Murderous Cops, Liberal Snake Oil, & Revolutionary Solutions (Part 1)

Please also read Part 1 Containing the following sections:
The Murder of Eric Garner & the Arrest of Ramsey Orta
The Murder of Michael Brown
Pattern of Systemic Injustice and Labor Action to Stop It
Patterns of Racist & Class Based Police Murder
at:
Murderous Cops, Liberal Snake Oil, & Revolutionary Solutions (Part 1)
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2015/01/11/18766730.php

[Photos: Fullerton, California homeless man named Kelly Thomas who was beaten to death by police as he pleaded for his life.]

Murderous Cops, Liberal Snake Oil, & Revolutionary Solutions
(Part 2)
by Steven Argue

Homeless People’s Lives Matter

In addition to racial injustices, extremely poor people, especially homeless people, are also routinely abused and murdered by police forces with impunity. One example is that of Kelly Thomas.

In Fullerton, California in 2011 a homeless man named Kelly Thomas was beaten to death by police as he pleaded for his life and police bragged of smashing his face in. Like Eric Garner, he had no weapons and was begging for his life as he was murdered by police on camera. The entire murder was caught on a city surveillance camera and audio was supplied by recording devices worn by police.

Kelly Thomas had a record of being harassed by the police for “crimes” like jay-walking, sleeping, and loitering. Kelly Thomas suffered from schizophrenia, had trouble taking care of himself, and at the time of his murder had a disheveled look that would make people think he was probably homeless. The night police gave him the beating that killed him, he had committed no crime. Without any provocation, Officer Manny Ramos put on latex gloves saying as he did it, "Now you see my fists?" To which Kelly Thomas responded, "Yeah, what about them?" Manos replied, "They are getting ready to fuck you up." Officer Manuel Ramos, Officer Jay Cicinelli, and Officer Joseph Wolfe then proceeded to beat Kelly Thomas to death with fists, clubs, and electric shocks. As these cops murdered Kelly Thomas, the suffering man cried with pleas of dad help me they’re killing me 31 times. He said he was “sorry” 15 times even though he had nothing to be sorry for. He asked God to help him 26 times. He said he couldn’t breathe and repeatedly respectfully begged for his life saying “sir please” over and over again.

Despite this clear case of cold blooded murder, on January 13th, 2014, Officer Ramos and Officer Cicilli were acquitted of all crimes charged against them. The District Attorney then dropped the charges against Officer Wolfe as well. Cathy Thomas, Kelly Thomas’s mother, responded saying:

“I guess it’s legal to go out and kill. It breaks my heart. Part of me died that night with Kelly, part of me died that night, part of me died in court. I feel dead inside. They got away with murdering my son.”

Defense attorney John Barnett, however, may have been telling more truth than many people would like to recognize when he said, “These peace officers were doing their jobs. They were operating as they were trained.” The capitalist courts agreed and found no wrong doing on the part of the three murderous cops who beat Kelly Thomas to death. Like almost all police murders, the cops got away with what they did.

Vigilante beatings and murders against homeless people are common as well. In Atlanta, on December 11th, 2014 the police reported that two separate incidents of homeless Black men murdered in their sleep were carried out with the same gun. Similarly, Tai Lam, a 63 year-old disabled Asian American man in leg braces, was beaten to death by three people
for being homeless in San Francisco on November 23rd, 2014.

Millions of people are homeless in the United States every year and homelessness was estimated to have gone up by 12% in 2008 after the capitalist collapse of 2007. According to the National Center on Family Homelessness in 2009, 1.5 million children experience homelessness in the United States every year.

Poverty, hunger, high rent, and homelessness are rampant in the U.S., one of the richest countries in the world. Yet, instead of working to resolve these problems, local governments pass laws against homeless people criminalizing everything from sleep to sitting down or covering up with a blanket to even arresting people for feeding the hungry. These laws are on the increase with one particularly bad example being a 119% increase between 2011 and 2014 of city bans on people sleeping in vehicles. This was reported to the United Nations by the National Law Center on Poverty and Homelessness. It is this kind of official treatment of the most vulnerable people, as a scourge to be gotten rid of, that helps set the stage for vigilante and police terror against homeless people. Further creating this violent atmosphere is the generalized impunity with which police carry out brutality and murder.

Revolutionary socialists oppose all of this anti-homeless oppression while we also fight for an end to homelessness. People are homeless in the United States for four major reasons: high rent, low wages, unemployment, and a lack of adequate or appropriate care for people disabled in various ways.

There is plenty of housing in the United States, but it will take the nationalization of the blood sucking capitalist banks a give foreclosed housing back to the poor who need it. Redistributing housing that has been foreclosed on by the banksters will go a long way towards resolving homelessness. Likewise, the socialist revolution will expropriate greedy landlords and set rent at rates no higher than 10% of a person’s income, as has been done in revolutionary Cuba. Unemployment, an additional cause of homelessness besides high rent in the United States, will easily be eliminated through a planned socialist economy that produces for human need instead of for profit.

While high rent and low wages are major causes of homelessness, mental illness plays a role as well. Numerous studies have put the number of homeless people suffering with mental illness at around 30%. This, however, does not establish cause and effect, because the severe mistreatment people suffer while being homeless is a cause of mental illness. In fact, a study by Dr. Guy Johnson and Prof. Chris Chamberlain found that only 15% of people were mentally when they first became homeless, and 16% developed mental illness while on the street. That’s over half of the people suffering mental illness developing that problem while being homeless. Despite these discrepancies, mental illness is still an important cause of homelessness, making people less capable of taking care of themselves.

An additional cause of mental illness is the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industrial complex. The massive drugging of people with harmful and addictive psychiatric medications has been shown to prolong and exacerbate mental illness. Nigeria, for instance, with far less mental health care and far fewer drug treatments prescribed for schizophrenia, has been shown to have a significantly higher recovery rate from that brain disorder than the United States. This and other studies have pointed to the fact that many psychiatric medications not only don’t help, but that they are in fact harmful. One may be inclined to think that these drugs are helpful due witnessing people acting out when they are “off their meds”. Yet, what people are often observing are actually the effects of withdrawals from highly addictive drugs that have powerful impacts on the mind, not an authentic indication of what a person would be like without their psychiatric medication.

The pharmaceutical industry is politically powerful and makes sure that the FDA is stacked with industry representatives. One measure that is needed to resolve this problem is the nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry, taking the profit out of medicine and taking the corruption out of FDA approval of profitable drugs. This will help establish a science based approach to drug approval rather than the current greed based approach which often ignores all scientific evidence. This will not resolve all mental health issues for all people, but it will be an important step in the right direction.

Increased forced psychiatric drugging is another step in the wrong direction that is presently taking place, however. For many people diagnosed with mental illness to retain housing under housing support programs, they must submit to taking prescribed psychiatric medications. Judges are also allowed to order non-violent offenders to take psychiatric medications in most states. Police then can become involved in forcing people to take medications that harm their minds and body and cause early death. This is another institutionalized form of violence and torture being carried out by the police and the capitalist state. Similarly, the most widespread form of child abuse in the United States today is the drugging of children with psychiatric drugs. One in 13 children in the United States is taking psychiatric medications. These drugs, which include extremely powerful speed, are setting up many children for lives where they suffer from drug addiction either in the form of illicit drugs or continued legal prescriptions and often forced medication on harmful pharmaceutical drugs.

Liberal solutions presented in the wake of the beating death of Kelly Thomas included more psychiatric care and sensitivity training for cops. Psychiatric care, however, as it is currently set up in capitalist America, is part of the problem. In addition, no amount of sensitivity training will help cops who beat a man to death as he begs for mercy as was done to Kelly Thomas. It is the capitalist state that allows the cops to get away with murder. What is needed instead is the unconditional housing of every single person and the jailing of killer cops. Rather than the U.S. spend trillions of dollars on imperialist wars to subjugate the world and billions of dollars to militarize U.S. police forces, better social measures could be established to care for people unable to care for themselves, but this will never be the priority as long as the two parties of blood sucking capitalists, the Democrats and Republicans, hold power in the United States.

Democrats Help Cause the Problem, Plead For Patience

Just after Michael Brown was murdered, Ferguson Mayor James Knowles urged people to be patient and to "have faith in the process". Familiar with how the criminal justice system works; African Americans in Ferguson were not willing to patiently stand beside as another racist police murder was white-washed by the capitalist state. The people knew better and protested for weeks. The police responded with brutality which included tear gas, the aiming of high powered deadly weapons directly at unarmed protesters and journalists, the firing of so-called non-lethal ammunition at protesters, and large numbers of arrests. The $3 billion that Obama’s Department of Homeland Security has spent per year on militarizing local police forces was seen in action as heavily armed cops entered the streets threatening to kill protesters and journalists. This included weapons pointed from fully armored Lenco BearCat vehicles. Prominent activists from around the country then joined the Ferguson protests, demanding both justice for Michael Brown and the right to protest in the United States.

Besides months of legal protest, Ferguson’s brutal and repressive police also inspired looting and vandalism of businesses. In addition, the group Anonymous also carried out direct internet action against the Ferguson city government including police computers as retaliation for the government’s repressive response to protesters.

It was the lack of silence in Ferguson to the police murder of Michael Brown that brought the attention of politicians and the corporate media. The same politicians and pundits who counsel patience when the people rise up are the ones who are silent when there is no uprising and the mainstream media pays no attention.

The second execution of Michael Brown occurred on November 24th, 2014 when a grand jury decided not to indict Officer Darren Wilson. Likewise, the second execution of Eric Garner occurred on December 3rd, 2014 when a grand jury decided not to indict Officer Daniel Pantaleo either. Prior to these decisions and the unrest they produced, the government was already preparing for war. Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, a Democrat, had already called a state of emergency and mobilized the National Guard on November 17th. The Ku Klux Klan, emboldened by racist government actions and statements, issued their own death threats against protesters.

Missouri Governor Jay Nixon’s mobilization of the National Guard against the African American community in Ferguson is not his first racist action. As Missouri Attorney General in 1999, he successfully fought against the state’s desegregation program in court, temporarily ending the state’s bussing program for desegregation. For many anti-racists, bussing has been seen as an important element for ending separate and unequal schooling for African American children in the United States. Jay Nixon’s stand against desegregation won him the title of Missouri’s George Wallace and he was protested by the NAACP and others for that act. It was Alabama’s Governor George Wallace (also a Democrat) who famously declared his intention to fight against desegregation at his inaugural address with the words, "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw a line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever!"

As is typical of racists, Governor Jay Nixon is anti-union as well. Currently, Jay Nixon is fighting against the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Council 72 which is asking for a modest raise for in-home health workers. This raise would be from $8.60 an hour to $10.15 an hour. This modest raise is needed both to aid the survival of underpaid workers and for the survival of the disabled, elderly, and dying people who need better pay to retain good workers.

Governor Jay Nixon is also a firm defender of the death penalty and executed 10 people in 2014 alone. This almost ties Democrat Nixon’s 10 executions in Missouri with Republican Rick Perry’s 11 executions Texas in the year 2014. Socialist revolutionaries, as opposed to Democrats like Jay Nixon, have no faith in this country’s racist cops, district attorneys, and courts in ever finding out who is guilty of a crime. There is no justice in the capitalist courts in part because cops and the wealthy are already represented by the prosecutors and judges. In addition, it is wealthy people who can afford proper representation and experts to properly challenge an unjust criminal charge. Innocent poor and working class people are routinely railroaded into prison and / or execution. For working class and poor Blacks, Chicanos, Native Americans, and Puerto Ricans, these injustices are multiplied in court by the racist prejudices of judges, attorneys, and jurors. To trust that system to decide who should live and who should die would seem an obscene proposition fit only for horror movies, except it is also the brutal reality of the United States today. Meanwhile, murderous cops, on the front line of defending the class and race injustices of the United States, are almost always above the law.

