Minnesota AFL-CIO Calls for Minneapolis Police Union President Bob Kroll's Immediate Resignation

Minneapolis Police Union President, Bob Kroll, has failed the Labor Movement and the residents of Minneapolis. Bob Kroll has a long history of bigoted remarks and complaints of violence made against him. The Minnesota AFL-CIO has asked him to resign

Minnesota AFL-CIO

https://portside.org/2020-06-03/minnesota-afl-cio-calls-minneapolis-police-union-president-bob-krolls-immediate

Minnesota AFL-CIO President Bill McCarthy issued the following statement calling on Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis President Bob Kroll to immediately resign:

Minneapolis Police Union President, Bob Kroll, has failed the Labor Movement and the residents of Minneapolis. Bob Kroll has a long history of bigoted remarksand complaints of violence made against him. As union President, he antagonizes and disparages members of the Black community. He advocates for military-style police tactics making communities less safe and the police force more deadly. Despite his conduct, Kroll was reelected with an overwhelming majority. If Bob Kroll does not value the lives that he is sworn to protect, then we can only expect more death under his leadership.

Now, instead of seeking meaningful dialogue or reform to make sure what happened to George Floyd never happens again, Bob Kroll is trying to justify this senseless killing and have the officers involved reinstated. Unions exist to protect workers who have been wronged, not to keep violent people in police ranks. All four police officers involved in George Floyd’s murder must be charged.

Today, Americans have witnessed the disastrous outcomes of unchecked power, authoritarianism, and white supremacy in our highest levels of leadership. We have seen Bob Kroll proudly stand behind this type of leadership. Kroll is no friend to working Minnesotans and should be the last person entrusted to enforce the law or protect our residents.

All working people deserve a voice on the job, the freedom to organize, and the right to due process. As unions, we also have a duty to be transparent to the public, accountable to our members and stakeholders, and always seek justice. Under Bob Kroll’s leadership, the Minneapolis Police union has failed in this duty.

The affiliated unions of the Minnesota AFL-CIO are committed to seeking economic, social, and racial justice for all working people – no matter what we look like or where we come from. There is no room for white supremacists in our movement. The Police Officers Federation of Minneapolis is not, nor has it ever been a member of the Minnesota AFL-CIO. Bob Kroll and those who have enabled violence and brutality to grow within police ranks do not speak for us.

The Labor Movement is rooted in the fight for justice. Bob Kroll’s actions and the ongoing lack of accountability in the Minneapolis Police union are not just. Bob Kroll must resign, and the Minneapolis Police Union must be overhauled. Unions must never be a tool to shield perpetrators from justice.

We join in solidarity with our fellow Minnesotans who are marching in the streets demanding justice for George Floyd. We join in solidarity with Black residents who have seen too many deaths at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department, but find no accountability, no justice, and no meaningful steps to make sure these events never happen again. Their cries for justice cannot go unheard.

A TALE OF TWO AMERICAS

https://otherwords.org/a-tale-of-two-americas/



Gun-toting quarantine protesters are called “very good people,” while unarmed people protesting police violence are “thugs.”
By Tracey L. Rogers | June 3, 2020


As protests and riots spread like wildfire across the nation in response to the death of George Floyd and other black people at the hands of white police officers, I cannot help but recall an old African Proverb:

“The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

Protests and riots are a part of this country’s history, from the Holy Week Uprisings that occurred after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to the Los Angeles riots that took place after police were acquitted of severely beating Rodney King in 1992.

Of course, I do not condone the looting and violence that often follow public gatherings of unrest. But as a black woman living in a racist society, I know the pain and frustrations of those who are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Dr. King once said in a speech that, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” For far too long, Black Americans have gone unheard.

The injustices that plague us become especially unbearable when you compare the mostly peaceful organizing by black activists seeking justice for George Floyd to the white protestors who entered the state capitol building in Michigan last month, armed with rifles, confederate flags, and other symbols of the slave-owning south, to reject — of all things — COVID-19 stay-at-home orders.

President Trump tweeted his support for those protestors. “These are very good people,” he said, “but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely!”

