Tuesday, June 9, 2020
JOE BIDEN IS A RACIST WHO LOVES POLICE BRUTALITY
By Rebecca Margolies, Left Voice.
June 8, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/joe-biden-is-a-racist-who-loves-police-brutality/
While Liberals Want Us To Believe That Voting For Joe Biden Is The Solution To All The Ills Of The Racist Capitalist System, The Fact Remains That Biden Is A Dedicated, Lifelong Racist.
He won’t save any of us, least of all the victims of police brutality.
A wave of potentially revolutionary anti-police uprisings is sweeping across the United States, with Black America once again at the forefront. These rebellions — taking place during a pandemic and in aftermath of the murders of Breona Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and countless other Black people by the cops and their white accomplices — show the deep anger felt by Black Americans and their allies over how the racist capitalist system specifically brutalizes Black and Indigenous people of color, especially those in the working class.
The response to this explosion of global struggle is predictable: state-sanctioned violence. The far-Right and Republicans are more explicit, while liberals and Democratic politicians in power give cover to this by also trying to find channels for the anti-racist rage that do not threaten private property, confront the legacy and reality of settler colonialism in the United States, or challenge the foundations of the capitalist state. This follows a classic pattern of setting up the “good” protester vs. “bad” rioter dichotomy, aiming to co-opt the former while brutally repressing the latter.
Liberals, seeking moderate and ultimately end the uprisings, are coalescing around a “don’t riot, vote” message, which has been taken up by corporate media figures, regular white liberals, and even former presidents. They’re selling the idea that the solution to police brutality and all the other ills of the racist capitalist system is to vote for Democratic Party nominee Joe Biden for president in November. If we get Trump out, they argue, things can return to “normal”: no more curfews, no more pandemic, no more police brutality. All these problems are caused by Republicans. Biden will save us!
Joe Biden is a dedicated, lifelong racist. He won’t save any of us, least of all the victims of police brutality.
A Long History Of Racism
Biden’s history of enthusiastic racism stretches back decades. From the moment he entered the U.S. Senate in the early 1970s, he vocally opposed busing to achieve school desegregation. Today he disputes this fact, claiming he only opposed federally mandated busing. Nevertheless, “opposing busing” has long been racist code for opposing Black and brown children going to school with white children. At a time when “separate but equal” was beginning to become politically unpalatable, Biden’s leadership against busing, in the most generous possible interpretation, provided cover for segregationists to continue their work.
Biden represented Delaware in the Senate, a state that essentially refused to desegregate schools through a combination of hair-splitting laws and white parents shifting their children to private schools en masse. Private school enrollment in Delaware is now among the highest in the nation, at 17.6 percent in Biden’s hometown of Wilmington — the vast majority of them white. Meanwhile, disproprotionately Black public schools are systematically starved of funds. This kind of de facto segregation is exactly what Joe Biden promoted in his anti-busing campaign.
Ahead of the 2020 South Carolina presidential primary, a focus group was asked about this very portion of Biden’s record. One woman in the group asked “are we honestly being asked to to believe he is a segregationist?” Evidence points to yes.
Twenty years later, having risen to the prominent position of chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden presided over confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas to become the second Black Supreme Court justice. The hearings became a crucible for the particular combination of racism and misogyny at the heart of the United States when law professor Anita Hill, also Black and who had previously worked for Thomas, came forward with sexual harassment allegations against him. The all-male, all-white committee Biden chaired questioned her in brutal detail. He refused to take her allegations seriously, launched no investigation, and failed to accept testimony from multiple other witnesses and survivors of Thomas’s harassment. With Biden’s collusion, Thomas was confirmed and today is one of the Court’s consistent right-wing votes. Reportedly, he’s also Trump’s favorite justice.
Biden’s dismal record here is especially important to note, since one of the main arguments deployed in his favor is that he will appoint better judges than Trump has to various federal courts.
