.S. imperialism, and the individuals that represent those targets.

In 1915, when Britain wanted to escalate war with Germany during World War I, they launched the British cruise liner Lusitania, traveling from New York to Liverpool, England, through a declared maritime war zone. Germany had already made it very clear on numerous occasions that any British ship in that zone would be considered an enemy vessel and would be attacked. So, it was attacked and thousands died. The tragedy was used to justify the U.S. entrance into the war two years later. The New York Times prominently featured photos of those killed. The U.S. used this coverage as a primary tool for propaganda and military recruitment.

After World War I, it was exposed that the sunken Lusitania was also carrying 50 tons of ammunition. This kind of tactic is being used again to sell the current war, but first let’s get some context.

From 1990 to 1991 the Soviet Union was given assurances from the U.S. and Western European countries that an expansion of the U.S.-led anti-Soviet military alliance, NATO, would not happen — and especially not move eastward towards them (NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard). The Soviet Union in 1991 therefore unilaterally dissolved their military alliance – the Warsaw Pact. Eight years later, with no Warsaw Pact to protect them, the U.S. directed a NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia that destroyed tens of thousands of homes, roads, hospitals, crowded markets, passenger trains, and the Chinese Embassy, killing three Chinese journalists. This was followed by bombings of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and many more NATO operations on the continent of Africa in the years following.

For the last 20 years NATO has doubled its member armies, expanding eastward and surrounding Russia.

Yet, in spite of the Russian government’s repeated warnings against turning Ukraine, which borders them, into another NATO member state with possible nuclear weapons, the U.S. poured more gas on the fire. They not only orchestrated a coup in 2014 to put in an anti-Russian, pro-NATO regime, but also began sending billions of dollars in funds, weapons and training to openly Nazi battalions that are now official sections of the Ukrainian military. In February, the U.S. then pushed those Nazi forces to escalate bombings of the Donbass region against a Russian-speaking minority population.

This was the Lusitania-like provocation, by the U.S. Those in the Donbass region pleaded for help from the Russian government to save their children. Since 2014 they have endured eight years of torture and bombings, with 14,000 killed. Then in February came this increased genocidal assault by the main terrorist Nazi threat, the Azov Batallion. Russia then decided it had no choice but to answer the call of the people in the Donbass and stop an existential threat on its borders – the possibility of a U.S.-led NATO state with nuclear weapons controlled by a Nazi-led military.

This is what the U.S. government with bipartisan support has done – they’ve pushed the world into a conflict that could start World War III, gambling the futures of our children and those abroad solely for the sake of profits.

These wars are, again, eased through with stories to push our buttons of evil men and evil deeds you’re just now finding out about. We’ve been here before and a look at the history of just one “newspaper of record” shows how the media has been an essential part of the Pentagon arsenal. Take this headline in the New York Times in August 1964: “REDS DRIVEN OFF; Two Torpedo Vessels Believed Sunk in Gulf of Tonkin.” The article begins:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 4—The Defense Department announced tonight that North Vietnamese PT boats made a “deliberate attack” today on two United States destroyers patrolling international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam.

Although the story was a total lie, it served to begin the U.S.-escalated war on Vietnam. On the day it was published, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This  authorized a war on Vietnam (without a formal declaration of war), giving the President broad authority in the use of military force, which escalated by 1968 to a half-million U.S. troops occupying Vietnam. More than 2 million civilians in both North and South Vietnam were killed during the war. In addition, the use of millions of gallons of the chemical weapon Agent Orange, sprayed throughout by the U.S. military from 1961 to 1971, killed or maimed another 400,000. Some 500,000 children were born with chemical warfare-caused birth defects.

Six months before the Soviet Union intervened in Afghanistan, in 1979 the Carter Administration began funding the new “freedom fighters” – the Mujahideen, which became the Taliban – in a war against a revolutionary government that, among other progressive reforms, had established for the first time laws mandating the equality of women. The Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, overwhelmed by U.S. military armed and funded Mujahideen, requested help from the Soviet Union. The Soviets were also worried about the threat of a possible U.S.-sponsored Mujahideen regime on their border. Sound familiar? This created the endless war in Afghanistan.