In Ferguson, Missouri as in New York, the grand juries decided that it was within the rights of the police to murder unarmed Black men. In Missouri, it was decided police could gun down an unarmed Black man with his arms up in the air. In New York, it was ruled legal to choke an unarmed Black man to death who is laying on the ground. These decisions were on the level of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dred Scot decision of 1857 that found that Black men have “no rights that a white man is bound to respect.” Not even the right to breathe or surrender without being shot or choked to death.

With these decisions, the protests that erupted when the shooting first happened returned to Ferguson and New York and spread across the United States and then the world. For the oppressed and brutalized people of Ferguson, the grand jury ruling was unacceptable. People took to the streets demanding an end to police murders with impunity and, just after the ruling, were attacked by police violence. Against the unarmed protesters in Ferguson, police used tear gas, flash grenades (causing injury), and carried out large numbers of arrests. In addition to militarized police, Governor Nixon increased the National Guard deployment to 2,200 troops occupying Ferguson.

In Ferguson, some wealth was redistributed through “looting”, but this was nowhere near what has been carried out by the ruling class with their billions in government bailouts to the wealthiest financial capitalists. Difference was that this was looting where poor people grabbed a few things rather than the looting of the national treasury by the banksters with the help of their representatives in the Democrat and Republican parties. The main problem revolutionary socialists have with the wealth redistribution in Ferguson is that its scale was far too small. We fight for a proletarian socialist revolution that will redistribute all of the wealth of the capitalist class without compensation. As a more effective intermediary step than looting, we will redistribute far more of the wealth of the capitalist class by resurrecting the fighting unions we had in the United States in the 1930s when union struggles were being led by Trotskyists, left socialists, and Moscow line Communists.

In Ferguson, arson also took place against police cars, other vehicles, and a good number of commercial businesses. There are some who are claiming that this was a false flag operation, that the arson was started by the police in order to “justify” the heavy handed response of the police. This motive has several holes in it, but more importantly, the video evidence that has been circulated supposedly showing a police SWAT team lighting a car on fire does not convincingly show anything like what is being claimed. The sound of the explosion in the video actually seems to come from the burning building across the street. The supposed “explosion” in the car looks more like flashlight light and reflections than an explosion. In addition, had the cop placed a flash bang grenade into the car at such a short distance, it would have caused injury and potentially blown his hand off. I haven’t seen much evidence of who actually burned up Ferguson, but there is nothing convincing about interpretations of that video and claims that it is evidence of police lighting a car on fire. Had the police actually carried out widespread arson, more evidence would probably be available and both business owners and insurance companies, who actually do have some considerable power, would be demanding immediate justice.

Far more likely than a police false flag operation, arson was probably carried out in retaliation against police cars and the businesses of the capitalist class whose government has declared open hunting season on young Black men. Obama said he had no sympathy for those who were carrying out “violence” in Ferguson, but by that he was not talking about the murderous cops. Instead, Obama was talking about protesters who committed property damage. Obama is wrong. Property damage is not violence. Killing young Black men, however, is. Obama also invoked the name of Michael Brown’s family as calling for calm. Yet, in reality, when the grand jury’s obscene decision was handed down, Michael Brown’s step father, Louis Brown, told gathered protesters to “Burn this motherfucker down!”

Even Martin Luther King Junior, who argued against rioting, recognized that “a riot is the argument of the unheard”. What Martin Luther King Junior did not recognize, however, is that politics only at its lowest level is actually an “argument”. It is an argument on that level to convince Blacks, people of color, poor people, and the working class in general to take action. Beyond that, proletarian politics is a struggle for power. Martin Luther King Jr., on the other hand, saw politics as an argument with the ruling white liberal Democrats he supported to get them to see the moral justice of taking action against white supremacist segregation and terror in the south. Yet, the capitalist Democrat and Republican parties, and the ruling capitalist class they represent, are not persuaded by moral arguments. They never have been and never will be. They are persuaded by actions and organization that threaten their profit margin or power.

Where Martin Luther King Jr’s tactics were somewhat successful were where they involved disruptions of business as usual and hit businesses in their pocket books. His heroic mass mobilizations in the face of police clubs, police dogs, fire hoses, and police and KKK murders also helped build working class and student sympathy to higher levels of struggle. Many of King’s initial successes in the 1950s were, however, met by a wave of KKK and police terror across the south. Had it not been for armed self-defense, Martin Luther King Jr's tactics would have failed.

For the Right of Armed Self-Defense

Where the tactics of Malcolm X, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, and Robert F. Williams were most successful was in the fact that they were armed both as a means of self-defense and as a threat of higher levels of action if the government and the KKK did not back down. Regarding the Deacons, Stokely Carmichael wrote, “Here is a group which realized that the ‘law’ and law enforcement agencies would not protect people, so they had to do it themselves...The Deacons and all other blacks who resort to self-defense represent a simple answer to a simple question: what man would not defend his family and home from attack?” The Deacons provided armed protection for the Civil Rights movement, including for the brave yet naïve Gandhian pacifist freedom riders from the north who were part of the 1964 Freedom Summer project, the 1966 March Against Fear, and protected Martin Luther King Jr. himself. The armed defense set up at the March Against Fear was carried out under an agreement from Martin Luther King Jr. himself.

By 1965, the Deacons for Defense and Justice had 65 armed chapters defending Black people and confronting the Klan across the south and one chapter in Chicago, Illinois. Chapters carried out patrols. Arms would be concealed by day and carried openly at night to discourage Klan attacks. Flyers were left by maids and nannies at white homes warning that anyone caught burning crosses on Black people’s lawns would be killed. Under the protection of the Deacons from the terror of the KKK and police, numbers of non-violent protesters rapidly grew. In Jonesboro, Louisiana cops ordered an end to a fire hose attack on Black student protesters after 4 Deacons calmly emerged from a car and loaded their rifles. Armed self-defense had ended a violent attack by law enforcement. In Bogalusa, Louisiana the terror of white racist lynch mobs operated in full daylight until racists were shot in firefights between Deacons and the Klan. As a result of armed self-defense, Klan activity was then driven into the cover of darkness in Bogalusa and Louisiana’s segregationist governor gave into the demands of the civil rights movement.

Besides playing a critical role in defeating police and KKK terror and Jim Crow segregation in the south, armed self-defense has also played an important role in the labor movement. This includes the leadership of the multiracial Mississippi Woodworkers Union who demanded in 1965 that factory management "treat the members of the Negro race exactly the same as the members of the white race." As a result, one of the union leaders, Ottis Mathews, was abducted at gunpoint and tortured by the Ku Klux Klan. Local police, who were most likely working with the KKK as they were all across the south, claimed they couldn’t uncover anything about the incident. The union responded by taking an ad out in the local newspaper declaring, "Our members have been advised to arm themselves against a future occurrence of violence," further warning the KKK that any effort to impede their travel on public roads would be “met by death.” In this manner, armed workers of a multiracial union also played a role in effectively fighting back against the racist and anti-union terror of the KKK and police.

The United States has a long history of government and vigilante massacres of workers in the United States. One of these was the 1914 Ludlow, Colorado massacre of 21 men, women, and children as terror against a union organizing drive of mine workers.

Bourgeois falsifications distort history and deny the importance of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, but their confrontations with the KKK and local white supremacist governments brought victories. This eventually put enough fear into the capitalist ruling class that President Johnson was finally pushed to destroy the power of the KKK and used federal troops to enforce desegregation orders. Johnson was completely wedded to the white supremacist power structure, but he wasn’t stupid; he saw the revolutionary potential of armed Black proletarian power rising in the south. Johnson took action rather than allow an armed Black working class to further mobilize and smash the terror of racist cops and the KKK, which would have built a stronger independent Black militant leadership in the process. Instead, once pushed by that alternative, Johnson preferred to take action himself and claim credit on behalf of the white supremacist power structure, Democrat Party, and moderate Negro leaders. This, in turn, helped preserve the white supremacist power structure, its racist divide and rule tactics, and its system of capitalist exploitation.

Similarly, the 200,000 armed Black men who fought in the Union Army to smash the southern slavocracy are barely mentioned in official histories given of the liberation of African Americans from slavery. Likewise, the fact that southern Blacks were immediately disarmed after the Civil War is hardly mentioned as the first step in the betrayal of Radical Reconstruction. By disarming the southern Black population the northern bourgeoisie was able prevent needed land reform and instead set up a sharecropper system with land still under the ownership of former slave masters. Blacks being disarmed and dispossessed of what was rightfully theirs set the stage for the next step of northern bourgeois betrayal, where they allowed the white supremacist fascist terror of the White League, Red Shirts, and Democrat Party to smash Radical Reconstruction and drive southern Blacks into almost a hundred years of legal Jim Crow segregation and extreme political repression.

The right of African Americans and the working class in general to be armed for self-defense is a critical question, not to be undermined by liberal bourgeois public opinion. History has shown that the right to armed self-defense against the terror of the white supremacist capitalist state and its vigilantes has been a critical question in regards to Black liberation and Native American liberation. It was the power of armed Black people in the south in the 1960s that dismantled the official power of the KKK and Jim Crow segregation. Unfortunately, some of that terror and segregation has been replaced by increased numbers of racist, brutal, and militarized cops on the streets as well as an expansion of the prison industrial complex. Meanwhile, the Democrat Party, which opposes armed self-defense for Black people, has been a central cause of the problem. Examples include Bill Clinton who promised, and gave us, 100,000 more cops on the streets. Likewise, today Obama is spending $3 billion per year to militarize police forces across the United State.

Armed protests have taken place against recent police murders. In response to the police murder of Michael Brown, dozens of members of the Hewey P. Newton gun club have marched with rifles in hand in Texas. The Revolutionary Tendency stands in solidarity with this action, despite other strong differences we have with the New Black Panther Party that led it. Likewise, we also stand with an armed multiracial protest held in Beaver Creek, Ohio in October against the police murder of John Crawford III. John Crawford III was an African American man who was inspecting a BB gun in a Wal-Mart store when cops blew him away. Store surveillance cameras show that John Crawford III broke no laws and never even pointed the BB gun at anyone. He was no conceivable threat. As is standard operating procedure, a grand jury has also failed to indict the cops who murdered John Crawford III. The armed protest for John Crawford III marched through the store where John Crawford III was murdered. This armed protest was organized by Anonymous, Cop Block, and Ohio Open Carry.

The right to open carry was outlawed in California in response to the armed anti-police brutality patrols of the Black Panther Party (BPP). These patrols were set-up by the BPP after the racist police murder of Denzil Dowell on April 1st, 1967. The BPP responded to this murder by exposing it with their press and setting up armed self-defense patrols. The patrols would listen in on scanners to the police and arrive on the scene of police abuses in the Black community with loaded weapons and legal experts to advise and defend victims of racist police arrests and violence. The successes of these patrols quickly caught the attention of the state government with Governor Ronald Reagan signing the Mulford Act (widely dubbed the Panther Bill) into law. Don Mulford who submitted the bill, like Ronald Reagan, was a Republican. The Mulford Act of 1967 prohibits the carrying of loaded firearms in public in the sate of California. Obviously, the Republican Party does not support the right to armed self-defense. In fact, they are an even more virulently racist party than the Democrats and only support the right to bear arms as long as the weapons stay in the hands of white people. Nationwide coverage of an armed open carry protest carried out by the BPP in Sacramento against the Mulford Act in 1967 gave birth to the BPP as a nationwide organization because young Black people were fed up and wanted to join a group willing to take such bold action.

Similarly, the 1934 ban on automatic weapons came when three important strikes lead by reds shook the foundations of the capitalist status quo in the United States. While gangsters like Al Capone were cited as the need for such a law, gangsters then were just as capable of getting illegal Thompson submachine guns as they are of purchasing illegal Uzis today. The purpose of gun control in 1934 as in 1967 was not to disarm criminals, but instead to disarm rebellious Blacks and the working class in general as they fought back against their oppression and exploitation. During the Great Depression the specter of working class revolution loomed greatly in the fears of the ruling class as capitalist economics and strike breaking had ground much of the working class into unacceptable conditions. Those fears were greatly amplified in 1934 as three ground shaking strikes were led to victory by revolutionary reds.

