‘He Must Resign’: Attorney General Barr Personally Ordered Police Assault on Peaceful DC Protesters, Report Says

https://citizentruth.org/he-must-resign-attorney-general-barr-personally-ordered-police-assault-on-peaceful-dc-protesters-report-says/







“AG Bill Barr’s behavior has been deeply problematic since he was sworn in, but now it has become truly dangerous. He needs to resign.”

(By: Jake Johnson, Common Dreams) Attorney General William Barr is facing demands to step down after the Washington Post reported Tuesday that the nation’s top law enforcement official personally ordered police to beat back peaceful protesters gathered near the White House Monday evening to clear the path for President Donald Trump’s walk to St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Two anonymous federal law enforcement officials told the Post that “the decision had been made late Sunday or early Monday to extend the perimeter around Lafayette Square by one block.” An unnamed Justice Department official said that Barr on Monday afternoon “went to survey the scene and found the perimeter had not been extended.”

“The attorney general conferred with law enforcement officials on the ground, which the official said is captured in a video of the incident,” the Post reported. “He conferred with them to check on the status and basically said: ‘This needs to be done. Get it done,’ the Justice Department official said.”

National Guard soldiers and police proceeded to club peaceful protesters with batons and fire tear gas canisters into crowds as Trump delivered a speech on the nationwide uprising sparked by the killing of George Floyd. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Barr “had strolled to the edge of the police line to observe the crowd in the minutes before the tear-gassing began.”

Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) was the first Democratic member of Congress to demand Barr’s resignation in the wake of the Post‘s reporting, which was confirmed by ABC News.


“The Attorney General is the top law enforcement officer in the country, the leader of an agency meant to protect Americans’ constitutional rights,” Beyer tweeted Tuesday. “Barr betrayed that mission by ordering the violent and systematic violation of peaceful protesters’ rights. He should resign.”

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), also called for Barr’s resignation Tuesday.

“AG Bill Barr’s behavior has been deeply problematic since he was sworn in, but now it has become truly dangerous,” CREW tweeted. “He needs to resign.”

Citizens for Ethics
✔@CREWcrew



AG Bill Barr's behavior has been deeply problematic since he was sworn in, but now it has become truly dangerous. He need to resign. https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1267881485522087937 …
The Washington Post
✔@washingtonpost


Attorney General Barr personally asked for protesters to be pushed back from D.C. park just before Trump spoke https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/02/george-floyd-protests-live-updates/ …
1,060
2:13 PM - Jun 2, 2020
Twitter Ads info and privacy
482 people are talking about this





In a statement released just ahead of the Post‘s report, Barr thanked the police and the National Guard for their “outstanding work” Monday night but did not mention his role in ordering the assault on demonstrators.

“I am particularly impressed by the citizen-soldiers of the D.C. National Guard, who are committed to serving their community, and did so with great effectiveness last night,” Barr said. “There will be even greater law enforcement resources and support in the region tonight.”

Before news of Barr’s instructions to law enforcement broke, Senate Democrats unveiled a non-binding resolution (pdf) condemning Trump for “ordering federal officers to use gas and rubber bullets against the Americans who were peaceably protesting in Lafayette Square… thereby violating the constitutional rights of those peaceful protestors.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Democrats will attempt to pass the resolution by unanimous consent Tuesday, but Republicans are expected to block it.


“President Trump ordered federal officers to attack peaceful American citizens exercising their constitutional rights by tear gassing them in a public park while military helicopters flew overhead,” Schumer tweeted. “Appalling. An abuse of presidential power. Blatantly unconstitutional.”

UPRISING: Goliath Is Not Invincible

https://consortiumnews.com/2020/06/04/uprising-goliath-is-not-invincible/







The streets in the U.S. are on fire once more because of the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by a white police officer and his accomplices in Minneapolis. Malcolm X once said “That’s not a chip on my shoulder. That’s your foot on my neck.”

A week before George Floyd was murdered, João Pedro Mattos Pinto (age 14) was killed by the police in Rio de Janeiro while playing in the yard of his house; a few days after his murder, Israeli occupation forces murdered Iyad el-Hallak (age 32), who worked in and attended a special needs school in Old Jerusalem. The foot on the neck of George Floyd, João Pedro and Iyad el-Hallak is the same foot that suffocates the Venezuelan people, who suffer each day from the U.S.-driven hybrid war.

Last year, while in Caracas, I walked with Mariela Machado in her housing complex known as Kaikachi in the neighborhood of La Vega. After Hugo Chávez was inaugurated president in 1999, a group of working-class residents of the city saw an empty piece of land and occupied it. Mariela and others went to the government and said, “We built this city. We can build our own houses. All we want are machines and materials.” The government supported them, and they built a charming multi-story complex that houses 92 families.

