Category: Racism

Killings By Police Must Stop Now

Statement by CCDS, July 15 2016police1

Nearly every U.S. city has had Black Lives Matter protests in the two years since Michael Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, MO. The Movement for Black Lives has been galvanized into action once again by shocking videos of the shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile at the hands of police. According to a July 10 National Public Radio report, over 200 protesters have been arrested in Louisiana, where Sterling was killed, and in Minnesota, where Castile was killed. These protests have been mirrored across the country over the last several days: thousands of protesters gathered in Oakland, CA on July 8 and blocked traffic in both directions on I-880; on July 8 and 9, 74 protesters were arrested in Rochester, NY; protesters in New York City held a moment of silence for the 11 police officers wounded or killed at a protest in Dallas, TX by lone gunman Micah Johnson, an Afghan War veteran. On July 11th the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, BLM, and Trinity United Church of Christ together mobilized 3,000 people in protest at Federal Plaza. More than 300 have been arrested across the U.S. protesting for justice in the last week.

The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism joins hands in this movement calling for an end to what amounts to a war on Black America.

There has been a long movement for civil rights, equality and justice in the United States whose victories have been inscribed in our Constitution. But the seemingly unstoppable spree of police murders has drawn attention to the fact that the real status of human rights in our country today is another thing altogether. In addition to a documented increase in killings of African Americans by police–often amounting to nothing other than summary execution–our country suffers under an historically unprecedented level of incarceration. Nearly half of all federal and state prisoners were incarcerated for nonviolent drug, property or public order offenses. The U.S. response to migration across our southern border has been violent and repressive. Our homeland security programs–including mass electronic surveillance–are eroding freedom of expression and association. American Muslims face discriminatory investigations and prosecution. The United States steadfastly refuses to grant reasonable access to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, both to our prisons in Guantanamo Bay as well as those within our borders. Those most likely to suffer abuse are those with the least power: racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, children, the poor and prisoners.

And yet our State Department lectures the world on human rights. The United States conducts unending drone killings of civilians in Pakistan, destroys entire countries such as Libya, Syria and Yemen, recklessly expands military operations in Eastern Europe and the South China Sea–all in the name of “humanitarian intervention.” No, nobody who has watched the video of Cleveland Police shooting down 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a drive-by encounter lasting no more than a few seconds, nobody who is awake, can believe this lie any longer.

To move racial and economic justice forward in our country, we must place demands on the state.

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed last March, former heads of state of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico flatly declared, “The ‘War on Drugs’ is an unmitigated disaster.” We must demand an end to the so-called War on Drugs.

police2In a strange twist, another unmitigated disaster, the 1994 Crime Bill, provides an opening for promoting criminal justice reform. It permits the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate local police departments and place those found to be in violation of civil rights under a consent decree. In two decades, we have seen little improvement from Justice Department supervision. But things could improve if the Justice Department’s framework for consent decrees incorporated a crucial feature of the report of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. That feature is Action Item 2.2.3: “mandate the use of external and independent prosecutors in cases of police use of force resulting in death, officer-involved shootings resulting in injury or death, or in-custody deaths.” In this election season, we must pressure the Department of Justice to incorporate Action Item 2.2.3, the use of external and independent prosecutors, in their consent decree framework.

We support the Black Lives Matter movement and the many local organizations fighting police crimes, such as the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression-led campaign for a Civilian Police Accountability Council (CPAC).

More than simply the right to live, people have the right to live in dignity. This connects the struggle against police brutality to the Fight for $15 and other living wage movements. We must raise Dr. King’s demand for a guaranteed income.

We must recall Dr. King’s courage in pointing out that there was a line that connected the vicious racism of the Selma, AL police with the illegal and immoral U.S. war on Viet Nam. He recognized that the United States was–and still is–the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today. On a very deep level, fighting racism at home calls for fighting to curb the U.S. war machine.

police3The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism has long believed that the problems we face have a systemic source, and that a better world is possible. With Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we believe that:

“On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: ‘This is not just.’”

Why Progressives Need a National Electoral Strategy—and Fast

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. [1] /

AlterNet [2]

April 12, 2016  – Every electoral cycle gives me the sense of “Groundhog Day” within progressive circles. It feels as if the same discussion take places over and again. No matter what has transpired in the intervening years; no matter what mass struggles; no matter what theoretical insights; progressives find themselves debating the relative importance of electoral politics and the pros and cons of specific candidates. These debates frequently become nothing short of slugfests as charges are thrown around of reformism, sell-outs and purism. And then, during the next cycle, we are back at it.

What has struck me in the current cycle are two related but distinct problems. First, progressives have no national electoral strategy to speak of. Second, elections cannot be viewed simply or even mainly within the context of the pros and cons of specific candidates. In fact, with regard to the latter, there are much bigger matters at stake that are frequently obscured by the candidates themselves.

