Atrocities committed by the United States of America against East Asia

Source: https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/main/us_atrocities.md

• Throughout the 1800s, US settlers engaged in a genocide of native Hawaiians. The native population decreased from ~ 400k in 1789, to 40k by 1900, due to colonization and disease. In 1883, the US engineered the overthrow of Hawaii's native monarch, Queen Lili'uokalani, by landing two companies of US marines in Honolulu. Due to the Queen's desire "to avoid any collision of armed forces, and perhaps the loss of life" for her subjects and after some deliberation, at the urging of advisers and friends, the Queen ordered her forces to surrender. Hawaii was initially reconstituted as an independent republic, but the ultimate goal of the US was the annexation of the islands to the United States, which was finally accomplished in 1898. After this, the Hawaiian language was banned, English replaced it as the official language in all institutions and schools. The US finally apologized in 1993, but no land has been returned. 1
• In 1899, after a popular revolution in the Philippines to oust the Spanish imperialists, the US invaded and began the Phillipine-American war. The US military committed countless atrocities, leaving 200,000 Filipinos dead. Jacob H Smith killed between 2,500 to 50,000 civilians, His orders included, "kill everyone over the age of ten" and make the island "a howling wilderness."1,2
• In 1900 in China, the US was part of an Eight-Nation Alliance that brought 20,000 armed troops to China, to defeat the Imperial Chinese Army, in the the Boxer Rebellion, an anti-imperialist uprising. 1
• In 1918, the US took part in the allied intervention in the Russian civil war, sending 11,000 troops to the in the Arkhangelsk and Vladivostok regions to support the anti-bolshevik, monarchist, and largely anti-semitic White Forces. 1
• From 1942 to 1945, the US military carried out a fire-bombing campaign of Japanese cities, killing between 200,000 and 900,000 civilians. One nighttime fire-bombing of Tokyo took 80,000 lives. During early August 1945, the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing ~130,000 civilians, and causing radiation damage which included birth defects and a variety of genetic diseases for decades to come. The justification for the civilian bombings has largely been debunked, as the entrance of Russia into the war had already started the surrender negotiations earlier in 1945. The US was aware of this, since it had broken the Japanese code and had been intercepting messages during for most of the year. The US ended up accepting a conditional surrender from Hirohito, against which was one of the stated aims of the civilian bombings. The dropping of the atomic bomb is therefore seen as a demonstration of US military supremacy, and the first major operation of the Cold War with Russia. 1,2
• US Troops committed a number of rapes during the battle of Okinawa, and the subsequent occupation of Japan. There were 1,336 reported rapes during the first 10 days of the occupation of Kanagawa prefecture alone.1 American Occupation authorities imposed wide-ranging censorship on the Japanese media, including bans on covering many sensitive social issues and serious crimes such as rape committed by members of the Occupation forces.
• After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Douglas MacArthur pardoned Unit 731, a Japanese biological experimentation center which performed human testing of biological agents against Chinese citizens. While a series of war tribunals and trials was organized, many of the high-ranking officials and doctors who devised and respectively performed the experiments were pardoned and never brought to justice. As many as 12,000 people, most of them Chinese, died in Unit 731 alone and many more died in other facilities, such as Unit 100 and in field experiments throughout Manchuria. One of the experimenters who killed many, microbiologist Shiro Ishii, later traveled to the US to advise on its bioweapons programs. In the final days of the Pacific War and in the face of imminent defeat, Japanese troops blew up the headquarters of Unit 731 in order to destroy evidence of the research done there. As part of the cover-up, Ishii ordered 150 remaining subjects killed.1,2
• Between 1946 and 1958, the US tested 23 nuclear devices at Bikini Atoll, using the native islanders and their land as guinea pigs for the effects of nuclear fallout. Significant fallout caused widespread radiological contamination in the area, and killed many islanders. A survivor stated, "What the Americans did was no accident. They came here and destroyed our land. They came to test the effects of a nuclear bomb on us. It was no accident." Many of the islanders exposed were brought to the US Argonne National laboratory, to study the effects. Afterwards the islands proved unsuitable to sustaining life, resulting in starvation and requiring the residents to receive ongoing aid. Virtually all of the inhabitants showed acute symptoms of radiation syndrome, many developing thyroid cancers, Leukimia, miscarriages, stillborn and "jellyfish babies" (highly deformed) along with symptoms like hair falling out, and diahrrea. A handful were brought to the US for medical research and later returned, while others were evacuated to neighboring Islands. The US under LBJ prematurely returned the majority returned 3 years later, to further test how human beings absorb radiation from their food and environment. The islanders pleaded with the US to move them away from the islands, as it became clear that their children were developing deformities and radiation sickness. Radion levels were still unacceptable. The United States later paid the islanders and their descendants 25 million in compensation for damage caused by the nuclear testing program. A 2016 investigation found radiation levels on Bikini Atoll as high as 639 mrem yr−1, well above the established safety standard threshold for habitation of 100 mrem yr−1. Similar tests occurred elsewhere in the Marshall Islands during this time period. Due to the destruction of natural wealth, Kwajalein Atoll's military installation and dislocation, the majority of natives currently live in extreme poverty, making less than 1$ a day. Those that have jobs, mostly work at the US military installation and resorts. Much of this is detailed in the documentary, The Coming War on China (2016). 1,2
• The U.S. installed Syngman Rhee,a conservative Korean exile, as President of South Korea in 1948. Rhee became a dictator on an anti-communist crusade, arresting and torturing suspected communists, brutally putting down rebellions, killing 100,000 people and vowing to take over North Korea. Rhee precipitated the outbreak of the Korean War and for the allied decision to invade North Korea once South Korea had been recaptured. He was finally forced to resign by mass student protests in 1960.1
• In 1949 during the resumed Chinese Civil War, the US supported the corrupt Kuomintang dictatorship of Chiang Kaishek to fight against the Chinese Communists, who had won the support of the vast majority of peasant-farmers and helped defeat the Japanese invasion. The US strongly supported the Kuomintang forces. Over 50,000 US Marines were sent to guard strategic sites, and 100,000 US troops were sent to Shandong. The US equipped and trained over 500,000 KMT troops, and transported KMT forces to occupy newly liberated zones as well as to contain Communist-controlled areas.[ American aid included substantial amounts of both new and surplus military supplies; additionally, loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars were made to the KMT.[ Within less than two years after the Sino-Japanese War, the KMT had received $4.43 billion from the US—most of which was military aid.[1
• From 1948-1949, the Jeju uprising was an insurgency taking place in the Korean province of Jeju island, followed by severe anticommunist suppression of the South Korean Labor Party in which 14-30,000 people were killed, or ~10% of the island's population. Though atrocities were committed by both sides, the methods used by the South Korean government to suppress the rebels were especially cruel. On one occasion, American soldiers discovered the bodies of 97 people including children, killed by government forces. On another, American soldiers caught government police forces carrying out an execution of 76 villagers, including women and children. The US later entered the Korean civil war on the side of the South Koreans. 1
• The US intervened in the 1950-53 Korean Civil War, on the side of the south Koreans, in a proxy war between the US and china for supremacy in East Asia. South Korea reported some 373,599 civilian and 137,899 military deaths, the US with 34,000 killed, and China with 114,000 killed.[ Overall, the U.S. dropped 635,000 tons of bombs—including 32,557 tons of napalm—on Korea, more than they did during the whole Pacific campaign of World War II.[[ The US killed an estimated 1/3rd of the north Korean people during the war. The Joint Chiefs of staff issued orders for the retaliatory bombing of the People's republic of China, should south Korea be attacked. Deadly clashes have continued up to the present day. 1
• In the beginning of the Korean war, US Troops killed ~300 South Korean civilians in the No Gun Ri massacre, revealing a theater-wide policy of firing on approaching refugee groups. Trapped refugees began piling up bodies as barricades and tried to dig into the ground to hide. Some managed to escape the first night, while U.S. troops turned searchlights on the tunnels and continued firing, said Chung Koo-ho, whose mother died shielding him and his sister. No apology has yet been issued. 1
• In the summer of 1950 in South Korea, anticommunists aided by the US executed at least 100,000 people suspected of supporting communism, in the Bodo League Massacre. For four decades the South Korean government concealed this massacre. Survivors were forbidden by the government from revealing it, under suspicion of being communist sympathizers. Public revelation carried with it the threat of torture and death. During the 1990s and onwards, several corpses were excavated from mass graves, resulting in public awareness of the massacre. 1
• From 1955-1975, the US supported French colonialist interests in Vietnam, set up a puppet regime in Saigon to serve US interests, and later took part as a belligerent against North Vietnam in the Vietnam War. U.S. involvement escalated further following the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which was later found to be staged by Lyndon Johnson. The war exacted a huge human cost in terms of fatalities (see Vietnam War casualties). Estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed vary from 966,000 to 3.8 million. Some 240,000–300,000 Cambodians, 20,000–62,000 Laotians, and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict, with a further 1,626 missing in action. Unexploded bomb continue to kill civilians for years afterward. 1
• See: Vietnam War#U.S. war crimes
• In 1955, the CIA provided explosives, and aided KMT agents in an assassination attempt against the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai. KMT agents placed a time-bomb on the Air India aircraft, Kashmir Princess, which Zhou was supposed to take on his way to the Bandung Conference, an anti-imperialist meeting of Asian and African states, but he changed his travel plans at the last minute. Henry Kissinger denied US involvement, even though remains of a US detonator were found. 16 people were killed. 1
• Starting in 1957, in the wake of the US-backed First Indochina War, The CIA carries out approximately one coup per year trying to nullify Laos’ democratic elections, specifically targeting the Pathet Lao, a leftist group with enough popular support to be a member of any coalition government, and perpetuating the 20 year Laotian civil war. In the late 50s, the CIA even creates an "Armee Clandestine" of Asian mercenaries to attack the Pathet Lao. After the CIA’s army suffers numerous defeats, the U.S. drops more bombs on Laos than all the U.S. bombs dropped in World War II. A quarter of all Laotians will eventually become refugees, many living in caves. This was later called a “secret war,” since it occurred at the same time as the Vietnam War, but got little press. Hundreds of thousands were killed
• From the 1960s onward, the US supported Filipino dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The US provided hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, which was crucial in buttressing Marcos's rule over the years. The estimated number of persons that were executed and disappeared under President Fernando Marcos was over 100,000. After fleeing to hawaii, marco was suceeded by the widow of an opponent he assasinated, Corazon aquino. 1
• In 1965, The CIA overthrew the democratically elected Indonesian leader Sukarno with a military coup. The CIA had been trying to eliminate Sukarno since 1957, using everything from attempted assassination to sexual intrigue, for nothing more than his declaring neutrality in the Cold War. His successor, General Suharto, aided by the CIA, massacred between 500,000 to 1 million civilians accused of being communist, in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66. The US continued to support Suharto throughout the 70s, supplying weapons and planes.
• In 1967, the CIA helped South Vietnamese agents identify and then murder alleged Viet Cong leaders operating in villages, in the Phoenix Program. By 1972, Phoenix operatives had executed between 26,000 and 41,000 suspected NLF operatives, informants and supporters.1
• US Troops killed between 347 and 504 unarmed civilians, including women, children, and infants, in South Vietnam on March, 1968, in the My Lai Massacre. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated. Soldiers set fire to huts, waiting for civilians to come out so they could shoot them. For 30 years, the three US servicemen who tried to halt the massacre and rescue the hiding civilians were shunned and denounced as traitors, even by congressmen. 1
• US dropped large amounts of Agent Orange, an herbicide developed by monsanto and dow chemical for the department of defense, in vietnam. Its use, in particular the contaminant dioxin, causes multiple health problems, including cleft palate, mental disabilities, hernias, still births, poisoned breast milk, and extra fingers and toes, as well as destroying local species of plants and animals. The Red Cross of Vietnam estimates that up to 1 million people are disabled or have health problems due to Agent Orange., 2
• In 1969, The US initiated a secret carpet bombing campaign in eastern Cambodia, called, Operation Menu, and Operation Freedom Deal in 1970. An estimated 40,000 - 150,000 civilians were killed. Nixon lied about this campaign, but was later exposed, and one of the things that lead to his impeachment. 1
• In 1970, In Cambodia, The CIA overthrows Prince Sihanouk, who is highly popular among Cambodians for keeping them out of the Vietnam War. He is replaced by CIA puppet Lon Nol, whose forces suppressed the large-scale popular demonstrations in favour of Sihanouk, resulting in several hundred deaths. This unpopular move strengthens once minor opposition parties like the Khmer Rouge (another CIA supported group), who achieve power in 1975 and massacres ~2.5 million people. 1 The Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, carried out the Cambodian Genocide, which killed 1.5-2M people from 1975-1979.
• In 1971 in Pakistan, an authoritarian state supported by the U.S., brutally invaded East Pakistan in the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971. The war ended after India, whose economy was staggering after admitting about 10 million refugees, invaded East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and defeated the West Pakistani forces. The US gave W. pakistan 411 million provided to establish its armed forces which spent 80% of its budget on its military. 15 million in arms flowed into W. Pakistan during the war. Between 300,000 to 3 million civilians were killed, with 8-10 million refugees fleeing to India. 1
• Between 1963 and 1973, The US dropped ~388,000 tons of napalm bombs in vietnam, compared to 32,357 tons used over three years in the Korean War, and 16,500 tons dropped on Japan in 1945. US also sprayed over 5 million acres with herbicide, in Operation Ranch Hand, in a 10 year campaign to deprive the vietnamese of food and vegetation cover. 1,2