But when unarmed black people took to the streets for Mr. Floyd, Trump tweeted, “These THUGS are dishonoring his memory, and I won’t let that happen.”

What the president and others don’t realize is that we’re not just protesting the death of George Floyd (or Breonna Taylor, or Ahmaud Arbery, or Eric Garner, or Alton Sterling, or Philando Castile). We are also protesting the racist culture embedded in police precincts throughout the nation — and the brutality that comes with it.

When Sacramento police shot and killed Stephon Clark in 2017, 84 people were arrested in a subsequent peaceful march against police violence. Just last month in New York, Shakheim Brunson was beaten and pinned to the ground by police after being asked to disperse in compliance with social distance orders.

And of course, peaceful, unarmed protesters are being violently attacked by police across the country today — most recently so Trump could enjoy a photo-op outside a Washington, D.C. church.

This is the infamous tale of two Americas.

Black protestors get pegged as “Black Identity Extremists” by the FBI and can be prosecuted as domestic terrorists.

If you’re a real-life white identity extremist, on the other hand, you can actually join the ranks of the law enforcement. “There is a long history of the military, police, and other authorities supporting, protecting, or even being members of white supremacy groups,” wrote Rashad Robinson in The Guardian last year.

All this comes around the 99th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre that took place in 1921, when white mobs rampaged against black people and black-owned businesses. Private planes from a nearby airfield even dropped firebombs on black neighborhoods, wiping out a district then known as “Black Wall Street.”

Who were the “thugs” in this incident?

And, as Dr. King asked in his speech on riots, “What is it that America has failed to hear?”

This injustice is precisely why we march. This is why we protest. This is why we chant, “no justice, no peace.”

GOING BACK TO WORK IN A PANDEMIC

https://otherwords.org/going-back-to-work-in-a-pandemic/





I don't feel safe going back to work, but the state of Texas is forcing me to put my health and my family at risk.

By Denita Jones | June 3, 2020


I’m terrified of going back to work.

It’s hard enough for the kids — missing school, missing friends, and now taking care of each other as I’m forced back to work in an environment where I don’t feel safe. Now they’re worried about me getting sick too, or bringing the virus home with me to them.

My 10-year-old cries,” Why do you have to go back, mom? Don’t go.” For Mother’s Day, my 16-year-old wrote in a card, “I worry about you every day.”

But I’m a single mom — it’s either work or my family starves. When Texas reopened, I lost my unemployment, so I headed back to work at a private billing company in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

There are no precautions in place at my office. There are signs at my workplace about social distancing, but no actual social distancing. I’m one of only a few who wears a mask.

I watch co-workers gather around cubicles and common spaces, carrying on as before, and I feel as if I’m living in an alternate reality. Don’t they know there’s a pandemic? Don’t they know that 100,000 Americans have died and more continue to die every day?

If they don’t care about their own safety, why not care about mine and my children’s? Why doesn’t my employer care?

So, I’ve imposed strict protocols for when I come home. First thing, I head straight for the shower — before I even see my children, before I can make dinner, ask how their day was, or help with homework.

And the bleach. The bleach. The kids and I are bleach-freaks by this point. We scrub down the house after I get home and then again when we get up. Just to be sure that we kill any trace of that frightening virus.

Before all this, I was staying safe at home, fortunately getting unemployment benefits.

Things weren’t easy. The $1,200 relief check covered just one month’s rent. Our grocery bill skyrocketed, due to price gouging and everyone being home. Cleaning supplies prices spiked even as we need so much more of them. But at least my family and I were safe at home.

Then, the governor decided to reopen the state, just days after Texas reported our highest jump in deaths from COVID-19 to date.

What if you don’t feel safe at work? It doesn’t matter. Because my place of employment is open, I’m now ineligible for unemployment benefits. So it’s work or starve, risk my life and the health of my kids or get evicted.

That’s right — Texas just lifted its moratorium on evictions, too.

My government is failing me and millions like me. We’re not looking for a handout. We’re looking to survive — not only this pandemic, but in an economy that is rigged against us in the best of times.

We need higher wages, better workplace protections, lower rents, access to quality affordable health care, and fresh healthy food. Real freedom means not having to choose between your health and your rent.