Before 1934, the working class of the United States was getting pulverized, in part due to the ineffective tactics of the union bureaucracy. It was a situation very similar to today. In 1934 this all changed with three major strikes led by reds. These were the Minneapolis Teamsters strike, led by the Trotskyists of the Communist League of America, the San Francisco Longshoreman's strike, led by the Communist Party, and the Toledo Auto Lite strike, led by the left socialists of the Workers Party (which later joined the Trotskyists). In Minneapolis and San Francisco these strikes escalated to general strikes after cops killed workers. In Minneapolis, deputies were also killed in fighting at the Battle of Deputies Run. These three strikes were the beginning of a labor upsurge that greatly improved the lives of the working class of the United States through collective bargaining. It also forced the ruling class to begin giving us the New Deal in 1935 which included a minimum wage, an end to most child labor, Social Security, and jobs programs. While this was only a beginning to what we deserve, they were still victories, and those victories were won through militant industrial actions with the essential leadership of communists.

Despite the victories in 1934, government brutality continued. This included the 1937 Memorial Day Massacre at Republic Steel in South Chicago when the Chicago police opened fire on marching steel workers and their families. Ten workers were murdered and 40 more were injured. All of them were shot in the back. An additional 101 protesters were injured from police beatings, including an 8 year-old child. In that strike, which was unfortunately not led by class conscious communists, the union misleaders told workers that they should welcome these cops sent in by the Democratic Party.

The push for gun control largely comes from white well off liberals who trust the police and Democrat Party to protect them. Arguments against cheap “Saturday night special” handguns are an argument to make guns more expensive and to keep them out of the hands of working class and poor people who need them the most. In addition, arguments that so-called “assault weapons” are not needed to kill deer miss the entire point of the Second Amendment for the right to bear arms. That amendment was added to the constitution because the poor plebian masses that had just made a revolution didn’t trust the ruling class and demanded that this right be put in the constitution, not to kill deer, but to kill oppressors as the need arises. The right to bear arms was a fundamental gain of the American Revolution. Likewise, U.S. government attempts at gun control are a counterrevolutionary act similar to British attempts at gun control that sparked the American Revolution in the first place.

The Revolutionary Tendency stands with the right to armed self-defense and opposes racist anti-gun laws like the Mulford Act. Likewise, we stand for the right of people to form armed self-defense militias and point out that in places where it is not legal to carry a loaded gun, it is still legal to carry other weapons like tasers.

Liberalism Versus the Right to Struggle by Any Means Necessary

As part of Martin Luther King Junior’s liberal pacifist strategy, he tried to prop up the Democrat Party. For most of his political career, Martin Luther King Jr. was even silent on the U.S. slaughter in Vietnam carried out by two successive presidents of the Democrat Party; This included being silent about Black people being slaughtered in that war. It wasn’t until soon before King’s murder when King finally broke his silence and spoke out against U.S. involvement in Vietnam in 1967.

In opposition to the liberal pacifist strategies of the Civil Rights movement emerged the leadership of Malcolm X which advocated the right of Black people to self-defense, denounced the Democrat Party as racist, advocated Black self-determination, and opposed U.S. imperialism in Vietnam, the Congo, and elsewhere.

Martin Luther King Jr. did play a courageous role in leading the Civil Rights movement from the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott up until his assassination in 1968. Yet, in all of Martin Luther King Jr.’s glad handling and support for the racist and mass murdering Democrat Party, of Malcolm X, King stated, “in his litany of articulating the despair of the Negro without offering any positive, creative alternative, I feel that Malcolm has done himself and our people a great disservice.”

Yet, this was false. Malcolm X did offer solutions. When King was desperate due to the Ku Klux Klan’s violence he begged for federal troops from his friend Lyndon B. Johnson. LBJ refused. Malcolm X responded:

“If the federal Government will not send troops to your aid, just say the word and we will immediately dispatch some of our brothers there to organize self-defense units among our people and the Ku Klux Klan will then receive a taste of its own medicine. The day of turning the other cheek to those brute beasts is over.”

Martin Luther King rejected the offer, calling it “immoral”. In 1965 Malcolm X traveled to the south and spoke out at the Tuskegee Institute and in Selma. At a Civil Rights gathering in Selma, Civil Rights leader and close associates of King, Andrew Young and Coretta Scott King, tried to prevent Malcolm X from speaking. Yet, participants at the event insisted Malcolm X should be allowed to speak and he was allowed to do so. From the podium, Malcolm X proclaimed he was:

“One hundred percent for the effort being put forth by the Black folks here. …they have an absolute right to use whatever means are necessary to gain the vote. ….I pray that all the fear that has ever been in your heart will be taken out, and when you look at that man, if you know he’s nothing but a coward, you won’t fear him. If he wasn’t a coward, he wouldn’t gang up on you… . They put on a sheet so you won’t know who they are—that’s a coward. No! The time will come when that sheet will be ripped off. If the federal government doesn’t take it off, we’ll take it off.”

Malcolm X was giving voice to a movement that at that time was in fact beginning to be highly armed. In fact, federal troops were not sent into the south until after Blacks were armed. FBI infiltration in the Nation of Islam was then used to successfully push for the assassination of Malcolm X.

Andrew Young, for his part, moved on in his career from trying to prevent militant action in the Black community to becoming the oppressor as the Democrat Party’s mayor of Atlanta, then Congressman, and then finally serving under the racist imperialist presidency of Jimmy Carter where he served as the U.S. representative to the United Nations. In that position, Andrew Young worked for Jimmy Carter’s imperialist policies which included direct support for the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, carrying out the U.S. imperialist economic blockade of Cuba, direct support for the Shah of Iran, direct support for the mujahideen holy war against women's rights and literacy in Afghanistan, (which gave birth to the Taliban) and direct support for the genocide of East Timor.

By murdering many of the best Black leaders and promoting hand pick leaders like Andrew Young, Barack Obama, Reverend Al Sharpton (a self-admitted former FBI informant), the U.S. government has managed to channel much of America’s justified Black anger into support for Black oppression in the Democrat Party. Similarly, the conservative labor bureaucracy misleads workers through losing tactics on the picket lines while promoting support for anti-union Democrats as the only way forward for labor. To combat these problems, a revolutionary workers party must be built that advocates winning strategies by the multiracial working class and opposes support for our oppressors in the Democrat Party on principle. Along the road to revolution, among the most important tools we have to pressure for changes are strike actions. Yet, to bring about this kind of effective action takes the patient organizing of a revolutionary party of the multi-racial working class that challenges the legitimacy of most of the current leadership of the unions and left in general in the United States. While strikes by the multi-racial working class are the most effective strategy of resistance we currently have, the current rarity of such actions insures that frustration also spills over and takes other forms. These other forms of resistance should not be ignored.

Please See Part 3

Please also read Part 2 Containing the following sections:
Homeless People’s Lives Matter
Democrats Help Cause the Problem, Plead For Patience
For the Right of Armed Self-Defense
Liberalism Versus the Right to Struggle by Any Means Necessary
at:
Murderous Cops, Liberal Snake Oil, and Revolutionary Solutions (Part 2)
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2015/01/11/18766733.php

[Photo of Black and Brown Lives Matter Protest, from the website of 54,000 member Bay Area SEIU (Service Employees International Union, Local 1021)]

Sections found here in Part 3:
Disrupting Business As Usual
Native American Lives Matter
Lives of Militant Blacks Matter
Cuban Lives Matter

Murderous Cops, Liberal Snake Oil, & Revolutionary Solutions (Part 3)
by Steven Argue

Disrupting Business As Usual

Multi-billionaire capitalist Donald Trump, who claims he’s “always had a great relationship with the blacks”, says of Ferguson, “They had a community that really worked, or it seemed to have worked, and now all this hatred's coming out." Brutal racist oppression “works” for the capitalist rulers of this country, until it doesn’t. While methods of property destruction and looting come at a great price, and I instead advocate other means of resistance, especially labor action, there should be no question that it is these methods that have helped create a crisis for the capitalist ruling class that is not without benefits for the rest of us. The people who do these things are widely portrayed as stupid, but these acts of desperation by people with absolutely no representation in government actually are not without intelligence. The case of Rodney King is a good example.

While justice is extremely rare under America’s racist capitalist government, one case where some semblance of justice was achieved was that of Rodney King in 1992. Despite videotape showing the cops using enough force to kill a man, the police were acquitted in their first trial. In that case, it took a mass six day uprising that destroyed over a billion dollars in property to win a new trial for the criminal cops. In the subsequent trial, two cops, Koon and Powell, were found guilty. For a change, two brutal cops went to prison for their crimes. In addition, the 1992 uprising forced the resignation of LA’s Chief of Police. On a small scale, property was also redistributed through “looting”. Yet, the people paid a heavy price for this action with all kinds of repressive government forces mobilized in the streets including the Marines, 53 people were killed, around 2,000 people were injured, and nearly 20,000 people arrested. Yet, the destruction of a billion dollars in property was not without sense, because much of what was destroyed was owned by the ruling capitalist class, our oppressors and exploiters.

Today, it remains the impunity with which police carry out brutality and murder in cities and towns across the United States that has ignited a mass movement of resistance. In these situations, revolutionaries point out that police brutality, murder, racism, and oppression are inherent in the capitalist system. These are means of terror and division by which the capitalist state maintains and enforces the inequalities of class exploitation. The cops do “protect and serve”; problem is the class they are serving is not ours.

The capitalist state is at its heart the coercive tools of oppression that beat us down, mainly the city police, sheriffs, FBI, NSA, CIA, prisons, courts, and military. Those who rule, the wealthy capitalists, will never allow those tools of oppression to be reformed to become institutions for the poor, people of color, or the working class in general. Instead, what is needed is the building of a multiracial revolutionary workers party that demands radical changes as it works to smash the capitalist state and abolish the class slavery of capitalism.

The revolutionary movement raises the transitional demands that the capitalist state must “Stop police brutality!”, “Jail killer cops!”, “Abolish the Racist Death Penalty!”, “End the mass incarceration of the poor!”, “Free Our Political Prisoners!”, “End racist profiling!”, “Repeal anti-homeless laws!”, “End imperialist wars!”, and “Stop torturing people!”. We do this with the knowledge that we will achieve some important, rare, and isolated victories that must be used to further the struggle. For instance, the demand for ending Jim Crow segregation was won. For another example, on some rare occasions the working class built a strong and militant enough movement to actually jail brutal and killer cops. Rare occasions. At the same time, we point out through those experiences that this system cannot be fundamentally reformed, that instead most real change will only happen through proletarian socialist revolution that smashes the capitalist state and puts the working class in power.

Police murders with impunity have been protested and exposed by activists and victims’ families for decades. This includes large numbers of lesser known cases that were barely mentioned and largely whitewashed in favor of the cops in the corporate media. What has changed is the level of resistance to these murders by police and wider exposure through social media and recordings from cell phones. Protests have taken place in hundreds of cities. Some of the most recent of these have included protests on December 13th where at least 30,000 people marched in New York, over 10,000 in Washington D.C., and 10,000 in Oakland.

Even professional football players have joined the protests. After the Ferguson ruling, five St. Louis Rams football players protested with their hands in the air as they entered the field, a symbol of solidarity with protesters who bring attention to Michael Brown’s attempt to surrender by holding hands in the air and chanting, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!”