Nevermind that. Quick, look over there! An evil dictator in Iraq must be stopped now!

Here’s more headlines from the “newspaper of record”: Czechs Confirm Iraqi Agent Met With Terror Ringleader; December 20, 2001: Iraqi Tells of Renovations at Sites for Chemical and Nuclear Arms; April 21, 2003: Illicit Arms Kept Till Eve of War, an Iraqi Scientist Is Said to Assert; and here’s a big one on April 24, 2003: U.S.-Led Forces Occupy Baghdad Complex Filled with Chemical Agents.

The problem with all these stories, and admitted by the New York Times in a published apology, is that none of them are true. They say it was the result of bad information with little verification. We’re just looking at the New York Times here but, you could look into the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN, or any corporate newspaper and find the same misinformation passed off as truth and accepted as such by politicians, talk-show hosts, Hollywood scripts, celebrity campaigns and most of us during whatever latest war they point our heads toward.

The reporter on that last story and many of these stories was Judith Miller and this is what Miller had to say about the numerous unchecked lies in numerous unchecked articles selling a U.S. war that killed 500,000 children: “My job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.”

In that “apology” from the editors of the Times they correctly stated that the fault was not just of the journalists reporting the story but the verification process – a process that accepted without question information lining up with the narrative of the State Department. Unfortunately, like racism, that process is very much a component of the military industrial complex.

In 1996 Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes interviewed then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright about the death of children in Iraq due to the U.S. war: “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

Albright replied calmly: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.” This, based on evidence her administration knew was a lie. One of the definitions of evil in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “something that brings sorrow, distress, or calamity.” Even evil seems too soft of a word to describe U.S. imperialism and its enablers.

Today, along with the corporate media, Congress is again playing its part in the war drive – Congress just approved $800 million more for the Ukrainian government and their Nazi battallions, which, again since it’s never mentioned, has been bombing the eastern region and committing war crimes against civilians in Lugansk and Donetsk FOR MORE THAN 8 YEARS, killing at least 14,000 civilians.

This faith in the U.S. State Department’s information comes in spite of the knowledge of contradictory news being suppressed in Ukraine. Three television stations were closed for not reporting coverage favorable to the Ukrainian government. Much information came out in Ukraine exposing the Azov Battalion when they took over hospitals, schools and apartment buildings in Mariupol that were then shown in the U.S. media as civilian buildings and not Azov Battalion outposts. Doctored and mislabeled videos and photos were prevalent during the beginning of the Russian intervention, even showing Israeli bombings and Palestinian resistance as “evidence” of Russian brutality and Ukrainian resistance.

The bombing by Nazi-led forces of the center of the city of Donetsk, killing over 20 civilians waiting at an ATM machine, was verified by various organizations in Donetsk, media outlets and independent journalists in the Donbass region. But, you never saw that report because the TV reporters and news publications in Ukraine that report those types of stories have been closed down. The journalists or activists who have reported this missile attack on civilian Donetsk, like Alexander Matyushenko from the Levitsa Association in Dnipropetrovsk (Dnipro), or the 37 other journalists detained in early March, have been jailed. In Kiev, arrests began even earlier. On Feb. 27, brothers Mikhail Kononovich and Aleksandr Kononovich, leaders of the Ukrainian Communist Youth, members of the World Federation of Democratic Youth as well as ethnic Belarusians, were seized and are being imprisoned along with members of other organizations we in the Socialist Unity Party and Struggle-La Lucha have been working with in Donbass. Last week I was communicating with someone from one of those organizations.

All of those detained are held on dubious charges with little explanation from authorities and are being denied legal representation.

The children who died in Iraq are just the tip of the iceberg of victims of U.S. and NATO wars, including the millions killed in Vietnam, Korea, Yugoslavia, Libya and Yemen. Now in Libya, because of the war by the Obama administration and destruction of civil society, slavery exists – a reality that undoubtedly is destroying the lives of children. In Yemen, the U.S. proxy war led by Saudi Arabia is now causing the starvation of millions of children, according to UN estimates.

