Reading this pamphlet, which was published in 2015. It's highly relevant and helpful to situate the events of the past week within a broader context. You can get it from @Mehring_Books. I'll share some important points from it here (1/) 
Since 1990, the US gov has transferred billions worth of arms, ammunitions, armored vehicles, and other DoD property to local police departments and even university police. Obama oversaw a huge expansion of this operation to militarize the police (2/)
"Within 24 hours of the killing of 18-year old #MichaelBrown, hundreds of vehicles, including at least one turreted MRAP vehicle normally used in Afghanistan and Iraq, were summoned to the scene, and SWAT officers patrolled the streets w/ attack dogs." wsws.org/en/articles/20…
While Obama oversaw the deployment of federal troops to put out the flames of social opposition in Fergusson, Detroit Democrats were shutting off water to poor residents, slashing benefits for public workers, and selling off public assets after filing bankruptcy (4/)
The political establishment used the protests against police violence as an opportunity to build up the military-police apparatus even further, and to step up the promotion of identity politics. Obama said that racism is "deeply rooted in our history." (5/)
@jkishore wrote at that time that major news publications, Black Lives Matter, and pseudo-left orgs insisted that police brutality arose from "a hatred of blacks that is somehow built into the genetic code of white people" not as symptoms of class exploitation and oppression (6/)
Behind all the "left" slogans for racial justice and "equity", the Dems and Republicans were transferring wealth from the working class to the ruling oligarchy, while steadily eroding democratic rights (7)
There is also a @WSWS_Updates record, analyzing the shift to the right by the capitalist class: the impeachment of Clinton in 1998, the stolen election of 2000, 9/11and the invasion of the Middle East, torture and assassinations by the US, the NSA spying revelations... (8/)
...the state of siege during the 2013 Boston lockdown, the CIA spying on the US Senate in 2014, the US-backed Israeli slaughter of Gaza in 2014. These indicated that American democracy was in shambles due to the crisis of US and world capitalism (9/)
What this material makes clear is that Trump's presidency and his current moves toward a dictatorship were paved by the anti-democratic policies pursued by successive administrations, including 8 years of Obama (10/)
And despite this blunt recognition of the dangers posed to democracy and living conditions, the @WSWS_Updates never expressed pessimism bc it leaned on the working class, the only social force upon which a socialist fight for peace, equality, and dem rights can be based (11/11)