On December 14th, Andrew Hawkins, wide receiver of the Cleveland Browns, also stood against the impunity with which cops in the United States murder people. He wore a shirt that said, "Justice for Tamir Rice and John Crawford III". Tamir Rice was a 12-year-old boy who was killed by the Cleveland police on November 22nd. He was playing in a park with a BB gun that looked like a realistic gun when police rolled up and immediately shot and killed him. Before releasing video, the police lied about the entire incident. They claimed that the police gave repeated warnings to Tamir Rice and that Tamir Rice reached for his waste, supposedly a threatening move. The release of video proved the cops were lying. Video shows that there was absolutely no time for the police to have issued the warnings that they claimed to have given. In addition, the idea of Tamir Rice reaching for anything makes no sense because Tamir never put the toy gun away. Nor did he point it at police. The 911 caller to police stressed twice that the “gun” Tamir Rice had was probably fake, which it was. After Tamir Rice was shot, police allowed him to roll around on the ground in agony for four minutes without any first aid, potentially contributing to Tamir’s death. Besides the protest by Andrew Hawkins, other protests have occurred in Cleveland for Tamir Rice, including at least one that blocked a major intersection.

Numerous other protests have continued up through the holidays and into 2015 as well. On December 20th, in Bloomington Minnesota, 3,000 protesters shut a section of the Mall of America down during one of the busiest shopping days of the year. One of the popular chants that broke out was, “There is Only One Solution, Revolution, Revolution!” During the protest, the workers at Lush Cosmetics walked out in solidarity with the protesters with their hands in the air. Protests like this cost the ruling capitalists money and force people to pay attention to police murders.

A similar philosophy has driven protests that have blocked freeways and major bridges in Berkeley, New York, San Francisco, and elsewhere.

LGBTQ protesters in San Francisco successfully blocked freeway entrances to Highway 101 on Christmas Eve day under the slogan of “Black Lives Matter!” It was in fact militant resistance by the LGBTQ community to police in the Stonewall Riots that first kicked off the movement for gay and lesbian equality in the United States in earnest. The Stonewall Riots started with a routine police raid of a gay and lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, New York on June 28th, 1969. These vice raids took place routinely all across the country at LGBTQ establishments where people were arrested for their homosexuality. Their names would then also be published in the corporate newspapers the next day and their jobs would be lost. What differed the morning that the Stonewall Riots started was that people physically fought back against the cops. Along with spontaneous physical resistance and speeches, people chanted “Gay Power!” and threw pennies at the cops, calling them “coppers” because pennies were all they were worth. This was the beginning of a movement that, while still having more progress to make, has won the legalization of homosexuality and eliminated homosexuality as a “condition” for which people could forcibly held in mental institutions and tortured. Today, Gay Pride rallies are held annually around the world in commemoration of the beginning of the Stonewall Riots.

Days of sustained protests in Berkeley for “Black and Brown Lives Matter!” have shut down freeways at least seven times. Vandalism occurred too, with at least some of that being instigated by undercover police. After being exposed as cops trying to instigate vandalism, two undercover cops then pulled out their guns on protesters and made an arrest. On December 15th, protesters in Oakland shut down the Oakland Police Department. Major walkouts of high school students occurred in Berkeley and Oakland as well, including 1,500 students who walked out of Berkeley High.

Police abuses against protesters by the Berkeley and Oakland police have included unprovoked attacks of protesters where people were beaten with batons, shot with rubber bullets, tear gassed, and thousands were arrested. Cops broke one person’s leg. Anonymous retaliated, disabling the computers of several Oakland government offices, including those of the Oakland Police Department. In addition, one Berkeley City Council meeting was rescheduled due to expected protesters. The next meeting had about 150 people in attendance. People at the meeting demanded that charges against protesters be dropped. Many demanded the resignation of Mayor Tom Bates whose police force had so brutally attacked peaceful protesters as well. People are also regularly showing up at the Oakland Courthouse (off 7th Street and Washington) in solidarity with those arrested at protests and demanding that charges against protesters be dropped. People facing charges can gain legal advice from the National Lawyers Guild at (415)285-1011.

In Minneapolis, we are also demanding that charges be brought against an SUV driver who brutally attacked protesters with his greenhouse gas emitting SUV, used not just as a deadly weapon against the planet, but also a deadly weapon against protesters. Video quite clearly shows that the driver purposely drove around another vehicle and rammed into a line of protesters while other drivers turned around. This was an assault with a deadly weapon, but police have filed no charges, despite knowing the identity of the driver to be Jeffrey Patrick Rice. One protester who was hit and run over, a 16 year-old girl, was hospitalized for a leg injury. We Demand: End Impunity For Vigilante Attacks on Protesters! Jail and Charge Jeffrey Patrick Rice for His Crime Now!

Native American Lives Matter

Many of the protests that have taken place have been under the slogan “Black Lives Matter”. In Rapid City, South Dakota, Native Americans held a similar protest on December 19th with the slogan “Native Lives Matter”. As I pointed out earlier, Native Americans are the minority group most likely to be shot and killed by police in the United States. One example is Take Mah-hi-vist Goodblanket, 18, a Cheyenne and Arapaho youth killed by cops in Oklahoma on December 13th, 2013. Two sheriff's deputies shot him seven times. The deputies claim Goodblanket threw a knife and tried to attack with another. However, Goodblanket’s girlfriend, Naomi Baron, was present and she says the cops are lying. She says, "He [had] his arms up and his hands were free ... he had no weapons." The Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation has conducted an investigation, but they have refused to release their report.

About 100 people attended the Rapid City protest and commemorated the lives of 25 people killed by law enforcement. A day after the protest, one of its Native American participants, Allen Locke, 30, was gunned down by Rapid City cop Anthony Meirose. Police claim that Anthony Locke charged police with a knife, but they have produced absolutely no evidence to back their claim. Without providing any evidence, Rapid City Mayor Sam Kooiker is also promoting the story of a knife wielding Allen Locke and is saying that this shooting had nothing to do with race. What authorities are giving is just the usual cover story of the police state, a cover story that has often proven to be a lie when actual evidence emerges.

The official poverty rate for Native Americans in Rapid City is over 50%. The Rapid City area has a long history of extreme violence and discrimination against Native Americans. Up through the 1960s, Native Americans in South Dakota were segregated much as Blacks were in the south. In addition, Native American children were kidnapped and brought to boarding schools for forced cultural assimilation. Native American women were subject to forced sterilization on a massive scale up through the 1970s. Much of this began to change for the better with the Occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in Washington DC by the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the armed uprising of Native Americans at Wounded Knee in 1973. These actions brought national and international attention to the plight of Native Americans in the United States. While Native Americans are small in numbers, nobody, including the capitalist government on the right and revolutionary socialists on the left, should ever underestimate their potential as a moral force in U.S. politics as a group that has suffered inarguable genocide and has widespread popular sympathy.

While AIM made major gains through the BIA and Wounded Knee actions, the retaliation of the U.S. government was brutal as well. On the Pine Ridge Reservation, the FBI worked with the corrupt and undemocratic tribal leadership of Dick Wilson to establish death squads, officially called GOONs. To suppress Native American dissent, the GOON death squads and FBI murdered at least 61 people on the Pine Ridge Reservation between 1973 and 1976 according to Ward Churchill. American Indian Movement (AIM) members have, however, estimated the number of people killed to be much higher, around 200, with those victims including Native Americans killed by cops working with the FBI outside of the reservations in several states as well. Members and supporters of AIM were the primary target of this brutal repression, but family members, including children, were also killed. During that FBI’s reign of terror, Leonard Peltier was framed up for the shooting of two FBI agents and remains in prison. While an innocent man sits in prison for decades, the FBI, local police forces, and GOONs who committed mass murder have never been prosecuted for their crimes. Revolutionary socialists call for Native American liberation through socialist revolution and we demand of the racist capitalist government: Free Leonard Peltier! Jail Killer Cops! Jail Murderous FBI Agents! Jail Responsible Government Officials! and Jail GOON Death Squad Members Now! There is no statute of limitations on murder.

Lives of Militant Blacks Matter

African Americans have faced brutal political repression similar to that of Native Americans in the United States with this also orchestrated by the FBI. In the 1960’s and 70’s the U.S. government liquidated the Black Panther Party For Self Defense through the murders of 38 members, constant police harassment costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in bail money, and the frame-up of many other members.

Fred Hampton was a leader of the Chicago Black Panther Party (BPP). He was murdered in his sleep at the age of 21 in a joint assassination carried out by the Chicago Police and the FBI. The operation also murdered BPP member Mark Clark. As a leader of the BPP, Fred Hampton organized a non-aggression pact between Chicago’s street gangs, a successful breakfast program, and a multi-racial Rainbow Coalition unrelated to Jesse Jackson’s later liberal appropriation of the name for the so-called “Democratic” Party. In addition, Fred Hampton gave fiery speeches that were part of building a movement for proletarian socialist revolution. As Fred Hampton said, “Racism is the excuse used; racism is just a byproduct of capitalism.”

This was a point also made by BPP member Connie Mathews in a speech to 500 students at San Jose State University on October 25th, 1969:

“…the reason they divided us up into ethnic groups, into races, because as Fanon has said—capitalism and racism—one is a cause and the other is effect. They did not bring Black people over from Africa as slaves because we are Black. They brought Black people over so capitalism could thrive. When capitalism reached its highest form—imperialism—they had to define methods to keep the division.”

These kinds of teachings were expressly forbidden by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who infamously declared in 1968, "The Negro youth and moderate[s] must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teachings, they will be dead revolutionaries."

By the time of Connie Mathews’ San Jose speech, that repression was already well under way as she pointed out, saying, “I am saying that over the last 6 months Nixon has launched a massive repression against the Black Panther Party that is unheard of.” Fred Hampton was not yet murdered at that time, that came two months later on December 4th, but he was rapidly rising up in the national leadership of the party due in part to FBI and police murders and frame-ups.

Among the prominent FBI frame-ups was that of Geronimo Ji Jaga (Pratt), a BPP member in Los Angeles who was finally exonerated (i.e. found innocent) after 27 years in prison. The FBI stated in their own files that they sought to "neutralize Pratt as an effective BPP functionary." While carrying out Geronimo’s frame-up, the FBI hid evidence of their knowledge that Geronimo was 350 miles from the murders for which he was framed at the time they occurred.

Other framed Black Panthers still sit in prison and Black Panther Assata Shakur lives in exile, granted political asylum by Cuba, but with a one million dollar bounty placed on her head by Chris Christie’s state government in New Jersey. In addition, Obama’s FBI has placed Assata Shakur on its most wanted “terrorist” list and is offering an additional million dollar reward. Some have feared a deal between the U.S. and Cuba now that both countries are setting up diplomatic relations for the first time since the early years of the Cuban Revolution. Cuba’s head of North American Affairs, Josefina Vidal, however, has responded by saying:

“Every nation has sovereign and legitimate rights to grant political asylum to people it considers to have been persecuted. ... That’s a legitimate right. We’ve explained to the U.S. government in the past that there are some people living in Cuba to whom Cuba has legitimately granted political asylum.”

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie responded, calling Cubans “thugs” and likewise applying typical racist disrespect by using Assata Shakur’s discarded slave name saying:

“So Joanne Chesimard, a cold-blooded cop-killer, convicted by a jury of her peers, in what is without question the fairest and most just criminal justice system in the world ... is now, according to an official of the Cuban government, persecuted. These thugs in Cuba have given her political asylum for 30 years. It’s unacceptable.”

In reality, Assata Shakur was not convicted by a “jury of her peers”, she was convicted by an all white jury. Assata Shakur was a victim of America’s racist courts and the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations that targeted Black radicals for police murder and judicial frame-up. Police ambushed Assata Shakur and her comrades in 1973. In that attack, police crossfire struck and killed New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster, with a bullet from a police revolver killing the cop. James Harper, the slain trooper’s partner has admitted that he lied about seeing a gun in Assata Shakur’s hand. Assata Shakur was supposedly being apprehended for 7 counts, including a bank robbery. She was later acquitted for all of these counts and a jury even decided that the picture the FBI had widely circulated, supposedly showing her during a bank robbery, wasn’t even a picture of her. She and her comrade Sundiata Acoli were, however, wrongly convicted in the death of Werner Foerster.

Before going to trial, Assata Shakur was badly tortured as were other Black Panthers in custody like Ruben Scott who confessed after being tortured. Assata Shakur did not confess.