Perhaps the most egregious example of Biden’s racist use of power is 1994’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the crime bill he wrote and continues to support vocally to this day. The bill is a laundry list of the worst aspects of the mass incarceration state. It led to a boom in the number of police officers and prisons, lengthened prison sentences, and created financial incentives to keep people in jail. It created 60 new death penalty offenses as well as the infamous “three strikes and you’re out” rule, which inflicted a life sentence for almost any crime, even ones considered very minor, if there were two prior convictions for “serious” or “violent” crimes. Since then, people have died in prison for things like stealing a dollar in loose change from a parked car, possessing less than 1 gram of a drug, and attempting to break into a soup kitchen. Biden had also co-written the Anti-Drug Abuse Act a few years earlier, during the so-called crack epidemic. It amplified sentencing disparities between crack cocaine users, who were mostly Black, and powder cocaine users, who were mostly white.
All these new laws affected people of color, especially Black and Indigenous people, the most, leading to a massive increase in incarceration, policing, and the destruction of Black communities. While the crime bill was very popular at the time, it came under heavy criticism from those who knew it would worsen carceral capitalism. Now considered widely to be a racist failure, some previous supporters have disowned it. Only someone truly committed to racism would maintain his support of the bill, as Biden still does. “On balance,” he says, “the whole bill … did in fact bring down violent crime.” And, he contends, “The crime bill didn’t increase mass incarceration.”
Biden’s racism can also be viewed through the lens of the infamous “civility” of the U.S. Senate — a body that serves as a playground in which rich and powerful Democrats and Republicans can disagree lightly during working hours while maintaining deep social, political, and financial connections. Biden was an enthusiastic participant in this tradition through his friendship and fruitful working relationship with noted segregationist and vile racist Strom Thurmond, the senator from South Carolina.
“I disagreed deeply with Strom on the issue of civil rights, and on many other issues, but I watched him change,” Biden said as he eulogized his racist friend in 2003. However, it’s not clear that they disagreed all that much. They worked together early in Biden’s Senate career on the 1983 Comprehensive Forfeiture Act, which increased the use of civil asset forfeiture by police departments across the country. Civil forfeiture is legalized theft, allowing cops to seize and sell any property they say is involved in a crime, even if the owner is never even arrested or convicted. It is used mostly against working class and poor people, especially if they are Black. Since 1999, the federal government alone took in $36.5 billion in assets through civil forfeiture, a percentage of which was used to buy military grade weaponry that was then allotted to local and state police agencies and has been deployed against protesters. Biden played a pivotal role in ensuring the law was passed, whipping the Democrats into voting for it and ensuring that Thurmond got the credit for the law.
“We don’t treat the opposition as the enemy,” Biden said while campaigning for president recently. “We might even say a nice word every once in a while about a Republican when they do something good.” Apparently, Biden thinks the police stealing from Black communities in order to repress them more thoroughly is good.
Another line of argument Biden’s supporters use to divert attention from his racism is that he was vice president under Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States. It doesn’t just smack of “I have a Black friend” side-stepping, it’s even more flimsy.
Obama’s own record on race while president isn’t a glowing one. He often relied on symbolism, rather than material action — such as with the infamous “beer summit” between a white police officer and the Black Harvard University professor the cop arrested for entering his own home. When he wasn’t ignoring race, he insisted it was a “both-sides” issue. For instance, in his famous 2008 “A More Perfect Union” speech, Obama spoke about solving racism in America if only everyone forgave each other. It’s the same “both-sides-ism” whenever a white liberal shares a photo on social media of a cop and a protester hugging (often minutes before the cops turn violent).
During the anti-racist, anti-police uprisings in Ferguson following the murder of Michael Brown in 2014, Obama criticized the protesters. “There are productive ways of responding and expressing those frustrations, and there are destructive ways of responding. Burning buildings, torching cars, destroying property, putting people at risk — that’s destructive and there’s no excuse for it. Those are criminal acts. And people should be prosecuted if they engage in criminal acts.”
Those words are echoed in how liberals are talking about protesters today. Obama, though, had more power than most liberals and used it to expand a racist system. It cannot be a defense of Biden that he served as vice president — a stepping stone to power in itself — under a Black president who pursued mass incarceration, surveillance, the war against drugs, imperialism, land theft from Indigenous people, and other policies of neoliberalism that disproportionately target people of color.