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See also: Republic of Korea#Misconduct and killing of civilians by U.S. forces during the war

"Napalm Jelly Bombs Prove a Blazing Success in Korea". April 1951 edition of "All Hands" U.S. Navy magazine. Napalm was used copiously by the U.S. throughout the Korean war.

During the Korean War, U.S. troops killed large numbers of Korean civilians and engaged in copious firebombing with napalm, and, as was eventually revealed through declassified documents, had at certain times a policy of deliberately firing on South Korean refugee groups approaching its lines. In an article of the Asia-Pacific Journal, Kim Dong choon writes that "Few are aware that the Korean authorities as well as US and allied forces massacred hundreds of thousands of South Korean civilians at the dawn of the Korean War". There were also incidents of U.S. pilots ignoring their orders to stay within Korea and flying beyond its borders, strafing military targets in China and the Soviet Union.

In the words of the United States Air Force General Curtis LeMay, commander of the U.S.'s Strategic Air Command:

[W]e went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, some way or another, and some in South Korea, too. We even burned down Pusan—an accident, but we burned it down anyway. The Marines started a battle down there with no enemy in sight. Over a period of three years or so, we killed off—what—twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?

During the Korean War, The United States dropped "635,000 tons of bombs in Korea (not counting 32,557 tons of napalm), compared to 503,000 tons in the entire Pacific Theater in World War II" and "at least 50 percent of eighteen out of the North's twenty-two major cities were obliterated." According to U.S. Naval Captain Walter Karig, in his book Battle Report: The War in Korea, a compilation from official sources:

[W]e killed civilians, friendly civilians, and bombed their homes; fired whole villages with the occupants--women and children and ten times as many hidden Communist soldiers--under showers of napalm, and the pilots came back to their ships stinking of vomit twisted from their vitals by the shock of what they had to do.

An anonymous U.S. officer's account of events of was aired to the U.S. public on the U.S. Defense Department radio program called "Time for Defense" during a time when the war was still being referred to as a "police action". In the call that aired on the broadcast, the U.S. officer states, "What makes it so difficult over here is that you can't tell the damn North Koreans from the South Koreans, and that's caused a lot of slaughter."(audio file)

Left: An unsigned Air Force memo from July 25, 1950 seeking alternatives on the policy of "strafing civilian refugees" which "is sure to receive wide publicity and may cause embarrassment to the U.S. Air Force and U.S. government." Right: A July 26, 1950 letter from the American embassy to the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State saying, "If refugees do appear from the north of US lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot."

Emblematic of the U.S. policy of firing on groups of refugees is the incident of the Nogeun-ri massacre, also written as No Gun Ri (Korean: 노근리). In July 1950, American soldiers "machine-gunned hundreds of helpless civilians under a railroad bridge" and according to accounts that came out after this story was revealed in 1999, U.S. veterans spoke of 100 or 200 or "hundreds" dead and described "a preponderance of women, children and old men among the victims", while Korean witnesses said 300 were killed at the bridge and 100 in a preceding air attack. One Korean witness commented that "the American soldiers played with our lives like boys playing with flies." One of the U.S. veterans described it as "wholesale slaughter."

Although this incident had gone unacknowledged for decades, in 2001 the U.S. Army acknowledged the killings, calling them a "regrettable accompaniment to a war." In 2006, it was revealed that among incriminating documents omitted from the 2001 U.S. report, there was a declassified letter from the U.S. ambassador in South Korea, dated the day the Nogeun-ri killings began, saying the Army had adopted a policy of firing on refugee groups approaching its lines. U.S. veterans have also described other refugee killings as well, when U.S. commanders ordered their troops to shoot civilians as a defense against disguised enemy soldiers, and declassified U.S. Air Force reports from mid-1950 show that pilots also sometimes deliberately attacked "people in white," (referring to white peasant garb) apparently suspecting disguised North Korean soldiers were among them.