The torture and murder of political dissidents by the U.S. government did not begin with Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, it was used against the Black Panther Party as well as directly by the U.S. government in places like Vietnam. For instance, before Guantanamo and the Panthers, there were the tiger cages of Côn Sơn Island where U.S. forces and the South Vietnamese puppet government tortured prisoners and murdered 20,000 people. The victims were largely leftists and suspected leftists who opposed the U.S. imposed dictatorship of southern Vietnam. Similarly, the CIA’s torture and assassination under the Phoenix Program in southern Vietnam targeted Communists and suspected Communist supporters. Few prisoners survived their interrogations. The U.S. State Department admits to directly killing 20,000 people under this program and another 20,000 people were murdered by it when the program was turned over to the South Vietnamese dictatorship.

It was in 1977 that Assata Shakur was convicted by an all-white jury that was kept unaware of the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign of murder and frame-up against the Black liberation movement. After the conviction, Assata Shakur’s comrades, however, broke her out of prison. She lived underground in the United States for 5 years and by 1984 she was able to escape to the freedom of Cuba.

While Assata Shakur benefits from the gains of the Cuban Revolution living in exile in Cuba, political prisoners who have not been able to escape the United States like Sundiata Acoli, who was arrested in relation to the same incident as Assata Shakur, still sit in prison. In September 2014, Sundiata Acoli, however, won an appeal to grant his release on parole, but the state of New Jersey is still fighting the ruling. Free Sundiata Acoli Now!

A similar case is that of Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald. He was pulled over by the California Highway Patrol in 1969, supposedly for a broken tail light. At that time, the police all across the country, in coordination with the FBI, were carrying out these kinds of stops and then opening fire on BPP members to kill them. In the shoot out that came with this CHP attack, Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald was shot in the head and CHP Officer Leslie Clapp was injured as well. At the trial for attempted murder, CHP Officer Leslie Clapp admitted that he was under orders to shoot and kill members of the Black Panther Party. The judge ordered the jury to disregard this essential fact. An additional charge for the murder of security guard Barge Miller was also placed on Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald. Yet, the one eyewitness against him couldn’t even pick out the picture of Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald when photos of three men were placed before him. Romaine “Chip” Fitzgerald fired on Officer Leslie Clapp in self-defense and was framed for the death of Barge Miller.

While all of this went on, the corporate media loyally reported the FBI’s murder campaign against the Black Panther Party in the reverse of reality, with the BPP portrayed as the aggressors. Other FBI operations were used to discredit and murder members of the BPP as well. For instance, on his own initiative, FBI agent “Crazy” Tom Mosher set-up the so-called Guevara guerrilla training base in the Santa Cruz Mountains. From this base FBI agent Tom Mosher carried out various illegal activities like robberies of pot growers and leftists as well as guerrilla activities that were used to get people busted, all while doing his best to associate himself with the BPP. In 1971, an important and well liked member of the BPP, Fred Bennett, was murdered and his body disposed of at this FBI run training camp. FBI agent Tom Mosher then “leaked” a falsified version of what happened to a reporter he worked closely with in his operations named Ed Montgomery of the San Francisco Chronicle. From this falsified FBI information, Montgomery reported that Fred Bennett’s murder had been ordered by BPP leader Bobby Seale because of a personal relationship Fred Bennett was having with a woman in the BPP. This was an obvious lie from a known liar, in part because the BPP had actually approved their relationship. In his article, Montgomery hid the fact that he knew his source was FBI, and instead reported him as a movement source.

Full details of the murder of Fred Bennett may never be known, but what appears likely is that a snitch jacket was placed on him, probably with the participation of FBI agent Tom Mosher himself. This fits with an FBI COINTELPRO memo from FBI headquarters to the San Francisco office on May 11, 1970, urging them to work with local police to plant fabricated documents and other "disruptive disinformation ... pinpointing Panthers as police or FBI informants." In this way, under a climate of fear and anger already created by FBI frame-ups and murders, the FBI also carried out a targeted campaign to incite BPP members to kill each other.

While innocent former Panthers sit framed-up in prison, live in exile, or have been put in their graves by the U.S. government; guilty FBI agents and city cops, including the Chicago police and FBI who murdered Fred Hampton in his sleep, have never been prosecuted for their crimes. Revolutionary Leininist-Trotskyists denounce this injustice. At the same time, we do make criticisms of the program of the Black Panther Party. It was a program that lacked a needed orientation to the multi-racial working class as both an agent for change and as a powerful force that can curtail repression by the capitalist state. The revolutionary party, as part of this working class orientation, fights for the leadership of the unions against its current conservative and bureaucratic leadership that is incapable of winning strikes and ties working class hopes to electoral victories of the racist and anti-working class Democrat Party. The Black Panther Party, lacking this needed orientation to the organized working class found itself increasingly under a war of extermination by the capitalist state, and without the strength of industrial unions to shut down production was reduced to a level of alternating between adventuristic military strikes and impotent appeals to the Democrat Party. Yet, it must also be said that such an orientation to labor was also less obvious at that time, a time when the organized working class was far better off than we are today as well as less influenced by the ideological gains of the Vietnam, Black, Chicano, Native American, women’s, and LGBT liberation movements that has had a big impact on the thinking of today’s working class.

Another former Black Panther Party member unjustly sitting in prison is Mumia Abu-Jamal. He is currently serving a life sentence in the United States for his political views and journalism under a blatant frame-up murder charge. Mumia managed to survive the wave of FBI and police terror against the BPP in the 1960s and 70s only to be the victim of an attempted police murder in 1981 and then framed-up by the Philadelphia Police and sentenced to death 1982. There have been decades of struggle for Mumia’s freedom that have included an ILWU strike on his behalf on May 1st 1999 that shut down all west coast ports from 6 AM to 8 PM with a 300 strong ILWU contingent marching at the head of a march of 20,000 people demanding justice for Mumia. It was due to these kinds of actions as well as international outrage that Mumia was never executed. In 2011, Mumia’s death sentence was commuted to a life sentence, still a major travesty of justice.

I write about the case of Mumia Abu-Jamal in more detail in a piece I link at the end of this article, but a brief synopsis is in order. During the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal, police coerced eyewitnesses into saying what they wanted to hear while the DA’s office illegally hid evidence for the defense and used obviously perjured testimony, including from one eyewitness that wasn’t even there. There were three reasons for the frame-up of Mumia Abu-Jamal. The first is that he was at the wrong place at the wrong time while a mob hit was taking place against Officer Faulkner, a cop who corrupt officers involved with the mob thought was part of an FBI investigation of their criminal activities. The second reason was that Mumia was Black, working class, and a former Black Panther, so he was an easy victim of police frame-up for cops who wanted to cover-up a murder they were involved in. The third reason was that Mumia, as a freelance journalist, had worked to expose rampant police murders and repression carried out against the leftist and largely Black organization called MOVE in Philadelphia.

In years following Mumia’s frame-up, his journalism behind bars has spread far and wide as an important voice of the voiceless. The continued attempts at his execution up until 2011 by the entire system were intended to silence that voice. The latest move to silence Mumia came in the form of the Revictimization Relief Act signed into law in October 2014 by Governor Tom Corbett. Soon after signing the law, Corbett held a press conference on the site where Officer Faulkner was killed where he stated the law would stunt the “obscene celebrity” garnered by offenders like Mumia Abu-Jamal. The law greatly curtails the free speech rights of Mumia Abu-Jamal and any journalist who would like to report what he or any other inmate says.

It is to terrorize and silence leftists and the Black community that the capitalist class carries out outrageous repression against Mumia Abu-Jamal, Philadelphia MOVE, and the Black Panther Party. Leninist-Trotskyists call for Black liberation through socialist revolution. In addition, we call for labor and other types of action to demand of the racist capitalist government: Free all political prisoners of the U.S. war on the Black liberation movement including Mumia Abu-Jamal, Sundiata Acoli, and Romaine “Chip” Fitzegerald! End the $2 Million Bounty Against Assata Shakur and Drop The Conviction Against Her! Jail the Police, Judges, FBI, and Prosecutors Who Slaughtered and Framed Leaders of the Black Liberation Movement! Jail Killer Cops Who Continue to Murder With Impunity Today! End the U.S. Imperialist Economic Blockade of Cuba!

Cuban Lives Matter

Cuba justly recognizes Assata Shakur as a political refugee from racist political persecution in the United States. As opposed to supporters of the white supremacist power structure of the United States, like Barack Obama who puts a million dollar bounty on Assata Shakur’s head, revolutionary socialists thank the Cuban government for their anti-racist solidarity and demand an end to the U.S. government’s persecution of Assata Shakur.

As with Assata Shakkur, Cuba did a great service to the Black liberation struggle of the United States by granting political asylum to Robert F. Williams as well. In North Carolina, Williams was a pioneer of the tactic of armed Black self-defense that was so successfully employed by the Deacons of Defense and Justice. This led to some early successes, but he also came under attack from liberal organizations, including the NAACP, as well as the U.S. government.

In 1961, Robert F. Williams, facing false charges of kidnapping white people that he was actually protecting from angry Black protesters, was pursued by the FBI and then driven into exile in Cuba and China. From revolutionary Cuba and the People’s Republic of China, Robert F. Williams and his wife Mabel were not silenced by FBI harassment, but he was instead able to exert influence in the United States against racist segregation through Cuban backed broadcasts of Radio Free Dixie between 1962 and 1965 and used his time in Cuba to publish the newspaper “The Crusader” as well as the book “Negroes With Guns”. This work, aided by the Cuban Revolution, influenced the Deacons for Defense and Justice and later Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party.

While the Cuban government grants asylum for legitimate political refugees, the U.S. shelters real terrorists like CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles. On October 6th, 1976, Carriles blew up Cubana Airlines Flight 455 with a bomb, killing all 73 people on board. Despite demands for extradition from Cuba and Venezuela, Luis Posada Carriles lives happily in Miami, sheltered from prosecution for his terrorist crimes by the U.S. government. Since the 1959 Cuban Revolution, 3,500 Cubans have been killed by CIA backed counterrevolutionary groups that have based their operations in Miami and carried out their crimes with impunity in the U.S.

An additional U.S. operation against the Cuban Revolution is to portray the Cuban government as racist. UCLA Professor Mark Sawyer, an African American man and leading U.S. scholar on the question of racism in Cuba, says, “The broad scholarly consensus is that Cuba through a combination of redistribution of wealth, improved education systems and open access to health care had moved the black population on the island closer to parity with whites than any other society in the world.” He also blows the whistle on attempts by powerful and well funded individuals to intervene to change that consensus, saying, “In the early 2000's the Cuban members of Congress funded projects located at HBCU's [historically black colleges and universities] for scholars under to contract to produce articles on racism in Cuba.”

For the Cuban exile counterrevolutionary community and their CIA backers, the question of race has always been a sticky one. They are predominantly the wealthy whites who fled the Cuban Revolution and deny the problems with rampant racism under the U.S. backed Batista dictatorship that was overthrown. In addition, both the CIA and the Cuban exile community supported the racist Apartheid system in South Africa, with the CIA even tipping off the South African government for the arrest of Nelson Mandela. Yet, these racist forces are funding people in academia in attempts to stir accusations of racism in Cuba as an attempt to discredit the Cuban Revolution. Likewise, a covert U.S. government operation to infiltrate the Cuban hip hop scene and fund any counterrevolutionaries within it was exposed in 2014. The operation was carried out through USAID, and became so exposed that even U.S. congress people spoke out against it (all be it for the wrong reasons).

Cuba’s commitment to the fight against racism was declared at the outset of the Cuban Revolution, with Fidel Castro declaring in 1959:

“One of the most just battles that must be fought, a battle that must be emphasized more and more, which I might call the fourth battle—the battle to end racial discrimination at work centers. I repeat: the battle to end racial discrimination at work centers. Of all the forms of racial discrimination the worst is the one that limits the colored Cuban's access to jobs.” –Fidel Castro, March 23, 1959, Havana labor rally

Race segregation and racism in hiring were outlawed. Other measures that helped poor people in general like socialized health care and the reduction of all rent to a maximum of 10% of a person’s income and the elimination of illiteracy helped Cuba’s poor Black population the most. Still, despite major progress, racism has not been eradicated in Cuba. This has often been recognized by leaders of the Cuban Revolution as well as by Cuba’s hip hop movement.

