THE COPS ARE NOT BLOWING OUT THE BRAINS OF WHITE FOLKS WHEN THEY STEP OUT OF THER BMWs! OR THE CRIMINALS WHO LIVE ON WALL STREET!!!
Today Biden heads a right-wing administration in the midst of an unprecedented economic, social and political crisis of American capitalism. His attempt to outflank the Republicans on the issue of law and order and support for the police underscores the impossibility of reforming the police under capitalism, as well as the bankruptcy of politics based on the notion that the Democratic Party can be pushed to the left and turned into an instrument for progressive change..... THE DEMOCRAT PARTY FOR BOTTOMLESS BAILOUTS FOR BANKSTERS, HIGH TECH BILLIONAIRES FOR OPEN BORDERS AND NO LEGAL NEED APPLY..... ALL THE REST IS NOTHING BUT A HOAX THEY ARE PERPETRATING!!!
Biden funnels pandemic relief funds into strengthening the police
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden announced new measures to deal with what he called an epidemic of gun violence in America. Speaking of his plan from the White House, Biden said nothing about the social causes of the spike in gun violence being reported in many US cities, nor did he mention the continuing wave of police killings that take more than 1,000 lives every year in the United States.
Rather, he sought to establish his law-and-order credentials and dissociate his administration from calls to “defund the police” that emerged during the mass demonstrations last spring and summer against police violence, following the police murder of George Floyd.
Saying that now was “not a time to turn our backs on law enforcement,” Biden announced that states and localities could use any portion of the $350 billion in pandemic relief funds allotted them under the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan enacted in March to fund their police departments.
In a statement released by the Treasury Department, the administration announced that the money could be used to hire additional police officers to reach pre-pandemic staffing levels, and, in communities with high rates of gun violence, increase the size of their department beyond pre-pandemic levels. The money could also be used to establish community violence intervention programs and purchase new policing equipment.
Biden and his attorney general, Merrick Garland, explained that the plan also included expanded deployment of the FBI and other federal police agencies to aid local police, as well as enhanced technology for tracking criminal activity, presumably a coded reference to surveillance activities.
Citing a 34-city study by the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice, the Biden administration claims that homicides rose by 30 percent in large cities across the US in 2020. Additionally, the study says aggravated assaults and gun assaults rose last year by 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively. The White House further states that the nationwide homicide rate was 24 percent higher in the first months of 2021 than it was in the same period of 2020, and 49 percent higher than two years ago.
According to data compiled by CNN and Gunviolencearchive.org, there were 10 mass shootings across nine states that killed seven people and injured at least 45 others just last weekend.
Biden claimed in his speech that “the secondary consequences of the pandemic and the proliferation of illegal guns” were behind the increase in crime and said he expected crime rates to rise over the summer.
“Crime historically rises during the summer,” he said. “And as we emerge from this pandemic with the country opening back up again, the traditional summer spike may even be more pronounced than it usually would be.”
A fact sheet released by the White House on Wednesday listed five major components of the administration’s strategy to reduce gun violence and crime: stiffer enforcement of firearms restrictions, increased federal funds for police departments, community violence interventions, summer jobs for teenagers and young adults and programs to help former prisoners find employment and housing.
As Biden’s White House speech on Wednesday made clear, however, the program is really about vastly increasing funding for the police, with the rest more a matter of packaging than substance.
Noticeably absent from his remarks was any mention of police reform, which he claimed to champion during his 2020 election campaign, as millions of all races and ethnicities were demonstrating in US cities and cities around the world in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd.
Nor did he speak of the massive job loss and growth of poverty for workers resulting from the pandemic, alongside a record rise in stock prices and wealth for the corporate-financial elite, fueled by trillions of dollars in bailouts and virtually free money provided by the Federal Reserve.
Over 600,000 Americans have died to date from COVID-19 due to the policy of subordinating human life to corporate profit pursued by Trump and continued in all essentials by Biden. This policy of social murder is being intensified with the lifting of all restrictions on the spread of the virus and the insistence on reopening the schools with in-person instruction, despite the rapid spread of the more virulent Delta variant of the virus and large parts of the country with low vaccination rates.
What is really driving Biden’s diversion of pandemic relief funds into the strengthening of the police is the mounting social and political crisis in the country and the growth of social opposition in the working class. The entire ruling class, complicit in a policy of mass death, is fearful of an eruption of working-class opposition that will escape the control of the pro-corporate trade unions and the two parties of the financial oligarchy.