On May 22, Biden sat down for an interview with “The Breakfast Club,” a popular radio show. Near the end of the interview, as he was questioned on policy by host Charlamagne the God, Biden said, “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”
Black people on social media were quick to point out the absurdity of a white man feeling entitled to determine who is or is not Black. In response to the swift backlash, Biden gave the requisite milquetoast apology. However, Charlamagne zeroed in on the problem. “I don’t ever care about the words and the lip service and the apology is cool, but the best apology is actually a black agenda … They’ve got to make some real policy commitments to black people. We’ve got to stop acting like the fact that blacks are overrepresented in America when it comes to welfare, poverty, unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction, crime, coronavirus—that’s no accident. The whole function of systemic racism is to marginalize black people.”
While Biden may have learned the right words to say in 2020 to avoid accusations of racism, as in his “plan for Black America,” he lacks the policies, actions, or record to back them up. Racism isn’t what you say; it’s what you do. And Biden continues to advocate for racist action worldwide, from criminal penalties for immigration to increased military spending, even after his recent and calculated about-face on prisons and sentencing.
Biden doesn’t really stand with Black Americans. Faced with the clear choice to stand with protesters fighting racist state violence or with the police brutalizing them, it is no surprise that he sought a pseudo-middle ground, saying, “The idea that instead of standing there and teaching a cop when there’s an unarmed person, coming at him with a knife or something, to shoot him in the leg instead of in the heart. There’s a lot of different things [policies] that can change.”
Apparently, Biden thinks the things that can change are limited to what part of an unarmed protester’s body the police should aim to shoot. The only way to read this is that Biden, an enthusiastic proponent of state violence, just wishes the cops would carry it out a bit more politely and with more plausible deniability. Either way, given his long support for racist policies and his blithe dismissal of any questioning of that record, there is no reason to believe Biden in any way stands with the protesters against racist state violence, or that the way the police terrorize Black communities would be different under a Biden administration than under Trump.
Joe Biden has said, “I’m not sorry for anything that I have ever done.” We should take him at his word, and look at his record. Even if a bourgeois politician could or ever would “solve” racism in America, Joe Biden is not that person. He has spent his life fighting for policies that make life worse for Black, Indigenous, and white working-class Americans. Why should anyone believe he will do anything different as president?
What Is The Real Solution?
The problem isn’t just Joe Biden. When you look across the United States at where police are responding to protests with brutal force, you’ll find many places with Democrats in power. Take New York City, with Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio. Black New Yorkers and their allies in the streets have been beaten, run over, and had chemical weapons deployed against them by the police — and he has defended the NYPD and established a curfew that has served as a cover for arbitrary police violence.
Instead of relying on powerful Democrats to solve problems they have helped cause, we should look to the uprisings. Socialists should work to show the people in the streets that our anger and outrage have an answer — and it won’t be found in voting for Democrats. The protests are in danger of being co-opted by calls for mild reforms such as asking cops to tell people before they shoot them or making minor budget cuts. We must hold the line against such compromises, which are a betrayal of all those who have risked their lives to stand up against the racist state and are especially a betrayal of all Black Americans who have no choice about whether to risk their lives.
Joe Biden won’t stop the violence. While we must always fight to make things better, ultimately there are no lasting reforms possible in a racist capitalist system that is functioning just as intended. The only lasting solution is to abolish the police and abolish capitalism the world over.
PHOTO OF POLICE OFFICER WITH ARMED MEN PROMPTS OUTRAGE AND INVESTIGATION
By Sara Gentzler, The Olympian.
June 8, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/photo-of-police-officer-with-armed-men-prompts-outrage-and-investigation/
A photo circulating on social media Friday showing an Olympia Police officer posing with a group of armed men in front of Baskin Robbins on Olympia’s west side has prompted outrage from many, a response from Mayor Cheryl Selby, and an investigation by the police department.
A Facebook post featuring the photo that was shared on Twitter Friday is captioned “this is us the 3% with a OPD at 140am when she came to that k (sic) us for being there and her partner on duty came and thanked us to.” It shows the officer in the middle of nine men, some sporting tactical gear and many of whom are flashing a hand gesture with three fingers outstretched and thumb and forefinger touching.
