O capitão vai mobilizar as camisas cinzentas dos PMs?
We don’t need Trump’s thugs in Chicago
The excuse for sending federal police here is to protect federal property. The reality is that this is a cynical re-election ploy aimed at earning support for a law-and-disorder president.
Jesse Jackson
Chicago Sun-Times – 29.7.2020
Chicago Sun-Times – 29.7.2020
“Hitler had his Brown shirts and Mussolini had his Black shirts, now Donald Trump has his camouflage shirts.” Thus began a statement signed by 15 distinguished interdenominational religious leaders in Chicago that I joined, including ministers, priests, and rabbis.
Comparisons to Hitler are always explosive, but the comparison is apt. “Hitler’s bullyboys,” the statement continues, “operated on the fringes or outside of the law to violently intimidate Germany’s leftists and finally to exterminate Jews. Trump’s bully boys are operating on the fringes or outside the law to violently intimidate America’s progressives and people of color who are exercising their First Amendment right to protest racial injustice.”
Portland, Oregon, provides the model. Trump dispatched untrained, unidentified, camouflage-wearing, military-uniformed, no name-tagged bullyboys who are literally kidnapping protesters, stuffing them in unidentified vans, taking them to unknown locations without charges — and against the wishes of local law enforcement officers the mayor of Portland and the governor of Oregon.
Trump has announced that he will send similar teams to Chicago, New York, Detroit, Atlanta, Baltimore and other “liberal Democrat-run cities,” to use his phrase. The excuse is to defend federal property. The reality is that this is a cynical re-election ploy. As Portland shows, Trump’s gambit will spark a large, hostile reaction which he hopes to use to scare suburban voters into supporting this law-and-disorder president.
Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has warned Trump not to try this in Chicago. “[N]o troops, no agents that are coming in outside of our knowledge, notification, and control that are violating people’s constitutional rights.” Lightfoot told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday during an appearance on “State of the Union. “We can’t just allow anyone to come into Chicago, play police in our streets, in our neighborhoods, when they don’t know the first thing about our city. That’s a recipe for disaster. And that’s what you’re seeing playing out in Portland on a nightly basis.”
We support her resistance — and the opposition expressed by the Pentagon, members of Congress, former U.S. military officials, historians and constitutional scholars — to Trump’s effrontery.
We don’t need the president’s thugs in Chicago, but we would like real federal assistance. While overall crime has decreased compared to last year, violent crime — particularly murders and shootings — has soared.
Chicago has no gun shop and no gun range. The guns come from outside of Chicago, generally across the border from Indiana. We need common sense regulations on guns to stop the pipeline into Chicago. Trump could help because it is Republicans and the gun lobby that stands in the way.
Real federal assistance wouldn’t be dispatching bullyboys to terrorize citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. It would help with jobs and training for the young. It would help with rent and mortgage forgiveness during the pandemic lockdown when people can’t work. If Trump and Senate Republicans don’t act immediately, literally millions will be on the verge of eviction.
We need real investment in our schools, so the savage inequality with suburban schools can be reduced. We need health care to be a right, not a privilege, and at the very least for the federal government to cover all medical expenses related to COVID-19. In a pandemic, we all have a stake in ensuring that the sick can afford to get the treatment they need.
Our sons and daughters volunteer to serve in the military. When Vladimir Putin puts a bounty on the heads of our soldiers, we need Trump to defend them, not to ignore the attack.
Trump scorns real assistance to cities. He scorns meeting with our elected leaders before announcing that he plans to dispatch his thugs to our city. And he disgraces our democracy with this cynical and dangerous campaign ploy.
Black Lives Matter Chicago and other organizations are going to court to get an injunction to prohibit Trump’s agents from “interfering in or otherwise policing lawful and peaceful assemblies and protests” in Chicago.
The religious leaders who issued the statement pledged that if Trump dispatched bullyboys to Chicago without the permission of the mayor, they would be met with a “massive, disciplined, nonviolent ... march of resistance.” We will not let the president trample our Constitution, suppress our rights, and terrorize our citizens with impunity.
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Ugly Protests Are Trump's Only Hope
Froma Harrop
Seatlle Times – 29.7.2020
Seatlle Times – 29.7.2020
It would take quite a spectacle to upstage America's humiliating failure to contain the coronavirus. It's not every day that the Bahamas labels U.S. tourists as carriers of disease to be kept out.
President Donald Trump's poll numbers continue to sink as cases and death tolls rise. The only thing that could possibly save him is political violence in America's cities. And that's what he's cooking up.
It's entirely in Trump's playbook to provoke civic discord. He's been drawing his detractors into his game for four years. And what better way now than to send armed federal officers in unmarked cars into cities that don't want them? Unfortunately, protesters in Portland easily rose to the bait. And that chaos set off violent clashes, this time with local police, in Seattle, Omaha and Oakland, California.
"I'm furious that Oakland may have played right into Donald Trump's twisted campaign strategy," Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf said. "Images of a vandalized downtown is exactly what he wants to whip up his base and to potentially justify sending in federal troops that will only incite more unrest."
Suppose the protesters hadn't shown up. Suppose they had left the federal agents with empty streets and little to do.
Their causes may be just and their demonstrations overwhelmingly peaceful. But that matters not in these fraught times. Any video snippet of street fighting is guaranteed to get on the evening news.
Meanwhile, some protests have been infiltrated by far-right creeps. In Nevada, for example, the U.S. attorney has charged three members of the "boogaloo" movement -- extremists trying to foment a race war -- with conspiring to cause destruction during peaceful marches in Las Vegas. They were found to possess Molotov cocktails.
If you were out to help Trump, isn't that what you would do? Predictably, Trump's attorney general, William Barr, blamed only left-wingers linked to antifa for the violence. Some may well be part of the poisonous mix. And large protests, especially after nightfall, have provided cover for some old-fashioned criminality.
Trump is already running a "You won't be safe in Joe Biden's America" campaign. Of course, it features video of fights with police in fiery clouds of tear gas. That all this stuff is, in fact, happening in Trump's America may be a valid point, but it is a point that will be lost on some viewers.
And with Americans already exhausted and scared, piling on night after night of chaotic protests will eventually work against the protesters' goals. Very intelligent people don't seem to get that.
Yale historian Timothy Snyder was just on Rachel Maddow saying, "If you're not protesting now, this would be a good time to start." That might have won him warm applause at the MSNBC studios, but it also greenlighted political events that even responsible organizers can no longer control.
Anxiety sells news. If two marchers among hundreds hold up idiotic "Defund Police" signs, they will be the featured image.
For the record, most black mayors want better policing, not less of it."We do not call for abolishing or defunding police departments," said McKinley Price, mayor of Newport News, Virginia, and president of the African American Mayors Association.
Again, no one is questioning the right to demonstrate, only the wisdom of letting it move the focus away from rampant disease, a plummeting economy and lockdown stress that has drained so many people of their self-control.
In fewer than 100 days, Americans will have an opportunity to send Trump packing. Those who want that should avoid becoming bit players in his staged spectaculars.
If protest leaders are smart -- and have sympathy for their suffering cities -- they will turn their attention to registering voters and away from large gatherings in the streets, at least until the election. Isn't more than 50 straight days of protests in Portland enough for now?
The answer in Trump world would undoubtedly be no.