This crisis just takes the Band-Aid off a wound that has been festering for too long. It’s time to apply some UV light and disinfectant to the wound of inequality in this country. If we don’t, and the virus doesn’t get us, the rigged economy will.

EVEN NOW, OUR LEADERS ARE STILL PUTTING THEIR FAITH IN THE RICH

https://otherwords.org/even-now-our-leaders-are-still-putting-their-faith-in-the-rich/




It has become crystal clear during this pandemic that working people fuel this economy, but they’re the ones bearing the cost.
By Shailly Gupta Barnes | May 27, 2020


The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed fundamental inequalities in this country.

With millions of us hurting — especially the poor and people of color — there’s been widespread public support for bold government action to address long-standing social problems. Unfortunately, our lawmakers haven’t met the overwhelming need to focus on the poor and frontline workers.

Instead, trillions of dollars have been released to financial institutions, corporations, and the wealthy through low-interest loans, federal grants, and tax cuts — all without securing health care, wages, or meaningful income support for the unemployed. This is all unfolding as we enter the worst recession since the Great Depression.

As Callie Greer from the Alabama Poor People’s Campaign reminds us, “This system is not broken. It was never intended to work for us.”

This system treats injuries to the rich as emergencies requiring massive government action, but injuries to the rest of us as bad luck or personal failures. It reflects the belief that an economy that benefits the rich will benefit the rest of us, because it is the rich who run the economy.

It is easy to see how this plays out in policies that directly favor Wall Street, corporations, and the wealthy. But we see it even in policies that appear to be more liberal and equitable.

The CARES Act, for example, provided free testing for coronavirus, but not treatment. It offered unemployment insurance for some who’ve lost their jobs, but not living wages for those still working. It identified essential workers, but didn’t secure them essential protections.

The failure to fully care for workers and the poor is the flip side of the belief that the rich will construct a healthy economy out of this crisis. We see it directly as politicians slash money from public programs during this crisis while refusing to touch the accumulated wealth of the few.

In New York state, Governor Andrew Cuomo passed an austerity budget that will cut $400 million from the state’s hospitals. In Philadelphia, Mayor Jim Kenney revised the city’s five-year budget to include government layoffs, salary cuts, and cuts to public services. Neither Cuomo’s nor Kenney’s budget made the proactive decision to tax the wealthy.

The same is true in Washington state, where Governor Jay Inslee has been cutting hundreds of millions from state programs, anticipating major declines in tax revenue. This in a state that’s home to two of the wealthiest people in the world, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

Of course, the rich are not the driving economic force in the country. It has become crystal clear during this pandemic that poor people, including frontline workers, actually fuel this economy. “We may not run this country,” said Rev. Claudia de la Cruz back in 2018, “but we make it run.”

But now we see the early rumblings of people coming together to assert this reality and challenge our faith in the rich.

Health care workers, students, child care givers, food service workers, big box store employees, delivery drivers, mail carriers, and others are taking action to call out gross inequities and organize our society differently. Demands to cancel rent and to secure housing for all, universal health care, living wages, guaranteed incomes, and the right to unions are being heard all across the country.

Meeting these demands would not only secure the lives and livelihoods of millions of people — it would begin to release our economy from the suffocating grasp of the wealthy and powerful. Instead of waiting for wealth to trickle down, we would revive our economy by raising up the poor.

When you lift from the bottom, everybody rises.

Trump cartoon

This Video Shows Everything WRONG With US Policing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSqV72dqGTo&feature

Revolution, Not Riots: Prospects for Radical Transformation in the Covid-19 Era

ANTHONY DIMAGGIO




https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/06/03/revolution-not-riots-prospects-for-radical-transformation-in-the-covid-19-era/







The murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police served as yet another wakeup call for a nation that has historically struggled with recognizing structural violence against people of color. The ensuing protests and riots represent a renewed effort to sensitize Americans to the reality of pervasive racism in their country. Recent events follow a familiar cycle:


1. racial profiling and police brutality persist, largely unabated, until public anger reaches a critical mass and boils over into protest and violence after a catalyst event – in this case, the murder of George Floyd;