In a statement Friday night, Interim Police Chief Aaron Jelcick described the men as “a group of armed individuals dressed in fatigue or militia like clothing.” The photo, according to the statement, is believed to have been taken in the early morning hours Friday.
In a statement Friday night, Jelcick announced the Police Department had initiated an investigation into the photo and would update the community as soon as there’s more information.
“I am disappointed and frustrated that the photo was taken at all, but particularly at this sensitive time in our city and nation,” Jelcick wrote. “I regret that this photo may damage the trust our community places in us that we have worked so hard to build. I apologize for the pain this has caused our community. It is imperative that Olympia Police Officers uphold our values, remain neutral to the message at public demonstrations, and do not engage in or promote conduct that will bring discredit to themselves, the Department or the City.”
The hand gesture is associated with the Three Percenters movement also mentioned in the photo’s caption. The gesture also looks similar to the “okay” sign — which, according to the Anti-Defamation League, took on a new significance due to a hoax by members of the website 4chan in 2017. They claimed the gesture represented “wp” for “white power,” and eventually it was sincerely adopted by some white supremacists.
“Three Percenters, who are right-wing extremists but are not typically white supremacists, often make a hand gesture to symbolize their movement that uses the outstretched middle, ring, and pinky fingers to represent a Roman numeral ‘3,’” the ADL website reads. “This gesture, from certain angles, can often resemble an ‘okay’ hand gesture and has been misinterpreted by some as a white supremacist symbol.”
Olympia Mayor Selby wrote her reaction to the photo on Facebook Friday. In it, she refers to the gestures as “white power signs.”
“After a long week for my community, I’m discouraged that I have to make a post like this,” the mayor wrote. “I have confirmed a photo of an Olympia police officer posing with a group of armed militia members, some of whom are displaying white power signs. I find this behavior to be abhorrent and unequivocally unacceptable.
“Our council/manager form of government restricts me from discussing disciplinary measures, though my council and I are demanding a thorough investigation,” she wrote. “As the picture clearly illustrates in no uncertain terms, a culture change within the police department and city government is clearly needed.
“We hear our community demanding it and we must rise to meet this challenge. The presence of an armed militia is not what we want to see in Olympia, and we are asking those people to stay home to ensure that peaceful protest can continue in our city.”
She ended her post with “BLACK LIVES MATTER!!!!!”
The “3% of Washington” Facebook page responded in its own post, saying the hand gesture was not “a white power hand sign,” but the 3% gesture.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups and other extremists in the U.S., says “percenterism is one of three core components within the antigovernment militia movement.” The reference to “3 percent,” according to the SPLC, is rooted in a “dubious historical claim that only 3 percent of American colonists fought against the British during the War for Independence.”
The Anti-Defamation League says group members “view themselves as modern-day versions of those revolutionaries, fighting against tyrannical U.S. government rather than the British.”
On its website, the national Three Percenters group refutes the labels “anti-government” and “militia,” describing itself as “a national organization made up of patriotic citizens who love their country, their freedoms, and their liberty” and saying it is “very pro-government, so long as the government abides by the Constitution, doesn’t overstep its bounds, and remains ‘for the people and by the people.’”
Reached by phone Friday night, Washington State Three Percent founder Matt Marshall told The Olympian that Washington’s group doesn’t affiliate itself with the national group. Part of the reason they broke off, Marshall said, was because national groups were acting like a militia.
He says the Washington group aims to “prepare our communities, support our communities, and if we need to, defend our communities.”
“Just because you’re a group and the Southern Poverty Law Center … labels us as something does not make it true,” Marshall said. He pointed out that Three Percent of Washington is registered as a nonprofit corporation with the Secretary of State.
A gun store in the strip mall on Harrison Avenue, ostensibly Private Sector Arms, had asked for “armed members of the community to make a presence in his parking lot,” Marshall said, after hearing that gun stores in the area might be burglarized. Washington Three Percenters from the area responded, he said, pointing out that one of the members was African-American, two were Hispanic, and one was Jewish.
They were there in a defensive posture, he said, and nobody showed up to target the store. When asked whether any Three Percenters have been to the rallies and protests in Olympia, he said over 30 were there a few days ago as part of the protest but none were open-carrying weapons.
