In 2007, Christopher Dorner, a three-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and former U.S. Navy Lieutenant, accused a fellow officer of kicking and punching a mentally ill man while handcuffing him. The claim of excessive force was declared “unfounded” and subsequently Dorner was fired in 2009 for “making false statements.”
Dorner issued a manifesto accusing the LAPD of using excessive force, of being racist and of firing him for raising those issues through official channels. He retaliated by vowing to kill cops and did so, as well as killing some family members of one and vowed to kill others. Such tactics will not fulfill Dorner’s aim of “reforming” the LAPD. Yes, the LAPD has a long history of racism and of brutalizing the working class of Los Angeles — but it cannot be reformed.
Now Dorner is dead, which is exactly where the LAPD wanted him. They had no intention of capturing him alive and allowing him to use a trial to tell what he knows about the racist evils rampant in the 10,000-member LAPD.
A multi-county manhunt for Dormer lasted almost two weeks. The bosses’ media tried to convince everyone that the police and sheriffs throughout Southern California were working around the clock to keep us safe from Dorner, but in reality they were only protecting their racist institutions.
In fact, the LAPD demonstrated their racist reputation during this manhunt when, without warning, they shot two innocent Latina women who were delivering newspapers. Seven cops just wildly opened fired from behind them, riddling their truck and the surrounding neighborhood with over 70 bullets as if they were in combat. The semi-automatic fire destroyed the truck which was not even close to the make and color of the real suspect’s vehicle. The LA Times reported that in the area there were “bullet holes in cars, trees, garage doors and roofs.”
Fortunately the women weren’t seriously injured, yet the round-the-clock coverage kept people in fear, afraid to drive around and get shot by mistake too. People started wearing T-shirts and posting signs on their trucks declaring, “Don’t shoot, I’m not Dorner!”
The cops searching for Dorner were using drones, not the first time they were being used to target civilians on United States soil. Drones have been used on the U.S.-Mexico border against migrant workers.
Imperialist wars in the Middle East continue to take the lives of tens of thousands of  workers there as well as that of  GIs and break apart their families. The returning soldiers are given little or no support to transition back into civilian life. Though we don’t champion Dorner’s actions, we can see where the problem stems from, because he likely suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from his tour in Iraq with the Naval Reserves and snapped.
The LAPD has been a kind of paramilitary force, pioneering the military-style Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) approach to “policing.” The U.S. military has employed such a tactic in Iraq and Afghanistan — “spray and pray” — which has led directly to the massive civilian casualties in those U.S. invasions.
Some working-class people rooted for Dorner throughout the chase for exposing the police for their various forms of racism against workers and youth they claim to protect. Yet, Dormer’s methods and goals to “reform” the police system are flawed. We must not confuse exposing the racist police with actual change. The police are agents who “protect and serve” the ruling class when workers organize around their class interests. No killing spree can end the racism and oppression by the police on working-class people until the system that requires them — capitalism — is smashed through communist revolution.

Millions of public sector workers went on a two-day general strike to protest the government’s increase in fuel prices and opening markets to foreign investment in aviation and insurance. Workers say this will lead to layoffs and more price hikes. Workers are threatening further and longer walkouts if their demands are not heeded. Taxi and rickshaw drivers — victimized by police terror — are warning they’ll strike indefinitely as of March 1.
These militant workers, like the bus workers in NYC, are responding to capitalism’s attempt to put their economic crisis on workers’ backs. Once communist ideas and a party develop a base among these workers, their militancy can be transformed into a revolution that will dump the profit system and promote workers’ power.

The U.S. capitalist state has a long history of a “war on terror” against the working class and any dissenters, going as far back as 1798 in President George Washington’s second term. That year four bills known as the Alien and Sedition Acts were passed to quell anyone favoring the French Revolution. Any “alien” who was a “danger to peace and safety or subject to a foreign power” are subjected to imprisonment. Newspapers were shut down and their editors arrested for publishing “any false, scandalous or malicious writing.”
Two hundred and fifty years of black slavery were enforced by the government, North and South. The Fugitive Slave Act sent slaves who escaped to the North from Southern plantations back to slavery. Post-Civil War conditions were hardly better for ex-slaves who were terrorized by racist Ku Klux Klan vigilantes, segregated and denied basic rights by Southern state governments for another 100 years.
From the 18th century on, the U.S. military enacted genocidal murder on millions of indigenous people of the U.S., driving them off their lands and restricting them to concentration camp-like reservations, which continue today.