2. Media coverage is heavily sensationalized, marginalizing the protesters who are non-violent, emphasizing looting and riots, and thereby obscuring the reasons for the protests;

3. National guard and police forces are mobilized to suppress the protests, further inflaming tensions and exacerbating the violence through the heavy-handed tactics of the police;

4. Millions of Americans nod in recognition of the travesty of racism and police brutality, while millions of others – including many whites – lament the destruction of property, while downplaying the loss of black lives to police violence;

5. Despite sensational media coverage, the basic point that millions of people of color are mad as hell at police brutality and societal racism manages to seep through, with it becoming increasingly difficult for most Americans to deny that race relations in the U.S. have reached crisis levels;

6. Reforms ensue, geared toward increased pressure on police forces to improve transparency, to rely more heavily on community policing initiatives, and to further sensitize Americans to the problem of structural racism. And the cycle repeats.

Covid-19, however, appears to have exacerbated public anxieties beyond a level seen in previous rounds of Black Lives Matter protests. Communities under pressure, particularly poor people of color who are worst hit by Covid-19, have reached a breaking point, and are rebelling in mass against the status quo of record economic inequality, racial oppression, rising unemployment, and a near-complete non-response from the federal government to the worst public health crisis in a century. Within the context of these intensified protests, many self-identified radicals I have talked to believe we are witnessing the beginnings of a political and economic revolution, in light of the violent protests that have now taken over dozens of cities in the U.S. But we should be wary of romantic celebrations of revolution. Americans are nowhere near developing the radical working-class consciousness that’s needed for a socialist revolution. And efforts to frame riots as revolution are fraught with peril in a country where the large majority of Americans lack critical working-class consciousness, let alone revolutionary consciousness.

Before examining the challenges faced by protesters and leftists who are seeking societal transformation, it’s important to emphasize the positive elements of this latest race rebellion in the struggle for democracy. First, protests are absolutely essential to drawing attention to police violence and repression in a country where large numbers of people have become willfully ignorant to recognizing these problems, despite a mountain of social science and journalistic evidence documenting the ways in which the “criminal justice” system routinely criminalizes people of color. Second, the protests represent a much-needed reorientation of our priorities, toward recognizing the tragedy of the loss of human life due to police repression, and away from the priorities of many privileged whites, who prefer to lament the destruction of property, while ignoring the countless lives lost to police violence. Third, most of the protesters in the streets are committed to non-violent action, and should be applauded for such restraint in the face of police repression. White affluent communities throughout the U.S. have long been allowed to self-police, with residents only engaging law enforcement when they are called to assist in defusing disturbances. I have little doubt that whites would be angry as hell, and many would riot too, if police treated them the same as they do people of color in communities that are severely over-policed.

Looting and riots across the country are the product of society’s failure to listen to those, like George Floyd, who are literally suffocating under the boot of police repression. Martin Luther King famously said in a speech assessing the prospects for change during times of violent protest and riots: “it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention.” MLK’s reflection represents a nuanced understanding of the frustrations that African Americans face in a society that systematically practices racial discrimination, as related to educational, occupational, residential, legal, and cultural repression. He recognized the legitimacy of the frustrations shared by people of color, without endorsing violent acts that provide an excuse for a “criminal justice” system to further suppress minority communities.

Despite the positive aspects of recent protests, there are some red flags that should be raised, and that threaten to undermine these protests. For one, it’s still disturbing how much we don’t know about many of those responsible for violence across American cities. Early accounts claimed that 80 percent of protesters arrested in Minneapolis were from out of state, although that conclusion was undermined after a review of arrest data showing that these protests were homegrown. With these efforts to marginalize demonstrators discredited, there is still the question of the extent to which white supremacists have participated in violence, in an effort to discredit the movement. A number of recent reports have spotlighted highly suspicious whites who are seeking to stoke riots, and who clearly have no interest in playing a positive role in protesting police brutality. Most perversely, some white supremacists have even used the protests as an opportunity to assault black protesters.