The development comes just hours after Mayor Selby held a press conference Friday morning asking citizens to self-police Friday evening, when the city expected outside groups may instigate violence at planned protests.
During the press conference, some citizens demanded the mayor address the issue of people bringing firearms to recent demonstrations prompted by the death of George Floyd. People cannot be arrested for carrying weapons, City Manager Jay Burney told them, and the city can’t ban open-carrying.
JOURNALISTS DEMAND END TO HARASSMENT AFTER OVER 100 ATTACKS ON THE PRESS
By Charles Davis, Business Insider.
June 8, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/journalists-demand-end-to-harassment-after-over-100-attacks-on-the-press/
In A June 1 Open Letter, Leading Press Organizations Pleaded With Law Enforcement To “Halt The Deliberate And Devastating Targeting Of Journalists In The Field.”
In Minneapolis, local law enforcement took aim at Linda Tirado, a photojournalist, and shot her eye out as she tried to cover protests over the police killing of George Floyd; they later subjected a black journalist from CNN to wrongful arrest. In Louisville, TV reporter Kaitlin Rust and her crew were targeted by local cops who peppered them with non-lethal bullets during a live broadcast.
In just four days, according to a count by the investigative news outlet Bellingcat, US police attacked journalists over a hundred times.
The police violence against a free press spurred a response Monday from leading journalism organizations, and a reminder for law enforcement: “These cities belong to all of us.”
“You must persuade your colleagues, commanders, and chiefs, and the mayors and governors who direct them, to halt the deliberate and devastating targeting of journalists in the field,” reads a June 1 open letter to police endorsed by groups such as the Society of Professional Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the National Press Club.
“Over the past 72 hours police have opened fire with rubber bullets, tear gas, pepper spray, pepper balls and have used nightsticks and shields to attack the working press as never before in this nation,” the letter states. “When you silence the press with rubber bullets, you silence the voice of the public. Do not abandon our Constitution and its First Amendment.”
Aaron Miguel Cantú, a freelance journalist in Los Angeles who was briefly detained while covering protests on Saturday, told Business Insider that while this weekend’s incidents may be alarming, what’s new is the attention they are receiving.
“Journalists across the field are now learning firsthand what may having been saying for the last decade: American police have grown so powerful that there is nobody left to meaningfully hold them accountable for their actions, particularly at large street protests,” Cantú said. In 2017, he was arrested and charged with “conspiracy to riot” while covering protests during President Donald Trump’s inauguration; the charges were ultimately dismissed after a prolonged legal battle.
With the president declaring reporters “enemies of the people,” harassment of the press is spreading to new quarters.
Freelance journalists have been targeted with “violence and arrest by police for years,” Cantú noted, “and now this kind of targeting increasingly includes journalists by corporate media outlets.”
TRUMP AND THE ‘PERMANENT LIE’
By Chris Hedges, RT.
June 8, 2020
https://popularresistance.org/on-contact-trump-and-the-permanent-lie/
Chris Hedges talks to Mark Green, former New York City Consumer Affairs Commissioner and Public Advocate, about the “permanent lie” used by US President Donald Trump to cancel out reality. Mark Green is co-author, with Ralph Nader, of “Fake President: Decoding Trump’s gaslighting, corruption, and general bullsh*t.”
Spending On Police Is Out of Control
Data show the growth of police budgets have far outpaced population growth in cities across the country.
David Sirota
Jun 8
“Defund the police” has become a nationwide mantra, and for good reason: Budget data from across the country show that in many cities, spending on police has far outpaced population growth, and drained resources from other public priorities.
Basically, our cities have been siphoning money from stuff like education and social services and funneling the cash into ever-larger militarized security forces.
Nationally, the numbers are stark: between 1977 and 2017, America’s population grew by about 50 percent, while state and local spending on police grew by a whopping 173 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to data from the Urban Institute. In other words, the rate of police spending growth was triple the rate of population growth.
Chicago and New York embody the trends.
Chicago: 27% Increase In Police Spending Amid School Closures & Population Decline
Chicago has been losing population over the last decade. At the same time, Mayor Rahm Emanuel grew the police budget by 27 percent during his eight-year term, to the point where Chicago now spends more than 38 percent of its general fund on police.