Across the road is a middle-class apartment building. Sometimes, Mariela told me, the people from that building throw trash into Kaikachi. “They want us to be evicted,” she says. If the Bolivarian governments fall, she points out, a government of the oligarchy will take the side of those residents, evict the families – mainly Afro-Venezuelans – who built the housing development, and hand it over to a landlord. This, she says, is the nature of her struggle, a class struggle to defend the precious gains of the poor against the oligarchy.

Everywhere you go amongst the Venezuelan working class and the urban poor, you are greeted with an effusive identity: Chavista. This word is used by women and men who are loyal to Chávez, certainly, but also to the Bolivarian Revolution that his election inaugurated. Revolutions are difficult; they must chip away at hundreds of years of inequality; they must erode cultural expectations and build the material foundations for a new society. Revolutions, Lenin wrote, are “a long, difficult, and stubborn class struggle, which, after the overthrow of capitalist rule, after the destruction of the bourgeois state…does not disappear…but merely changes its forms and in many respects becomes fiercer’. Hunched shoulders must straighten and aspirations beyond the most basic needs must be met. That was the agenda put on the table by Chávez. Initially, oil revenues provided the resources for these dreams – both within Venezuela and across the Global South – but then oil prices collapsed in 2015, which impacted the ability of the Venezuelan state to deepen revolutionary change. But the revolutionary process did not weaken.

From 1999, the main oil and mining companies tried their best to delegitimise the revolutionary process in Venezuela. They did this not only to access the resources of Venezuela, but also to make sure that the Venezuelan example of resource socialism did not inspire other countries. In 2007, for instance, Peter Munk, the head of Canada’s Barrick Gold, wrote an inflammatory letter to the Financial Times with the title ‘Stop Chavez’ Demagoguery Before it is Too Late.” Munk compared Chávez to Hitler and Pol Pot, saying that such “autocratic demagogues” should not be permitted to function. What bothered Munk – and executives of mining companies such as him – is that Chávez was carrying out a “step-by-step transformation of Venezuela.” What was the nature of this step-by-step transformation? Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution were taking resources away from the likes of Barrick Gold and diverting their wealth to benefit not only the Venezuelan people, but also the people of Latin America and elsewhere. This resource socialism had to be destroyed.



In 2002, the United States – with funds provided by the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID – attempted a coup d’état against Chávez. This coup failed decisively, but it did not stop the shenanigans. In 2004, U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield produced a five-point plan of the embassy: “the strategy’s focus,” he wrote, “is 1) strengthening democratic [namely oligarchic] institutions; 2) penetrating [meaning to disorient and buy off] Chavez’ political base; 3) dividing Chavismo; 4) protecting vital U.S. business, and 5) isolating Chavez internationally.”

These are the elements of the hybrid war against Venezuela, a war whose tactics range from sanctions to throttling the economy to spreading misinformation and isolating the revolutionary process. Every attempt has been made by the United States government and its allies (including Canada and a number of governments in Latin America) to overthrow not just President Chávez and President Nicolás Maduro, but also the Bolivarian revolution in its entirely. If the U.S. and its allies were to win such a war, there is no doubt that they would erase the Kaikachi housing complex where Mariela Machado is a local leader.



When I met Mariela in 2019, the U.S. had been trying to install Juan Guaidó – an insignificant politician inside of Venezuela up to that point – as the president. It was people like Mariela who took to the streets on a daily basis to resist the attempted coup and hybrid war engineered by Washington, DC, by the transnational corporations, and by Venezuela’s old oligarchy. Chavistas like Mariela understood very well Chávez’s comments from 2005: “Goliath is not invincible. That makes it more dangerous, because as it begins to be aware of its weaknesses, it begins to resort to brute force. The assault on Venezuela, utilizing brute force, is a sign of weakness, ideological weakness.” What Chávez said then mirrors what Franz Fanon wrote in “A Dying Colonialism” (1959): “What we are really witnessing is the slow but sure agony of the settler mentality’ and the ‘radical mutation’ that the revolutionary process produces in the working class. Chavismo is the name of revolutionary energy, of the radical mutation of the personality of the Venezuelan who is no longer willing to bend before the oligarchy or of Washington, D.C., but dignified in the struggle, is unwilling to accept a life of submission.

During the period of the global pandemic, a sensitive world would have united to condemn the suffocation of places like Venezuela and Iran, which face a hybrid war from Washington, DC that has diminished their ability to combat the virus. But, instead of ending or even suspending the hybrid war, the United States government – and its Canadian, European, and Latin American allies – increased their attack on Venezuela. This attack ranges from preventing Venezuela from using the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Covid-19 fund to accusing – without evidence – key Venezuelan leaders of narco-trafficking to attempting to invade the country.

Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research worked closely with Ana Maldonado of Frente Francisco de Miranda (Venezuela), Paola Estrada of the International Peoples Assembly and Zoe PC of Peoples Dispatch to craft CoronaShock study No. 2: “CoronaShock and the Hybrid War Against Venezuela” (June 2020). The text covers the hybrid war against Venezuela during 2020 and shows how – despite entreaties from the United Nations – the United States persisted in, and even increased, its sanctions policy and military attacks. We urge you to read this booklet, discuss it with your friends and comrades, and circulate it widely.

Words such as “democracy” and “human rights” have been emptied of their meaning by the hybrid war. The United States accuses Venezuela of “human rights violations” at the same time as it operates a sanctions policy that is tantamount to a crime against humanity; the U.S. – out of thin air – chooses a man that it anoints as the president of Venezuela in the name of ‘democracy’ without concern for the democratic processes inside Venezuela.

Years before Chávez won his election, the Venezuelan poet Miyó Vestrini wrote about this manipulation of language:

I wonder if human rights really
are an ideology.
Fernando, the only alcoholic bartender who hasn’t retired,
speaks in rhymes:
the night is dark
and I don’t have my heart.
As I understand it, he’s one of the few left who
thinks human rights are morals.

Certainly, in Washington, D.C., they treat ‘human rights’ as an instrument of war.



Meanwhile, five Iranian oil tankers broke what is effectively a U.S. embargo on Venezuelan trade to bring gasoline into the country. The first tanker, Fortune, entered on 24 May and the fifth, Carnation, came into port on 1 June. Last year, an Iranian ship, Grace 1, was hijacked in Gibraltar, but this time the United States could not provoke an incident. It helps that China and Russia are supporting Venezuela with resources to assist in the struggle against Covid-19, and it helps that China has made it clear that it will not allow a regime change in Caracas. This is not enough of a shield, however; nothing in our times seems to prevent Washington from conducting a war.

Vijay Prashad

Police Reform Stalled In NY As Cash Flowed to Cuomo & Dem Leaders

NEWS: Police Reform Stalled In NY As Cash Flowed to Cuomo & Dem Leaders
Cuomo, his party and New York’s legislative leaders have raked in more than $1 million from police unions as they have refused to enact a bill proponents say would deter police violence.


David Sirota
Jun 4






New York is a blue state -- Democrats control the governorship, every statewide constitutional office, and both chambers of the legislature. And yet for all their talk of civil rights, New York legislators have still not passed a package of bills designed to bring accountability to local police departments -- and New York’s governor is now suggesting that police violence has not been happening, when clearly it has.

Maybe that has something to do with a flood of money that has made New York politics another shade of blue -- police blue.

In all, police unions and associations have delivered more than $7 million to current New York state elected officials, according to campaign finance data from the National Institute on Money In Politics. That includes $600,000 to Cuomo during his gubernatorial campaigns. Police unions have also delivered more than $274,000 to Cuomo’s New York Democratic Party since 2010. Democratic Senate Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Democratic Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie have received $187,000 and $76,000 over their careers, respectively.

To date, police reform legislation has remained bottled up in the legislative committees that Stewart-Cousins and Heastie control.



Accounting for all campaign money from police, firefighters, and emergency medical technicians, Cuomo has received the largest share of that money of any public official in the country. Five of the top 10 biggest recipients of that cash in the entire nation are New York public officials.

In recent days, some New York legislators have started returning police donations.
Fight Over Police Transparency Legislation

As police money has flooded into New York politics, Cuomo has repeatedly gone to bat for police interests.

For instance, amid police violence throughout New York City, Cuomo called for the deployment of more police, and apologized to the city’s police chief for mildly criticizing them. He has also imposed a city curfew designed to halt peaceful protests, and today he suggested that police violence has not occurred in New York City. While he did pocket veto a bill in 2015 that critics said would have weakened elected officials’ power to discipline police officers, he has not pushed a key section of long-sought police reforms in the legislature, known as the Safer NY Act.

At issue is a bill to repeal the 50a provision in New York state law that critics say keeps police misconduct records secret. The Albany Times Union notes that the “statute prevents the public, and in most instances defense attorneys, from accessing the disciplinary records of police officers, including criminal allegations that may have been handled internally… In many departments, civilian police review boards are not allowed to know the identity of the officers whose conduct they are reviewing, including whether an officer has been the target of multiple complaints.”

