Police-racist murders and the protests against them: this is what a police state looks like

           The Police murder of George Floyd and of Breonna Taylor, the negligence of not immediately investigating the racist murder of Ahmaud Arbery and arresting the three murderers, in concomitance with the violently excessive police and national guard response to the protests against these documented murders (even shooting paint rounds at people on their own property not participating in any protests, assaulting members of the press clearly identifying themselves as such as well as government officials), along with the fact that the police have more personal protective equipment (ppe) than the nurses and doctors treating the patients sick with Covid-19 during the global pandemic illustrates all too clearly what a police state looks like.   

            The multiple documented videos of police vehicles recklessly driving directly into protestors, in New York, Los Angeles, etc., which is precisely what the white Christian terrorist did to murder Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, is yet more evidence that none of the more recently touted police reforms have actually reformed police brutality and violence as it so clearly and painfully hasn't.  In Louisville (where police murdered Breonna Taylor in her own home) police shot into a crowd which witnesses state were not protesting when the police arrived, and witness testimony is all the evidence there is as the officers hadn’t turned on their body cameras in violation of policy, and by indiscriminately firing into a peaceful crowd not even protesting they murdered David McAtee and left his body where it fell for twelve hours.  This past weekend witnessed a national police riot.  This is what a police state looks like.  

            As the human rights organization Amnesty International stressed Sunday, the police response to the protests across the United States must end its excessive force and militarized police response as heavy-duty riot gear and military-grade weapons are more fit for a battlefield than public areas, such as the use of a Predator drone to surveil Minneapolis, and are more probable to prime the officers’ minds for inevitable conflict and appallingly too frequent in the video documented evidence officers can be visibly seen and audibly heard priming themselves for violence which they then initiate and perpetrate.      

            That police departments in many of the cities experiencing protests and solidarity protests in response to the recent murders committed by police are both better equipped with ppe (ever more military grade ever since the W. Bush administration’s Patriot Act and reframing of the Cold War propaganda to the “war on terrorism” hysteria) than the hospital staff across the states and enjoy fully a third of public funding while educational and medical programs have been defunded illustrates painfully vividly where the ruling class establishment’s priorities are.  These are the deadly realities one would expect to find in a third-rate banana republic police state rather than the richest superpower in the world now sliding ever deeper towards catastrophic failed state. 

            Protests and solidarity protests will continue as they must and the demilitarization and defunding of the police across the country must be realized immediately.  There is no reason in the world why doctors and nurses are expected to provide their own ppe and to reuse them well past moderately safe use-by timelines during the worst global pandemic within our lifetimes while the police departments across the nation continue to gorge themselves on a full third of public funding and military hand-me-downs.  

            All of the criminal police officers must be arrested and charged, not only Derek Chauvin who killed George Floyd with his knee on his neck, but the other officers who held the rest of Floyd’s body down while Chauvin strangled him to death for 8 minutes and 46 seconds.  They were just as responsible for Floyd’s death as was Chauvin and after being fired can easily move a couple of cities away, reemploy themselves in police work and that is absolutely unacceptable.  This holds not only for the officer accomplices in Floyd’s murder but also for Taylor’s murder as Bakari Sellers explains.  Sellers further observes that the federal civil rights standard ought to be lowered such that it’s not so disgracefully difficult to bring criminal charges against police officers for murdering citizens of color and to limit qualified immunity.  Sellers' fourth suggested reform is to establish a national database for police officers who perpetrate terrible behavior in order to prevent officers being fired in one city for heinous acts only to move somewhere else and be rehired.
           
            The 1% ruling class clearly hopes to completely loot the entire country during the pandemic and continue to exploit foreign states with its imperial hegemony which is marked by 800 military units deployed around the world, and clearly clings in trembling fear to its dogma of white Christian supremacy that Trump, less the commander in chief so much as the racist in chief, has at every moment made shamefully obvious, from referring to the white Christian supremacists who rampaged through Charlottesville and murdered Heather Heyer as "very fine people" to tweeting a southern segregationist phrase from the sixties that "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," and calling the protesters "THUGS," transparently displaying his vulgar and impeachable racism.  It was only last fall when the head of the Minneapolis police union, Bob Kroll, thanked Trump for ending "Obama's oppression" of the police, a white Christian supremacist foot soldier saluting the racist in chief.  