• In 2018 after the release of a suppressed ISC (International Scientific Commission) report, and the release of declassified CIA communications daily reports in 2020, it was revealed that the US used germ warfare in the Korean war. Many of these attacks involved the dropping of insects or small mammals infected with viruses such as anthrax, plague, cholera, and encephalitis. After discovering evidence of germ warfare, China invited the ISC headed by famed British scientist Joseph Needham, to investigate, but the report was suppressed for over 70 years.
• In 1975 Australian Constitutional Crisis, the CIA helped topple the democratically elected, left-leaning government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, by telling Governor-General, John Kerr, a longtime CIA collaborator, to dissolve the Whitlam government.
• In December 1975, The US supplied the weaponry for the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. This incursion was launched the day after U.S. President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had left Indonesia where they had given President Suharto permission to use American arms, which under U.S. law, could not be used for aggression. Daniel Moynihan, U.S. ambassador to the UN. said that the U.S. wanted “things to turn out as they did.” The result was an estimated 200,000 dead out of a population of 700,000. Sixteen years later, on November 12, 1991, two hundred and seventeen East Timorese protesters in Dili, many of them children, marching from a memorial service, were gunned down by Indonesian Kopassus shock troops who were headed by U.S.- trained commanders Prabowo Subianto (son in law of General Suharto) and Kiki Syahnakri. Trucks were seen dumping bodies into the sea.
• In the 1970s-80s, wikileaks cables revealed that the US covertly supported the Khmer Rouge in their fight against the Vietnamese communists. Annual support included an end total of ~$215M USD, food aid to 20-40k Khmer Rouge fighters, CIA advisors in several camps, and ammunition.
• In 1996, after receiving incredibly low approval ratings, the US helped elect Boris Yeltsin, an incompetent pro-capitalist independent, by giving him a $10 Billion dollar loan to finance a winning election. Rather than creating new enterprises, Yeltsin's democratization led to international monopolies hijacking the former Soviet markets, arbitraging the huge difference between old domestic prices for Russian commodities and the prices prevailing on the world market. Much of the Yeltsin era was marked by widespread corruption, and as a result of persistent low oil and commodity prices during the 1990s, Russia suffered inflation, economic collapse and enormous political and social problems that affected Russia and the other former states of the USSR. Under Yeltsin, Between 1990 and 1994, life expectancy for Russian men and women fell from 64 and 74 years respectively to 58 and 71 years. The surge in mortality was “beyond the peacetime experience of industrialised countries”. While it was boom time for the new oligarchs, poverty and unemployment surged; prices were hiked dramatically; communities were devastated by deindustrialisation; and social protections were stripped away.1,2
• Between 1996-2006, The US has given money and weapons to royalist forces against the nepalese communists in the Nepalese civil war. ~18,000 people have died in the conflict. In 2002, after another civil war erupted, President George W. Bush pushed a bill through Congress authorizing $20 million in military aid to the Nepalese government.1

Asia

Korean War

See also: Republic of Korea#Misconduct and killing of civilians by U.S. forces during the war

"Napalm Jelly Bombs Prove a Blazing Success in Korea". April 1951 edition of "All Hands" U.S. Navy magazine. Napalm was used copiously by the U.S. throughout the Korean war.

During the Korean War, U.S. troops killed large numbers of Korean civilians and engaged in copious firebombing with napalm, and, as was eventually revealed through declassified documents, had at certain times a policy of deliberately firing on South Korean refugee groups approaching its lines. Due to the massive failure, unmanageability, and extremely poor living conditions of the camp, the surviving Navajo were allowed to walk back home after having been there for four years, after signing a treaty. The treaty held that they would not oppose the building of a railroad through their land, and that they would send their children to government boarding schools, a system for stripping them of their native culture and assimilating them into the U.S. settler-state.

• From its creation in 1968, The American Indian Movement (AIM) has been a target of repression from law enforcement agencies, and surveillance as one of the FBI's COINTELPRO targets. This includes the wounded knee incident and the pine ridge shootout. 1
• In Nov. 1969, a group of 89 Native Americans occupied Alcatraz Island for 15 months, to gauge the US's commitment to the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), which stated that all abandoned federal land must be returned to native people. Eventually the government cut off all electrical power and all telephone service to the island. In June, a fire of disputed origin destroyed numerous buildings on the island.[ Left without power, fresh water, and in the face of diminishing public support and sympathy, the number of occupiers began to dwindle. On June 11, 1971, a large force of government officers removed the remaining 15 people from the island.1
• In 1973, 200 Oglala Lakota and AIM activists occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, called the Wounded knee incident. They were protesting the reservation's corrupt US-backed tribal chairman, Dick Wilson, who controlled a private militia, called Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOONs), funded by the government. FBI, US marshals, and other law enforcement cordoned off the area and attacked the activists with armored vehicles, automatic rifles, machine guns, grenade launchers, and gas shells, resulting in two killed and 13 wounded. Ray Robinson, a civil rights activist who joined the protesters, disappeared during the events and is believed to have been murdered. As food supplies became short, three planes dropped 1,200 pounds of food, but as people scrambled to gather it up, a government helicopter appeared overhead and fired down on them while groundfire came from all sides. After the siege ended in a truce, 120 occupiers were arrested. Wilson stayed in office and in 1974 was re-elected amid charges of intimidation, voter fraud, and other abuses. The rate of violence climbed on the reservation as conflict opened between political factions in the following three years; residents accused Wilson's private militia of much of it. 1
• In 1975, FBI agents attacked AIM activists on the Pine Ridge Reservation, in the 'Pine Ridge Shootout'.[ Two FBI agents, and an AIM activist were killed. In two separate trials, the U.S. prosecuted participants in the firefight for the deaths of the agents. AIM members Robert Robideau and Dino Butler were acquitted after asserting that they had acted in self–defense. Leonard Peltier was extradited from Canada and tried separately because of the delay. He was convicted on two counts of first–degree murder for the deaths of the FBI agents[ and sentenced to two consecutive terms of life in prison, after a trial which is still contentious. He remains in prison.
• In 2016, the US army corp of engineers approved a Energy Transfer Partners' proposal to build an oil pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, sparking the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests, evoking a brutal response from North Dakota police aided by the National Guard, private security firms, and other law enforcement agencies from surrounding states. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe believes that the pipeline would put the Missouri River, the water source for the reservation, at risk, pointing out two recent spills, a 2010 pipeline spill into the Kalamazoo River in Michigan, which cost over billion to clean up with significant contamination remaining, and a 2015 Bakken crude oil spill into the Yellowstone River in Montana. Police repression has included dogs attacking protesters, spraying water cannons on protesters in sub-freezing temperatures, >700 arrests of Native Americans and ~200 injuries, a highly militarized police force using armored personnel carriers, concussion grenades, mace, Tasers, batons, rubber bullets, and tear gas. In November 2017, the keystone XL pipeline burst, spilling 210,000 gallons of oil in Amherst, South Dakota.

