SIRATYST (Stuff I Read and Thought You Should Too) --
“To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
(Calgacus, as quoted by Tacitus, Agricola 30-31)"
By signing on to this document, you are endorsing the following statement:
Police
reform efforts—from Minneapolis to Seattle—have failed. To stop police
violence, the police must be reduced in size, in budget, and in scope.
The police have never served as an adequate response to social problems.
They are rooted in violence against Black people. In order to protect
Black lives, this moment calls for investing and expanding our safety
and well-being beyond policing. To that end, we demand:
1-
Seattle's Mayor and City Council must immediately defund Seattle Police
Department (SPD). The city faces a $300 million budget shortfall due to
COVID-19. Seattle City Council should propose and vote for a 50% cut
from the $363 million already budgeted for SPD.
2- Seattle's
Mayor and City Council must protect and expand investments to make our
communities safe, prioritizing community-led health and safety
strategies. Full access to affordable housing, community-based
anti-violence programs, trauma services and treatment, universal
childcare, and free public transit are just a few of the non-police
solutions to social problems.
3- The Seattle City Attorney must
not prosecute protesters, including those arrested violating curfew, and
those living in encampments. Protesters took to the streets to call for
the end of the murders of Black people by police, and SPD unnecessarily
escalated tensions and violence.
Our schools, workplaces, and
government offices frequently collaborate with police. The police are an
occupying force in Black communities. Their brutality towards Black
people is condoned and accepted as business as usual. We urge all local
governmental and non-governmental entities to cut ties with the SPD.
When they put on their badges, police officers cease to be members of
the working class. In fact their primary role is to surveil, control,
and silence all forms of dissent to support the continuity of a racist,
harmful, murderous status quo.
--- *These demands are
prepared by COVID-19 Mutual Aid Seattle, a network of organizations and
individuals who came together in response to COVID-19 to demand an
abolitionist, anti-racist public health response to the COVID-19 crisis.
You can reach us at covid19mutualaidsea@gmail.com.
You can follow us on Instagram at @covid19mutualaid, on Facebook at
@covid19mutualaid, and on Twitter at @covid_mutualaid. Thank you for
supporting this important effort.
Pundits have been taking it upon themselves to tell the Black Lives Matter movement that the demand to abolish the police is the wrong one. Sarah Jaffe argues abolitionism has been making gains for decades - and now it’s breaking through.
Alarmed by the unfettered power accumulated by the military and its affiliates, President Eisenhower, himself a participant at the highest levels, warned of the attendant dangers:
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist.
Similarly, the “misplaced power” of the police threatens the lives and well-being of African Americans, the poor, and working people. Like the military and the security agencies, the role of the police cannot be separated from its central function of protecting wealth and privilege. It cannot be detached from the capitalist system.
The insurrections that are rising throughout the US are a remarkable sign of both the breadth and depth of anti-racist sentiment. They are inclusive in the best possible way. And they have frightened the Trumps, Cuomos, DeBlasios and the others charged with maintaining compliance with the system. The capitalist media is doing its best to shatter the hard-won unity against racism and against the police.
Insofar as the police are central to maintaining the legitimacy of capital, the rebellion is a rebellion against capitalism, whether its participants recognize it or not.
We must do everything to safeguard that unity and expose the source of racism and police violence: capitalism.
Nearly 30 years before a bystander with a cellphone caught a Minneapolis Police Department officer restraining George Floyd with his knee on Floyd's neck, police in Los Angeles were covertly taped beating a criminal suspect. And Sen. Joe Biden, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, proposed legislation siding with police.
Historically in the United States, police aggression has come before
any unrest. In 1967, unrest in Detroit spurred the US government to study the causes, which they assumed
would be communist instigators and an inflammatory press. The riots,
the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner
Commission) said, “were not caused by, nor were they the consequences of, any organized plan or ‘conspiracy.’”
Instead, the Kerner Commission said the cause of the unrest was structural racism. “What white Americans have never fully understood,” the report noted, “is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”
By “ghetto” the report’s authors meant the atrocious class inequalities in the United States that had – because of the history of enslavement – been marked by race.
Rather than address the deep inequalities in society, the US government chose to arm police officers heavily and send them to discipline populations in distress with their dangerous weapons. The commission proposed instead “a policy which combines ghetto enrichment with programs designed to encourage integration … into the society outside the ghetto.”