Critics argue that police can be more easily held accountable if the records are public. However, City and State has reported that “opposition from police unions – and lukewarm responses from the governor and the state’s biggest police department – have slowed efforts to repeal or amend the law.”

The Times Union pointed out that Cuomo “has never offered his own bill to repeal the statute or directed the State Police to release their personnel files, as he has said New York City should do. Nor has he sought to add legislation to repeal the statute in his annual executive budgets.”

In 2016, Cuomo deflected efforts to repeal the law, asserting that cities could go around it if they chose. Earlier this year, Communities United for Police Reform said it was “disappointed in Governor Cuomo’s failure to address reducing police violence and improving police accountability and transparency in New York State.”
Renewed Push For Repeal

Under increasing pressure this week, Cuomo announced he now supports reforms to the police secrecy law. However, 85 civil rights groups, unions and other grassroots organizations insist that the law must be fully repealed, not merely reformed.

“The continued police secrecy in New York enables that police violence and allows abusive officers to continue to act with impunity,” they wrote to legislative leaders in Albany. “We should be able to look up the misconduct and disciplinary records of every officer who mass-pepper sprayed, assaulted, blatantly covered their badge numbers and engaged in other abuse of authority and violence against New Yorkers. Instead, we are left in the dark and abusive police officers are given special rights and shielded because of 50-a.”

They concluded: “The time to pass a full repeal of 50-a is now. We cannot afford to entertain proposals to amend 50-a that will give a false sense of progress while loopholes continue to entrench police secrecy.”




Andrew Perez contributed research and reporting to this story.

Mass re-openings worldwide have accelerated the coronavirus pandemic

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/05/covi-j05.html






By Bryan Dyne
5 June 2020

The mass economic re-openings in the Americas, Europe and Asia that began in May have paved the way for a massive spread of the coronavirus pandemic internationally. According to data aggregated by Worldometer, the average number of new cases has been more than 115,000 since May 27, a number which has been steadily rising since May 12.

The accelerating spread is also reflected in the number of new deaths each day. Starting in April, the number of new deaths had begun to decrease, a result of the physical distancing taken up by hundreds of millions of workers, toilers and youth around the world. The rate of new deaths, however, has now stabilized at an average of 3,770, as those people have been steadily forced back to work, and it is poised to climb in the wake of the hundreds of thousands of new infections.

As of this writing, there have been nearly 6.7 million officially confirmed cases and more than 390,000 deaths caused by COVID-19 worldwide. A plurality of cases are in the US and Brazil, which have totals of 1.9 million and 610,000 cases, respectively, along with 110,000 and 33,000 deaths.
The governments of both countries have also whipped workers back into factories and plants under threat of economic destitution if they don’t return. In Brazil, meatpacking plants were opened on May 20, while auto production started resuming the previous week. Hundreds of workers in these facilities have already become infected, spreading it to their homes and their communities. Despite this, President Jair Bolsonaro is storming ahead with the full reopening of the country, overseen by local mayors and regional governors.

Factories in the United States began opening even earlier. Some states, including Oklahoma, North Dakota and Nebraska, never had stay-at-home orders, while states such as Georgia began reopening the last week of April. Certain industries, such as auto, waited until the second or third week in May to fully resume manufacturing their products, but these were only ever shut down in the first place as a result of wildcat strikes that erupted in early April, after reports emerged of infections spreading in the auto plants.

The spread is in every state. While states such as New York, New Jersey, New Mexico and Connecticut report a 14-day decrease in the number of new daily cases, nearly half of states have an increase in new cases, particularly in areas where the pandemic did not initially widely infect. Florida, for example, yesterday saw its highest new case count yet, bringing its total cases above 60,000. The state’s death toll stands at more than 2,600.


Mexico has also emerged as a new hotspot for outbreaks of the pandemic. It is now on par with the United States and Brazil for the number of new deaths each day, and is the fourteenth country to exceed 100,000 cases and the seventh to breach 10,000 deaths. Hundreds of these were caused by the premature reopening of the country’s maquiladora sweatshops, which are used by US auto and other manufacturing companies to produce cheap parts.

Similarly in India, large sections of industry were ordered to resume production in mid-May, particularly parts and car companies. Even then, the number of cases in the country were still increasing, largely a result of the haphazard lockdown implemented by the Modi government in April that trapped millions of migrant workers in the already crowded and unsanitary slums of Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and other cities. The Modi government’s actions have caused India’s official case and death counts to soar. They currently stand at 226,000 and 6,309, respectively, and are increasing exponentially.

