The protest demonstrations following the May murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis have waned.  Demonstrations have waned in other cites, except for Portland, Oregon.  There demonstrations have continued for 55 consecutive nights against police brutality and other grievances.  Last night, Mayor Ted Wheeler who joined the lawful demonstration was tear gassed.

Portland has given the President occasion to dispatch camo clad federal officers in unmarked vans in order to suppress the demonstrations — in his bid to position himself as the law & order candidate, with the upcoming November election in mind.  The President is mindful that states in the south and west are roiled with increasing rates of coronavirus infection, and the death toll is rising.  Rightfully blamed for abdication of responsibility to coordinate a national response to the infection,  now he desires to divert attention from his diffident, erratic response to the pandemic.

Closer to home here in the midwest, the President and his Attorney General announced sending a detachment of  200 additional agents to Chicago. .  Both men took pains to explain that the 200 agents, drawn from the ATF, Homeland Security, the FBI, etc., would be working with Chicago Police in the usual fashion, and not acting independently to arrest demonstrators as they are doing in Portland.  Mayor Lightfoot cautiously accepted the help, unsure if this will prove to be true.  The President after all is known to lie often and easily.

Under what conditions will the November election be held, when contingents of federal “brown-shirts” are deployed on the streets of major American cities, many of which have Democratic mayors?

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This is to preface some paragraphs that I would like to share, written about the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles.  Guy Debord penned these words in analysis of the uprising of poor blacks living in Watts, right next door to Hollywood.  The riots lasted for three days and were finally suppressed by thousands of police and soldiers, including an entire infantry division supported by tanks.  Stores were plundered and burned.  Official sources listed 32 dead, 800 wounded, and 3000 arrests.  Perhaps you were not alive in 1965 to remember these events.

It is obvious that the crude and glaring illegality
from which blacks still suffer in many American states
has its roots in a socioeconomic contradiction
that is not within the scope of existing laws,
and that no future judicial law will be able to get rid of this contradiction
in the face of the more fundamental laws of this society.

What American blacks are really daring to demand is the right to really live,
and in the final analysis this requires nothing less
than the total subversion of this society.
….The issue is no longer the condition of American blacks,
but the condition of America,
which merely happens to find its first expression among the blacks.

How do people make history
under conditions designed
to dissuade them from intervening in it?
Los Angeles blacks are better paid than any others in the United States,
but they are also
the most separated from the California superopulence
that is flaunted all around them.
Hollywood, the pole of the global spectacle, is right next door.
They are promised that, with patience,
they will join in America’s prosperity,
but they come to see that this prosperity
is not a fixed state but an endless ladder.
The higher they climb,
the farther they get from the top,
because they start off disadvantaged,
because they are less qualified
and thus more numerous among the unemployed,
and finally because the hierarchy that crushes them
is not based on economic buying power alone:
they are also treated as inherently inferior
in every area of daily life
by the customs and prejudices of a society
in which all human power is based on buying power.
Just as the human riches of the American blacks
are despised and treated as criminal,
monetary riches
will never make them completely acceptable in America’s alienated society:
individual wealth will only make a rich nigger
because blacks as a whole must represent poverty
in a society of hierarchized wealth.

Excerpt, The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy
by Guy Debord

The more things change, the more they remain the same.