If only those corporate editors of the media were as dedicated to exposing the war on children as they are in pushing for illegal and inhumane wars and proxy wars by the U.S., like the war in Ukraine now.

John Parker, of the Socialist Unity Party, is on the ballot as a candidate for the U.S. Senate from California in the June primary of Election 2022. He is part of the Left Unity Slate of the Peace and Freedom Party and has been endorsed by the Green Party.

I am not a Republican (if I were, these days that would make me a supporter and/or enabler of white supremacy and the ideology of fascism). 

I am also not a Democrat (a party that now mimics Republicans because it seems the only thing that matters is winning those Trump supporters in the next election).

That conservative trajectory led President Biden to chanting during his State of the Union address, that in the context of the reality of racist police murder, conjured images of lynchings and cross burnings to me – and I’m sure I’m not alone among many Black people paying attention. The chant was in opposition to the very moderate demand of taking some funds from the police. “Fund the police, Fund them, Fund them” he exclaimed as if he was preaching the gospel. And, it looked in fact like he was preaching to the choir since he got a standing ovation in the House chambers.

Biden is not worried about Black voters. He thinks we as Black people have no choice. During the last election he said if we didn’t vote for him we weren’t Black. He joins Joe Rogan in thinking he knows what it is to be Black.

His version of being Black is like being Eric Adams, the right-wing mayor from New York City who uses his African American ethnicity and willingness to push racist policing policies as a means to further his political career. Mayor Adams is now reviving the plainclothes crime units that were responsible for 31% of fatal police shootings in 2018, despite being only 6% of the police force in the city, according to a study by the Intercept.

Many will remember that in 1999 an unarmed 23-year-old Guinean immigrant and student named Amadou Diallo was also shot by four plainclothes NYC cops and killed, simply for reaching for an identification card.

Then there is Vice President Kamala Harris, another person of African ethnicity preferred by Biden, and one of the people to stand up immediately in that standing ovation for the “fund them” chant. Vice President Harris, before becoming vice president, was the top cop in California as the Attorney General — who would not allow a reform to go through that would have forced prosecutors to finally prosecute killer cops.

According to the prestigious international scientific journal, the Lancet, in a study examining fatal police violence by race and state in the U.S. from 1980–2019, the unwillingness to consistently prosecute criminal murder by police is what maintains this systemic nightmare: “Accountability and transparency in policing are lacking, as evidenced by ongoing problems with under-reporting. Police officers who kill civilians are rarely charged with a crime; Mapping Police Violence reports that in 2017, of 1,147 deaths, officers were charged with a crime in 13 cases, or 1% of the time. Police violence and racism in policing in the USA are not new or unexplained problems; they are the current manifestations of a system that was built to uphold racial hierarchy for most of the USA’s history.” [my emphasis -JP]

On the other hand, the type of Black people Biden doesn’t like would be Assata Shakur, former Black Panther who was exiled to Cuba due to a racist frameup by police. In fact, Biden’s administration has a bounty on her life. Or George Jackson, a Black Panther and political prisoner who was assassinated by prison cops in 1971. And Claudia Jones, a Black communist born in 1915 and deported from the U.S. as an adult due to her powerful activism and, like Fred Hampton, skills at uniting our class and advocating solidarity with the most oppressed.

Claudia Jones and Fred Hampton especially understood that real solidarity with the oppressed is only possible when our working class has a scientific understanding of how this capitalist society works. In considering the entities of capitalism, for example, the military and police – what are their functions in keeping capitalism alive. For those answers they also studied another revolutionary – Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, a revolution that allowed, for the first time, working people – our class – to take control over the factories, land and machinery to utilize them for their benefit. And, it’s a good thing because it was the only country capable of stopping Nazi Germany during World War II because of its because of its non-privatized and centralized method of production and its anti-fascist ideology.

But before the 1917 Bolshevik revolution could happen, it would take the working people, agricultural workers and unemployed, to understand who were their friends and allies and who were their enemies. Lenin understood that the legislators, military and police were in place to protect the capitalist system of exploitation by any means and at all costs, especially including the taking of life, whether by the denial of basic social services or through a bullet. This is why the police keep us in fear and target the most exploited as the system pushes us further into poverty.