The outbreaks in these countries and many others underscore the warnings that have been repeatedly issued by the World Health Organization against reopening without having a system of mass testing, contact tracing and isolation in place to fight the coronavirus. Hans Kluge, the European director for the WHO, recently noted, “The second wave is not inevitable. But an increasing number of nations are lifting restrictions, and there is a definite threat of a repeat outbreak of the COVID-19 infection. If those outbreaks are not isolated, a second wave may come and it may be very destructive.”

Even this statement is behind the times. The first wave of the pandemic, in global terms, never actually abated, and is now cutting a bloody swathe through some of the poorest regions of the world. South Asia, as well as Africa, have not only been devastated by the coronavirus, but also from powerful typhoons and massive locust swarms.

Kluge also noted, “We still have neither a vaccine nor a cure for COVID-19.” Similar statements were issued on Wednesday by Anthony Fauci, the director the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the US. He warned that, while it is possible that there will be a vaccine available sometime next year, there is no evidence that any immunity will last.

“When you look at the history of coronaviruses, the common coronaviruses that cause the common cold, the reports in the literature are that the durability of immunity that’s protective ranges from three to six months to almost always less than a year,” Fauci said during an interview with Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Editor Howard Bauchner. “That’s not a lot of durability and protection.”

The re-openings are also occurring alongside the mass protests in the US and internationally against the police murder of George Floyd and the dictatorial actions taken by President Donald Trump. While many protesters are wearing masks in an attempt to protect themselves from the disease, the large crowds, chanting and holding hands are ideal for the contagion to rapidly spread. George Floyd himself was infected when he was killed, his autopsy showed.

The protests are also becoming an excuse for areas to close testing sites in California, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Testing for the disease is a crucial step in containing outbreaks and is the only way to objectively know how far the pandemic has spread.

Less testing also artificially deflates the case counts, which can in turn be utilized to justify further re-openings. In a story virtually ignored by the national media, the worker who developed Florida’s coronavirus database was fired last month for refusing to manipulate the data in order make it seem as though the state had reached the threshold to safely reopen. As testing becomes less common, it becomes easier for false data to be presented as legitimate.

Trump intensifies campaign to brand domestic opposition as terrorism

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/05/pers-j05.html






5 June 2020

The Trump administration is continuing its campaign for military intervention against the mass protests over police brutality that have swept the United States since the police killing of 46-year-old African American George Floyd on May 25. Attorney General William Barr and FBI Director Christopher Wray held a press conference Thursday afternoon to voice lying claims that left-wing groups bent on violence had “hijacked” the protests, in an effort to manufacture a pretext for repression.

Barr advocated the use of anti-terrorism units to apprehend “agitators” whom he accused of “hijacking” demonstrations. The branding of domestic political opposition as terrorism is aimed at delegitimizing and criminalizing all opposition to police violence and the policies of the oligarchy.

The level of lying in the Barr press conference would be admired by Nazi spokesman Josef Goebbels, the propaganda chief for Hitler’s “big lie.” Barr conjured up an invented world in which demonstrations involving millions of people in hundreds of cities, large, medium and small, are being manipulated by Antifa, an “organization” that has not a single identified member. He also claimed that “foreign actors” were intervening in the protests, adding the specter of a Russian, Chinese, Iranian or Al Qaeda role.
Antifa is little more than a label adopted by youth who protest against ultra-right and white supremacist provocations. As an organized group, it exists mainly in the fevered imaginations of FBI informers and agents—who likely comprise most of its “membership.” If Antifa did not exist (and it may not), Trump, Barr & Co. would be compelled to invent it, as a pretext for the mass repression that they are carrying out against the American working class.

Barr advocated the use of existing Joint Terrorist Task Forces against the supposed Antifa threat. The JTTF unite federal and state police agents in a common effort, initially directed against the Islamic fundamentalists who carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York City and Washington, but now to be turned against all left-wing opposition to the policies of the Trump administration and its collaborators at the state level.

FBI agents working through the JTTF will go out to question people about their political views, in gross violation of the First Amendment, and seek to criminalize their participation in protests. A Department of Homeland Security memorandum, obtained by Politico, cited the need for intelligence agents to be “vigilant in looking for any kind of emerging threat to the homeland,” while making the revealing admission that “some of the observed suspicious behaviors include constitutionally protected activities…”

Barr has emerged as one of the principal agents of Trump in preparing a presidential dictatorship. The “chief law enforcement officer,” as the attorney general is described, is actually a full-fledged co-conspirator in the assault of the US Constitution and democratic rights.

Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, but unlike 1992 in California, no state governor has requested federal military assistance. So, the White House aims to use the District of Columbia, which is federal territory and not part of any state, as a demonstration of the use of overwhelming military force to crush protests and intimidate the largely African American population.