           The empowerment of such white Christian supremacy must be completely dismantled.  Every racist murderer police officer must be fired and arrested and all of the systemic racist policies that allowed their operating in the very first place must be thoroughly exposed and expelled.         

             

Covid-19 and disaster capitalism: this is what the class war looks like

            The Covid-19 global pandemic is a window into the looming ecological catastrophes being driven by the global financialized market political economy that may well result in the unviability of global human civilization.  

            The United States’ response to the pandemic is also a transparent window into the class war being waged by the 1% being ratcheted up to further enrich themselves and further impoverish and imperil the precariat as is the modus operandi of the shock doctrine of disaster capitalism.  The coronavirus-corporate bailout is a giant gift to the financial market and myriad corporations while shafting the general populace, yet another iteration of socialism for the rich and market discipline for everyone else.  

            Even the medical workers on the literal front-lines of the response to the pandemic are forced to continue to go to work without the absolutely necessary personal protective equipment (ppe) required to mitigate the continued spread of the virus.  Ludicrously U.S. Customs and Border protection vessel manifests indicate that as recently as mid-late March businesses were shipping medical equipment needed for the pandemic response from the United States to foreign purchasers, profiting themselves while depriving their fellow citizens of protective equipment that the United States is now running out of.  

            While most nonessential businesses remain closed during the pandemic, many “essential” workers remain working, particularly within the massive delivery corporations of Amazon, FedEx, UPS, etc.  These corporations continue business as usual without providing ppe for their workers, means to maintain sanitation and sanitized work-spaces and, even worse, disrupting and firing their employees who have called for safer, sanitized working environments and organized to demand them.  Jeff Bezos is one of the richest persons on the planet and it is more than only correlational that Amazon employees’ working conditions are rather hostile and that the employees’ organizing and calling for better conditions and protections elicited racist and classist assaults rather than improved conditions.  This is what the class war looks like.  

            The United States' foreign policy involving sanction regimes, against Venezuela and Iran for instance, is already under normal circumstances vicious for the populations, but within the pandemic are a tool of mass murder as the sanctions on Iraq of the 90s more than demonstrated.  Alternatively Cuba has sent doctors and medical help to Europe which is in sharp contrast to Germany's inability to help Greece and Washington's decision to enforce the civilian deaths of its sanctioned states.    

            Labor organizing and collective actions are required for the safety of the entire nation’s and, consequently, world’s populace.  The proven means by which to empower the workers and people is to organize and to strike.  The gravity of the pandemic crisis demands mass strike action, wildcat and solidarity strikes, and sit-down (shop occupation) strikes.  The people united will never be defeated.

The Coronavirus/Covid19 Pandemic and Bernie Sanders for 2020 President

            The global coronavirus/Covid19 pandemic and its simultaneous revealing of how utterly incompetent the political establishment is and how utterly insufficient the patchwork of private health insurance is in the United States compared/contrasted with the rest of the world’s nations is both an appalling indictment and call for significant structural changes within the political economy of U.S. society.  

            That most of the developed world is able to better care for their citizens, limiting the spread of Covid19 and providing monthly economic relief to the citizenry while the United States has barely begun to enact measures that are meant to limit the spread of the virus, with the measures being limited to the State level and to those States’ whose Governor’s have chosen to take the pandemic seriously as the Trump White House can only be bothered to pretend to care about it when it personally affects Trump's reelection campaign and financial interests is pointing towards the United States creeping ever closer to "shit-hole" and failed state status.    

            That the relief bill has focused more upon establishing a slush fund for Wall Street corporations and a paltry one-time check to some citizens while Trump and his personality cult’s followers have been talking about reopening the economy even if this entails the deaths of millions of the elderly and vulnerable, at-risk individuals, and packing Churches for Easter during the time-frame of the pandemic’s projected peak in the United States, illustrates very clearly that these right-wing sociopaths care very little about human life, despite their constant propaganda about pro-life hysteria and delusional death-panels invented to attack the Affordable Care Act, and are more than willing to sacrifice millions of lives at the alter of their capitalist market god.

            Nothing better illustrates the absolute necessity in nominating Bernie Sanders for the Democratic candidate for President as he and his campaign staffers and supporters are nearly the only political leaders actually leading during this crisis.  Sander’s prescient warning in 2005 about a potential pandemic and the need for adequate preparedness as well as Medicare-for-All demonstrably proves that he has maintained the correct positions and is the most capable political leader contending for the Presidency.