Riots in Covid-19 era are the ‘language of the unheard’, looted bare by white elite

The massive scale of the protests sparked by the police killing of a black man in Minneapolis bares the roots of American discrimination – economic woe and ‘legal’ ruling-class looting, multiplied amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
The killing of 46-year-old black man George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis has sparked a wave of violent protests rooted in something bigger than one more terrible incident of racist police brutality.

There is nothing new, sadly, about mass black protests in the wake of a white police officer killing an unarmed black man in the 21st Century United States. Mass marches and confrontations with police and (in some cases) the National Guard followed the ‘police-involved killings’ of Eric Garner (New York City in July 2014), Mike Brown (in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014), Walter Lamar Scott (North Charleston, South Carolina in April 2015), Freddie Gray (Baltimore in April 2015), Philando Castille (Falcon Heights, Minnesota in July 2016), and Keith Lamont Scott (Charlotte, North Carolina in September 2016).

Familiar unrest on a massive scale

With the killing of Floyd, however, the response has gone beyond the usual ‘Black Lives Matter’ speeches, marches, and confrontations. Minneapolis has experienced four days and nights of civil disturbance, with over 100 buildings damaged or looted. The unrest has included popular break-ins to appropriate life necessities and other goods from corporate retail outlets (“looting”), and arson, including the remarkable burning down of the Minneapolis police precinct that was home base for the four cops complicit in Floyd’s death.

The city’s white mayor has been compelled to apologize for the killing, and Minnesota’s governor has acknowledged “institutional racism” even while deploying the National Guard to squelch the rebellion.

Donald Trump has used social media to threaten state-sanctioned mass murder by tweeting that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” – a comment Twitter flagged for “glorifying violence.” Trump’s phrase is taken from southern segregationists cracking down on black protests since the 1960s,

As nobody in the mainstream US media wants to admit, looting is a regular and highly organized ruling-class activity in the US. The recent bipartisan $2.2 trillion coronavirus pandemic corporate bailout (passed with only a pittance of relief for the nation’s working-class majority) is just the latest example. “How much,” left activist Doug Selwyn writes me, “have the rich looted, that is, stolen through tax giveaways and bailouts... trillions... with no real protest?” (None, at least since the Obama administration and Democratic-run city governments moved to repress the Occupy Wall Street movement in the fall of 2011.)

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You know the greatest president since FDR.

Obama to Reinforce the Militarized Police Occupation of Black America

Protesters rejected the official mythology, that cops risk life and limb to “protect” the community. “They are not at risk. Police officers are the threat,” wrote BYP 100’s New York City chairperson Rahel Mekdim Teka. “Police do not keep us safe. Police do not protect us. They are the danger that keeps Black people unsafe.” Demonstrators at the two protest sites demanded action to “defund the police, and fund black futures.”

It is now common for protesters to demand that police funding be redirected to community social needs. This demand rejects the legitimacy of the armed occupation of Black communities, and makes a claim to control of the allocation of resources in those communities – a step towards self-determination.

President Obama, however, has diametrically opposite plans for these communities. According to the Reuters news agency, Obama is preparing to reverse his decision to ban the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars in armored vehicles, battlefield weapons and riot gear to local police departments. The president reportedly agreed to review the restrictions after meeting with leaders of the Fraternal Order of Police and the National Association of Police Organizations.

Obama’s short-lived retreat from the federal government’s frenzied militarization of local police, announced with great fanfare in May of 2015, was his sole substantial concession to the movement that swept the nation after the rebellion in Ferguson, Missouri. The sight of armored vehicles and battle-ready cops on the streets of American cities was an international embarrassment for the United States – bad “optics” for the First Black President’s legacy. However, the sad truth is that Obama is responsible for the biggest escalation in the history of the one-sided war against Black America.

By 2014, the year that Michael Brown was shot down – and when the full Congress, including 32 members of the Congressional Black Caucus, rejected a bill that would have shut down the 1033 program – Obama was sending three quarters of a billion dollars, more than $787 million a year, in battlefield weaponry to local police departments. In other words, President Obama oversaw a 24-fold (2,400%) increase in the militarization of local police between 2008 and 2014. Even with the scale-back announced in 2015, Obama still managed to transfer a $459 million arsenal to the cops – 14 times as much weapons of terror and death than President Bush gifted to local police at his high point year of 2008.

This was not simply a “surge” in militarization of the police; Obama escalated the war against Black and brown communities by several orders of magnitude. Based on these numbers, Obama is the biggest domestic war hawk in the history of the United States – bigger than Bush, Clinton and all his predecessors since the genesis of the Black mass incarceration regime in the late Sixties.
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The Obama administration marks a new stage in the street war against Black and brown people – a war he escalated before the emergence of a new Black movement, rather than in response to it. Activists should dismiss, out of hand, the Obama administration’s propaganda about “community policing,” a catch-all for finessing an ever deeper police presence in Black communities. When Obama was earmarking $163 million for U.S. Justice Department “community policing” projects in 2015, he was simultaneously budgeting more than half a billion dollars for militarization of the police. Conclusion: Obama is willing to invest limited funds in cultivating more snitches, but he’s really gung-ho about outfitting the cops with tanks, machine guns and grenade launchers.

Let’s remember that the first black American president brought slavery to Libya too. Damn now that is some legacy don’t you think? And yet people are begging for Obama to address the nation because Trump is a bad man. Plus he’s orange.

Vote blue no matter who folks because democrats are your friends and republicans are not.

The world is watching this shit show brought to us by the government going back 400 years.