As press reports have begun to show, it was Barr who played the main role in the police-military attack on peaceful protesters in Lafayette Park, across the street from the White House, on Monday night. The anti-riot force of the federal Bureau of Prisons, under Barr’s direct authority since it is part of the Department of Justice, was the spearhead of the effort to clear the park, using tear gas, pepper balls, and other riot gear, so that Trump could take his massively publicized walk across the park and pose, holding a Bible, in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, which had suffered minor fire damage over the weekend.

At the press conference, Barr hailed the role of myriad federal agencies in the DC repression, declaring, “We have deployed all the major law-enforcement components of the department in this mission, including the FBI, ATF, DEA, Bureau of Prisons, and U.S. Marshals Service.”

He recalled his own role in 1992, during his previous term as attorney general in the administration of George H. W. Bush, the last time that a president invoked the Insurrection Act, during the upheaval in Los Angeles that followed the acquittal of the police thugs who beat Rodney King—an earlier racist atrocity by police that, like the killing of George Floyd, became a national scandal because it was filmed by bystanders and the whole country was able to witness the true nature of American “law and order.”

Vice President Pence, who was absent during the Lafayette Square provocation, has resurfaced as a fervent advocate of the Insurrection Act and the use of federal troops. In an interview with a Pittsburgh television station, Pence condemned the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania for only calling out 500-600 National Guard troops and threatened to send in the US Army instead.

“The president and I will continue to urge the governors, like Governor Wolf, to call up the National Guard, deploy them to the streets and in a strong and decisive manner to restore order. The American people expect nothing less,” said Pence.

While lies on the scale of those advanced by Barr may seem demented and unbelievable, there is a definite logic at work. It is part of a game plan to justify a military coup d’état that would place unchallenged power in the hands of the president. The gangster language of Trump and his accomplices, including aides like Stephen Miller and advisers like Steven Bannon, demonstrates that they are not playing by any sort of constitutional-democratic rulebook. They will do and say anything to carry out their plans to establish an authoritarian regime based on the military and the police.

The greatest danger for working people and youth would be to underestimate the dangers and believe—as the corporate media and the Democratic Party would suggest—that Trump has given up his plans for military rule because of opposition from within the political and national-security establishment. Spreading this poisonous complacency was the main function of the sermon delivered by Democratic Party operative Al Sharpton to the memorial service held for George Floyd Thursday in Minneapolis.

Sharpton was compelled to admit that the massive turnout at nationwide protests, with large numbers of young whites comprising a clear majority of those outraged and angry over the murder of George Floyd, marked something new in American political and social life. But he quickly turned to his real purpose: portraying the attack on Floyd as purely racial, thus concealing its class character as an attack on the working class, and the role of the police, whether white or black, as the repressive arm of the capitalist state.

Making light of Trump’s threat to use military force against the protesters, Sharpton called the president “all bark and no bite.” This under conditions where at least a dozen people have already been killed by police and National Guard since the protests began, and where Trump and his co-conspirators are actively preparing an intervention by the military on the streets of America that would mean a terrible bloodbath.

Not one prominent Democrat has denounced Trump for threatening a military takeover or demanded that he be removed from office. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has been virtually invisible. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the top Democratic in Washington, merely sent a letter to the White House Thursday, requesting it to supply Congress with a list of the military and police agencies involved at Lafayette Park, as though there were not an ongoing effort to overthrow the constitutional structure of the United States.

The Socialist Equality Party has issued a call for workers and youth to oppose the White House plans to suppress democratic rights and impose a police-military regime. We said:


The working class must intervene in this unprecedented crisis as an independent social and political force. It must oppose the conspiracy in the White House through the methods of class struggle and socialist revolution.

The millions of workers and youth taking part in mass protests against police violence must begin to raise political demands against the gangster methods of the Trump administration, calling for the removal of Trump, Pence and their conspirators from office.

Patrick Martin

'This is Huge': Move to Defund Police Gains Support Nationwide

"In moments of crisis, people want services and resources that go directly to help people rather than police that surveil, brutalize, and kill us."


by
Eoin Higgins, staff writer




https://www.commondreams.org/news/2020/06/04/huge-move-defund-police-gains-support-nationwide




As law enforcement officers across the country continue to brutalize peaceful demonstrators in the nationwide protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last week, support for defunding the police is rising as Americans become increasingly fed up with the institution's racism and violence.

"In moments of crisis, people want services and resources that go directly to help people rather than police that surveil, brutalize, and kill us," Black Lives Matter LA co-founder Melina Abdullah told the Guardian.

The murder of Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers on May 25 served as the catalyst for the uprising that has filled city streets around the nation with unprecedented numbers of protesters.

