Translated "Avante!" article by Angelo Alves

" Ferguson and Iraq"

Translated "Avante!" article by Angelo Alves, Member of the Political Committee of the CC and member of the International Department

Ferguson, in Saint Louis suburbs, Missouri, is in war. Last Monday, the National Guard made its appearance, armed to the teeth. Its arrival – ironically coincident with Obama’s appeals of “reconciliation” – immediately resulted in two deaths. Behind, were ten days of demonstrations and confrontation upon Michael Brown’s death by the police, a young disarmed Afro-American, who was mortally hit by six bullets, two of which in the head. The USA state responded to the protests by calling up military forces and imposing the curfew. But not even the brutal repression measures stopped demonstrations, which meanwhile spread through other USA towns and regions.

The racial issue has been the motto of the news approach on these serious events, but those who consider the roots of the protests being the “mere” racial conflict, are wrong. Not in the least! / No! What is behind these and others events, amid the USA, is class nature, and cannot be unrelated from the economic and social crisis, which spreads throughout the USA society, having aggravated significantly in the last years, although systematically ignored by the official propaganda, in order to maintain the USA’s international image as a great power.

The USA is one of the most unequal countries in the world. Income inequality amid the greatest world economic power has reached the highest value in the last 100 years. The country, which has a military expenditure of 700 thousand million dollars is the same one that holds 17% of poor population, 15% of family households, living under an insecure alimentary support situation, unemployment and under-employment reaching over 20 million people.

The USA is a social time bomb, and many others say. “ Unsuspected” economists point out inequalities, poverty and unemployment – together with the USA economy galloping debt – as factors which deepen more and more the USA crisis. The USA’s power system feels it and therefore, since the 90’s decade, has more and more militarized its security forces, which has been training special army units used in “social convulsions”, in the last years.

Who suffers mostly with the USA social reality are exactly those who currently protest: immigrants, Afro-Americans and Hispanics, among others. The data do not leave any doubts. An Afro-American family average income is 60% of a “white” family’s. According to the 2013 reports, 42,5% of under five year old Afro-American and 37,1% of the same age Hispanic face poverty challenge. Among the USA’s huge prisoner population, 37% are Afro-American who abandoned school. This is the social war which exploded in Ferguson. A social war dictated by a class policy and uses racism, xenophobia and repression in order to safeguard the dominant classes’ power, independently from skin colour of those who generate that same exploitation system.

Ferguson’s citizens are victims of that policy, just as the Middle East populations suffer several military conflicts , launched by a racist policy, which financed and trained, for years, those who currently are bombed in Iraq, accusing them, hypocritically, as intolerant and genocidal, at the same time, it moves on, in order to balkanize the region, attempting to divide to reign, and therefore contradict what, in their “homeland”, is already visible: the USA’s decline, as a world economic power.

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