In recent decades a major cause of Cuba’s growing racial inequalities has been increasing capitalist inroads into the Cuban economy. The most important of these was the legalization of the American dollar. This was a measure taken after the capitalist counterrevolutions in the USSR and Eastern Europe eliminated 85% of Cuba’s foreign trade almost overnight in the early 1990s. This brutally thrusted Cuba’s economy back into the world capitalist market. This also took place under the continued pressures of the U.S. economic blockade. In the early years of this economic crisis, international aid agencies credited Cuba’s socialist food distribution policies for preventing a mass humanitarian food crisis. To help the economy, Cuba also made moves towards encouraging limited and strictly regulated foreign investment as well as legalizing the dollar. With the dollar legalized, Cubans with relatives in the United States were greatly benefited because they could get dollars sent to them. The problem is, most of the Cubans with relatives in the U.S. are white or lighter skinned. A far higher percentage of Blacks stayed in Cuba with the Cuban Revolution. As a result of fewer dollars being sent to Cuban Blacks from the United States, racial inequalities have greatly increased in Cuba.

Attempts to bring in needed foreign currency for the Cuban economy have also produced a luxury tourist industry and services that are out of reach of what most Cubans can afford. They also often involve joint state and foreign capitalist investment. The international class divisions involved in such enterprises have also helped exacerbate racial divides, so much so that Cuban revolutionary leader Raúl Castro felt compelled to issue a public warning in 2000 saying that, “If a single person is not allowed to enter a hotel because of being black, then by law that hotel will be closed down.”

Cuba’s internationalist commitment to Black liberation can be seen in part by the political asylum they have given to people like Robert F. Williams and Assata Shakur. It has also been shown clearly with the troops Cuba sent to Angola to successfully defeat the invading white racist South African army. The victories of Cuba’s heroic troops in Angola played an essential role in defending Angola’s independence, winning independence for Namibia, and the ultimate defeat of the racist Apartheid system in South Africa.

In addition, in attempts to help struggling African American, Latino/a, and other poor communities in the United States, Cuba gives free education to Americans who want to become doctors provided they go back to the United States and use their skills in under served communities. Cuba also attempted to send hundreds of doctors trained and experienced in disaster situations to the U.S. to help out after Hurricane Katrina. These professionals would have saved lives, but Bush Jr. preferred to let poor Black people in New Orleans die. Bush refused the doctors entry.

While Cuba works to build ties with oppressed and exploited communities in the United States, U.S. ties with Cuba were originally broken in 1960, not long after the Cuban Revolution overthrew the U.S. backed capitalist dictatorship of Batista in 1959. This was a dictator that tortured and murdered at least 20,000 people with full U.S. backing. Cuba became an enemy to the U.S. ruling class when the Cuban Revolution expropriated the holdings of U.S. capitalist exploiters, establishing in their place a planned socialist economy with guaranteed nutrition, free healthcare, free education, and low rent and utilities. Just as the U.S. government under the presidency of Thomas Jefferson (a slave owner who never freed his slaves) placed an economic embargo on the Black people of Haiti for carrying out the first successful slave revolt in world history, the U.S. has similarly punished the Cuban people for decades for ending a brutal U.S. backed dictatorship, outlawing racist discrimination, and establishing a planned socialist economy that benefits the majority of the people.

Barack Obama is now talking about ending the U.S. economic embargo that was begun against Cuba by Eisenhower in 1960 and maintained by every U.S. president as well as worsened by Bush Senior and Bill Clinton. A possible end to the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba is also signaled by Obama’s renewal of diplomatic relations with Cuba and freeing of the remaining prisoners of the Cuban Five. The Cuban Five were Cubans who went to Miami to infiltrate CIA backed exile terrorist organizations to help prevent terrorist attacks on Cuba. Unfortunately, they were caught and spent many years in prison in the United States. An end to the U.S. economic blockade of Cuba will indeed be a major step forward when and if it finally does come. The imperialists may be changing their position partly because decades of imperialist economic blockade have failed to bring the Cuban people to their knees. An additional reason is because U.S. capitalists are realizing that they are missing out on many investment and trade opportunities as the Cuban leadership liberalizes portions of Cuba’s socialist economic system. A third reason is that U.S. imperialists recognize that economic engagement may be a means to destroy the remaining gains of the Cuban Revolution and thereby destroy its inspirational example to the rest of the world in the fight against racism, capitalism, and U.S. imperialism.

Capitalist inroads into the Cuban economy, the unequal social forces it produces, as well as increased racial inequalities may ultimately be used as a lever to pressure and overthrow the remaining gains of the Cuban Revolution. A key means of preventing this that is advocated by Leninist-Trotskyists is through breaking Cuba out of its economic isolation through building the world revolutionary socialist movement. This was an important component of Lenin and Trotsky’s Theory of Permanent Revolution, promoted at the time they were in power in the USSR through their establishment of the Communist International. During this time the leadership of the Communist International built more effective parties around the world through measures that included instructing the communist movement of the United States on the necessity of adopting a program on combating the special oppression of African Americans. Under the instructions of the Communist International, the Communist Party’s new program to combat the special oppression of African Americans as a doubly oppressed section of the working class was a vast improvement over the Socialist Party of Eugene Debs that supposedly had a color blind policy.

A similar question arises in Cuba. The Cuban revolution, while taking great steps in alleviating problems of systemic racism through socialist measures, also has a leadership that sees the question of race as largely resolved by socialism and has repressed real discussion of areas where this is not true in Cuba. This is partly a result of Cuba copying of the USSR’s top down model of bureaucratic rule, consolidated by Stalin after Lenin’s death, rather than establishing real workers democracy as advocated by Lenininist-Trotskyists. Cuba largely imported a top down method of rule that while not as brutal as the system established in the USSR during Stalin’s rule, has not allowed a proper exercise of workers democracy. Violations of workers democracy have included the suppression of discussions of racism through banning independent organizations of the working class that could advocate for Blacks, also curtailing at times important freedoms of the hip hop movement, as well as suppression of the Trotskyist movement.

Leninist-Trotskyists support Cuba’s right to defend itself from U.S. imperialist attack and internal capitalist counterrevolution, including U.S. sponsored attempts to bring about capitalist counterrevolution through paid CIA terrorists and advocates of bourgeois “democracy”. At the same time we advocate the need for legitimate workers democracy that allows a freer discussion of issues of racism, internationalism, austerity, capitalist inroads, Trotskyism, and other issues that affect the Cuban Revolution.

Yet, the Cuban revolution, despite some very serious unhealthy tendencies, so far largely continues a commitment to socialism as well as its internationalist commitment to the Black liberation struggle Despite important deformations of the communist program, Cuba does also provide some positive lessons and examples of anti-racism, internationalism, and what a planned socialist economy can do. Of the U.S. imperialist government, Leninist-Trotskyists demand: End the U.S. Imperialist Economic Blockade of Cuba! End Torture at Guantanamo by giving it Back to the Cuban People! Let Justice Be Done For the Murder of 73 Innocents, Honor Cuba’s Extradition Request For Luis Posada Carriles!

Please Also See Part 4

Please also read Part 3 Containing the following sections:
Disrupting Business As Usual
Native American Lives Matter
Lives of Militant Blacks Matter
Cuban Lives Matter
Murderous Cops, Liberal Snake Oil, & Revolutionary Solutions (Part 3)
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2015/01/11/18766735.php

[Photo: Mary Hawkes killed by Albuquerque cop Jeremy Dear who claimed his camera “malfunctioned” during three incidents of police brutality, including during the shooting death of Mary Hawkes.]


Sections found here in Part 4:
Mexican and Central American Lives Matter
Asian Lives Matter
Liberal Reforms and Investigations
Investigations
Sensitivity Training
Police Cameras
Citizen Police Review Boards
Revolution

Murderous Cops, Liberal Snake Oil, & Revolutionary Solutions (Part 4)
By Steven Argue

Mexican and Central American Lives Matter

In stark contrast to revolutionary Cuba, the people of Mexico and Central America suffer under murderous U.S. backed capitalist regimes. The mass kidnapping and murder of 43 students at the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers' College of Ayotzinapa on September 26th, 2014 is the latest example of the terror of the U.S. backed capitalist regimes in the region. From confessions and a body found, it appears that the students at the leftist school were abducted by the police on their way to a protest and, under orders of the mayor, turned over to mobsters of Guerreros Unidos ("United Warriors") who then murdered the students, burned their bodies, and threw them in the river. The identity of the remains of one student has been confirmed, but a number of other murdered bodies found in the search did not belong to the students, an indication of the prevalence of mass murder in Mexico today, both as a means of political terror and as a means of eliminating capitalist competition between competing cartels.

The Ayotzinapa students were hitchhiking and riding on buses at the time they were abducted by the police under orders of the mayor. In what is thought to be a related case of mistaken identity, a busload of football players was also attacked by gunmen around the same time with 6 people killed including one who was found the next day with his eyes gouged out and his face flayed down to the bare skull. The kidnapping and mass murder of these students is an example of the kind of terror U.S. client states in the region employ in order to maintain an unjust social order of grinding poverty, capitalist exploitation, corruption, and U.S. imperialist control.

After the abductions, militant protests erupted in Guerrero, the region of these kidnappings, as well as elsewhere in Mexico with slogans including “It was the state!” “We are all Ayotzinapa!” and “We want them back alive!” Government buildings and headquarters of ruling capitalist parties were torched. Universities, highways, and airports were shutdown. Eleven protesters who shutdown the airport in Mexico City, battling a violent attack by Mexico’s murderous police with Molotov cocktails and rocks, have outrageously been charged with attempted murder. Of the murderous Mexican state, the international communist movement demands without hesitation: Release All Protesters and Drop the Charges Now!

As a result of militant protests that have become a threat to the stability of the capitalist state, 80 suspects have been arrested including 44 cops. Also arrested is the mayor of Iguela, José Luis Abarca, who ordered the massacre. José Luis Abarca is a member of the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution). This author has long criticized much of the left, including the Zapatistas, for supporting the capitalist PRD as a supposed lesser evil alternative to Mexico’s other two ruling capitalist parties, the PRI and PAN. Abarca himself is now also accused of shooting another leftist activist in the face last year. Also driven from office in the latest protests is the PRD governor of Guerrero, Ángel Aguirre. Aguirre’s forces attacked Ayotzinapa student protesters in 2011, killing two people. He also reportedly has ties to the Beltrán Leyva drug cartel. The PAN and PRI are no better with a long history of capitalist murder, austerity, privatization, and union busting under their belts. For these reasons, a popular slogan of protests has become “Throw Them All Out!”

Attempting to take the place the PRD once held as the leftist opposition party now is the Movement for National Regeneration (Morena) led by former PRD member Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO). Yet, like the PRD before it, Morena fails to offer real solutions because to do so must include smashing the brutal capitalist state in a proletarian socialist revolution and the total expropriation of the capitalist class, including the drug cartels, without compensation. Without such a program, such a party will simply become part of the problem as they become the administrators of the bourgeois capitalist state after taking positions of power.

The Obama Administration directly aids the Mexican government’s war on the working class and peasantry through the Merida Initiative which has supplied $3 billion dollars in training and equipment to the Mexican police and military since 2008. The pretext of much of this aid is the so-called war on drugs, but in reality this equipment is used by a corrupt government deeply involved in the drug trade for counterinsurgency efforts against a population that is profoundly fed-up. While the illegal drug trade provides a pretext for U.S. military support for Mexico’s brutal capitalist government, the illegality of the drug trade has also helped turn Mexico into a war zone with over 100,000 people killed since 2006. The narco drug wars in Mexico along with the mass incarceration of the poor in the United States, largely under drug charges, points to the need to decriminalize drugs.