Black people

• The origins of US police lie in the slave-catching patrols of the 1700s.
• In the 18th and 19th centuries, US plantation owners benefitted from African Slavery, which eventually became the dominant mode of production in the south. Words cannot do justice to the inhumanity of slavery as practiced by the US, but specific examples above will attempt to highlight its brutality. The total slave population in the South eventually reached 4 million before liberation. 1
• In 1787, the Three-Fifths Compromise, was a compromise between southern and northern states for how slaves should be counted for representation and taxation purposes, and determining how many seats a state would have in the house of representatives. Black slaves were counted as 3/5ths of a white person. 1
• In the summer of 1800, Gabriel Prosser planned a large slave rebellion in Richmond, Virginia. Information regarding the revolt was leaked prior to its execution, and he and twenty-five followers were taken captive and hanged in punishment. In reaction, Virginia and other state legislatures passed restrictions on free blacks, as well as prohibiting the education, assembly, and hiring out of slaves, to restrict their chances to learn and to plan similar rebellions. 1
• The 1811 German Coast Uprising was a revolt of black slaves in parts of the Territory of Orleans. Between 64 and 125 enslaved men marched from sugar plantations near present-day LaPlace on the German Coast toward the city of New Orleans. During their two-day, twenty-mile march, the men burned five plantation houses (three completely), several sugarhouses, and crops. White men led by officials of the territory formed militia companies to hunt down and kill the insurgents. Over the next two weeks, white planters and officials interrogated, tried and executed an additional 44 insurgents who had been captured. Executions were by hanging or decapitation. Whites displayed the bodies as a warning to intimidate slaves. The heads of some were put on pikes and displayed at plantations. The alleged leader, Charles Deslondes, had his hands chopped off, was then shot in one thigh & then the other, until they were both broken – then shot in the Body and before he had expired was put into a bundle of straw and roasted. 1
• In 1822, Denmark Vesey a former slave who had purchased his freedom, began organizing his parish for a slave rebellion in Charleston, South Carolina. Vesey and his followers were said to be planning to kill slaveholders in Charleston, liberate the slaves, and sail to the black republic of Haiti for refuge, but were arrested beforehand. Vesey and five slaves were among the first group of men rapidly judged guilty by the secret proceedings of a city-appointed Court and condemned to death; they were executed by hanging on July 2, 1822. In later proceedings, some 30 additional followers were executed. 1
• In 1831, Nat Turner lead a Slave Rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia. Rebel slaves killed from 55 to 65 white slave-owners, the highest number of any slave uprising in the Southern United States. There was widespread fear in the aftermath of the rebellion, and white militias organized in retaliation against the slaves. The state executed 56 slaves accused of being part of the rebellion. In the frenzy, many non-participant slaves were punished. At least 100 African Americans, and possibly up to 200, were murdered by militias and mobs in the area. Blacks suspected of participating in the rebellion were beheaded by the militia. "Their severed heads were mounted on poles at crossroads as a grisly form of intimidation." Across the South, state legislatures passed new laws prohibiting education of slaves and free black people,[ restricting rights of assembly and other civil rights for free black people, and requiring white ministers to be present at all worship services.1
• The Fugitive Slave act of 1850 was a law that required all escaped slaves, upon capture, to be returned to their masters and that officials and citizens of free states had to cooperate in this law. Abolitionists nicknamed it the "Bloodhound Law" for the dogs that were used to track down runaway slaves.[ 1
• In 1859, white abolitionist John Brown attempted to begin an armed slave revolt, rallying nearby black and white abolitionists, and raided an arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. He intended to use the rifles and pikes he captured at the arsenal, in addition to those he brought along, to arm rebellious slaves with the aim of striking terror in the slaveholders in Virginia. He planned to send agents to nearby plantations, rallying the slaves. They would free more slaves, obtain food, horses and hostages, and destroy slaveholders' morale. Brown planned to follow the Appalachian Mountains south into Tennessee and even Alabama, the heart of the South, making forays into the plains on either side.[ Due primarily to intelligence leaks, the raid failed; 10 were killed and 6, including Brown, were captured (lead by future confederate general Robert E. Lee), then executed by hanging. Before his execution, John Brown addressed the court: ''I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done. [...] Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends, either father, mother, brother, sister, wife, or children, or any of that class, and suffered and sacrificed what I have in this interference, it would have been all right; and every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment." 1
• In 1865, the 13th Amendment, abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. This would become an important loophole, as white supremacists, land-owners, and business-owners in the south would enact legislation and find ways to imprison blacks for petty crimes, and thus be able to use free prison labor for their businesses. This continues up to the present day, in such policies as the disparity of sentencing between prescription "white" drugs, and drugs typically used in poorer black communities.
• In 1865-66, the Black Codes were laws passed by Southern states after the Civil War. These laws had the intent and the effect of restricting African Americans' freedom, and of compelling them to work in a labor economy based on low wages or debt. Black Codes were part of a larger pattern of Southern whites trying to suppress the new freedom of emancipated African American slaves, the freedmen.
• The Memphis Riots of 1866 occurred after a shooting altercation between white policemen and black soldiers recently mustered out of the Union Army. Mobs of white civilians and policemen rampaged through black neighborhoods and the houses of freedmen, attacking and killing black men, women and children. 46 blacks and 2 whites were killed, 75 blacks injured, over 100 black persons robbed, 5 black women raped, and 91 homes, 4 churches and 8 schools burned in the black community.[Modern estimates place property losses at over $100,000, suffered mostly by blacks. Police and firefighters made up one third of the mob (24% and 10%, respectively, of the total group); they were joined by small business owners (28%), clerks (10%), artisans (10%), and city officials (4.5%). Many blacks fled the city permanently; by 1870, their population had fallen by one quarter compared to 1865.1
• After the Civil war, black voting in the period after 1869 resulted in 2 black senators and 20 black congressmen. This list would dwindle rapidly after 1876, due to the reactionary policies of Johnson-era reconstruction, and the empowering of the KKK in the south. By 1901, there were no blacks in congress, and the number still hasn't returned to its 1869 levels.
• In the 1860s-70s, the Ku Klux Klan, aided by police, organized raids, lynchings, beatings, burnings, throughout the south. For Kentucky alone, between 1867 and 1871, the National Archives lists 116 acts of violence. A sample:
  • Sam Davis hung by a mob in Harrodsburg, May 28, 1868.
  • Wm. Pierce hung by a mob in Christian July 12, 1868.
  • Geo. Roger hung by a mob in Bradsfordville Martin County July 11, 1868. ...
  • Silas Woodford age sixty badly beaten by disguised mob. . ..
  • Negro killed by Ku Klux Klan in Hay county January 14, 1871.