That right arm of capitalism – the police who protect the haves from the have nots – will never be negotiated or voted away as long as capitalism exists, unless the ruling class is forced to disband them by a mightier force than their cops and military.

We have the potential to become that force by understanding our power and ability to make their system come to a halt. There are many more of us than there are of them. And, it’s only our labor that is fundamental to the creation of their wealth – we just need unity and solidarity.

We also need to understand that our Black, Brown and Indigenous communities must have the right to banish these cops from our neighborhoods and the right to the resources to train and develop our own community entities of safety and protection. We must do more than defund – WE MUST DISARM AND DISBAND the police.

If not, we will be sentenced to hearing the endless nonsense from President Biden and others as solutions, which actually encourage more police terror and murder – so more Amadou Diallo tragedies will occur. By the way, Diallo’s killers, the four cops, remain free and after the incident were even offered their jobs back.

And, on March 2, the day after President Joe Biden delivered that State of the Union speech, Thomas Siderio, a 12-year-old boy was shot and killed by Philadelphia police.

Don’t give Biden and the enablers of genocide a pass – let’s build a militant movement with a clear understanding of what’s needed and the dedication to building real working-class solidarity, with our friends and allies – not our enemies.

John Parker, of the Socialist Unity Party, is on the ballot as a candidate for the U.S. Senate from California in the June primary of Election 2022. He is part of the Left Unity Slate of the Peace and Freedom Party and has been endorsed by the Green Party.

SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2022 AT 1 PM – 4 PM
In the spirit of Dr. King: STOP THE WAR LIES
Herald Square, 34th St. & Broadway, NYC

Jeff Bezos’ $500 million yacht was a hot news item back in February. The ship was so large that in order to move it from a Dutch shipyard a bridge in Rotterdam would have to be disassembled.

That obscene display of wealth by the union-busting Amazon boss could easily have built housing for over a thousand homeless families. Yet the media is now silent about Bezos’ yacht.

Instead the internet is buzzing about yachts belonging to Russian billionaires being seized. Why are rich Russian scoundrels called “oligarchs” while U.S. billionaires are treated like movie stars?

The different treatment even extends to dictionaries. The Oxford dictionary featured by the Google search engine gives this definition for oligarch: “(especially in Russia) a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence.”

Who has more political influence than U.S. billionaires? They control the U.S. government from the top to bottom.

They often run for office themselves like the former money bags mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg. Supreme Court justices are groomed in their corporate law firms and Ivy League law schools.

The wealthy and powerful have been running the U.S. since before 1776. Nearly three out of four signers of the Declaration of Independence owned enslaved Africans.

The U.S. Constitution was largely written by those who had a financial interest in the government taking over the debts of the states. This was shown by historian Charles Beard in “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.” 

Red, white and blue oligarchs are immensely richer than the Russian variety. The 400 richest U.S. billionaires last year had a total wealth of $4.5 trillion.

That’s 12 times as much as the $375 billion stash of Russia’s billionaires. 

Wall Street’s empire controls vast areas that the Roman emperors never even knew existed. The U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet threatens China while throttling the Pacific Ocean like it’s Lake Michigan. 

Fortunes are theft

The French novelist Balzac allegedly wrote that “behind every great fortune lies a great crime.” Gustavus Myers wanted to see if that was true.  

Apologists for the super rich claimed that they got their dough honestly by hard work and smarts. Myers found otherwise in his “History of the Great American Fortunes,” published a century ago.

U.S. tycoons got to the top of the heap not only from slavery, child labor, low wages, broken strikes and dangerous working conditions. Myers’ investigation proved that just as crucial for the captains of industry was breaking laws and stealing from other capitalists.

John D. Rockefeller ― the founder of Big Oil who became the world’s first billionaire ― had his brother bomb a rival oil refinery in Buffalo, New York. 

The Astors become the hemisphere’s biggest slumlords by taking the profits stolen from Indigenous nations in the fur trade and investing it in New York City real estate. Also necessary was bribing Michigan territorial governor Lewis Cass. New York city council members were paid off in a waterfront land grab.

A whole series of U.S. billionaires are war profiteers. The Du Ponts’ fortune hit the big time with World War I. They used the profits to buy up General Motors.  