While government mass murder and deaths due to illegal competition in the drug trade have plagued Mexico, no country other than those at war has a higher per-capita murder rate than Honduras since Obama’s 2009 coup in that country overthrew the elected government and brought back the 1980s death squads. Overthrown was the elected government of President Manuel Zelaya. That government was put in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism because Zelaya increased the minimum wage paid to workers in U.S. owned sweatshops and maintained good relations with the government of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Important U.S. officials are known to have been in Honduras at the time of the coup advocating that kind of action. For show, the United States briefly suspended military aid to the Honduran military that carried out the coup, but that was quickly restarted and increased to levels much higher than before the coup.

After the coup, a reign of terror ensued where journalists, unionists, human rights activists and lawyers, and opposition political activists have been routinely shot or abducted, tortured, and murdered by government death squads. Murder increased by 50% in Honduras after the U.S. backed coup with a 90% impunity rate and Supreme Court justices replaced by the military in the middle of the night. This terror, with U.S. backing, continues. For instance, 32 journalists have been murdered since the coup, including three in 2014. In addition, hundreds of land rights activists have been murdered as well as dozens of LGBT activists, and at least 20 opposition party activists and organizers. Despite this reign of terror, the U.S. was quick to recognize the illegitimate elections carried out by the coup government and to pressure other governments to recognize the coup government as well. In addition to military aid, the United States helped set up wiretapping capabilities for the Honduran government in 2012 to increase the government’s capabilities to snoop on the phone and internet communications of people potentially targeted for death.

In addition to political murder, the drug trade plays a role in Central American violence as well. Rampant poverty in most of Central America drives many children and youth into street gangs and the drug trade. Drug violence doesn’t just come from the criminal gangs that often force youths to work for them; It also comes from brutal militarized police forces given U.S. aid in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala that often kill completely innocent child and teenage suspects. Out of the appalling conditions of poverty and violence the U.S. has helped create in countries like Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, a steady stream of political and economic refugees, including children, attempt to escape northwards into the United States. The response of the Obama Administration to this massive humanitarian crisis that they have helped create has not been to aid these victims of U.S. imperialism, but instead to increase spending to $17 billion per year in an attempt to keep refugees out of the United States. This, in turn, has not reduced the influx of immigrants, but has greatly increased the numbers of people, including children, who die trying to cross the border and who die after being sent back.

Asian Lives Matter

In December, 2014 many of the stories of victims of torture in U.S. secret prisons were confirmed by a Senate investigation into the matter. By the CIA’s own admission, many of these prisoners were innocent of even what they were accused. Among the crimes carried out against prisoners was murder through hypothermia. Tortures included forcing people to stand for hours on end on broken limbs, jabbing in rectum in ways that caused multiple types of long term injury, sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours often chained upright in a stress positions, cold, threatening to rape and kill mothers, children, and other family members, mock executions, Russian roulette, water boarding, and being chained in an upward position for up to 17 days. The declassified portion of the Senate report only admitted to the murder of one prisoner. His name was Gul Rahman who died of hypothermia as he was forced to sit in the dark in a cold cell shackled with his pants off. Two months after murdering Gul Rahman, one of his CIA murderers was given a $2,500 reward for his good consistent work. One month after the murder of Gul Rahman, the use of 45 degree Fahrenheit rooms for nude detainees was approved as a torture technique.

The Senate’s report documenting torture cases was 15,400 pages long, but Obama only allowed the Senate to see 6000 pages of it. In turn, the Senate only released 525 pages of the study to the press. With only 3.4% of the report deemed allowable for the public to see, and the brutality of what has been revealed in what has been released, one can easily deduce that there are many crimes that are even more gruesome being hidden in the pages that remain secret. None of this is a surprise to people who have been watching and who are inclined to believe the stories of victims of torture by the U.S. government. Much is made of the fact that there was no actionable information achieved through this torture. Of course there wasn’t. Everyone who has studied the issue knows that the true purpose of torture is to let the stories of it leak out to drive terror into targeted populations.

Today, Obama, who openly admits “We tortured some folks,” has not ended the torture of the Bush Administration. Obama’s Executive Order #13,491 officially ended some of the torture techniques ordered by the Bush Administration, but continued others. Obama’s executive order explicitly continues to allow the torture techniques found in Army Field Manual 2 22.3. These include sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, humiliation, the use of fear, and sensory deprivation. In addition, no attempts have been made to pass legislation outlawing torture or to bring the criminals of the Bush Administration to justice for their crimes. The impunity with which the Bush Administration got away with its crimes of kidnapping, torture and murder helps assure that future presidents, as well as the current president, will be allowed to get away with the same crimes.

In addition to carrying out torture, the Obama Administration has directly carried out many thousands of extra-judicial executions by drone in Pakistan, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Iraq, among other countries. These are extra-judicial murders carried out without even the cover of trial. Speaking for the Obama Administration, John Kerry claimed on May 26, 2013 that “The only people we fire at are confirmed terror targets, at the highest level. We don’t just fire a drone at somebody we think is a terrorist.” Even if that were true, which it is not, and even if we could trust the Obama Administration and the CIA to murder the right people without trial, which we cannot, we are still left with the fact that almost everyone being killed in drone strikes were not even targeted for death by the Obama Administration. This was made clear in a study by the human rights group Reprieve which looked at a sample of 1,147 people killed in U.S. drone strikes and found that only 41 of the people murdered were actually intended targets of the attacks. This means that out of every 200 people the U.S. murders by drone, about 7 people were intended victims and 193 were not even targeted at all. So how does the Obama Administration claim that most victims are “bad guys”? That’s simple. They lie. As the New York Times reported on May 29, 2012, the Obama Administration, “counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.”

Just as the racist imperialist government of the United States counts all military-age males as combatants in the traditionally Muslim world, so too the U.S. government considers all young African American, Native American, and Latino men as “thugs” and “criminals”. As dehumanized subsets of the population, the U.S. government at all levels works to terrorize, not uplift, these subsets of the world and U.S. population. Within that context, it should be understood that all liberal reforms are intended to legitimize the terror currently being dished out, not to do something about a system that purposely allows that terror with impunity. The Obama Administration reduced (but did not eliminate) the number of abductions and torture without trial carried out against peoples of the traditionally Muslim world, only to divert attention and move to mass murder through drone extra-judicial executions. Likewise, as police murder with impunity, the government is attempting to divert our attention from the fact that every institution of “justice” in the United States is set-up to allow government murder with impunity. They are doing this by setting up new institutions, investigations, and evidence that are intended to be used, or not used, in the exact same manner as what presently exists.

Liberal Reforms and Investigations

Mass protests, riots, and international outrage have been met with both repression and a few liberal reforms. On November 30th, Ferguson Mayor James Knowles announced the formation of a “citizen’s” police review board in Ferguson. On December 1st, Barack Obama announced a $75 million dollar program to equip police with body cameras. Obama’s funding does not, however, require that police departments make the wearing of cameras mandatory. On December 4th, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a program that will give three days of retraining for the police. This is being billed as a sort of refresher course for what cops learn in the academies without any real specifics given. On December 15th, Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson instructed his police chief to put body cameras on officers and give his officers racial sensitivity training. Federal investigations have been announced as well.

Investigations

In response to the latest popular outrage against police brutality, the Obama Administration has also announced its usual fruitless investigations of civil rights violations. Obama’s (now former) Attorney General, Eric Holder, has announced an investigation into Missouri’s racial profiling (a practice that has already been well documented by the state’s own Attorney General’s Office). On December 3rd, Holder also announced a civil rights investigation into the death of Eric Garner. Yet, like Holder’s federal investigation of the of the murder of Trayvon Martin, which has still failed to produce any results, one would be advised not to hold ones breath for results. It is not impossible for some investigations to produce results, but for that to happen it will most likely be necessary to increase the pressure on the government. While we don’t oppose federal investigations, it is incorrect to demand them because federal investigations are likely to be cover-ups as well. Instead of demanding investigations, revolutionary socialists demand killer cops be jailed and leave it open to our enemies in the government to figure out how to do it.

Sensitivity Training

Sensitivity training will never work under the current system. This is because in real life the most brutal cops are encouraged in their sadistic brutality and insensitivity by those in charge. This goes all the way up to the mayor’s and district attorney’s offices and even further with the lack of action by the federal government. Encouragement includes the impunity with which cops carry out their murders, frame-ups, false arrests, and brutality (and are often promoted for it). Brutal and discriminatory police are also encouraged by their bosses in the government who pass anti-homeless laws and back racist stop and frisk policies. Cops who blow the whistle on police brutality and corruption risk their lives and are driven from police forces, as was famously exposed in the example of the true story of Frank Serpico in New York. Sensitivity training will never work under capitalism because the ruling capitalist class wants the police to be an insensitive and brutal occupation army, not a force of caring people that could ever be called in any stretch of the imagination “peace officers”. No amount of sensitivity training will help cops who will not listen to a man who says 11 times “I can’t breathe” as he is choked to death. What will give cops a little bit of real sensitivity training, however, is if more killer cops are jailed.

Police Cameras

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced a fast-track program, working with Obama, to put cameras on the NYPD. Yet, the entire murder of Eric Garner was caught on film and the police still got away with it. De Blasio hasn’t even fired the cop who carried out that murder on film. Obviously, cameras on police will not come anywhere near fixing the problem, and are largely just a distraction from what really needs to be done. Yet, they do potentially have some small advantages so they are still worth considering.

The city of Rialto, California began a pilot program of putting cameras on officers in February, 2012. In that first year, police use of force decreased by 60% and complaints against the police fell by 88%. Yet, in another example of Albuquerque, New Mexico police have murdered with police cameras on and gotten away with it and in another case killed a person after purposely disabling a camera. No criminal charges have been filed against police in either case.

Putting cameras on cops isn’t without some advantages, but doesn’t fix the problem either. The three main problems with cameras are that: (1) Film footage of blatant police murders are not enough to convict cops of crimes in America’s capitalist courts or even indict them by grand juries; (2) Cops can and do destroy footage or keep their cameras turned off when it suits their purposes; (3) Cameras catch anything, including justified resistance to cops. No capitalist court in the United States will condone resistance to a cop, no matter how justified. Therefore, in many cases where the evidence will be used, we are better off without any evidence at all. As opposed to liberal apologists for the brutal capitalist state, revolutionary socialists stand with the right of victims of that system to resist by any means necessary.

In those cases where it is the cop acting as the criminal, usually no amount of evidence can ever convict a brutal or killer cop. In the case of Eric Garner, there actually was video that showed Officer Daniel Pantaleo murdering Eric Garner in a choke hold as he pleaded for his life. That still was not enough to put Pantaleo on trial, let alone convict him of murder. Like Eric Garner, homeless person Kelley Thomas, with no weapons and begging for his life was murdered by police on camera as well and the police still got away with it. Obviously, the problem we are dealing with is far deeper than any lack of evidence.

In another recent case, Albuquerque police murdered James Boyd, a homeless man fed up with being harassed by police. As police harassed him for camping illegally on rural New Mexican land, he wielded two knives at a safe distance from police. After a two hour standoff, James Boyd attempted to walk away into the wild hills. This was when police opened fire on him. James Boyd was retreating and no conceivable threat to anyone except for to the cops if they advanced further in carrying out their violent home invasion in an attempt to arrest him for camping. No discipline or prosecutions of the murdering cops were ever handed down despite the film footage clearly showing the police murder.

A comparison of the treatment of James Boyd with the treatment of supporters of far right racist rancher Cliven Bundy may be useful here as well. Cliven Bundy’s supporters held off armed federal agents with high powered rifles instead of knives and they won. Perhaps the message is that the government prefers better off racist ranchers who illegally desecrate large tracts of federal lands with cattle over a poor person just trying to lay his head down and sleep somewhere. Or perhaps the lesson is that homeless people, African Americans, people of color, and the working class in general, need better weapons.