• In 1887, white paramilitaries attacked and killed between 35-300 black Knights of Labor sugar workers on strike for better conditions, in the Thibodaux Massacre. Victims reportedly included elders, women and children. All those killed were African American.[1
• In the years between 1889 and 1903, on the average, every week, two Negroes were lynched by mobs -- hanged, burned, mutilated.
• In 1921, a white mob started the Tulsa race riot, attacking black residents in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in what is considered one of the worst incidents of racial violence in US History. Thousands of whites rampaged through the black community for two days, killing men and women, burning and looting stores and homes, and using private planes to drop burning balls of turpentine on rooftops. ~300 blacks were killed, and ~10,000 blacks were left homeless. More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals and more than 6,000 black residents were arrested and detained. In 2001 it was revealed that the police and national guard assisted the whites. 1
• In 1927, the US had Marcus Garvey, a black organizer, deported under false pretenses of mail fraud. Garvey was unique in advancing a Pan-African philosophy to inspire a global mass movement and economic empowerment focusing on Africa known as Garveyism.[ Promoted by the UNIA as a movement of African Redemption, Garveyism would eventually inspire others, ranging from the Nation of Islam to the Rastafari movement (some sects of which proclaim Garvey as a prophet.)[1
• In such cities as Birmingham, Alabama, police ruthlessly enforced segregation, and white supremacist terrorism. In 1963, the police assisted the KKK in bombing the black leaders of the Birmingham Campaign for desegregation, leading to the Birmingham Riot of 1963, as well as the 16th st. Baptist Church Bombing, where 4 black girls were killed. The US government sent in troops to quell the revolting black populace. In the 1963 Children's Crusade, police mass arrested black children who had walked out of school protesting segregation, using fire hoses and attack dogs against them. Over 1,000 people were arrested throughout the campaign.
• From December 1963 until his death in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was the target of an intensive campaign by the FBI to 'neutralize' him as an effective civil rights leader. This included wiretapping his phones, blackmail letters threatening to expose his extramarital affairs, a letter encouraging him to commit suicide, as well as watching King during his assassination, leading many to believe the FBI were either complicit, or accomplices. The FBI are similarly accused of being complicit or accomplices to the nation of Islam's murder of Malcolm X. 1
• In 1967, a nationwide series of riots broke out in the black ghettos of the US, involving young blacks revolting against the white-supremacist power structure. In the 1967 Detroit Riot, Lyndon Johnson brought in the Michigan National guard to put down the revolt. The result was 43 dead, 1,189 injured, over 7,200 arrests, and more than 2,000 buildings destroyed. 1
• Starting in 1967, The Black Panther Party, a revolutionary black socialist group, became the target of FBI's COINTELPRO. Hoover deemed the Panther's free breakfast program (which served food for 10,000 children daily at its height), and its free medical care programs, as a dangerous threat to the US. Local police forces, aided by the FBI, were involved with multiple break-ins of panther headquarters, shoot-outs, the arrests, imprisonment, or murder of nearly every high-ranking member, and achieved its systematic destruction by 1980. A faithful account of its history is in founder Huey P. Newton's autobiography Revolutionary Suicide, and the history Black against Empire. 1
• In 1969, the FBI in collaboration with chicago police, murdered an influential black panther organizer, Fred Hampton, when he was 21 years old. An FBI informant drugged him in the evening, then agents broke into the apartment, killing another, and firing into the room where Hampton and his pregnant girlfriend slept. The FBI targeted him as being a potential "Black Messiah", as Hampton was organizing poor blacks, whites, Latinos, and Native Americans in Chicago with the Rainbow Coalition, to fight the repressive police brutality under mayor Daley. After a break-in at an FBI office in Pennsylvania, the existence of COINTELPRO, an illegal counter-intelligence program, was brought to light. One of the documents that was released after the break-in was a floor plan of Hampton's apartment. Another document outlined a deal the FBI brokered with the deputy attorney general to conceal the FBI's role in the assassination of Hampton and the existence of COINTELPRO. 1
• Between the 1950s and the 1970s, predatory contracts called "home sale contracts" were given to 75% of the 60k homes purchased by black Chicaogans. These "home sale contracts" allowed the seller to hold the property until the buyer paid off the entire mortgage. This meant that no equity was accrued by the buyer and the owners could kick the buyers out if a single monthly payment was missed. Black contract buyers in Chicago payed an average of $71k more than they would have through a conventional non-predatory mortgage. In total, between $3.2B and $4B were expropriated from Chicago's black community.
• Between 1932 and 1972, the US public health service secretly infected ~200 black men with syphilis, under the guise of receiving free health care, in the Tuskegee syphilis experiment. None of the men infected were ever told they had the disease (told instead they had "bad blood"), and none were treated with penicillin even after the antibiotic became proven for the treatment of syphilis in 1947. By the end of the study in 1972, only 74 of the test subjects were alive. Of the original 399 men, 28 had died of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis. 1
• In 1978, the police were involved in shootout with MOVE, a black power commune in Philadelphia, after attempting to evict them. The 9 surviving members (called the MOVE 9, including Charles Sims Africa) were given 100 year long sentences, 7 of which are still currently in prison.
• In 1979, Los Angeles police shot and killed Eulia Love over a disputed gas bill. LA police had a notorious reputation for using violence in black, brown, and gay communities. The police chief in a press conference later corrected the amount of the bill, after a reporter quoted an incorrect amount for the bill. 1>
• In 1979, a communist-led march to oust the Ku Klux Klan and the American Nazi Party lead to the Greensboro Massacre, where local police helped the KKK stop the march and kill 5 protesters. Edward Dawson, a Klansman-turned FBI informant as part of the agency's COINTELPRO program and was among the founders of the North Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan when the North Carolina chapter of the United Klans of America split. By 1979 he was working as an informant for the Greensboro Police Department. He was given a copy of the march route from the police and informed them of the potential for violence. Absent the police, the attackers escaped with relative ease. All of the killers were acquitted in state and national trials. The city lost a civil lawsuit in 1980, being one of the few times in US history when "a jury held local police liable for cooperating with the KKK in a wrongful death." The Greensboro city council finally apologized for the incident in 2017. 1
• On May 13, 1985, the police again attempted to evict MOVE, and bombed an entire city block, killing 11 people (including 5 children, Delisha, Thee, Netta, Frank, Raymond, Vincent, Conrad, Rhonda, Lil Phil, Thomaso, & Theresa Africa), and leaving 250 homeless. Police initially lobbed tear gas canisters at the building, and a gunfight with semi-automatic and automatic firearms ensued. Commissioner Sambor then ordered a bombing from a Pennsylvania State Police helicopter, and Philadelphia Police Department Lt. Frank Powell proceeded to drop two one-pound bombs made of C4 explosive (which the police referred to as "entry devices") made of FBI-supplied water gel explosive, a dynamite substitute, targeting a fortified, bunker-like cubicle on the roof of the house. The resulting explosions ignited a fire from fuel for a gasoline-powered generator in rooftop bunker that eventually destroyed approximately 65 nearby houses. The firefighters, who had earlier deluge-hosed the MOVE members in a failed attempt to evict them from the building, stood by as the fire caused by the bomb engulfed the first house and spread to others, having been given orders to let the fire burn. Despite the earlier drenching of the building by firefighters, officials said that they feared that MOVE would shoot at the firefighters. Eleven people (John Africa, five other adults and five children aged 7 to 13) died in the resulting fire and more than 25 people were left homeless. Ramona Africa, one of the two survivors, stated that police fired at those trying to escape. No one from the city government was charged criminally. Many MOVE members are still in prison, fighting for their release. 1
• In 1991, Los Angeles police beat up Rodney King, a black taxi-driver, and his two passengers, after he refused to pull over. The brutal beating, in which he was gagged, tazed, kicked, and beaten with batons by around 6 cops, with ~15 more idly watching, was caught on video, and the media frenzy and black community reaction surrounding his beating lead to the 1992 Los Angeles riots. 1
• In 1991 in Los Angeles, Latasha Harlins was a 15-year-old black teen who was shot in the head by Soon Ja Du, a 51-year-old female store owner from South Korea, who was tried and convicted of voluntary manslaughter in Harlins' death. Harlins' death came 13 days after the videotaped beating of Rodney King. Du was fined $500 and sentenced to five years of probation and 400 hours of community service but no prison time for her crime. Some cited the shooting as one of the causes of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.1
• In 2004, during a protest at the republican national convention, over 1,800 people were arrested. They were held at Hudson Pier Depot at Pier 57 on the Hudson River, a three-story, block-long pier that has been converted into a temporary prison, described as overcrowded, dirty, and contaminated with oil and asbestos. People reported having suffered from smell, bad ventilation, and even chemical burns and rashes. In 2014, the city was forced to pay $6.4 million to 430 individual plaintiffs. $6.6 million was paid to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by 1,200 additional people. 1,2
• In September 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Police shot and killed 2 black civilians and wounded 4 others in the Danziger Bridge Shootings. New Orleans police fabricated a cover-up story for their crime, falsely reporting that seven police officers responded to a police dispatch reporting an officer down, and that at least four suspects were firing weapons at the officers upon their arrival.[ Although 5 police officers were initially convicted by a federal jury in New Orleans, this decision was overturned. In 2016, the five officers plead guilty and received reduced sentences from 3-12 years. 1
• On March 3rd, 2014, Police claimed 22 year old Victor White shot himself while handcuffed (behind his back) in the back of a Louisiana state police car. A later autopsy revealed that he was shot in the front by a right-handed person (he was left-handed). Yet, the Iberia Parish coroner continued to declare the death a suicide. 1
• On April 30, 2014, a police officer, Christopher Manney, shot and killed Dontre Hamilton, a black man with a history or mental illness, at Red Arrow Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After the shooting, Manney applied for duty disability, saying the shooting and its aftermath caused him to experience severe post-traumatic stress disorder, after being fired. No charges were brought against him.1
• On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner died in Staten Island, New York City, after a New York City Police Department (NYPD) officer put him in what has been described as a chokehold for about 15 to 19 seconds while arresting him. A grand jury found the officer Pantaleo innocent, sparking a series of nation-wide demonstrations against police brutality of blacks.1
• On August 5th, 2014, Tulsa Oklahoma police officer Shannon Kepler shot and killed his daughter's 19 year old black boyfriend, Jeremy Lake, after Lake tried to shake his hand. After the killing, he fled the scene, and neither called for medical help, nor stayed to talk with police. As of July 2017, there have been 3 deadlocked trials. 1
• The shooting of John Crawford III occurred on August 5, 2014. Crawford was a 22-year-old African-American man shot to death by Beavercreek police officer Sean Williams, in a Walmart store in Beavercreek, Ohio, near Dayton, while holding a toy BB gun.1