Nothing came of that report, as nothing has come of any of the reports that stretch back 150 years. Rather than genuinely invest in the well-being of people, the US government – whether run by Republicans or Democrats – cut back on social programs and cut back on welfare spending; it allowed firms to erode wages and it allowed them to diminish working conditions. What
The ruling elites no longer have legitimacy. They have destroyed our
capitalist democracy and replaced it with a mafia state. What the Roman
philosopher Cicero called a commonwealth, a res publica, a
“public thing” or the “property of a people,” has been transformed into
an instrument of naked pillage and repression on behalf of a global
corporate oligarchy. We are serfs ruled by obscenely rich, omnipotent
masters who loot the U.S. Treasury, pay little or no taxes and have
perverted the judiciary, the media and the legislative branches of
government to strip us of civil liberties and give them the freedom to
commit financial fraud and theft.
The loss of control over our system of rulership, the misuse of all
democratic institutions, the electoral process and laws to funnel money
upwards into to a handful of oligarchs while stripping us of power,
ominously means that the ruling elites can no longer claim the right to
have a monopoly on violence. Violence employed by police and security
agencies such as the FBI, which have devolved into occupying forces, to
protect the exclusive interests of a tiny, ruling criminal class exposes
the fiction of the rule of law and the treason of the ruling elites.
“In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a
conscience,” Stokely Carmichael warned. And if your opponent is bereft
of a conscience, then state violence is inevitably met with
counter-violence. Tyranny takes the place of reform. The danger of
widespread sectarian violence in America is now very real.
There are three options: reform, which, given the decay in the
American body politic, is impossible; revolution; or tyranny. The more
things deteriorate, the more the elites feel threatened, the more brutal
the police, the National Guard and the organs of state security will
become. The longer the serfs defy their masters the more the populations
in the jails and prisons, which are already the largest in the world,
will swell.
If the mafia state is not overthrown, then America will become a
naked police state where any opposition, however tepid, will be met with
draconian censorship or force. Police in cities around the country have
already thwarted the reporting by dozens of journalists covering the
protests through physical force, arrests, tear gas, rubber bullets and
pepper spray. The huge social divides, largely built around race, will
be used by the neo-fascists in power to divert a legitimate rage by a
betrayed working class to set neighbor against neighbor. Neo-fascist
“patriots” will be unleashed like attack dogs against people of color,
Muslims, feminists, intellectuals, artists, the media and liberals.
Dissent, even nonviolent dissent, will become treason.
The uprisings in the streets of American cities are not only about
the wanton murder by police of yet another person of color, but a
frantic fight to wrest back power over our own lives. They go far behind
police brutality, a daily reality for those trapped in our internal
colonies where 1,100 citizens are murdered by police every year, almost
all unarmed. The uprisings are fueled as well by the seizure of the
institutional and structural mechanisms that once made some form of
equality, always imperfect and always colored by an animus towards the
poor and people of color, possible.
Half the country lives in poverty or a category called near poverty.
The working class and the working poor are priced out of the health care
system. The schools do not educate their children, wholive without
adequate food and often clean water, are repeatedly evicted from their
homes, have their utilities shut off, cannot find jobs, are crippled by
punishing debt peonage and with the pandemic are dying at
disproportionally higher rates. They get the message the oligarchs are
sending. They, and their children, are expendable. They don’t count.
Their lives are of no consequence, unless they are locked in a cage
where their bodies can generate as much as $60,000 a year for the
multitude of corporations, including the for-profit medical services,
food services, money transfer services, commissary services, phone
services, private prisons and prison contractors, not to mention the
large corporations and state governments that exploit the cheap and
bonded labor of 1 million of our 2.3 million prisoners.
The prison system is a multi-billion dollar a year industry with
lobbyists in state capitals and Washington making sure these bodies
remain in cages or are put back into cages soon after they are released.
The neo-slavery in our prisons is the corporate model envisioned for
all of America.
The two ruling parties are equally complicit in this assault. The
Democratic Party, in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the
Great Depression, is trying to sell us a presidential nominee, Joe
Biden, who was one of the principal architects of de-industrialization
and responsible for the loss of hundreds of thousands of good, union
jobs. Biden and Bill Clinton also destroyed our welfare program, where
70 percent of the recipients were children, and orchestrated the
doubling of our prison population and the tripling and quadrupling of
sentences.
