[D66] Obama hails police-state methods in Chicago

[Antid Oto]

Obama hails police-state methods in Chicago
22 May 2012

President Barack Obama on Monday praised the performance of Chicago city
officials and the Chicago Police Department after a week of violence, repression
and frame-ups directed against antiwar demonstrators in the city.

Speaking at the conclusion of the NATO summit, Obama paid tribute to Mayor Rahm
Emanuel, his political crony and former White House chief of staff, and added,
referring to the thousands of police mobilized against protesters, “Chicago’s
finest did a great job under significant pressure and a lot of scrutiny.”

What was this “great job?”

• Downtown Chicago was effectively shut down for four days, Friday through
Monday, not by the protesters, never more than 5,000 people, but by a huge
mobilization of police and paramilitary forces who frequently outnumbered the
demonstrators. The entire area around McCormick Place, site of the summit, was
under lockdown.

• Police arrested well over 100 demonstrators in the course of the week,
including more than 60 Sunday, a day of tense confrontations in which police
continually vented their hostility towards the demonstrators, who were opposing
the US-NATO war in Afghanistan and other imperialist military interventions.

• The violent dispersal of the protesters late Sunday afternoon was entirely
one-sided, as described by the Chicago Sun-Times—a staunchly pro-police
tabloid—which headlined its account, “Riot Gear Cops Rain Down Blows on
Protesters.” The beatings were so widespread and indiscriminate that one of the
newspaper’s own reporters was among those bloodied. At least 25 demonstrators
were injured, with a dozen requiring hospital treatment.

• Most ominously, five protesters were arrested in police raids targeting
individuals supposedly preparing “terrorist” attacks on the NATO summit. The
same two informants fingered all five men, after the undercover cops had
circulated widely among the protesters looking for anyone they could instigate
or entrap.

The charges of “conspiring to commit domestic terrorism during the NATO summit,”
brought before the Cook County Circuit Court, are a deliberate attempt to
intimidate opponents of the US-NATO war in Afghanistan and other imperialist
military interventions either under way or being planned by the Obama
administration.

The whole machinery of provocation and frame-up, erected over the past decade in
the name of the “war on terror,” is now being used against the democratic rights
of working people and youth who oppose the policies of the American government.
As the World Socialist Web Site has consistently warned, the methods tested out
against immigrants and Muslims are now being unleashed against the American
people as a whole.

The Chicago frame-ups of antiwar protesters follow in the footsteps of previous
provocations: last month’s arrest of five Cleveland-area Occupy protesters on
similarly trumped-up charges; the systematic police violence against Occupy
encampments last fall and winter; the FBI raids on the homes of antiwar
activists in Minneapolis and Chicago in the fall of 2010.

They are part of a broader assault on democratic rights being carried out by the
Obama administration, which has gone even further than the Bush White House in
erecting the scaffolding of a police state. Obama signed the National Defense
Authorization Act, which gives the president the right to order the military
detention, without trial, of anyone he designates as a terrorist threat,
including US citizens. Obama has sharply increased targeted assassinations of
alleged terrorists, including the murder of US citizens, and openly defended the
president’s supposed unilateral “right” to do so.

Both big business parties are systematically shredding the Bill of Rights and
stripping the American people of their constitutionally guaranteed rights.

These heavy-handed measures expose the fraudulent character of the claims by
Democratic and Republican politicians that American imperialism is on the side
of “democracy” and “freedom” when it wages wars against countries that possess
vast reserves of oil and natural gas, or occupy strategic locations adjacent to
such resources.

America is the most heavily policed of the industrialized countries. The
combined forces of repression—local and state police, the military, the FBI, the
CIA and other intelligence agencies, the vast apparatus of the Department of
Homeland Security, the endless armies of private security personnel—number in
the many millions.

In the final analysis, this vast apparatus of repression testifies to the crisis
of American capitalism, not its strength. The more acute the social tensions,
the more charged the political atmosphere, the deeper the resentment of working
people towards the privileged elite, the more the ruling class is compelled to
surround itself with what Marx and Engels described as the essence of the
state—“bodies of armed men.”

The working class must take a warning from the events in Chicago on the role of
the police, including their informants and provocateurs, and the role of the
Obama administration.

The decisive issue is the political clarification of the working class and the
development of a mass, independent political mobilization of working people and
youth based on a socialist and internationalist program. Only such a mass
movement, fighting to take political power and establish a workers government,
can forestall the drive towards repression and dictatorship by the corporate
elite and its political defenders, both Democratic and Republican.

Patrick Martin

http://wsws.org/articles/2012/may2012/pers-m22.shtml