In the years leading up to his presidency, Donald Trump was so tied in to organized crime that the state of New Jersey refused at first to give him a gambling license.

The Hearst family’s media fortune includes the San Francisco Chronicle, 23 other newspapers, dozens of TV stations and ESPN, which is jointly owned with Disney. These outlets attack Russia and ignore the neo-Nazi gangs in Ukraine that function like a Ku Klux Klan.

According to “Citizen Hearst,” by W. A. Swanberg, the Hearst riches began before the U.S. Civil War in a Missouri lead mine. George Hearst didn’t hire miners; he bought miners who were enslaved Africans.

If an honest title search was conducted into the origins of the biggest fortunes it would find that they were based on theft. It’s tens of millions of unpaid and underpaid workers who actually produced their wealth.

Birth of the oligarchs

Karl Marx pointed out that it was the African Holocaust and the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas that jumpstarted the capitalist world market. He described capitalism’s birth as “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” 

The origin of the Russian billionaires is much more recent. It was the U.S. capitalist government that’s responsible. The Pentagon spent at least $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons aimed at the Soviet Union.

Under this unrelenting pressure, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev threw in the towel. The door was open for overthrowing socialism. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund demanded the privatization of the industries that had been built by the working class.

Russian oligarchs never would have been able to steal trillions of dollars of socialist property without Boris Yeltsin’s assault on the Congress of People’s Deputies. Hundreds of people were killed there in October 1993. 

The U.S. media either applauded the massacre or were silent about it. Their attitude was much the same about the bloody U.S. wars against Panama, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and Yemen.

Yet we’re supposed to believe them when they tell us the Russian Federation is committing war crimes in Ukraine.

The 1993 massacre allowed a fire sale of Soviet assets that were gobbled up by the new Russian tycoons. One of the reasons the wealthy hate Belarus is that it was the only former Soviet Republic that didn’t give away the bulk of its nationalized property.

The Russian billionaires have invested hundreds of billions in London and New York City money markets. This flight of capital helped prop up the U.S. dollar and British pound. 

The oligarchs in the former Soviet Republics are justly hated by the poor and working people there. The working class there will have to deal with them like the workers did in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

We have our own oligarchs to deal with. They own half the earth and are the enemies of humankind.

Don’t let our struggle against racism and poverty be derailed by a war drive against Russia.

On March 3, the Department of Homeland Security designated Ukraine for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 18 months. 

What is Temporary Protected Status?

TPS gives exemption from deportation, eligibility to apply for work authorization, and the possibility to be given authorization to travel outside the U.S. While TPS is not directly a path to legal residency or citizenship, it does not prevent you from filing for residency or citizenship. 

The Department of Homeland Security decides what countries are eligible for Temporary Protected Status. They say they base their decision on what they call “temporary conditions” – an ongoing armed conflict or an environmental disaster, for example. 

So is Ukraine being granted TPS a bad thing?

Of course not. The U.S. and NATO engaged in conflict with Russia through Ukraine. The least they could do is offer Ukrainians some measure of safe passage. (Of course, leave it to the fascist elements of the Ukrainian military and police to halt, harass, and murder non-white, non-Christian refugees at the border.) 

What’s the problem then?

At issue is the double standard upheld by U.S. imperialism. In a better world, migrants and refugees would not need to rely on whether their country is eligible for Temporary Protected Status – we could travel and begin a path to citizenship anywhere in the world, for any reason. After all, multinational corporations have that freedom now. 

Further, the countries currently designated for TPS are countries either directly or indirectly under attack by U.S. imperialism. Myanmar, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen are on the list of eligible countries.

The U.S. military, via AFRICOM, occupies and bombs Somalia, for example. 

Somalia, Myanmar, Nicaragua, South Sudan, Venezuela and Yemen are under the attack of U.S. sanctions, that is, economic warfare. 

Saudi Arabia, with the help of U.S. funding and arms, bombs Yemen regularly. El Salvador is still struggling decades after the U.S.-backed coup. And, of course, Syria has been the target of a U.S. proxy war campaign for nearly a decade. And so on and so on. 