Biden, as Naomi Murakawa points out
in “The First Civil Right: How Liberals Built Prison America,” () was a
driving force behind the notoriously harsh penalties in the Anti-Drug
Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, and the three-strikes legislation in the
Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which also
provided funding for 100,000 new police officers and the aggressive
prosecution of 60 new capital crimes. He sponsored legislation to
dramatically curtail the ability of those in prison to appeal and led
the passage of the Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 and The
Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. He oversaw the
militarization of the police and the massive expansion of death-eligible
crimes, which he has repeatedly bragged about.
Biden was also at the forefront of the re-segregation of our public
school system and has repeatedly called for cuts to Social Security. He
was instrumental in the disastrous trade deals such as the North
American free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)and austerity programs as well as
establishing the most pervasive system of mass government surveillance
in human history. Watching Stacey Abrams, who certainly knows better,
twist herself into contortions to lavish praise on Biden, even tossing
the #MeToo movement overboard, is another sad example of the corrosive
disease of careerism. Biden, one of the most important architects behind
the wars in the Middle East, where we have squandered upwards of $7
trillion and destroyed or extinguished the lives of millions of people,
is personally responsible for far more suffering and death at home and
abroad than Donald Trump.
If we had a functioning judicial and legislative system, Biden, along
with the other architects of our disastrous imperial wars, plundering
of the country and betrayal of the American working class, would be put
on trial, not offered up as a solution to our political and economic
debacle. The myopia of the ruling elites is that they think they can
foist Biden on us because he is not Trump. But the game is up. The
façade of democracy no longer works.
It is only the dwindling and largely white middle and professional
classes who still believe the fiction that this election offers a choice
or that we live in a democracy. The working class and the working poor
know better. Their lives were, as Barbara Ehrenreich wrote, one long
emergency before the pandemic. Now they face the prospect of bankruptcy
this summer when unemployment and stimulus checks run out, the
moratorium is lifted on evictions to double or triple the unhoused
population of 11 million people and unemployment skyrockets to 25
percent. Forty-eight percent of front line workers remain ineligible for
sick pay, and some 43 million Americans have just lost their
employee-sponsored health insurance. Food banks are already overrun with
tens of thousands of desperate families.
And in the midst of this crisis, what did our kleptocratic rulers do?
They looted $4 trillion on a scale unseen since the 2008 bailout
overseen by Barack Obama and Biden. They gorged and enriched themselves
at our expense, while tossing crumbs out of the windows of their private
jets, yachts and palatial homes to the suffering and despised masses.
How long can you expect people to watch their children go hungry? How
long can you expect people to watch their loved ones suffer and die
because they can’t get medical care? How long can you expect people to
be abused by lawless police and a court system designed to railroad the
poor into jails and prisons? How long can you watch the rich profit from
your misery?
I would prefer that our revolution eschew the poison of violence,
which I know too intimately from my two decades as a war correspondent.
But I also know that when everything around you conspires to crush you,
the only way left to affirm yourself is to destroy, not only the
structures and institutions that have oppressed you, but often yourself.
I saw this when I lived in the impoverished neighborhood of Roxbury in
Boston and when I worked as a reporter in Gaza. This understanding was
something Malcom X, who came out of poverty, always understood and
Martin Luther King, a product of the black bourgeoisie, learned later.
It is ultimately the ruling elites who will determine the mechanics
of resistance. When they close every escape route, when they speak
exclusively in the language of force, then the language of force becomes
the only form of communication. Trump’s demand that states use the
National Guard to crush the protests and threat to deploy the U.S.
military in the streets of American cities only heightens the anger and
frustration that led to the uprisings.
The ruling elites are, at the same time, desperately seeking
scapegoats. The idea that Antifa, which on the spectrum of terrorist
groups would rank alongside the Boy Scouts, is behind these clashes is
as ridiculous as the idea that Russia is responsible for the election of
Trump. This desperate search for explanations that absolve the ruling
elites saw Susan Rice, who was Obama’s national-security adviser, blame
the violence on “foreign actors,” adding that “this is right out of the
Russian playbook.” This trope is always trotted by despotic rulers to
discredit dissidents who are branded as the enemy of the people.
The longer the ruling elites refuse to address the root causes behind
these protests, the more they loot the treasury to enrich themselves
and their fellow oligarchs, the more they engage in futile and absurd
efforts to deflect blame, the more unrest will spread. The last
desperate resort by the oligarchs to save themselves will be to stoke
the fires of racialized violence between disenfranchised whites and
disenfranchised people of color. This, I fear, is the next chapter in
this saga. I saw this tactic used to deadly effect in the former
Yugoslavia. These are dark times. They are about to get darker.
