Police-state tactics vs. right to protest
Bush, Bloomberg wage war on New York
By Fred Goldstein
New York
The months-long, carefully orchestrated campaign of
intimidation against protests at the Republican National
Convention, spearheaded by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York,
was aimed at protecting the representatives of his fellow
billionaires and millionaires from the justifiable wrath of the
people.
Under the political cover of the so-called "war on
terrorism," Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and
the Bush administration mounted a major show of force in an
effort to forestall a militant, Seattle-type protest.
Bloomberg was the point man for the Secret Service, the
Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the
Pentagon. He had the complicity of the totally pliable big
business media, which reinforced the message of intimidation
and passed over the gross violations of constitutional rights,
endorsing police-state tactics, just as it cheered on U.S.
aggression in Iraq when it was embedded with the Pentagon.
When they planned their convention over a year ago, the
Republican Party and the Bush administration undoubtedly
planned to make a triumphant march into New York City after
having set up a puppet government in Afghanistan and completed
their conquest of Iraq. But that was then, and this is now.
Now they have come to New York--historically a center of
progressive, radical and revolutionary politics--as an invading
army of reaction that has stirred the anger of the world.
They are the bloody occupiers who cannot subdue the national
resistance of the Iraqi people. They are the architects of
torture at Abu Ghraib prison, Guantanamo and Afghanistan. They
are the corrupt tools of Halliburton and the oil billionaires.
They are the benefactors of the military-industrial complex and
the darlings of the rich through their tax cuts. They engage in
sabre rattling in every direction and have promised "endless
war."
Add to this the Patriot Act and all the racist and
repressive measures they have carried out. Throw in their
economic program of cutbacks across the board on social
spending, anti-union policies and attacks on overtime pay,
among other things. Then consider their totally reactionary
social program of racism, attacking women's reproductive
rights, and denying equality to lesbians, gays, bi and trans
people.
The very presence in New York City of this assemblage of
political reactionaries and their obscenely opulent ruling
class sponsors is a major provocation. It is no wonder that
Mayor Bloomberg had to enter into an alliance with the Bush
administration and the Republican Party in order to come up
with the $75 million they are spending on the most massive show
of force in the history of any city against its people.
Warmakers are lawbreakers
The "war against terrorism" was invoked to justify
unprecedented measures taken to prepare for repression against
the masses of people. Over 30,000 police were deployed to
protect the RNC, including 10,000 street cops in the area
surrounding Madison Square Garden. They were supplemented by
hundreds of bicycles and scooters for mobile tactics clearly
aimed, not at a conspiracy of a few, but at the resistance of
the many. Bloomberg took a "law and order" line from day one,
promising to crush anyone who, in the eyes of the ruling class,
breaks the law.
It was an attempt to divert attention from the fact that the
Bush administration has violated just about every international
law with regard to war, including the United Nations Charter
and laws like the Geneva Conventions that forbid preemptive
invasions and military aggression, plus the U.S.
Constitution.
As a consequence of these violations of law, tens of
thousands of Iraqis and Afghans have died. Hundreds of
thousands more have been wounded, made homeless and had their
livelihoods destroyed. Almost 1,000 U.S. troops have now been
killed and many thousands more seriously injured.
The capitalist ruling class has violated these laws to
advance the interests of the oil companies, the Penta gon and
the transnational corporations seeking profits and control of
the Gulf region.
Bloomberg, Kelly and the entire capitalist media do not want
to call attention to these violations of law. The authorities
are prepared to brutalize and jail protesters who want to take
to the streets to protest the crimes of Bush.
By these standards of "upholding the law," Bloomberg and
Kelly would have arrested Martin Luther King Jr. and the tens
of thousands of civil rights demonstrators who committed civil
disobedience to overturn the lawlessness of segregation.
It was the right of the African Amer icans and the civil
rights movement to use whatever means available to overturn the
criminal, racist practices of segregation and racism in
general.
It is certainly the right of the political movement to
struggle in the streets to prevent imperialist aggression,
intervention or colonization of Iraq, Palestine, Haiti or
anywhere else, and to prevent crimes against the poor, against
people of color, against women or lesbian, gay, bi or trans
people.
It is the right of workers to fight for their survival
against the bosses despite court injunctions, anti-labor laws
and other "legal" means that restrain labor from defending
itself against the exploiting capitalist class.
Right to resist war crimes
The movement has to insist that the right of the people to
defend themselves against ruling class injustice takes absolute
and total legal priority over the right of the oppressing
classes, such as those represented by Bloomberg and Kelly, to
enforce their will upon the people.
It is important to protest against the use of "excessive
force" and put the police and the government on the defensive
about their brutality. The unprovoked and completely
disproportionate aggression by the cops must be exposed.
But we should also point out that no force by the capitalist
state against people fighting for their rights is justified.
Whatever class-based complaints the government utilizes to
justify its repression of the protesters against the RNC should
be regarded as subordinate to the legal right to demonstrate to
stop monumental war crimes, crimes against the poor, the racist
death penalty, crimes against the environment, and so on.
The recently emerged Bush-Ridge-Ashcroft-Bloomberg axis of
reaction has more than the short-term goal of suppressing
demonstrations at the RNC. The longer-range goal is to
intimidate the entire working class and progressive and
revolutionary movements in New York, while sending a signal to
the country as a whole.