In 1886, Chicago cops killed protesters demonstrating for the 8-hour work day — following a general strike — and later hung four of its leaders. It was out of this strike that May Day was born, which PLP has been celebrating for the past 42 years.
From 1918 to 1921, Attorney-General Mitchell Palmer launched an anti-communist crusade, carried out by incoming FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. Amid a wave of post-World War I strikes, communists were blamed for all social ills. Without warrants, Palmer thugs raided and smashed union offices and the headquarters of communist and socialist organizations. As many as 10,000 were arrested. In December, 1919, 249 resident aliens were seized and put on a ship deporting them to the Soviet Union (then two years old). The crusade’s hysteria was exemplified by the imprisonment of a Connecticut clothing salesman for saying he thought “Lenin was smart.”
Red-led Auto, Steel Workers Beat Back Bosses’ Attacks
Fifteen years later, vigilantes organized by General Motors attempted to smash the then growing communist-led auto sit-down strikes. The National Guard was ordered out to surround the plants in an attempt to starve out the workers. But 40,000 workers from four states descended on Flint, Michigan, surrounding GM’s struck plants and forced the company to recognize the United Auto Workers Union and agree to a 40-hour week.
May 30, 1937, saw the Republic Steel Memorial Day Massacre, when police shot at a crowd of 1,500 strikers marching peacefully on the company’s South Chicago plant. Ten workers were killed, shot in the back, and 90 others wounded. The workers eventually won union recognition.
In June, 1940, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act — commonly known as the Smith Act — which made it a crime to belong to an organization that advocated overthrow of the U.S. government. Over 200 members of the Communist Party were indicted under its provisions and its entire leadership was convicted and jailed for from five to eight years.
A Page from Hitler’s Book: Concentration Camps
In 1941, the Roosevelt Administration seized hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans and put them in concentration camps for the entire four years of World War II as “suspected spies.” They lost their homes, farms, and small businesses.
A decade later Congress passed the anti-communist Internal Security Act of 1950, the McCarran Act, mandating the fingerprinting and registration of all “subversives” in the U.S. and authorizing concentration camps “for emergency situations.” Six were constructed across the country.
That same year Congress enacted the Subversive Activities Control and Emergency Detention Acts which required “communist organizations” to register with the U.S. Attorney General. It allowed detention of  “dangerous, disloyal or subversive persons during wartime or in an “internal security emergency.” Such citizens could be barred from entering or leaving the country. The bill was used to revoke Paul Robeson’s (pro-communist artist) passport, preventing him from traveling outside the U.S. to expose its racist apartheid system.
During this period, Congress also passed two anti-communist, anti-labor laws. The Taft-Hartley and Landrum-Griffin Laws barred communists from holding union office even if elected by the rank and file. They instituted injunction clauses to prevent workers from striking upon contract expirations. They also made it more difficult to organize non-union shops and proved a bonanza for the bosses.
Throughout this era, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) operated an all-out anti-communist witch-hunt, going from city to city to subpoena leftists and communists.
When reds were asked if they were members of the Communist Party and when the latter refused to answer, citing the 5th Amendment “protection” against self-incrimination, this led to firing as well as jailing for “contempt of Congress.” But here is where HUAC met its match with PL and ultimately its demise.
PL’ers Turn the Tables
on the Anti-Communist
Witch-hunters
After members of the Progressive Labor Movement (PLM, forerunner of the Progressive Labor Party) had broken the government ban on travel to Cuba, in 1963 they were called before HUAC in Washington, DC, and asked the big question. They not only did not hide behind the 5th Amendment but shot back that they “were proud to be communists.” HUAC was dumfounded. CP members had never replied in this fashion. PL’ers turned the hearings into a political attack on HUAC, exposing the Kennedy Administration’s imperialist invasion of Vietnam. Pictures depicting this counter-attack were flashed across the front pages of newspapers across the country.
After the 1964 Harlem Rebellion, a New York City Grand Jury was convened to try to prove that PLM had “incited a riot.” PL’ers refused to cooperate with the rich man’s Jury while mass pickets lined the streets outside the hearing rooms. Several PL members were cited for contempt for their non-cooperation and sentenced to continuous 30-day jail terms to force them to cooperate. They were held in the notorious Greenwhich Women’s House of Detention where they exposed the horrific conditions inside that jail while mass picket lines ringed the prison. The exposé led to the institution’s closing.