Those increases coincided with a spate of police brutality scandals, as well as budget cuts that resulted in teacher layoffs and the mass closure of Chicago public schools. And yet, Chicago’s new mayor, Lori Lightfoot, has been pushing a new 7 percent increase in the police budget.
New York: Little Population Growth, But Massive Increase In Police Spending
In New York, it’s a similar story. Back in 2008, the city spent $4.1 billion on its police force, according to city council documents. Twelve years later, the city is spending $6 billion on its police force. That’s a 46 percent increase during a period in which the city’s population growth was essentially flat. A new report by New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer notes that in the last five years alone, spending on police rose by 22 percent, driven by a 6 percent increase in the number of officers on the force.
All this happened during a period when the city experienced many years of budget cuts to social services and schools. Indeed, as Public Citizen points out, New York’s police budget is now “more than the city spends on health, homelessness, youth development and workforce development combined.”
These are hardly anomalies, as illustrated by a Center for Popular Democracy report looking at 12 major cities. That analysis concluded that “governments have dramatically increased their spending on criminalization, policing, and mass incarceration while drastically cutting investments in basic infrastructure and slowing investment in social safety net programs” to the point where today, “police spending vastly outpaces expenditures in vital community resources and services.”
Predictable Pushback From The Hacks
To be sure, political pundits and right-wing fearmongers will try to scandalize the “Defund The Police” motto, as a way to elide and denigrate the deeper systemic criticism of the criminal justice system.
Just this morning, CNN’s Chris Cillizza -- one of the most reliable purveyors of establishment conventional wisdom -- is out with a typical bullshit clickbait article headlined “Is 'Defund the Police' a massive political mistake?”
Meanwhile, in typical “well, actually” form, fossilized Democratic operatives, including an adviser to stop-and-frisk advocate Michael Bloomberg, are suddenly arguing that “police reform” polls better than “defunding the police.”
Setting aside the grotesque spectacle of professional political mercenaries lecturing a youth-driven mass movement about proper etiquette and tone, there is the problem of so-called “reforms” not working.
As a majority of Minneapolis city council members declared this weekend: "Decades of police reform efforts have proved that the Minneapolis Police Department cannot be reformed, and will never be accountable for its action.”
The Very Real Potential For Change
Despite that truism, the opponents of wholesale change will inevitably continue pushing back, and they will be making two cynical bets.
First and foremost, they are wagering that America is forever frozen in the Reagan-Clinton era -- the epoch in which retrograde politicians got elected berating “superpredators,” promising “tough on crime” measures, pledging to restore “law and order” and pushing to deploy ever-larger quasi-military police forces throughout our communities.
They are also betting that Americans cannot process any nuance at all and that we will interpret “Defund the Police” as some sort of radical idea to turn the country into a completely lawless Purge-esque hellscape.
In the past, those cynical bets might have been pretty safe -- after all, for the last 40 years, America has indeed remained stubbornly authoritarian, inhumane and stupid when it comes to criminal justice policy.
However, of late, there seem to be new signs that we’re getting smarter. Recent polls suggest that popular opinion is with the protesters, not the police -- and favorability ratings for police have plummeted. Additionally, the New York Times notes that “never before in the history of modern polling has the country expressed such widespread agreement on racism’s pervasiveness in policing, and in society at large.”
And because of the recent protests -- and years of prior activism and organizing -- some local politicians are starting to move forward with sweeping changes. As just one example: a majority of Minneapolis city council members announced Sunday that they are beginning "the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department and creating a new transformative model for cultivating safety in our city.”
No rational human being thinks public officials are suddenly going to disband entire police forces. Clearly, though, many rational human beings seem ready to support significant reforms of police policy. And many may similarly support a change of budget priorities.
Let’s remember that only a few years ago, Donald Trump himself was submitting budgets proposing to defund the police. And now we’re seeing a similar push in some cities.
Whether or not we actually follow through and make those changes will hinge on whether or not we’re willing to have an honest discussion about how these outsized spending increases on police are draining resources from everything else.
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