Once again the police murderer of an innocent victim is walking free: King County prosecutors have decided not to file charges against SPD gunman Ian Birk, executioner of Native American woodcarver John T. Williams.
This is the kind of class-biased and racist justice that is daily meted out in capitalist America.
Capitalism means a tiny minority exploiting the labor power of the great majority. And rooted in genocide against the Indigenous Peoples and chattel slavery, U.S. capitalism has a unique racist history that continues today. Racial discrimination is used to extract super-profits from the exploitation of national minority and immigrant workers, while some national minorities are forced into unemployment at twice the rate of whites.
But Native Americans, African American, Latinos and others constantly struggle against the injustices they find at every turn, and they’re always on the verge of mass rebellion. The entire system of laws, courts, prisons, and police is therefore designed to control and repress them—and the working people and poor more generally.
On top of this the American ruling class has for decades been pushing the majority of people downwards and backwards. Under Bush, and now Obama, many trillions of dollars have been lavished on the finance capitalists while Obama has no jobs or housing programs, and promises more budget cuts for the masses while giving the Pentagon record war budgets. Indeed, he’s so “concerned” about the poor that last year he robbed the food stamp budget to pay school teachers, while this year he plans to slash the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. So there’s no wonder why the gulf between the rich parasites and the poor is the widest since the 1920s. Meanwhile both parties of the ruling class have been building a police state in order to put down resistance and inevitable rebellion. They’ve expanded, militarized, and better organized the police at all levels; and they now incarcerate more people than any other country; disproportionately these are national minorities.
John T. Williams was a casualty of this system.
And in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere the U.S. dispenses the same kind of street justice as it did to John Williams. His life, and how it ended, had more in common with the people of those countries than it ever did with the rulers of this country.
But this is not a world where everything is fated to stay the same. A great wave of revolt is sweeping the Arab world and already spreading beyond. For example, the Egyptian people have long been oppressed by a dictatorship supported by the U.S. to the tune of $1.3 billion in military aid annually as part of its imperialist strategy to dominate the region. Nonetheless, they’ve for many years struggled against neo-liberal economic policies, unemployment, and police murders and brutality. Then, just three years ago they began their largest strike wave since WWII, fiercely fought back against the police and military, and denounced the U.S.-supported tyranny. Now they’ve risen in an unprecedented mass revolutionary upsurge that has won concessions from the capitalists and forced Mubarak into hiding.
Out of this the everyday men and women have felt their collective power, and they’re currently waging more strikes and other mass actions because they know that replacing Mubark by the generals is not enough.
So the masses everywhere are now saying “walk like an Egyptian, ” and we should do this. Let us rise in struggle against police murders—murders to enforce a racist system based on the exploitation and impoverishment of the working class. Let us organize to bring about a great wave of revolt such as that which has been changing the Arab world, and spread this revolt to the workplaces and streets of America, thereby bringing about real change. And let us never forget John Williams and the countless others who have been and are the daily victims of the police brutality spawned by this great American “civilization.”
Seattle Anti-Imperialist Committee, February 16, 2011