• The shooting of Michael Brown occurred on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, a northern suburb of St. Louis. Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old black man was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, 28, a white Ferguson police officer, after robbing a convenience store. Protests in Ferguson erupted after the murderer was found innocent, evoking a militarized crackdown on black protestors by the predominantly white police force. After his mother and some supporters put have been few industries which have been immune.[1]. A long flowers and candles on the spot where he was killed, police ran over the spot with their vehicles.This systemic pattern of murder of unarmed black civilians spawned the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. 1 At least 6 of the most visual Ferguson protestors have been killed or "suicided" under suspicious circumstances in the years since.2 Other harrassments include bullets being shot into protestors cars, snakes being placed in cars, and cars being run off the road. The Ferguson community suspects a vigilante murderer, or white supremacists, working with the police. Missouri has over 5,000 militia groups active in the state. Due to the protestors opposition to police, their murders remain unsolved.
• On October 20th, 2014, 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was shot and killed by police in Chicago. The police at first claimed he was behaving erratically with a knife, and shot him 16 times. The initial police portrayals of the incident, consisting of about 400 pages of typed and handwritten reports, prompted police supervisors to rule the case a justifiable homicide and within the bounds of the department's use of force guidelines. Dashcam footage released a year later (after the police denied 15 previous requests) showed that he was walking away from police when shot. There was also a security camera at a nearby Burger King restaurant that may have captured the shooting, but during the time of the shooting there is a gap of 86 minutes in the recording. The officer was found guilty of second degree murder, and a $5M settlement was awarded to his family, however a USDOJ report released in January of 2017, described police as having a culture of "excessive violence," especially against minority suspects. Three Chicago police officers tried for allegedly attempting to cover up events related to the shooting were found not guilty by the Cook County Circuit Court on January 17, 2019.
• On November 14, 2014,Albuquerque New Mexico police officer Keith Sandy killed a mentally ill homeless man, Boyd. Sandy told another officer: “For this fucking lunatic? I’m going to shoot him in the penis with a shotgun here in a second.”, then killed Boyd 2 hours later. Sandy chose voluntary retirement (in order to avoid an internal investigation) and a pension, getting 70% of his pay for the rest of his life. 1
• On November 22, 2014, in Cleveland, Ohio, two police officers killed 12 year old Tamir Rice, after receiving a call that he had a weapon. It turned out to be a toy. 1
• The shooting of Walter Scott occurred on April 4, 2015, in North Charleston, South Carolina, following a daytime traffic stop for a non-functioning brake light. Scott, an unarmed black man, was murdered by Michael Slager, a white North Charleston police officer. Slager was only charged with murder after an eyewitness video surfaced which showed him shooting Scott from behind while Scott was fleeing, and which contradicted his police report. Without the video, the shooting would've likely been deemed justified, as nearly all murders by police result in no charges. 1
• On March 30, 2015, After being pulled over for rolling through a stop sign, Floyd Dent was beaten by officer William Melendez, who had a history of civil complaints for brutality. Melendez punched him 15 times in the temple, put him in a chokehold, until another officer arrived and tased him. Melendez repeatedly threatened to kill Dent, and plant drugs on him. 1
• On April 12, 2015, Freddie Carlos Gray, Jr., a 25-year-old Black man, was arrested by the Baltimore Police Department for possessing what the police alleged was an illegal switchblade under Baltimore law. While being transported in a police van, several cops held him down, putting pressure on his spinal cord, after which he fell into a coma and died on April 19, 2015. This sparked a series of protests in Baltimore; riot police responded violently, and called in the national guard to aid against the "thugs", as they were labeled by Obama in a press conference. After the protests were put down, the police officers were given separate trials, and all of them were found innocent. 1
• On November 5th, 2015, Two police officers shot and killed 24-year old Jamar Clark. The cops were placed on paid leave. Protests over the shooting lead to another act of terrorism where 4 white men shot 5 Black lives matter protestors. 1
• On July 6th, 2016, Philando Castile was shot and killed by Jeronimo Yanez, a St. Anthony, Minnesota police officer. Castile's girlfriend live-streamed the murder, showing Yanez pointing the gun at both her and her daughter. After Yanez was acquitted of all charges on June 16, 2017 by a jury, a video of the murder was leaked, showing Philando openly disclosing that he had a firearm on him, only to then be shot point-blank 5 times. According to author and former FBI agent Larry Brubaker, who has written two books on officer-involved shootings, "this is the first time an officer has been charged for a fatal shooting in Minnesota in more than 200 cases that spanned over three decades". 1
• On July 18th, 2016, Police shot Alfred Kinsey, a mental health therapist who was unarmed, while he was helping an autistic patient in a park. Kinsey was lying on the ground with his hands in the air and trying to negotiate between officers and his patient when he was shot. Both Kinsey and his patient were unarmed. Following the shooting, Kinsey stated he was handcuffed and left bleeding on the ground for 20 minutes with police giving him no medical aid. Authorities stated that they were investigating the incident, which received significant media attention following the appearance of cellphone video footage. The officer who shot Kinsey was arrested in 2017 and charged with attempted manslaughter and negligence. However, he remains employed and has not been fired. 1,2
• On Feb 12, 2017, Jerimy Mathis, a white North Carolina state trooper shot 31-year-old Willard Scott twice in the back, killing him, as he was running away from the trooper after a traffic stop. Mathis was placed on paid leave, and no charges have been filed.1
• On June 18th, 2017, Seattle police murdered a 30 year old pregnant woman suffering from mental health issues, Charleena Lyles, while her 3 of her 4 children slept in the next room. No charges have been brought against the police officers. 1
• On July 19th, 2017, Cincinatti OH prosecutors decided not to pursue a third murder trial for police officer Ray Tensing, who shot Samuel DuBose in the head on July 19th 2015, killing him, after pulling him over for a missing front license plate. The prosecutor told the mother, "since there are more racists in Hamilton county than not, its pointless to pursue another trial because you won't get a conviction." Tensing was wearing a confederate battle flag T-shirt when he murdered DuBose. 1
• On June 20th 2018, a Pittsburgh PA cop shot 17-year old Antwon Rose in the back while he was running away and killed him. Luckily a cell phone video caught the incident, showing officers handcuffing his corpse. "He was just a really lovely, gentle kid," Gisele Fetterman told the newspaper at a World Refugee Day event in Market Square on Wednesday. "His mom is amazing. All the kids loved him. Just a fine person. Bubbly. Funny. Goofy. Just really special."1
• On September 27th, 2018, a Dallas TX police officer getting off work entered the apartment of 26 year old Botham Jean (thinking it was her own), and shot and killed him. The officer, Amber Guyger, at first was placed on administrative leave, and eventually was charged with manslaughter. Jeans family accused the Dallas Police Department of using Jean's marijuana use in news articles as a justification for his murder. The trial for Amber Guyger concluded in October, 2019, finding Amber Guyger guilty, but only receiving a 10 year sentence. The judge hugged her after the verdict. One of the witnesses of the murder, Jean's next door neighbor Joshua Brown, is suspiciously murdered a few days after the trial. He was expected to testify against police in a different case, a second time. 1,2,3
• In March, 2019, an Oklahoma City cop shot 14-year-old Lorenzo Clerkley Jr. twice through a crack in a wooden fence, only giving him a 0.6 second warning, while him and his friends were playing with BB guns in their backyard. The horrific scene showed that the cop knew they were BB guns before shooting. It also shows Lorenzo telling him he was shot in the right side, then the cop rolling him on that side, as well as being dragged over broken glass. The family does not have health insurance and can’t afford the medical bills, including a $1,300 ambulance ride. Oklahoma County District Attorney determined the shooting was justified, and the Officer is currently on paid leave. A review of all of the department’s police shootings between 2004 and 2013 found that none of the 78 police shootings investigated by the homicide unit ever resulted in criminal charges, firing, demotion, or unpaid time off.
• On June 12th, 2019, US marshalls shot and killed 20 year old Brandon Webber, as he was getting into his vehicle outside his home. The police have alternately claimed that he rammed them with his car, and that he was carrying a weapon, but aren't releasing details or dashcams. The killing provoked a strong protest from the community, police used tear gas to disperse the crowd, and arrested three people. 36 cops were injured from flying rocks and bricks thrown by protestors. Mayor Strickland stated: "Let me be clear, the aggression shown towards our officers and deputies (Wednesday night) was unwarranted." Memphis police have a history of killings of young black men, including Darrius Stewart, an unarmed 19 year old shot and killed in 2015.
• On Augist 24th, 2019, Minneapolis police arrested black teen Elijah McClain, beat him, held him down, and injected him with ketamine, killing him. Ketamine injections (forced drugging) are a widespread practice used by police to subdue suspects.
• On October 12th, 2019, yet another police officer went into a home, and shot and killed the inhabitant, 28-year-old Atatiana Jefferson, in Fort Worth, TX. It began with a neighbor who called 911, after seeing a house with the door open - “When I made that non-emergency call, I didn’t say it was a burglary. I didn’t say it was people fighting. I didn’t say anything to make them have a gun. All they needed to do is ring the doorbell,” neighbor James Smith said. The officer has been placed on paid leave.
• During the 2020 coravirus pandemic, it was found that a law that empowered police to arrest those for not social distancing, lead to 80% of those arrested being black and latino.
• On May 11th, 2020, 27 year old EMT Breonna Taylor and her boyfriend were at their apartment in Louisville Kentucky, when police, doing a no-knock-no-announce raid, stormed in and blindly fired more than 20 shots, killing her. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, returned fire, thinking they were intruders. The police were searching for two drug suspects who were already in police custody, who lived more than 10 miles away from Taylor's house. Kenneth Walker was charged with first degree assault and attempted murder, while the cops were placed on paid leave. Walker's case was brough to a grand jury, but after protests erupted, he was released by the judge, and the district attorney moved to dismiss all charges against him. As of Septemeber 2020, the only charge brought, was against one officer, none of whose bullets killed Breonna Taylor, but for "wanton endangerment", since he fired shots into the walls of other apartments. The other officers who murdered Breonna Taylor went free, and the nation erupted in protests.
• On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pinned George Floyd with his knee on Floyd's neck for over 7 minutes, killing him in a manner reminiscient of Eric Garner. Bystander Darnella Frazier filmed the encounter. During that time, Floyd moaned, sobbed, "Oh Mama, oh Mama," begged, "Please, please, I can't breathe, I can't breathe" at least 11 times. Other distressed witnesses joined in with "Bro, you've got him down, at least let him breathe, man," and, "He's not even resisting arrest ... he's human, bro." One of the cops responds, "This is why you don't do drugs, kids." After about four minutes, Floyd lost consciousness. Though a witness charged, "You just really killed that man, bro," Chavin kept his knee on Floyd's unmoving neck for another four minutes. Afterwards, protests erupted in dozens of US cities, with over 50 cases of police brutality. Many police posed for US Media-friendly photo ops with protesters, then immediately tear gassed, shot pepper balls, and cleared them from the area. Over 11k people have been arrested, and several killed, including a 13 year old. A massive, documented list of all the cases of police brutality in the wake of these protests, in every US state.