The police are part of the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. They are the frontline force for suppressing the working class and upholding the system that exploits it. All factions of the ruling class and both of its parties seek to shore up the police to be thrown against a mass movement of workers.
In an op-ed piece published Wednesday, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman expressed the panicked concerns of the ruling class when he warned of the danger of “civil war.” Biden and the Democrats, he argued, had to make clear their support for the police. Under the headline “Want to Get Trump Re-elected? Dismantle the Police,” he warned of “volcanic forces … that could blow the lid off our democracy.”
In 1994, as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Bill Clinton administration, Biden championed the Violent Crime Control and Enforcement Act, which established mandatory and draconian sentences for drug offenders, leading to a surge in incarceration of poor and minority workers and youth. The law also expanded the reach of the death penalty.
Biden drafted the Senate version of the law in collaboration with the National Association of Police Organizations. He warned at the time of “predators” who were “beyond the pale.”
Today he heads a right-wing administration in the midst of an unprecedented economic, social and political crisis of American capitalism. His attempt to outflank the Republicans on the issue of law and order and support for the police underscores the impossibility of reforming the police under capitalism, as well as the bankruptcy of politics based on the notion that the Democratic Party can be pushed to the left and turned into an instrument for progressive change.
Democrats, media suppress new
revelations of military and police
complicity in January 6 coup attempt
More than five months since the January 6 coup attempt, there is an ongoing effort to conceal from the American people the full scope of the conspiracy and the fascistic forces mobilized by Trump and the Republican Party, with the aid of top officials in the FBI, the Pentagon and the US Capitol Police.
There is a division of labor between the two parties of US capitalism. The Republican Party has overwhelmingly lined up behind the would-be-Führer Trump, repeating his false claims that the election was fraudulent and that the storming of the Capitol by Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, white supremacists and neo-Nazis was a non-event.
The Biden administration and the bulk of the media work to suppress stunning revelations, some emerging in congressional hearings run by the Democrats, documenting the critical role of Trump allies within the state in sabotaging any defense of the Capitol complex.
Pleading with Trump’s Republican accomplices for “bipartisanship” and “unity,” the Democratic Party, itself a party of Wall Street and the military, is terrified of the political and social consequences of revelations exposing the stench of dictatorship behind the façade of American “democracy.” Each new revelation is systematically downplayed or entirely ignored by the Democratic leadership as well as the mainstream media, from the New York Times and the Washington Post to the broadcast and cable news networks.
On Tuesday, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform held a hearing with FBI Director Christopher Wray, Lt. Gen. Walter Piatt, director of the Army staff, and Gen. Charles Flynn, currently the commanding general of the US Army Pacific.
In the course of the hearing, the following revelations emerged:
• The FBI failed to act on over 50 separate notifications by the social media platform Parler, relaying, in the words of Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, “specific threats of violence being planned at the Capitol.” In one warning, a Parler user called on fascists to come to D.C. on January 6 to take on “Antifa” and “start eliminating people.”
• Director Wray refused to answer why the Bureau did not issue a threat assessment specific to January 6 or coordinate with the Department of Homeland Security and designate January 6 as a National Special Security Event. Nor could Wray explain why the FBI had yet to turn over documentation requested by the committee.
• Gen. Piatt admitted that he did not want federal troops to be used as a “clearing force at the Capitol,” even as the building was under siege by fascistic militias and desperate lawmakers were begging for help.
• Neither general could explain why it took hours to send National Guard troops to clear the Capitol. Their absurd stonewalling about the need for a “concept of operation” plan was belied in previous testimony by then-D.C. National Guard Commander William Walker. Walker said Piatt and Flynn justified their rejection of his initial request for permission to deploy National Guard troops, at 1:49 p.m., on the grounds that having soldiers deployed to the Capitol would be “bad optics.”
Walker further testified in March that he had 155 guardsmen fully equipped and ready to deploy, and that their timely dispatch to the Capitol could have “secured the perimeter” and “made a difference.”
No one at Tuesday’s hearing mentioned the fact that Charles Flynn is the younger brother of retired General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. Days before the January 6 coup attempt, Michael Flynn publicly urged Trump to declare martial law and hold new elections at gunpoint in swing states that had given Biden his margin of victory.
