Right-wing Wackos Beat Lefties to The Punch - Defund The FBI

Even a broken clock is right twice a day without trying.

The funding for our national WAR department and our local police departments are way out of proportion to the proper funding for our underfunded social/economic/environmental needs.

As our history of policing shows, local policing evolved from slave patrols of the south and hired corporate vigilantes of the north. Both corporate-paid enforcement groups were employed to protect the property of their employers. This protected property was the means of production each employer owned: slaves or factories. This concept of protecting the property of the rich has evolved into our current policing systems, including the FBI, which has a similar earlier genesis:

"The precursor to the FBI, the Bureau of Investigation, was created in 1908 in large part to investigate political threats to the power of the robber barons. These threats included striking workers, anarchists and communists. Driven initially by fears of communist revolution following the Russian Revolution and then the massive strikes and labor militancy of the 1930s, the Bureau of Investigation became the primary federal tool for surveilling and subverting left organizing. It was taken over by J. Edgar Hoover in 1924 and transformed into the FBI in 1934, when it became a massive domestic intelligence-gathering operation with files on millions of Americans including politicians, celebrities, labor leaders, journalists, religious figures, and anyone suspected of subversive leanings, many of whom were people of color, Jews, and other members of historically oppressed communities. Tim Weiner, in his book, Enemies: A History of the FBI, meticulously documents the political origins of the FBI and its dirty tricks.

"In the 1960s, Hoover identified a new subversive threat: the civil rights movement. The Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), was an FBI-created program that spied on and undermined both socialist leaders and civil rights movement leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., and helped coordinate local attacks on the Black Panthers, the Socialist Workers Party, and many other groups. FBI agents attended activist groups' meetings, openly photographed license plates of attendees, wiretapped phones, sent fake correspondences, and used informants to plant false rumors about marital infidelities and police cooperation to sow fear and dissension. The FBI was directly involved with local officials in Chicago who conspired to assassinate Black Panther leader Fred Hampton."

"Defunding" of the FBI or our local police is one way to drawing attention to a problem. The real problem, however, is sanctioning citizen abuse and death with public funds. That has to change!

"As right-wingers make a bizarre and twisted case for defunding the FBI, we on the left need to make our own case for defunding the FBI's intrusive and illegitimate political policing. Then we must go further and question the basic function of federal law enforcement in propping up a system of profound inequality, injustice and state violence."

It's worth noting in this questioning of police protection, there is no legal requirement for local police to protect citizens.