POLICE in the US state of Missouri, in the town of Ferguson, St Louis, are continuing to clash with protesters nightly, amid growing anger at the execution of a black teenager, 18-year old Michael Brown, by police.
A number of local workers have said that they have been arrested and then beaten up before they are released, as do a number of journalists. Anger at the police execution of a back teenager is growing, not abating.
Eyewitnesses insist that the unarmed teenager had his arms raised when he was shot multiple times by a police officer, who is a member of a force of whom 52 out of 55 are white.
Interventions have been made by President Obama and others to appeal for calm and an end to the nightly protests and clashes. Obama has rushed to promise a full investigation by the US Department of Justice into the teenager’s death, and the FBI has launched its own inquiry.
‘I know the events of the past few days have prompted strong passions, but . . . I urge everyone in Ferguson, Missouri, and across the country, to remember this young man through reflection and understanding,’ Obama said in a statement.
His appeal has been ignored.
The St Louis County Police Department order issued on Wednesday – that demonstrators must gather only in the daylight hours and disperse ‘well before the evening hours, for safety reasons’, that is to avoid being shot or gassed or bludgeoned by the police – has only increased the anger of the people and made them more determined to fight till they get class justice for the murdered young man.
Currently, the armoured vehicles that block off the streets are faced up to by angry demonstrators who link arms defiantly, and refuse to move, after they are told through loudspeakers to disperse or face arrest.
The demonstrators chant: ‘Hands up, don’t shoot,’ and some are responding to the police smoke bombs and tear gas by hurling back Molotov cocktails at the police lines.
US journalists are being shocked that the police tactics are being directed at them as well as the demonstrators.
One journalist, Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post, tweeted: ‘Apparently, in America, in 2014, police can manhandle you, take you into custody, put you you in cell & then open the door like it didn’t happen.’
Many will respond that the USA has been like this for some time, but that since the 2008 crash, and the bailout of the bosses and the bankers by Obama, at the expense of the working class and millions of jobs, the capitalist state in the USA has run riot, whether it is in the form of mass surveillance or the mass beatings that were handed out to supporters of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement!
The fact that the people of Ferguson, St Louis, will not listen to or trust President Barak Obama is the direct result of the way that Obama handed out trillions of dollars to the bankrupt bankers, and to the bosses of huge companies like GM and Ford, to rescue them from the crisis that they had created, and which erupted with the collapse of Sub-Prime mortgages in 2008.
GM was taken under state control, while Obama and the GM bosses reorganised the industry, closing many plants, sacking hundreds of thousands of workers, and cutting wages and pensions.
As well, entire cities have been bankrupted, like Detroit (the former motor capital of the world) ruining many more workers, depriving them of jobs, wages and pensions and turning the city into a graveyard.
The USA is now a different country, where tens of millions of fast food workers are fighting for a minimum wage of $15 an hour, and where many more millions of workers are on very low wages. There are now battles going on to organise unions at plants throughout the USA, while many millions of US workers oppose Obama’s policies at home and abroad.
The time has come when US workers and the US trade unions must break with the Democratic Party and form a Labour Party that will fight for a socialist USA and for the defeat of imperialism world-wide.
