The City of Chicago is united in rejecting the provocation of the Trump administration in sending hundreds of militarized, highly armed secret-police gunmen into our streets—in the midst of a public health crisis and economic catastrophe.

The Communist Party of Illinois condemns this cynical ploy by Donald Trump to divert attention from the criminal failure of his administration to safeguard the well-being of America’s people.

The result of bringing more firearms into our city, supposedly to deal with gun violence, will inevitably be more blood in our streets, more spread of disease, more suffering for hundreds of thousands already teetering on the brink of poverty.

The primary responsibility for our city’s plague of gun violence—for the hundreds of lives lost, thousands of bodies maimed, mostly Black and Latinx youth—rests with the gun industry and its political supporters. They countermand every effort to keep these tools of death out of our working-class neighborhoods. Chicago’s ban on hand guns was overturned and its gun registry eliminated by these very forces, leaving our citizens and democratically elected mayor and city council stymied in attempts to stop the flow of illegal weapons into the city’s neighborhoods. Billions of dollars in profits for the gun industry and its lobbyists are the other side of this deadly equation.

Responsibility also rests with corporate policies that have concentrated the wealth created by our nation’s working class in the vaults of a tiny class of billionaires, leaving neighborhoods without essential services and a pandemic crisis that is disproportionately killing African American and Latinx Americans.

Trump’s paramilitia, infiltrated by white supremacists from the Border Patrol and other agencies, will only encourage and ally with the worst white supremacist elements in the Chicago Police Department, which already has a long history of racism, brutality, “Red Squad” surveillance, murder, and disruption of progressive activists and organizations.

Led by a courageous young generation, the people of our city and state are rising up and taking to the streets, demanding that Black Lives Matter, the Fight for $15, abolition of prisons and defunding of police, passage of a Civilian Police Accountability Council, and a massive investment to make schools safe to attend.

Were the Trump administration as dedicated to fighting the coronavirus as it is to eroding civil liberties, it would get on board with supporting the HEROES Act. Support for that would really help Chicagoans.

Instead, the fascist-minded Trump and his corporate backers, discredited and on the defensive, seek to heighten tension and unleash a secret police force on our people. That’s an ominous step toward sabotaging the people’s will in this November’s election that must not pass.

Image: Strike for Black Lives, July 20, 2020, photo by John Bachtell.

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