Let’s begin in reverse order. In a recent exchange on Facebook I had with a friend, he raised the point that Hillary Clinton holds some positions to the right of Donald Trump. His, apparent, point was that in a final election, should it come down to Clinton vs. Trump, it would actually not make much of a difference who won. Someone I do not know responded to my friend by pointing out that Hitler was to the “left” of certain candidates as well and that the issue of intolerance needed to be the point of focus.

Looking at the platform or views of a candidate reveals only part of the equation. It gives one a sense of the candidate. What is just as important are the social forces that have assembled around a particular candidate and the direction of their motion. Let’s go back to Hitler for a moment. Within the NSDAP (Nazi Party) there were forces on the left and the right, of course these terms being quite relative. The Brownshirts, otherwise known as the SA (Stormtroopers) proselytized in favor of a “national revolution” in Germany. Hitler and his SA supporters advocated some very radical solutions to the problems facing Germany. They consciously utilized left-wing symbolism (such as a red flag as background to the swastika) in order to appeal to the working class and other disgruntled forces crushed by the economy. They did this while promoting antisemitism and militarism. On June 30, 1934, after assuming power and after cementing his alliance with the German military and major elements of the economic establishment, Hitler and the SS crushed the SA and any further discussion of a “national revolution.” While the SA may have sincerely been interested in their perverted notion of a “national revolution,” the Nazi movement had built a base and a set of alliances that was interested in something quite different: a radical restructuring of capitalism, the end of political democracy, and a relocation of Germany among the world’s powers.

Right-wing populism, whether in its fascist or non-fascist form, can assume a posture and articulate a language that can appear left-wing. History has demonstrated this time and again. Yet right-wing populism is NOT “right-wing + populism” but is, instead, a specific integral phenomenon known as “right-wing populism.” It is irrationalist, xenophobic, frequently anti-Semitic, racist and misogynistic. And it is a movement, rather than just a few crazed individuals.

Looking at Trump and his platform tells us something but not enough. An examination of his base and their objectives is just as important. The white revanchism that exists among his base, i.e., the politics of racial and imperial revenge, flows through and from the Trump campaign like waste through a sewer. The economic anger of the Trump base is something that is very real, but it is anger seen through a racial lens and articulated through coded racial language. (Continued)

Continue reading Why Progressives Need a National Electoral Strategy—and Fast

Standing Against the Right

By Bill Fletcher
Telesur


Dec 18, 2015 – It is not just Donald Trump; nor is it just Trump and Marine Le Pen (leader of the Front National in France). The specter of right-wing populism haunts the planet and places us all in a state of perpetual anxiety.

Right-wing populism is not equivalent to the entirety of the political Right. It is a specific trend within which one can find movements such as fascism. It rises in response to progressive social movements and it specifically seems to emerge in times of economic crisis when the larger capitalist system has proven dysfunctional. It poses itself as the defender of the “people” against various elites and “alien” forces, frequently defining the elites in racial/ethnic/religious terms. While it may articulate language reminiscent of the political Left, it is more a caricature or a deception which aims to peel away supporters and potential supporters of Left and progressive projects.

Right-wing populism is dangerous in its irrationalism. As one can observe in the Donald Trump campaign, Trump has never been constrained by facts or the truth. Perhaps the most obvious example has been his repeated references to alleged cheering by thousands of Arab Americans (and/or Muslims) on 11 September 2001 at the time of the al-Qaida terrorist attacks. No documentation has ever been discovered of such alleged cheering, yet Trump insists upon it and many of his supporters have either been willing to take a pass on his suggestion or go so far as to back up his story.

There is a term for seeing things that don’t exist…

The irrationalism and revanchism of right-wing populism speaks very much to the crisis faced by the white population of the U.S. and, indeed, the crisis facing so-called whites in many parts of the capitalist world. While right-wing populism is not limited to whites — with a case in point being the Hutu genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 — there is a particularity to right-wing populism in the advanced capitalist world. It is a combination of the sense that their [white] old world is disintegrating due to both massive economic changes as well as demographic changes. In the U.S., such a combination has fueled movements such as the Tea Party that emerged during the first year of the Obama administration.

With the rise of the Islamic State group, right-wing populism in multiple countries has shifted gears with Muslims becoming the target of choice. In fact, it can be argued that Islamophobia is the most acceptable form of open racism of the moment. Islam has been branded, by right-wing populists, not only the religion of terrorists but the religion of the brown and black barbaric masses that supposedly threaten Western so-called civilization.

Right-wing populism cannot be written off as irrelevant lunacy, despite its irrationalism. It is a powerful social movement that represents danger to progress wherever it raises its ugly head. For forces on the Left, the challenge is how to combat this phenomenon? While it will not be easy, it cannot be collapsed into simply offering an alternative for the future, though our work must contain that. It should include, but not limit itself to: (continued)

Continue reading Standing Against the Right