lunes, 25 de agosto de 2014

From Ferguson to Los Angeles

dont shoot

Demilitarize the cops under community control!

St. Louis County Police in Ferguson.
Massive militarization of police forces has intensified a racist Rambo mentality among U.S. cops, as they disproportionately kill young African American men with impunity. Among the latest victims is Michael Brown, an 18-year-old, college-bound resident of Ferguson, Missouri, a poor, highly segregated, black suburb of St. Louis that is under the thumb of a white government and police force.

Michael’s crime? Walking while black. To compound the injustice of this present-day lynching of an unarmed youth, the cops rolled out tanks, tear gas, rubber bullets, and military combat gear in an attempt to stop the justifiable protests that erupted. Evoking images of the Jim Crow south, police turned dogs on the protesters. They jailed news media and set up a no-fly zone to block reporters from filming the assaults. Protesters responded with signs reading “I am a man” and “I am a woman,” echoing those carried by Memphis sanitation workers in 1968.
dont shoot
New York City
Why is police terror ramping up?
As the economic system confronts an ever-deepening crisis, capitalism relies more and more upon divide and conquer. The bosses need an unemployed or jailed army of workers who can be scapegoated for the ills showering down upon the population at large. Emily Woo Yamasaki, a Freedom Socialist Party activist in Harlem, says NYPD raids on multiple housing projects and mass arrests in Harlem this past June were carried out like a military invasion, terrorizing and brutalizing residents of all ages. She links the raids to city attempts to privatize public housing and to the drive for mass incarceration, which aims to crush resistance to an unjust system while fueling the profits of private prisons. Black and brown men are the new “terrorists;” immigrants are “stealing jobs;” and unionists are “thugs.” These lies fuel the bosses’ continued attacks on everyone’s standard of living. Youth of color bear the brunt through an astronomical unemployment rate and the poverty-to-prison pipeline. The system isn’t “broken” as some claim, it is working exactly as it is supposed to. Capitalism sees only one way out of the economic crisis — to drive down wages and eliminate the social safety net — and it must stifle Ferguson-type protests in order to do that.
Time for united action!
• Demand an end to the police violence in Ferguson. The residents don’t need increased militarization by the National Guard, they need economic and political justice.
• Build a movement that fights for immediate needs such as jobs, education and community control of the police, but don’t stop there —
• Come together to replace the bigoted capitalist system, which forces hardship and want on the many, with a socialist world of shared abundance and equality of all races and oppressed peoples.
Issued jointly by Freedom Socialist Party & Radical Women
www.Socialism.comwww.RadicalWomen.org
Edit:A video from this article by Washington Post, identifies what military riot gear was provided to the Ferguson Police Department by the U.S. Pentagon.

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