A rare case where film footage was useful in helping achieve a small measure of justice was that of Oscar Grant in Oakland, California. Yes, the film footage of Oscar Grant’s execution by police was important in winning a conviction for his killer, but where that evidence was important was in building a mass movement and strike action, not in court.

Video of Officer Mesherle’s murder of Oscar Grant was, however, captured on people’s cell phones, not with police cameras. Police footage will usually only be available if it helps the prosecution of civilians, not cops. Cops are perfectly capable of turning the cameras off or destroying footage that doesn’t help them while making claims that cameras malfunction. This was the case with Albuquerque cop Jeremy Dear who claimed his camera “malfunctioned” during three incidents of police brutality, including during the shooting death of a teenage girl, 19, named Mary Hawkes. The autopsy shows that Officer Dear pumped three bullets into her head, neck, and chest. The bullets entered her body at a trajectory where Officer Dear was standing over her. After protest, the police investigation showed that instead of the camera malfunctioning, it was intentionally disabled by Officer Dear. As a result, on Monday, December 1st, 2014, Officer Dear was fired. Officer Dear still has not been charged for his crime, but his firing comes after protests in Albuquerque and the eruption of a mass movement against police brutality across the United States.

The suspicion created by the fact that Officer Dear didn’t turn on his camera for the third time did help create local and national outrage and helped get him fired. Yet, according to Officer Dear’s attorney, Thomas Grover, “if they fire every officer who doesn’t turn on his uniform camera, they won’t have anyone left on the department.”

One recent case of an unarmed Native American man killed by cops was that of Corey Kanosh, 35, of the Paiute Tribe of Utah. He was an artist and father of one. Before being shot in 2012, Corey Kanosh was wrongly suspected of car theft, but proven to be innocent of any crime. The dispatch call also falsely claimed Corey Kanosh was armed, but this was not true. Details emerge from the one witness present who was independent of the cops, the other innocent suspect, Dana Harnes. According to his account, within 10 seconds of emerging from a vehicle, the unarmed Corey Kanosh was shot down by Milliard County Sheriff’s Deputy Dale Josse. Deputy Dale Josse claims there was a long struggle and he tasered Corey Kanosh before shooting him. Yet, there were no taser marks on Cory Kanosh’s body and if Dana Herne’s story is true, there was no time for a struggle to have taken place.

In regards to film, Deputy Dale Josse’s car followed just behind the victim’s vehicle, but suspicious claims are made that the camera in the deputy’s car was out of range of the car Corey Kanosh and Dana Hernes were in. If that evidence showed wrong doing by Deputy Dale Josse, it would likely have been destroyed. Their department does not, however, wear body cams. Had these deputies been forced to destroy evidence from a body cam as well; it is likely that nobody with any sense would have any question of who was the guilty party. Not that this would have brought justice for Sheriff’s Deputy Dale Josse, at least not without a major struggle, but it would have made it easier to carry out that struggle. So yes, body cams may be useful as an extremely limited reform, but far more is needed.

For the most part, Obama’s funding of body camera’s is a distraction from the fact that we are getting nearly zero justice in the capitalist courts and that basically no amount of evidence can put a killer cop in prison without strike actions and or major riots. Perhaps limited support can be given to Obama’s funding of body cameras, but additional provisions need to be attached that make their use mandatory by all law enforcement agencies in the United States and with the turning off of the cameras or otherwise disabling them made a felony.

Citizen Police Review Boards

Another reform proposed and implemented in some places on the local level are citizen police review boards. Of Ferguson’s new citizen’s police review board, Mayor Knowles says, “This groundbreaking initiative will be one of the first of its kind in this region.” That may be true. Yet, it will not be the first of its kind in the nation.

This author witnessed the results of a now dissolved citizen’s police review board in Santa Cruz, California. That body was usually an obstacle to challenging police abuse rather than a solution.

Citizen police review boards don't work for one simple reason. They are never meant to work. They are set up by the exact same local governments that already have full control of the police. The police review boards are created as an avenue to divert anger to powerless appointees while at the same time rubber stamping police cover-ups of police crimes.

One example of how police review boards operate was in Santa Cruz, California. In the time that the city of Santa Cruz had its Citizen's Police Review Board (CPRB), numerous cases of police abuses were rubber stamped as OK by the CPRB. These included the police murder of homeless activist John Dine and my arrest and beating for distributing leftist newspapers that exposed police crimes. The CPRB almost always simply worked to cover up police abuses. In my arrest and beating for a First Amendment protected activity of free speech, the CPRB found no wrong doing on the part of the Santa Cruz Police. Yet, I kept up the political and legal pressure and Federal Judge Ware eventually ruled in my favor. The CPRB was, however, worse than useless in these cases and was in fact part of the problem.

Numerous other cases of police abuse were paraded before the CPRB where the CPRB attempted to white wash the crimes of the police in a similar manner. One particularly egregious case was that of homeless activist John Dine. John Dine was shot and killed by Santa Cruz Police Officer Connor Carey. On television, the claim by Police Chief Belcher was that John Dine was pointing a toy gun at the officer before he was shot. Yet none of the many independent eyewitnesses backed up that claim. Even the Citizen's Police Review Board (appointed by the City Council) recognized that John Dine was not pointing a gun. Yet, the CPRB claimed not to be contradicting Chief Belcher in their findings despite telling an entirely different story. While pro-homeless writers like me, Becky Johnson, and Robert Norse picked up on these facts, they were ignored by the corporate media.

Instead, the CPRB's report stated that the shooting of John Dine was justified because he was reaching for what appeared to be a gun. Because of activism, too much of the truth had gotten out to the public for the CPRB to stick with Chief Belcher's version of a pointed toy gun, but the CPRB continued the cover-up with this new falsified version of events where John Dine is supposedly reaching for what appears to be a gun. The independent eyewitnesses refuted this CPRB version of events as well.

Some of the eyewitnesses had become so upset about the cover-up by the city government, DA, and the corporate media that they became activists in trying to get out the truth and punish those responsible. The CPRB simply gave its rubber stamp to the police cover-up. Instead of playing an independent role in investigating and disciplining the cops, it helped create the illusion that independent review actually exists while at the same time giving their rubber stamp to a police cover-up. This helped nobody except the political establishment, brutal cops, and the capitalist class.

As an activist I was familiar with a good number of cases that went before the CPRB while Santa Cruz had one. In that time there was only one exception of where having CPRB was useful, and even in that case it didn’t do much good. That was the case of Officer David LaFaver's brutality against a woman holding a child at the May 22nd, 1999 protest against the U.S. bombing of Yugoslavia. I stepped in and stopped that brutality by punching Officer LaFaver in the nose, allowing the woman and child to escape without further harm. The CPRB, under major citizen pressure in a small town, pressure that included a CPRB meeting packed with 100 people demanding LaFaver be fired or at least be investigated, did decide to carry out an independent investigation of what took place. That investigation found Officer LaFaver guilty of excessive force against the woman that endangered the child. As a result, I was told by an insider that Officer LaFaver was given the choice between resigning or being fired. LaFaver resigned.

After Officer LaFaver resigned in Santa Cruz, he joined the Sunnyvale police where he makes $150,000 a year. From Sunnyvale, I later got a call from a woman who had called the police as a result of suffering domestic abuse. According to her, Officer LaFaver arrived on the scene, but instead of being helpful, beat her, the victim, up. I, for my part served 7 months in jail (mostly in solitary confinement), 3 years probation, fines, anger management counseling, and suffer in trying to find employment due to a felony conviction on my record. All this was for stopping a brutal and misogynistic cop from continuing his crime his crime against a woman and child at what had been a peaceful and legal demonstration against the U.S. war in Yugoslavia. Yet, while little justice was produced by the CPRB’s ruling, the results of this one independent investigation that forced resignation of Officer LaFaver was closest the Santa Cruz CPRB ever came to bringing justice in its entire time of existence in Santa Cruz. Usually it was instead a complete obstacle to justice. Even in this case, little happened, LaFaver should have been prosecuted and gone to prison rather than moving on to another well paid police job.

Similarly, three members of the Albuquerque Police Oversight Commission (POC) resigned in protest in April 2014. Their letters of resignation were damning, saying they were under instructions from the city attorney not to go against the findings of the police department. One of the resigning members of the POC, Jonathan Siegel, summed it up in his resignation saying, “I cannot continue to pretend or deceive the members of our community into believing that our city has any real civilian oversight.” Likewise, activists who are familiar with how government works and with the history of Santa Cruz should not deceive people into thinking that a civilian police review board will resolve any our problems of police brutality, racist profiling, or abuse of homeless people.

Reforms like civilian police review boards are at best a distraction from the real struggle, at worst, when implemented, just another political tool of the capitalist state to spread lies and defend its murderous police forces from prosecution as criminals.

Revolution

The true predators in America span from the politicians and judges who hold the highest positions of power all the way down to their badged minions and racist wannabes who patrol the streets, killing with impunity. They represent the wealthy capitalists who own America. Obviously, in capitalist America for those who hold power, the lives of young Black, brown, and poor people are cheep. No protest, no strike, and no rebellion by itself will change these facts. To truly jail all of the criminals who are responsible and bring racial justice to America will take a proletarian socialist revolution carried out by America’s multi-racial working class. That revolution must completely smash the capitalist state, at its heart the police, courts, prisons, and military to build new institutions based on racial equality and economic justice. Instead of destroying the property of the capitalists, our goal needs to become one of completely expropriating the entire capitalist class and using our ownership of the economy to guarantee everyone a job, housing, education, healthcare, security, and a clean environment through a new socialist planned economy based on human needs rather than profit.


-The author, Steven Argue, is a former political prisoner and member of the Revolutionary Tendency

Check out the Revolutionary Tendency on Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/RevolutionaryTendency

For related articles by this author see:

Nelson Mandela: Eulogies of Imperialist Hypocrites & a Revolution Betrayed by Capitalism
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/12/15/18747847.php

Closing Our Eyes Won’t Make Racial and Ethnic Inequalities Disappear
(Has a corrected typo of North vs South Dakota at beginning)
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/01/21/18473855.php

Food Stamps under Attack; For Working Class Retaliation in the One-Sided Class War!
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/07/23/18740281.php

United States Port Actions End Business as Usual For Israel
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2014/08/26/18760701.php

Do Our Protests Accomplish Nothing? A Response to a Smug Cop
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2014/12/10/18765373.php

The Case of Trayvon Martin: There is No Justice in The Capitalist Courts!
http://neworleans.indymedia.org/news/2013/07/18241.php

Some History of Blatant Political Repression in Santa Cruz, California
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/08/05/18718924.php

Protest Shuts Down City Council, Urban Assault Vehicle Approved, Anti-Homeless Law Delayed
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2014/12/10/18765377.php

Forced Sterilizations, Racist Terror, and the Native American Uprising of 1972-1973
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2013/02/03/18731287.php

William Singletary, 65, Courageous Witness of Mumia's Innocence
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/01/12/18704643.php

Why The Russian Revolution is Still Important
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/03/03/18708611.php

The Movie J. Edgar; Just More Hollywood Lies
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2012/06/23/18716133.php

A few selected sources:

The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement
By Lance Hill

Negroes With Guns
By Robert F. Williams

Teamster Rebellion
By Farrell Dobbs

The Big Strike
By Mike Quin

The Black Panthers Speak
Edited by Philip S. Foner

Occupy This: Crazy Tom the FBI Provocateur
By Steve Weissman
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/275-42/8619-occupy-this-crazy-tom-the-fbi-provocateur

"Witness 40": Exposing A Fraud In Ferguson
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/unmasking-Ferguson-witness-40-496236

Also See:

Read the appeal from vets and active military personnel for the National Guard in Ferguson to stand down:
http://www.marchforward.org/veterans_appeal_to_national

DEATH, For a Cigarette
by Mumia Abu-Jamal
https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2014/12/12/18765456.php

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