Latinos

• In 1951, the Los Angeles Police Department severely beat up 5 latino and 2 white men, in an event called Bloody Christmas, leaving them with broken bones and ruptured organs, and covered it up. After pressure from the Mexican-American community, the LAPD opened up an internal inquiry, resulting in eight police officers being indicted for the assaults, 54 being transferred, and 39 suspended.1
• In 1954, the US implemented Operation Wetback, a US law enforcement initiative under Eisenhower to curb Mexican immigration, in which over 1 Million Mexicans were arrested. After implementation, Operation Wetback gave rise to arrests and deportations by the U.S. Border Patrol that were civil rights violations, which resulted in several hundred United States citizens being illegally deported without being given a chance to prove their citizenship. A total of 750 immigration and border patrol officers and investigators; 300 jeeps, cars and buses; and seven airplanes were allocated for the operation.[ Teams were focused on quick processing, as planes were able to coordinate with ground efforts and quickly deport people into Mexico.[ While the operation included the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago, its main targets were border areas in Texas and California.[ Overall, there were 1,078,168 apprehensions made in the first year of Operation Wetback, with 170,000 being rounded up from May to July 1954. In addition, many illegal immigrants fled to Mexico fearing arrest; over half a million from Texas alone. 1
• In 1983, a mostly latino workforce lead the 3-year long Arizona Copper Mine Strike of 1983, in which the police, national guard, and Arizona governor assisted in one of the largest strikebreaking incidents of the 1980s, ending with the Phelps Dodge Corporation replacing most of the workers and decertifying the unions. Miners were subject to undercover surveillance by the Arizona Criminal Intelligence Systems Agency, to identify strikers engaged in violence, with the governor sending 325 National Guard soldiers to Morenci, and increasing the number of state policemen there to 425. Meanwhile, the local government passed injunctions limiting both picketing and demonstrations at the mine. The Arizona copper mine strike would later become a symbol of defeat for American unions.
• By 1984, during the Reagan-era of social services and welfare cutbacks, 42% of all Latino children and one-fourth of the families lived below the poverty line.
• In 1996, in response to increased immigration from countries such as El Salvador and Guatemala ravaged by US imperialism and authoritarian dictatorships, the US passed the Anti-Terrorism and effective Death Penalty Act, allowing deportation of any immigrant ever convicted of a crime, no matter how long ago or how serious. Lawful permanent residents who had married Americans and now had children were not exempt. The New York Times reported in July that "hundreds of long-term legal residents have been arrested since the law passed." 1
• In early 2017, ICE began a campaign of arrests and deportation of undocumented immigrants. 700 People have been arrested so far. 1
• On March 27th, 2017, ICE agents in Chicago broke into the home of Felix Torres, and shot him while he and his family slept in their home. After speaking with Torres’ daughter, the People’s Response Team added that “no members of the family are undocumented, and the family has lived in the home for at least 30 years.”Carmen Torres said, “They didn’t say anything. They just came in and pointed pistols in our faces and dragged us out,” DNA Info reported. “It’s a lie when they say he was holding a gun. He doesn’t even own a gun,” she said. “They shot my dad. They shot him, and I don’t know why.” He is in critical condition. 1
• On March 25th-27th, 2017, ICE agents arrested 84 immigrants in Oregon and Washington. Many arrested had no criminal background. Oregon Governor Katie Brown complied with ICE, but received vitriolic responses when she tweeted in support of immigrant families. 1
• Beginning in 1994, sheriff Joe Arpaio opened up a "tent city", outside of phoenix, a facility which he called, his own "personal concentration camp", used to house prisoners, in terrible conditions. In 2011, inmates complained that fans near their beds were not working, and that their shoes were melting from the heat.[ During the summer of 2003, when outside temperatures exceeded 110 °F (43 °C), Arpaio said to complaining inmates, "It's 120 degrees in Iraq and the soldiers are living in tents and they didn't commit any crimes, so shut your mouths!". Arpaio reinstuted chain gangs (for female prisoners as well), forcing people to work 7 hours a day, 7 days a week. Arpaio also entrapped 18-year-old James Saville into an assassination attempt against himself. Saville's attorneys eventually discovered that MCSO detectives had bought the bomb parts themselves, then convinced Saville to build it even though he was not predisposed to commit such a crime. On July 9, 2003, a Maricopa County Superior Court jury acquitted Saville, finding that the bomb plot was an elaborate publicity stunt to boost Arpaio's reelection bid. On April 4th, 2017, newly elected Phoenix sheriff Paul Penzone finally closed it down due to public pressure, after 23 years of operation. Trump pardoned sherriff Arpaio in August 2017, after holding a rally in Phoenix AZ in which police tear-gassed protesters. 1
• Beginning in May 2017, ICE began another wave of deportation targeting Mexicans. Hugo Mejia and a coworker, Rodrigo Nuñez, were imprisoned by ICE officials, despite living in the US for 17 years, and having clean records.1
• The United States Department of Homeland Security rescinded DACA, or Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, a program which protects ~ 800,000 minors from being deported, on June 16, 2017, while continuing to review the existence of the DACA program as a whole. The DACA policy was rescinded by the Trump administration on September 5, 2017, but full implementation of the rescission was delayed six months to give Congress time to decide how to deal with the population that was previously eligible under the policy. 1
• In July 2017, police shot Ismael Lopez, a Mississippi car mechanic, in the back of the head at his own home, killing him. While the police say that he was holding a weapon, his guns were nowhere near his dead body, and police also killed his dog, and bullet holes were found from police shooting through the front door. No officer has been charged.1
• Throughout 2018, I.C.E. started another wave of deportations, breaking up hundreds of families, and mandated the legal separation incoming parents from their children (presumably to deter future asylum-seekers). ICE arrested 114 people in Sandusky OH. Trump and Jeff Sessions have ramped up a trend of forcible deportations started by Clinton and Obama. Between 2016 and 2017, apprehensions of undocumented immigrants jumped by a third. In 2017, President Trump deported more than double the number of noncriminals than Obama had the previous year. Those deported include a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy in San Antonio; a grandmother described as the “backbone” of a Navy veteran’s family; a father of two in Detroit who had lived in the U.S. since he was 10 years old. A major consequence of this new policy has been an explosion of fear among immigrant communities “When everyone’s a target, no one is safe,” says Luis Zayas, dean of the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin. He cites instances of ICE agents arresting people who had just filed paperwork for a green card, left church or dropped off their kids at school. “The arrests feel arbitrary, and that’s different,” he says. “The fear is worse now than I’ve ever seen it.” 1, 2,3
• Starting in April 2018, the Trump administration began a policy of separating families who attempt to cross the border. Separated children have been housed in a number of newly constructed tent facilities, such as one in Tornillo, TX. Another facility in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, the same military prison that held Japanese and Apache civilians, will hold south american migrants. Andrea Pitzer, the author of “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps" writes, “While writing a book on camp history, I defined concentration camps as the mass detention of civilians without trial, usually on the basis of race, religion, national origin, citizenship, or political party, rather than anything a given individual has done. By this definition, the new child camp established in Tornillo, Texas, is a concentration camp.” Recently it has been found that the Trump administration has been drugging children without consent. Children as young as 14 were abused at a Stanton VA ICE facility. "Whenever they used to restrain me and put me in the chair, they would handcuff me," said a Honduran immigrant who was sent to the facility when he was 15 years old. "Strapped me down all the way, from your feet all the way to your chest, you couldn't really move. ... They have total control over you. They also put a bag over your head. It has little holes; you can see through it. But you feel suffocated with the bag on." 1,2,3
• In May 2018, at a California press conference regarding Sanctuary cities, Trump, referring to Mexican immigrants stated: "These aren't people. These are animals".
• On Nov 25, 2018, US customs and border agents fired tear gas at hundreds of Central American migrants on the US border. “We ran, but when you run, the gas asphyxiates you more,” Honduran migrant Ana Zuniga, 23, told the Associated Press while cradling daughter Valery, 3, in her arms. The use of tear gas is banned in warfare, while its use for riot control is internationally accepted. Protesters and amnesty seekers would have more rights and protections if they simply declared war on the US government.
• On January 29th, 2019, Tempe Arizona police shot and killed a 14 year old, Antonio Arce. He was shot in the back between his shoulder blades while running away. Police at first delayed, then released a small section of the bodycam footage, intentionally cut right before seeing the body, 3 days after the shooting. After backlash over the shortened video, they held a private showing to select reporters, barring any cameras or recording devices, seemingly showing Arce with the orange-tipped airsoft gun found near his body. They've refused to release that video to the public, leading many to believe it to be doctored, with police planting an airsoft gun on him after the killing as a justification. The original video has no such airsoft gun. The officer who murdered him is currently on administrative leave.
• In early June, 2019, several reports of abuse surfaced about the US's migrant prison camps, run by US customs and Border Patrol. One such facility, named "The Dog Pound", by border patrol agents, had no running water, no tarp or safety from the elements. A group of prisoners were held in a single cell for 30 days without shower or clothes changes, in 100 degree temperatures. There is severe overcrowding in the El Paso camp, with as many as 76 migrants packed into a tiny cell designed for a maximum of 12 people. A number of children have died while being held, including one baby born in an overcrowded cell. The mother was never taken to a hospital. 4 toddlers in a Texas facility were so ill and neglected, that a lawyer intervened to force the government to hospitalize them. Children are often taken from mothers, due to the horrible conditions in the camps. In several Rio Grande Valley facilities, migrants were not provided soap, toothbrushes, and were sleep-deprived. Health and Human Service says it is past capacity with over 13,000 kids in its care at the moment. A mole exposed a Facebook group containing 9500 border patrol agents, with incredibly racist and sexist rhetoric, including threats against US rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was planning a visit to the camps.
• On Feb 7th, 2019, a US border patrol officer shot and killed 21 for old Mendivil Perez, an American citizen, in Nogales, AZ. More than six months later, CBP won’t name the officer who fired his gun, or explain why he fired, or acknowledge the killing.
• On June 14th, 2019, an off-duty cop, Salvador Sanchez, in Corona, CA, shot and killed a mentally ill man, Kenneth French,, as well as shooting his family 8 times, while his family was with shopping for fathers day at a Costco. "I begged and told him not to shoot," his father Russell French said. "I said we have no guns and my son is sick. He still shot." Sanchez then fired at least eight rounds, striking all three family members. A man inside Costco stood and prayed over Russell French as he lied on the ground bleeding, he said. Kenneth French was shot twice in his back, Galipo said. There were also two gunshot wounds in his armpit and shoulder area. After the shooting, Corona Police said Sanchez was assaulted "without provocation" before Sanchez opened fire. He was placed on administrative leave days after the shooting, into which the LAPD is conducting an internal investigation.
• In the present day, ICE (U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement), the police tasked with immigration enforcement, operates over 500 prison camps, holding over 34,000 undocumented people deemed "aliens", 20,000 of which have no criminal convictions, in the US system of immigration detention. The camps include forced labor (often with contracts from private companies), poor conditions, lack of rights (since the undocumented aren't considered citizens), and forced deportations, often splitting up families. Detainees are often held for a year without trial, with antiquated court procedures pushing back court dates for months, encouraging many to accept immediate deportation in the hopes of being able to return faster than the court can reach a decision, but forfeiting legal status, in a cruel system of coercion. After the creation of DHS and ICE, the budget for immigration enforcement doubled from $6.2 billion in 2002 to $12.5 billion in 2006 under Obama. 1, 2,3