In 1964, HUAC came to Buffalo, where PL had a base among steel, auto and other basic industrial workers, as well as in the colleges, the Committee tried to “expose” them in order to get them fired. But PL turned the tables on HUAC. In the hearings, members exposed them as fascists while outside PL organized mass demonstrations on the streets, including a broad spectrum of anti-racist, anti-fascist workers and professors. This had never happened at any of HUAC’s previous anti-communist forays. HUAC was literally run out of town and gradually faded from sight.
From this base in Buffalo and with this counter-attack, PL showed that the bosses’ anti-communism can be challenged and defeated. It was out of such experiences that the Progressive Labor Party was born and to this day is the leading force against the terrorists in the U.S. ruling class, championing the fight for communism in the international working class.

Part I  reviewed the ways U.S. rulers make their laws at will to suit their purposes, and use “illegal” methods to punish their opponents. Now they have new technologies to pursue their profit-making goods.

Many of the techniques being used here have come to light since the Arab Spring. Protesters released records showing that Western — usually U.S. — companies had been marketing to the dictators a wide array of technology for snooping on people without the latter knowing it. There are “surveillance industry conferences” all around the world (Prague, Dubai, Brasilia, Washington DC, Kuala Lumpur).
At the recent D.C. event, firms were selling products to enable a computer to snap a picture of who is using it and send the image to police; track hundreds of cell phones at once; read e-mails by the tens of thousands; use phony updates for iTunes to infiltrate phones/tablets/computers. When questioned, the firms’ response has been: we only sell to governments, and most of our customers are law enforcement agencies in the U.S.
Journalists’ probes discovered that the firms have been pushing sales to smaller and smaller police departments; what was once done only by the Feds is becoming universal. Moreover, the firms are now actively selling to private detectives. Some of the worst techniques are legal for private eyes to use. They started with contested divorce cases, but now firms are buying the technology to keep tabs on workers.
The main technique is to force internet service providers (ISP) and cell phone carriers to do the cops’ dirty work. An example: Egyptian rebels had been using Skype since they thought that wiretapping Skype is next to impossible. What they did not realize was that the secret police had required the ISP to let the cops install remote “keystroke-capture” software which let the cops learn the rebels’ passwords. The cops then listened in on every Skype conversation.
‘Stingrays’ and Mobile Phones
For the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military developed devices that are now in use in the U.S. The FBI has gone to great lengths to hide its widespread use of “stingrays” which locate a mobile phone even when it is not being used to make a call.
The stingray is placed in a van which drives along mimicking a cell phone tower. Cell phones are constantly on the alert for the nearest cell phone tower, so when the phone detects the stingray, it connects just as it would to a tower. The stingray then measures how the strength of the signal changes as the van drives along, thereby pinpointing the phone’s location much more precisely than is possible with the records from the cell phone company.
The FBI claims it gets (sealed) court orders to use stingrays, but it appears that cops in Minnesota, Arizona, Miami and Durham, NC use them.
Twenty years ago, the British secretly developed very sophisticated license-plate readers to track the movement of IRA rebels. Their work at night, in the rain, for cars travelling at high speed, across four lanes of traffic. Then it quickly matches up the license plate with the car’s owner. Type in a license plate, and the system pulls up where that car has been.
This system was developed for the “war on terror” but is now used routinely. The Washington Post reports that the 73 cameras in D.C. gather more than a million license-plate readings a month (in a city of 600,000 people), but they hope to greatly increase that by incorporating the hundreds of traffic-monitoring cameras into the system. As the Post put it, “there are no laws governing how or when the Washington area policy can use the tag reader technology.” License-plate readers are just one example of cameras being spread in public places under the guise of the “war on terror.”
Communist Revolution Will Defeat Capitalist Technology
Workers should not be fooled by “legalities.” Historically, ruling classes have made, changed or eliminated laws when it suits their purpose of maintaining their class dictatorship. The question of “legality” is merely the window-dressing of “democracy” that they use to hide that dictatorship. During crises, this window dressing comes down and the fascist core at the center of capitalism can clearly be seen.
However, the news is not all bad. Each time the ruling class changes the rules or uses new technology to put down dissent, the working class fights back. Clever workers are developing ways to defeat each of the rulers’ new technologies, or even to turn it against the cops. We can be confident that the working class’s creativity is at work! However, the main way to defeat the cops’ snooping is to create such a large communist movement that the cops can’t follow us all. There is safety in numbers — yet another reason to redouble our efforts.
Masses of workers in action, especially communist-led, have overcome the enemy in the past and will do so again.