As Common Dreams reported Wednesday, polling this week shows a majority of Americans believe both the anger and the actions of the protesters are at least partially justified—including the burning of the Minneapolis Police Department Third Precinct building last week.

Activists have long called for defunding the police as part of the solution to the institution's myriad problems. Long seen as a fringe position by more mainstream liberals and conservatives, the call to defund is now seeing widespread support among the public and politicians alike.


"We need to defund the police and make sure that money goes back into the communities that need it," said Cori Bush, a progressive candidate running for Missouri's 1st District House seat, in a statement.

"We have to end the militarization of police, stop the racial profiling," Bush added. "Throwing money at the problem will not solve it."

According to Rolling Stone:


As the protests continue around the country, activists in New York, where the police department’s budget is poised to swell to nearly $6 billion in 2021, and Los Angeles, where LAPD's funding was increased this year to $1.8 billion, are mounting their own defunding campaigns. The first step for anyone interested in pushing for a re-thinking of their city's priorities is to get involved in the budgeting process by attending city council meetings and speaking. The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human rights had a toolkit, praised earlier this week by former President Barack Obama, with more resources and information on how to get involved.

The increasing support comes as images and videos of police attacking peaceful protesters and innocent bystanders continue to spread across social media as demonstrations entered their tenth consecutive day Thursday.


In New York City, peaceful activists were beaten by police wielding batons and it appeared officers were also randomly assaulting passers-by.


The Working Families Party, in response to the ongoing brutality, issued a statement saying the group would not support any candidate who would not commit to defunding the NYPD.


Alex Vitale, writer of the book "The End of Policing," said in an interview with The Nation Thursday that he believes the funding for police departments should instead be put toward community service jobs.

"The police department and the corrections department are always hiring and community centers aren't," said Vitale. "And when they do hire, it's at half the salary and half the benefits. So this budget battle is about getting cities to reprioritize how they deal with the very real needs of the most disadvantaged communities that are subjected to the most intensive policing."

The speed with which public opinion has turned on the issue didn't surprise Tony Williams, a member of Minneapolis-based abolitionist group MPD150, who noted the increasing nationwide anger over the high number of police killings of unarmed black men since 2015.

"This is unprecedented in our movement," Williams told the Guardian, "but it is a natural consequence of where we've been over the last five years."

Ten thousand people have been arrested across the US as protests against police violence continue to expand

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/06/05/demo-j05.html






By Kevin Reed
5 June 2020

More than 10,000 people have been arrested in the US during the protests against police violence as of Thursday, the tenth day of demonstrations in a row since George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police on Memorial Day.

In a tally taken of recorded arrests across the country, the Associated Press reported that the number of protesters arrested has grown by the hundreds each day. The news agency reported that one quarter of the arrests have been made in Los Angeles followed by New York City, which has 2,000 arrests, Dallas, and Philadelphia.

The AP analysis also showed that the majority of the arrests are for “low-level offenses such as curfew violations and failure to disperse.” Exposing as false the claims by President Donald Trump and Democratic politicians such as Minnesota Governor Tim Walz that the majority of the protesters are outside agitators, AP reported that, during a 24-hour period over the weekend in Minneapolis, “41 of the 52 people cited with protest-related arrests had Minnesota driver’s licenses.”

Additionally, in the US capital, AP reported, “86 percent of the more than 400 people arrested as of Wednesday afternoon were from Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia.”

The actual number of those detained by law enforcement is unknown. “The protesters are often placed in zip-ties and hauled away from the scene in buses,” an issue, the report said, “at a time when many of the nation’s jails are dealing with coronavirus outbreaks.”
New York County Supreme Court Justice James Burke ruled on Thursday against a writ filed by New York’s Legal Aid Society and refused to release anyone held longer than 24 hours between arrest and arraignment. While New York courts stipulate that those in custody over 24 hours are entitled to release, Judge Burke ruled that the pandemic and mass protests were a “crisis within a crisis” and the New York City Police Department had thereby provided justification for the delays.

The historically unprecedented protests—in the face of arrests and ongoing police assaults with tear gas, rubber bullets, flash grenades and other “non-lethal crowd control munitions”—continued to expand across the country on Thursday. According to a summary published by USA Today, protests have been reported by local news media in 584 cities and towns across all 50 states and as well as the territories of Puerto Rico and Guam.

In New York City, thousands of protesters marched from a memorial service for George Floyd in Brooklyn—which featured the first public appearance of George’s brother Terrance Floyd—across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. The assembled crowed expressed hostility by turning their back on Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio, drowning him out and forcing him to cut his remarks to 90 seconds at the memorial, as they chanted, “I can’t breathe,” “resign” and “defund the police.”