On the same day, the House Administration Committee held a hearing with Capitol Police Inspector General Michael Bolton, during which Bolton discussed the contents of his fourth “flash report.” In the report and in the course of the hearing the following was revealed:
• The US Capitol Police Containment and Emergency Response Team, or CERT, spent a total of $90,075 in 2018 and 2019 for training by a private paramilitary contractor run by neo-fascist former Special Operations killers who cut their teeth in America’s dirty colonial wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
• The same CERT team failed to respond to urgent requests from besieged police within the Capitol during the coup. During questioning it was revealed that one CERT official told a special-ops officer that CERT did not want to deploy “less-lethal” ammunition because “they did not want people falling down the steps.”
• CERT failed to carry out “leadership evacuations,” i.e., efforts to rescue targeted Democratic lawmakers as well as Vice President Mike Pence from militarily trained militia members who invaded the Capitol and demanded that they be hanged.
Committee Chairwomen Zoe Lofgren asked Bolton if CERT’s failure to deploy put “congressional leadership or even the vice president in danger?” Bolton, with emphasis said, “It is a concern that they were not there.”
Virtually none of these facts have been reported by the mainstream media or mentioned by the Biden administration or the Democratic congressional leadership. Joining the conspiracy of silence, including on the integration of neo-Nazi paramilitary forces into the Republican Party and the state institutions of repression, are the so-called “progressives” within the Democratic Party. Not a word about these revelations has appeared to date on the twitter accounts of Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her follow House “Squad” members.
In early March, when Walker first testified about the one hundred and ninety-nine minutes between the initial request on January 6 to top military command for the deployment of the National Guard troops and its final approval, the WSWS wrote, “If the events documented by Walker had occurred in any other country, they would correctly be seen as an attempted military coup. Walker’s testimony, however, has largely been ignored and downplayed in the media.”
Three and a half months later, the information that has come out in the limited and carefully circumscribed congressional hearings confirms this analysis. Such is the decay of American democracy, however, that an attempted fascistic coup by a sitting US president is swept under the rug by the ruling class, in the name of “unity” and in defense of a bipartisan policy of war and social reaction.
These developments must be taken as a sharp warning by workers. In the defense of democratic rights and against the growth of fascist forces, no confidence can be placed in the Democratic Party or any faction of the ruling class. Only the united struggle of the working class, nationally and internationally, conducted on the basis of a conscious struggle for socialism, can halt the capitalist drive to war, mass poverty and dictatorship.
Biden's gun crime prevention speech was equal parts ludicrous and scary
With murder rates skyrocketing in major American cities, Joe Biden announced his "gun crime prevention strategy." Because Democrats are opposed to punishments for crime, Biden was reduced to maligning the Second Amendment. Thankfully, he lacks the authority to grab our guns, but he managed a few chilling statements.
Violent crime has dramatically escalated in Democrat-run states and cities, where Democrats have released violent prisoners; defunded, hamstrung, and demoralized the police; decreased or done away with bail; and elected Soros-funded prosecutors who refuse to prosecute potential Democrat voters. As a Democrat, Biden could not promote stiffer prison penalties, meaningful bail, and aggressive prosecution. However, he did concede that police make a difference:
[C]ities experiencing an increase in gun violence were able to use the American Rescue Plan dollars to hire police officers needed for community policing and to pay their overtime.
[snip]
And for folks at home, the American Rescue Plan, which is a once-in-a-generation investment to reduce violence in America, is available. I'm proud of it. It means more police officers, more nurses, more counselors, more social workers, more community violence interrupters to help resolve issues before they escalate into crimes.
The real point of Biden's speech was grabbing guns. (If the filibuster holds, Biden lacks the political might to pass gun-grabbing laws.) His problem is that the cities with the worst violent crime already have gun-grabbing laws.
Biden fell back on the old Chicago standby, saying that the illegal guns used to commit crimes in Democrat cities are smuggled in from states with lax gun laws:
With these strike forces, local and federal law enforcement and prosecutors are going to be able to better coordinate the prosecution of illegal gun trafficking across city and state lines, so illegal guns sold from the back door of a gun shop in Virginia don't end up at a murder scene in Baltimore.
What Biden failed to explain is why those gun-supplying states don't also have out-of-control gun crime.
Biden also insisted that the only reason to have weapons and ammo is deer hunting:
Background checks for purchasing a firearm are important; a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines — no one needs to have a weapon that can fire over 30, 40, 50, even up to 100 rounds [Me: 100 rounds? Someone's been getting into the Geritol] unless you think the deer are wearing Kevlar vests or something; community policing and programs that keep neighborhoods safe and keep folks out of trouble.
