Trump Sends Federal Agents Into Chicago!

by Carl Dix

The fascist in chief, Donald Trump, tweeted, "Crime and killings in Chicago have reached such epidemic proportions that I am sending in Federal help" He has been threatening to send the feds in to fix the violence in Chicago since his inauguration. Now 20 additional agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) have been assigned to Chicago to work with the police to deal with gun violence.

The Trump regime blames Black people for the violence in Chicago. When asked what's driving this violence at a press briefing, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, "I think that the problem there [Chicago] is pretty clear that it's a crime problem. I think that crime is probably driven more by morality than anything else." A representative of a president who wakes up in the morning to spew out women-hating tweets and lies on an almost daily basis, and more, has no basis to question anybody's morality.

And even worse, they're blaming Black people for what the system is responsible for. It's the capitalist-imperialist system that creates the conditions that have young Black people caught up in killing each other. The system has segregated Black people into torn-up communities with few legitimate ways to survive and raise families. The system has geared the educational system to fail the youth. And it has given the police a green light to brutalize and even murder Black people. This leaves people with no way to be somebody except to take up the street life and its code of revenge and retaliation.

The role of the police is not to serve and protect the people. It is to serve and protect the system that rules over the people. To enforce the relations of exploitation and oppression, the conditions of poverty, misery and degradation into which the system has cast people and is determined to keep people in. The law and order the police are about, with all of their brutality and murder, is the law and the order that enforces all this oppression and madness.

Sending the feds into Chicago won't do anything good for Black people, or anybody else. This is the fascist Trump/Pence regime seizing on the way so many Black people are caught up in killing each other to make Chicago ground zero for an overall offensive against Black people. These ATF agents are the advance guard of an overall program that will bring a reign of terror down on Black people. Along with sending in federal agents, the Trump/Pence regime will dole out a few jobs to enlist people as enforcers for their fascist program, destroy the public schools, and send students to schools that will turn them into Christian fundamentalist drones who are unable to think or resist.

This reign of terror will be on top of the centuries of oppression this system has already perpetrated against Black people. This country built up its wealth and power on the basis of enslaving generations of African people. It continued to brutally exploit and oppress Black people for decades as sharecroppers on the same plantations where many had been slaves, subjecting them to Jim Crow segregation and lynch mob terror. In cities like Chicago, Black people have been bled dry thru cruel and perverse new forms of exploitation and oppression. Now Trump has a program that would take all this to a whole other level, speeding up the slow genocide this system has already been inflicting on Black people.

The fascist threats and measures of the Trump/Pence regime have reached epidemic proportions--the Muslim travel ban; deporting even more immigrants than the deporter in chief, Barack Obama; tweets that drip with hatred of women and attacks on women's rights; destroying the feeble measures the U.S. had taken to address the devastation of the environment; military aggression and threats of even more aggression; intensifying the War on Drugs and taking the gloves off the police, who have been getting away with murdering Black people again and again. And now, beginning to send the feds to Chicago. All this calls for resistance that is commensurate to the horrors being perpetrated--resistance that aims to drive this regime from office.

And as part of doing that, everybody who hates injustice has to call out Trump sending federal agents to Chicago for what it really is--part of an overall offensive that aims to beat Black people down so far, they could never do anything about the oppression this system enforces on them. And everybody MUST firmly oppose this!