Protesters were particularly angry about the baton assault by police on Wednesday night against those who remained on the street passed the 8:00 p.m. curfew. Both de Blasio and Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo defended the violent actions of the police on Thursday morning which had been captured on video and seen widely across social media. Amid the melee two police officers were shot and one was stabbed in the neck in Brooklyn.

Unlike the night before at the Manhattan Bridge, New York City police did not attempt to block demonstrators from entering the bridge, as the crowd swarmed both the northern land side and the pedestrian walkway. According to a report in the New York Times, “Drivers in the opposite lane honked horns and raised fists in shows of support.”

Protests in Washington, DC continued on Thursday near Lafayette Square and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, while many rallied near the DC/Maryland border. Earlier in the day, Washington, DC’s Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser lifted the 11:00 p.m. curfew, citing the fact that there had been no arrests the previous day. Bowser has also adapted herself to the stationing of federal troops in the city, merely demanding that non-DC troops leave.

Meanwhile, military vehicles and police expanded the perimeter around the White House on Thursday, erecting tall metal fencing and putting in concrete barricades in preparation for what is expected to be a mass protest on Saturday.

According to a statement by the US Secret Service, “The areas, including the entire Ellipse and its side panels, roadways and sidewalks, E Street and its sidewalks between 15th and 17th streets, First Division Monument and State Place, Sherman Park and Hamilton Place, Pennsylvania Avenue between 15th and 17th streets, and all of Lafayette Park, will remain closed until June 10.”

Demonstrations took place in multiple locations in the Chicago area on Thursday, including several hundred protesters who marched from Lincoln Park High School to Whitney Young High School three miles away on the north side of the city. Other protests took place in the northern suburbs of Evanston, Grayslake and Zurich Lake.

Chicago Democratic Mayor Lori Lightfoot declined to answer questions at a press conference regarding a high-speed police chase on Wednesday evening that resulted in the death of a female motorist as well as two other incidents of police violence. One was at Brickyard Mall parking lot, where officers were caught on video pulling two women out of their vehicle and brutalizing them, with an officer kneeling on the neck of one of the two while she was on the ground. In another video, an officer is seen chasing down and punching a protester in Uptown on Monday night.

Tensions are high in New Orleans on Thursday evening, following the events of the previous night in which New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) used tear gas to disperse a large group of protesters who marched onto the interstate from downtown New Orleans and headed for the Crescent City Connection bridge to cross over into the West Bank, Jefferson Parish. The Jefferson Parish police are notorious for their brutality and cruelty, known to be openly racist and blatantly abusive.

NOPD Superintendent Shaun Ferguson defended the repressive actions at a press conference on Thursday morning, showing social media videos of the confrontation and claiming that rubber bullets were not used on the crowd, although this was disputed by protesters. When asked about plans for Thursday evening Ferguson said, “We don’t know what they’re planning to do tonight.”

Despite the rain, protesters gathered in Orlando, Florida for a fifth night in a row on Thursday downtown near city hall and prepared to march to the headquarters of the Orlando Police Department where a dozen officers were reportedly waiting in helmets and with shields. On Wednesday night, tear gas was used after a crowd at city hall of approximately 2,000 people began moving through downtown and violate a previously announced 8:00pm curfew.

Protests continue to grow in size and scope throughout the San Diego area, with many held Thursday throughout smaller cities and suburbs in addition to the downtown protests which included over two thousand people. Cities such as Chula Vista, Oceanside, Julian, North Park, Carlsbad, Encinitas, La Mesa, and Santee held protests in the hundreds.

In the growing downtown protests, police and national guardsmen kettled in protesters and shot rubber bullets and tear gas indiscriminately into crowds. Just the day before, at least 200 armed national guardsmen arrived in San Diego, following a request from San Diego Sheriff Gore. After Wednesday’s protests, the San Diego Police Chief announced a ban on chokeholds.

San Diego County is home to the largest military and naval base in the US. Stoked by Trump and the brutality of the state’s response, some right-wing and white nationalist groups have been organizing in cities such as Santee and Carlsbad to join police and engage in violence against protesters. These small groups, however, represent a tiny fraction, compared to the thousands who continue to take to the streets throughout the county.

In an example of the spread of protests across the US, hundreds of people demonstrated at the downtown parking garage in Grand Forks, North Dakota, 80 miles north of Fargo, and marched through the downtown area as organizer Kollin King shouted over a bullhorn, “What’s his name?” and the crowd yelling back, “George Floyd.” The demonstration stopped briefly near the Red River and then continued on past its previously agreed-on route.