The Second Amendment has nothing to do with deer-hunting — and it's not the government's job to tell us what we need to defend ourselves, including against a tyrannical government. And that leads us to Biden's incoherent, yet frightening attack on the Second Amendment:
The Second Amendment, from the day it was passed, limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own. You couldn't buy a cannon.
Those who say the blood of lib — "the blood of patriots," you know, and all the stuff about how we're going to have to move against the government. Well, the tree of liberty is not watered with the blood of patriots. What's happened is that there have never been — if you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.
The point is that there has always been the ability to limit — rationally limit the type of weapon that can be owned and who can own it.
A few points:
The first national gun control law limiting the types of guns Americans could own was in 1934, a mere 143 years after the Second Amendment was ratified.
Following America's creation, the laws controlling who could own guns came from Democrats disarming Blacks. Except for some renegade Southern Democrat branches of the NRA, the NRA pushed vigorously to overturn those laws.
Apparently, Thomas Jefferson was wrong when he said that "the Tree of Liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." In Biden's America, if you face the government, you'd better come prepared, unless you're an unarmed civilian whom the Capitol Police welcome into the Capitol. Then, you're more dangerous than a nuclear bomb.
In 2018, Larry Correia practically predicted Biden's attitude (h/t: Glenn Reynolds):
I've had a Caring Liberal tell me that the example of Iraq doesn't apply, because "we kept the gloves on", whereas fighting America's gun nuts would be a righteous total war with nothing held back… Holy s---, I've got to wonder about the mentality of people who demand rigorous ROEs to prevent civilian casualties in a foreign country, are blood thirsty enough to carpet bomb Texas.
You really hate us, and then act confused why we want to keep our guns?
In the end, all Biden could do was say he'll go after law-violating gun-dealers. Still, his implied threat about turning the Army on Americans should make everyone wary.
Image: Biden talks about gun violence (cropped). YouTube screen grab.
Biden Threatens to Nuke Americans but Manages to Blow Up a Big Democrat Narrative Instead
Earlier today, as RedState reported, Joe Biden launched into another dementia-laden rant where he talked about nuking Americans and shooting deer in kevlar vests. No, I’m not being facetious. That actually happened (see Biden Accidently Makes Best Ever for Second Amendment in Speech Promoting Gun Control Initiatives).
In one of the best arguments for the Second Amendment ever spoken by a president, Biden asserted that no one can stand up to the government without F-15s and nuclear weapons. He seems to have a thing for the F-15, having mentioned it several times in this context and perhaps not realizing that the U.S. Military has an array of other fighter-bombers to murder U.S. citizens with. I mean, if you gonna threaten to vaporize your countrymen, at least diversify a bit.
The arguments against this are legion. I could point out that in order to nuke your own citizens, you’d need to have a military willing to do that. Even though I don’t trust the military as far as I can throw them when it comes to protecting the rights of Americans, I’m skeptical any military leader would order a tactical nuclear strike on Montana.
I could also note that rights are not based on whether they ultimately achieve a given outcome. When I vote, I may fail to elect the politician I want. My right to vote still exists regardless. The Second Amendment, which clearly was meant to allow citizens to bear military-grade arms, doesn’t cease to exist if the government gets powerful enough to defeat the exercising of it. Of course, there’s also the reality that the American military has been repeatedly thwarted by low-tech insurgencies because war is a lot more complicated than F-15s and nukes.
Regardless, it was something else that stuck out to me while watching Biden rant about things he has no knowledge of. Namely, that what he’s saying blows up the Democrats’ January 6th narrative.
Stick with me here. If Biden and his party truly believe the government is so all-powerful that any possible rebellion would be put down with ease, then how does that square with their claims that our “democracy” was on the brink of destruction on January 6th because some unarmed people took selfies in Pelosi’s office? Either our system of government is so fragile that a dude in horns and facepaint can threaten its existence, or it’s so untouchable that the government would just nuke anyone who got within a mile of doing any harm to it. Which is it? Because it can’t be both.
Are you starting to see how the Democrats’ views on guns and government power shift on a dime in order to sustain their political narratives?
The truth is that if enough Americans felt the government had become tyrannical and rose up against it with arms protected by the Second Amendment, things would be a lot more complicated and gray than “well, the military has nukes.” We’ve seen that reality play out in foreign countries many times. Further, the very fact that Biden would threaten such is yet more proof the Second Amendment must be protected.
Going back to January 6th, as I’ve said several times before, there was no insurrection or imminent danger to our system of government. To pretend that for partisan gain was always pure hysteria mixed with cynicism. I’m just glad Biden came out and made that clear, even if he didn’t realize it.
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