The militarization of the police in America has reached frightening proportions. We are practically living under an open, fascist police state, and more people must take a stand or things will only get worse.
The heavily armed military-style units that turned out to confront protesters in Ferguson, Mo., after the police execution of Michael Brown are just one of the latest examples. The people dare not show up in the street to raise their voices without running the risk of confrontation with what amounts to a local army.
The militarization of local police departments began in the 1980s and escalated radically after 9/11. The “war on drugs” and the “war on terror” created the justification to turn local police forces into armies of occupation and instruments of terror. Local police across the country acquired tanks, helicopters, machine guns and armored vehicles, among other things, some of it donated by the Pentagon and some of it bought with $35 billion in grants to state and local police from the Department of Homeland Security.
Police SWAT teams are now dispatched on such routine missions as serving warrants for nonviolent offenses. SWAT team deployments escalated from just 3,000 in the early 1980s to 50,000 a year now. More than 120 SWAT team raids occur in America every day, often resulting in deaths or serious injuries. Demonstrations against police violence or for jobs, decent wages, health care, etc., are often met with tear gas, billy clubs and rubber (and real) bullets.
Government repression marks the last stand of an economic system based on the private property of the billionaires and that is unable to provide jobs, livable wages, food, water, housing, health care or a safety net for tens of millions of people. Jobs are automated or shipped overseas, and the wealthy owners of industry and finance will not pay to support labor they don’t need.
Labor-replacing electronic technology has created a new section of the working class—a new class—that has no future in an economy based on wage labor. Their needs can only be met in a cooperative society where the people own the means of producing what we need to live and where everyone has the necessities of life. That means the people forced out of the system are a threat to the ruling class. The same automation that is eliminating jobs could give us a world of abundance if the people controlled our society.
The legacy of discrimination and racism that came out of slavery left the bulk of Black workers in those jobs that were eliminated first by labor-replacing technology, so they are at the heart of this new class. Thus the Black workers are suffering the worst of the attacks by the police. But make no mistake: They are moving toward an attack on the entire working class and the whole of society.
The police are becoming a law unto themselves, standing above the people and dictating to them. But the people are beginning to open their eyes to this. We must fight every attack on our liberty, and do so with the understanding that we are fighting for a new society, for the world of peace and freedom that electronics makes possible.
The People Confront the Militarized Police
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