There is much talk about how New York is a Democratic Party
town and this is what's behind the massive demonstrations. To
be sure, the Democratic Party is strong in New York, even
though it serves the same ruling class, for the same
reactionary aims as the Republicans. But for the ruling class,
that's not the primary significance of this show of force in
crowd control and mass repression.
Bloomberg fears NYC's workers and oppressed
New York is a major center of progressive and revolutionary
politics. The ruling class knows the country is headed into a
period of deepening military intervention and war, as well as a
deepening and insoluble economic crisis. Bloomberg, with the
backing of Wall Street and Washington, anticipates coming
struggles and is moving to strengthen the state apparatus while
waging a campaign of intimidation.
New York has been vilified around the country by the ruling
class media for its progressive character. It is a labor town
with more union members than any other city. It has become the
most multinational city in the country, with a majority Black,
Latin@, Asian, Arab and other peoples of color. It has Harlem,
the African American political and cultural center of the
country. It is the stronghold of the reproductive rights
movement in the country. It has the largest lesbian, gay, bi
and trans community in the country. It has a huge immigrant
community and a sweatshop industry with massive numbers of
super-exploited workers.
It is the largest city in the country by population. Its
massive numbers of workers and oppressed people are
concentrated into a very small geographical area, which
facilitates united action.
New York is where the first major post-World War II mass
urban uprising against racism and police repression took
place--in 1964, with the Harlem rebellion. Dozens of rebellions
followed around the country.
Abortion rights were won in New York before the rest of the
country. The Stonewall Rebellion took place in New York in
1969, spawning a world-wide struggle for lesbian, gay, bi and
trans rights.
During the Vietnam War, massive, militant demonstrations
against the war and the draft forced the government to close
down draft boards and deterred government officials from coming
to the city. On Feb. 15, 2003, half a million people marched in
New York, trying to prevent Bush from invading Iraq.
Great labor demonstrations shook the city during the 1930s.
Ever since the unions have periodically demonstrated their
militancy and organization. The Labor Day demonstrations,
although tame in recent years, attract tens of thousands and
are an annual reminder to the ruling class of the sleeping
giant living here. This is also true for the annual turnout of
a million people for Brooklyn's Caribbean Day and the yearly
massive Puerto Rican Day parades. Recently, 100,000 immigrant
workers and their supporters held an unprecedented and historic
demonstration in the multinational borough of Queens.
The ruling class knows that poverty in this country is
growing, including in New York, which houses some of the
richest millionaires and billionaires in the world. This
parasitic class sees only continued occupation and military
expansion. Whether Kerry or Bush gets elected, plans for the
draft are on the drawing board. The weak capitalist recovery
presages another bust, while the workers have never recovered
from the last one.
This is what the deployment of 30,000 police on 12-hour
shifts, and the public practice sessions in crowd control, were
about.
Ruling class behind attacks on demonstrators
Mayor Bloomberg was said to be worth $4 billion when he
bought the office of mayor. But it's not his wealth alone that
makes his intervention in the process of expanding the
capitalist state so significant.
Bloomberg is not just an ordinary mayor. He made his fortune
by gathering up-to-the minute financial information from all
the bond, stock and commodity markets--not just in the U.S. but
worldwide--and making it rapidly available to the ruling class
and to all speculators. As such, his firm has contact with
commercial and investment banking, great brokerage houses and
finance capital in general, making him perfectly suited to set
up a virtual temporary police state, abridge the rights of the
masses by diktat, and have the entire capitalist media embedded
with him and his police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, just the
way they were embedded with the Pentagon during the invasion of
Iraq.
This is what gave Bloomberg the authority to purchase and
publicly exhibit the Bear Cat, a 15-ton, $200,000 armored
vehicle with openings for firing tear gas or other ammunition.
This is why the media were invited to a Brooklyn airfield to
see and hear a demonstration of a super sound system--used by
the U.S. in Iraq--which is capable of virtually paralyzing a
mass gathering at its loudest ranges. This is why the cops let
the big mass demonstration on Aug. 29 pass, arresting "only"
200 people, but then pounced on smaller demonstrations in the
following days to test out their new techniques, such as
throwing nets over people and mass detention at pens with chain
fences and razor wire, like in Iraq or Guantanamo.
It is said that foreign policy is an extension of domestic
policy. In the case of the repression at the RNC repression,
the domestic policy of repression was calculated to stop
protest against the foreign policy of occupation. The goals
were both intimidation and practice, the way the Pentagon tries
to intimidate the world and also practices its new weapons
systems in each military action, from the Gulf War of 1991 to
Yugoslavia in 1999 to the invasion of Baghdad last year.
But while Bloomberg and Kelly may have succeeded for now in
keeping a large-scale rebellion from breaking out, they were
not able to break the spirit of the people, who came out in
record numbers brimming with anger and hostility to the
warmakers.
Just as in Iraq, where the vicious occupation has bred a
mighty resistance, the police-state tactics of Bush, Bloomberg
and Kelly will only open the eyes of a new generation to the
need for militant mass struggle. They will pave the way for the
rebellions and resistance of the future.
Reprinted from the Sept. 9, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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