Here’s the political background to the police raids against antiwar students on campuses across the country this week, violent crackdowns that have Joe Biden’s fingerprints all over them: On Tuesday, *Biden demonized the protesters as hate groups.* On the same day 22 Democratic House members called for the students at Columbia to be cleared from the campus, this was followed by Chuck Schumer speaking on the floor of the Senate denouncing the occupation of Hind Hall as *an act of terrorism*. Then the NYPD did its vicious nightwork at Columbia and CCNY. *On Wednesday morning, the Biden White House compared these brave students–from Columbia to UCLA, Indiana to Texas–to the white power tiki torch thugs at Charlottesville.* On Thursday, Biden gave a speech that would have condemned the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement, women’s movement, Native American Rights movement, anti-Vietnam War movement, Stonewall, anti-apartheid movement, BLM and the labor movement he claims to venerate (not to mention the Boston Tea Party) as outside the American tradition of free speech. *Biden is the author of the most repressive crime laws in the history of a nation whose statutes are full of repressive crime laws. He hasn’t changed.* In fact, he’s gotten worse as his brain demyelinates and his grip on power becomes more and more tenuous.
In contrast to Biden’s reactionary blandishments of the antiwar movement, here are the words of the most successful progressive leader in the US today, Shawn Fain, head of the UAW: *The UAW will never support* the mass arrest or intimidation of those exercising their right to protest, strike, or speak out against injustice. Our union has been calling for a ceasefire for six months. This war is wrong, and this response against students and academic workers, many of them UAW members, is wrong. We call on the powers that be to release the students and employees who have been arrested, and if you can’t take the outcry, stop supporting the war. Perhaps the UAW will now retract its premature endorsement of Biden? Unlikely, of course. The endorsement itself probably doesn’t matter much. Many of the UAW’s rank-and-file will still vote for Trump. The campaign money might. The endorsement lends Fain’s very clear statement even more weight. Fain’s statement is not going to change Biden’s mind. *He’s encased himself in 50 years of pro-Israeli political concrete.* But it helps to undermine the disgusting narrative put out by the White House and top Democrats that the students are naive dupes of Hamas, justifying these brutal crackdowns. In 1970, Richard Nixon famously made a trip to the Lincoln Memorial to actually talk with anti-war protesters for more than two hours. Biden sneers at them, encourages the liberal press to smear them and university presidents to send in riot squads to clear them off campus… In reply to a question from FoxNews about the campus protests, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and the Department of Education will be involved in the investigations, suggesting that *the Biden administration may be pursuing federal “hate crime” charges against student protestors**.* Imagine the reaction from the White House, Congress and the US media if Putin had used these violent police tactics to suppress anti-Ukraine war protests on campuses in Russia. https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/05/03/roaming-charges-tin-cops-and-biden-coming/ -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#30192): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/30192 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/105891162/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: marxmail+ow...@groups.io Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [arch...@mail-archive.com] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