A second concern is the haphazard way that protesters have thrown caution to the wind by failing to make good-faith efforts to practice social distancing, in order to prevent the rapid transmission of Covid-19. It should be too obvious a point to remind people who have been told repeatedly for the last three months that it’s a really bad idea to be out in large groups in public without remaining six feet apart. Despite being a long-time (20 year) participant in progressive and radical social movements, I’ve made the decision, as someone with multiple immune system disorders, to refrain from participating in these protests. From all the news footage I’ve seen in recent days, and from the many individuals I know personally who have engaged in protests of Floyd’s murder, it’s become abundantly clear that large numbers of demonstrators are simply failing to practice social distancing. This failure carries perils. As public health experts are warning, large protest congregations, even with individuals wearing masks, threaten to further spread Covid-19 in heavily-populated urban areas. Furthermore, the failure to practice social distancing makes a mockery of leftists’ condemnations of “reopen America” protests, considering the main criticism put forward against these individuals was that they were flaunting basic public health and safety concerns. The failure to put public health first opens up Black Lives Matter protesters to charges of hypocrisy. Viruses, after all, don’t distinguish between worthy and unworthy political goals.

Most importantly, it is vital that we recognize there is a mountain of difference between rioting and revolution, and that we are nowhere near the latter at this time. It’s tempting to see people rising up in the streets and conclude that system-level change is afoot. And that may well end up being the case if these protests continue. But the difficult work of organizing and movement building to achieve system-level change has not been done. The worker strikes at Instacart, Amazon, McDonalds, Whole Foods, and elsewhere are an encouraging start for Americans seeking to assert themselves in the workplace. But the goals are hardly revolutionary. They include a $15 minimum wage – which has now become mainstream policy in the Democratic Party – and efforts to protect workers from Covid-19 infections in the workplace, among other reforms. And the labor movement in the U.S. remains a shadow of its former self, with only one in ten Americans being a member of a union as of 2019. Perhaps this pattern can be reversed, but it will require major struggles beyond this first round of Covid-19-era labor activism.

Furthermore, if revolution is the goal, no viable or radical mass worker organization yet exists that can help individuals in their workplaces to coordinate a national campaign to agitate for and demand collective expropriation and ownership of the means of economic production. We still appear to be very far from revolution, at least one that’s based on a libertarian vision of socialism in which workers decide their own fates and control occupational decision-making. And in order to get there, there will need to be a rapid rise in working-class identity and consciousness – and radical class consciousness – both of which have been in short supply to date.

The vast majority of Americans – approximately 90 percent – see themselves as some version of “middle class,” not as revolutionary proletarians. Even when a “working-class” option is provided in surveys, less than a third of Americans identify as such, while a sizable majority – almost two-thirds – prefer the amorphous “middle-class” designation. And as of early 2020, only 28 percent of Americans hold a favorable view of socialism, which includes less than 40 percent of younger Americans aged 18 to 38. Even for those who support socialism, most have little understanding of what it would look like in practice. They’ve been socialized by Bernie Sanders and his supporters to think that socialism means Scandinavian-style New Deal reformism and progressive-liberalism. That definition has little to do with historic understandings of socialism as founded upon grassroots, radical revolutionary politics, and worker takeovers of the means of economic production. A miniscule one percent of Americans cite “cooperative”-style work arrangements, in which workers are empowered to make their own decisions, as constituting the core of socialism. Clearly, we are very far from any sort of bottom-up organic socialist revolution when the vast majority of Americans don’t even understand the historical meaning of the concept, and overwhelmingly associate it with general notions of “equality” and government run public goods like Medicare-for-all.

The latest uprisings against racist policing are encouraging and can serve as a launching point for renewed efforts to combat inequality in America. But we should be careful not to romanticize rioting or mistake it for revolutionary change. If we seek the latter, then our nation has to work toward developing a radical working-class consciousness – one that understands capitalist owners of the means of production (the “bourgeoisie” in Marxian terms) as retaining fundamentally contradictory interests compared to the vast majority of Americans who are facing rapidly rising economic stresses in the Covid-19 era, and who have been squeezed by decades of corporate capitalism, unrestricted by basic obligations to the citizenry. Without an understanding of society that centers on class conflict and the incommensurable interests that exist between working Americans and political and business elites, there is little chance of working toward revolutionary transformation.