Meanwhile, there are still plenty of nations either under attack or reeling from intervention by the U.S., whose people now struggle tooth-and-nail to be able to live in the U.S., the nation that caused their displacement in the first place. 

Undocumented students and workers have led numerous struggles for extending and maintaining TPS, for the DREAM Act, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), in many cases successfully. Migrants from all over the world fight to claim asylum, being forced to prove to the same system that displaced them that they qualify for asylum. Even Iraqis and Afghans, promised a life in the U.S. in exchange for military cooperation, have to prove their case.

That Ukraine has gained Temporary Protected Status, after having its fascist coup and fascist military and police being backed and funded by the United States, is yet another page in the book against U.S. imperialism. 

El pasado 14 de marzo, las televisoras boricuas publicaron un corto mensaje pre grabado del gobernador Pierluisi donde anunciaba con bombos y platillos una Nueva Era para Puerto Rico. Supuestamente ya no estamos en quiebra y se abre ¡Una era de prosperidad!

Eso, porque el próximo día se cumpliría el plazo para la implementación del Plan de Ajuste de la Deuda – ilegal y odiosa  – impuesto por el Congreso estadounidense a través de su Junta de control Fiscal.

Tanto el ejecutivo como la legislatura hicieron todo lo posible para desoír los reclamos del pueblo y obedecieron ciegamente a la JCF y ese 15 de marzo comenzó a regir la prioridad de pagarle a los bonistas mucho más de lo que habían pagado inicialmente por los bonos, antes que cubrir las necesidades del pueblo. 

Comenzó la destrucción del país: comenzó el aumento masivo en el costo de vida que ya de por sí es insostenible. Los recortes en programas que benefician a las personas con más desventajas, la reducción de pensiones, como por ejemplo del magisterio que han llevado a que 2,800 educadores se retiren ahora para poder conservar su jubilación, porque de lo contrario vivirían en una miseria absoluta después de 30 años de servicio al país. 

Decenas de los 78 municipios existentes que son quienes ofrecen los servicios a su población en situaciones de emergencia podrían cerrar. Hasta la Escuela pública de Medicina – en medio de una pandemia – perdería su acreditación por los recortes tan profundos que se la ha impuesto. 

Por eso aquí no queda más que ir contra el gobierno y sus lacayos y contra la dominación yanki.

Desde Puerto Rico, para Radio Clarín de Colombia, les habló Berta Joubert-Ceci

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 30, 2022 AT 5 PM
Land Day march to #DefundRacism and #DefendPalestine
60 E 42nd St, New York

Press TV
https://www.urmedium.com/c/presstv/104503

John Parker responds on Press TV in a report on the racist police attack in New Jersey. Parker, of the Socialist Unity Party, is on the ballot as a candidate for U.S. Senate from California in the June primary of Election 2022. He is part of the Left Unity Slate of the Peace and Freedom Party and has been endorsed by the Green Party.

March 2, the day after President Joe Biden delivered the State of the Union speech, 12-year-old Thomas Siderio was shot and killed by Philadelphia police officers.

Investigators say that a bullet was fired into an unmarked police vehicle with four undercover police officers inside. Two officers got out of the car and fired at Siderio. One chased him, then shot him in the back while he was running away. 

The Philadelphia police commissioner said the officer who killed Siderio will be fired at the end of his 30-day suspension due to violations of the “use of force policy” directive that prohibits shooting someone who is fleeing and not pointing a gun at the officer. The police say it is unknown who fired at the police car. News reports say the police suspect it was one of two young men they were following, not Siderio.

The Family and Friends of Siderio mourned the loss days after he was shot and killed by police. They are confused and looking for answers. Siderio’s former foster mom said, “I feel that I failed him, I admit it; we tried. I love him to death; and I will always miss him.”  His biological mom hired a high-powered law firm to take his case.

President Biden in his speech, recounted his recent visit to the New York City Police Department days after the funerals of two police officers. 

He went on to claim that the Justice Department is assuring police accountability, requiring body cameras, banning the choke hold, and restricting no-knock warrants. That’s what they say. But most significantly, Biden nearly led a chant of “Fund the police, fund them, fund them.” 

