http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/may2010/chic-m03.shtmlLast week, two Illinois state representatives, John Fritchey and LaShawn Ford, both Democrats from the Chicago area, called on Governor Pat Quinn and Mayor Richard Daley to deploy the National Guard in the US city’s western and southern neighborhoods.
The state Democrats pointed to the deaths of 113 people, mostly African Americans, in street violence since the beginning of the year to justify their call to send in military troops. Such an action has nothing to do with stopping crime, however, which is the product of mass unemployment and poverty and the dismantling of public education in the city.
Crime is being used as a pretext to employ state violence and intimidation against the working class population of the city. If it were to occur, the dispatch of troops in America’s third largest city would mark a new and ominous stage in the decay of US democracy.
Well aware that popular anger and class tensions are reaching a breaking point in Chicago—where the gap between the wealthy elite and the masses of working and poor people has never been larger—the proposal to dispatch the National Guard is part of an ongoing debate within the political establishment on how to best deal with potential “civil unrest.”
Like the anti-immigrant law in Arizona, the call for the National Guard is being used as a trial balloon nationally, in order to shift the debate further to the right, undermine constitutional prohibitions against the use of the military for domestic policing and legitimize the widespread use of troops in the cities for the first time since the ghetto rebellions of the 1960s...
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