ON TUESDAY, the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, US president Joe Biden met with Floyd family members.
The meeting had been arranged in the expectation that it would mark the signing by Biden of a bill – the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act – which he had pledged to make law on the date of Floyd’s murder.
In the event, this pledge turned out to be worthless and all Biden did after this meeting was to issue a statement promising to keep supporting the legislation.
While members of the Floyd family went ahead with the meeting, his sister Bridgett Floyd refused to attend.
She boycotted it and attended instead a rally in Minneapolis, the city where her brother was killed under the knee of police officer Derek Chauvin.
At this rally Ms Floyd attacked Biden saying that he ‘broke a promise’, adding: ‘There’s been a lot of names added to the list after my brother’s death, and still nothing’s being done.’
This bill has stalled in the Senate in the face of determined opposition from Republicans and lukewarm support from many Democratic members just as Biden knew it would.
Indeed Biden prepared the way to ditch all the pledges made during his Presidential campaign to curb the power of the police and make them accountable.
During that campaign, Biden called for an end to military weapons and equipment being supplied to the police saying ‘stop transferring weapons of war to police forces.’
Since election Biden has refused all calls to put this pledge into action.
He refused to issue a presidential executive order to that effect, something that is entirely within the powers of the president and which would bypass Congress completely.
Instead, Biden has passed the bill over to senators to go through the charade of pushing through legislation that would ban the use of chokeholds, impose restrictions on deadly force and make prosecution of police officers easier.
With Republicans and the powerful police lobby fiercely opposing any move to make the police accountable for their action and demanding that there are no changes to the legal shield known as Qualified Immunity, that protects individual police officers accused of brutality, the chances of the George Floyd bill becoming law is non-existent.
Biden never had any intention of taking action over the murderous attacks by the police on workers and youth, and certainly not doing anything to impede the development of a paramilitary police force armed to the teeth with weapons of war.
With massive unemployment and millions of American workers reduced to poverty while the billionaires live in luxury, the US ruling class is preparing for a war against the working class, increasingly revolutionised by this crisis.
A paramilitary police given the freedom to carry out the most brutal attacks on workers and young people is an essential preparation as the ruling class prepares to dump its historic crisis on their backs.
In Britain, the Tory government has introduced the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill that gives the police powers to ban demonstrations or anything that causes a ‘serious disruption to the country’s economy, political life and free speech.’
The Covert Human Intelligence Sources Bill passed into law by the Tories, with Labour support, last year gave British state forces a ‘licence to kill’ in the ‘interests of the economic well-being of the United Kingdom.’
The ruling class in America and Britain have been shaken by the massive uprising of the Black Lives Matter movement and the overwhelming support it has from the working class, but all the promises by Biden to do anything about police murder are designed to try and head the movement off.
The police will never be anything other than an armed wing of the capitalist state whose sole function is the repression of the working class.
George Floyd’s murder was part of this war against the entire working class, and the only way forward for the working class of the US and the world is to mobilise to seize the power and carry out a socialist revolution to overthrow capitalism and smash its state, replacing them with a workers state and socialism.