Biden added that the $350 billion tax provided under his “American Rescue Plan” is to be used for cities, states, and counties “to hire more police.”

This statement drew much applause and a standing ovation from the privileged audience present listening to Biden’s speech in Washington, D.C.  Vice President Kamala Harris and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi stood in full view behind Biden.

Workers want change

How do the workers in the U.S., who pay more than their fair share of taxes, react to Biden’s statement? Workers want to change policing by minimizing the presence and contact with armed, militarized police in our states, cities, counties and communities. Workers — employed and unemployed — in Black, Brown, and poor communities are calling for community control of policing. They want tax dollars to fund livable wages, childcare, schools, college education, housing, physical and mental health care, and action on climate change. They want a real response to the economic juggernaut resulting from the pandemic and the U.S. fueling war against Russia.

How did the workers respond when Biden said, “Let’s not abandon our streets and choose between safety and equal justice? Let’s come together.”

Coming together is what workers are doing. Employed and unemployed workers are fighting, protesting in the streets against violence and for equal justice, peacefully in solidarity. Yet, they are being met with armed police, tear gas, pellet bullets, dogs, horses, and armored police vans.

The movement for justice and against racist police violence has never been about causing harm or committing violent acts against police and the capitalists. Republicans and Democrats know this. It is about safety on both sides. It is not a competition to see who is killing more people — police or civilians.

How many youths age 17 and under were killed by the police from 2015 to present? According to the Washington Post database “Killed by the Police,” some 122 youths age 17 and under were shot by the police between 2015 and 2022; of that, 31 were unarmed or in possession of a toy gun. That’s an average of 17 youths per year.

The police must be placed at a higher standard because people expect the police to be there to protect and serve. The police, like an army, are trained professionals who should know the difference between a taser and a gun, who should have knowledge of the laws and abide by them, and should not be threatening if they must pull you over for a violation.

Many people at home or in public call 911 when they sense danger; some feel a bit safer when there is a police station or noticeable police officers patrolling the streets of their community. However, for many in Black and Brown communities the opposite is felt. Some seek police to handle stressful domestic disputes or ask the police for guidance when lost. Many in Black and Brown communities seek the police only when things have reached the point of extreme desperation, as they are unsure of the police response. And when the police fail them, they all realize that the police reflect the racist, oppressive, and violent system we live in.

Many people believe that individual police officers are good, but there are a few that poison the whole criminal justice system. Police brutality and the disrespectful, dehumanizing treatment of oppressed communities is a daily occurrence that’s not restricted to just a few. Even if it were only a few, the brutality and abuse is so prevalent that all police are aware of its occurrence but refuse to act to stop it or even report it. The few who have spoken out found themselves fired from the force. So the remaining police are complicit, whether they participate directly in the behavior or not.

George Zimmerman, the vigilante who killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, believed he was providing a needed service to his neighborhood. So did the two vigilantes, Gregory McMichael and Travis McMichael, who killed 25-year-old Ahmaud Albery while William Bryan recorded the fatal shooting. The McMichaels reported the murder; Bryan turned in the video footage and was sent home, no arrests made. Two months later a local attorney published Bryan’s video and it went viral. The McMichaels were arrested and Bryan was arrested shortly after. If this is the way it works for non-police, imagine what the racist police officers get away with daily. The frequency of police murders and the intense racist, corrupt criminal justice system makes it evident that the whole criminal justice system needs to go.

The greatest purveyor of violence

The words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. are as true today as they were when he said them 55 years ago: “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.”

The primary role of the police is to serve the rich and protect their private property. The hundreds of thousands participating in protests nationwide are working hard to change this. What the protesters must realize is that only a revolution will change this criminal justice system … a socialist revolution.

The solution to crime prevention is not to “fund, fund, fund” the police, but to abolish the police and let working people — especially those in the oppressed communities most targeted by police — be empowered to create their own methods of safety in their communities, that reject racism and respect the right to life and human dignity. A better solution would be to fund movements for racial justice, equality, and a world where human needs are valued more than the private property of the rich.

Every day younger activists are reading and studying socialism. This is a good thing.