Asians

• The Anti-Coolie Act of 1862 was passed by the California legislature in an attempt to appease rising anger among white laborers about salary competition created by the influx of Chinese immigrants at the height of the California gold rush.The act sought to protect white laborers by imposing a monthly tax on Chinese immigrants seeking to do business in the state of California. 1
• The Pigtail Ordinance was a racist law passed in 1873 intended to force prisoners in San Francisco, California to have their hair cut within an inch of the scalp. It affected Han Chinese prisoners in particular, as it meant they would have their queue, a waist-long, braided pigtail, cut off. 1
• The Chinese Massacre of 1871 was a racially motivated riot which occurred on October 24, 1871 in Los Angeles, California, when a mob of around 500 white men entered Chinatown to attack, rob, and murder Chinese residents of the city.[[ An estimated 17 to 20 Chinese immigrants were systematically tortured and then hanged by the mob, making the event the largest mass lynching in American history.[[[1
• The Page Act of 1875 prohibited entry of immigrants considered undesirable, classifying that as any individual from Asia who was coming to America to be a forced laborer, any Asian woman who would engage in prostitution, and all people considered to be convicts in their own country. It was introduced to "end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women".[ The Page Act was supposed to strengthen the ban against “coolie” laborers, by imposing a fine of up to $2,000 and maximum jail sentence of one year upon anyone who tried to bring a person from China, Japan,or any Asian country to the United States “without their free and voluntary consent, for the purpose of holding them to a term of service”.[ However, these provisions, as well as those regarding convicts “had little effect at the time”.[ On the other hand, the ban on female Asian immigrants was heavily enforced and proved to be a barrier for all Asian women trying to immigrate, especially Chinese.1
• The San Francisco Riot of 1877 was a two-day pogrom waged against Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, California by the city's majority white population from the evening of July 23 through the night of July 24, 1877. The ethnic violence which swept Chinatown resulted in four deaths and the destruction of more than $100,000 worth of property belonging to the city's Chinese immigrant population
• In 1882, the US passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, illegalizing Chinese immigration, in a long chain of anti-chinese legislation. It was repealed in 1943. 1
• The Scott Act of 1888 was a law that prohibited Chinese laborers abroad or who planned future travels from returning. It left an estimated 20,000-30,000 Chinese outside the United States at the time stranded. 1
• The Immigration Act of 1917 imposed literacy tests on immigrants, and created new categories of inadmissible persons and barred immigration from the Asia-Pacific Zone.1
• The repression faced by Chinese Americans in the 19th and 20th century are found in the articles, History of Chinese Americans, and Anti-Chinese Sentiment in the US.
• From 1942-46, FDR imprisoned ~120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps after the attack on pearl harbor. The conditions of the camps were notoriously horrible, and most were forced to make "loyalty oaths", or risk deportation and separation from their families. It was later admitted that government actions were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership". Most lost their homes and jobs, as whites took over vacated homes. 1
• Between 1956-65, the Chinese Confession Program sought confessions of illegal entry from US citizens and residents of Chinese origin, with the (misleading) offer of legalization of status in exchange. The program resulted in 13,895 confessions,[[ with about 10,000 in the San Francisco region (where the bulk of the illegally entering Chinese population was concentrated.[ This was far less than the number of people suspected of having entered illegally, and the less than complete usage of the program was attributed to lack of trust in the United States immigration enforcement agencies among the Chinese population, the lack of clear benefits from confessing, and the risk of deportation faced by the confessor as well as his or her (blood and paper) family.[ Since confessions by neighbors could implicate a person and cause him or her to be deported, the program created fear and distrust in many Chinese-American communities. Anybody who had illegally entered and came in contact with the FBI before he or she had confessed was subject to immediate deportation.[ The confessions had a significant impact on the Chinese-American community: as a result of the confessions, 22,083 people were exposed and 11,294 paper son slots were closed.[[ For comparison, the 1950 Census listed 117,629 Chinese in America (excluding Hawaii).[ 1

LGBTQ People

• In the 2nd Red and Lavendar Scare of 1947-56, Joseph McCarthy framed homosexuality as a dangerous, contagious social disease that posed a potential threat to state security.[ Hundreds of suspected homosexuals were imprisoned or fired.1
• In 1969, LGBT activists began the Stonewall riots in response to a police raid in Greenwich Village, which highlighted a pattern of discrimination against gay people in the legal system. The Stonewall Inn It catered to an assortment of patrons and was known to be popular among the poorest and most marginalized people in the gay community: drag queens, transgender people, effeminate young men, butch lesbians, male prostitutes, and homeless youth. Police raids on gay bars were routine in the 1960s. The riot began an extended confrontation with the New York City police, and within weeks, Village residents quickly organized into activist groups to concentrate efforts on establishing places for gays and lesbians to be open about their sexual orientation without fear of being arrested. 1

Women

• US elites in the 18th and 19th centuries pushed a narrative of domestic purity, or the cult of true womanhood, for women as a way of pacifying her with a doctrine of "separate but equal"-giving her work equally as important as the man's, but separate and different. Inside that "equality" there was the fact that the woman did not choose her mate, and once her marriage took place, her life was determined. One girl wrote in 1791: "The die is about to be cast which will probably determine the future happiness or misery of my life.... I have always anticipated the event with a degree of solemnity almost equal to that which will terminate my present existence." Marriage enchained, and children doubled the chains. One woman, writing in 1813: "The idea of soon giving birth to my third child and the consequent duties I shall he called to discharge distresses me so I feel as if I should sink."
• In the 1830s, The Lowell Mill Girls were female workers who came to work in industrial factories in Lowell, Massachusetts, during the Industrial Revolution, and who despite living in cramped boarding houses and working from 5am-7pm every day, developed a culture of defiance against the factory owners, and created reform associations, and began strikes in 1834 and 1836. 1
• From the 1880s onward, many US states (27 + Puerto Rico in 1956) operated a system of forced sterilization of women, rooted in white supremacy. The principle targets were the mentally ill, Native Americans, and blacks. For example, in Sunflower County Mississippi, 60% of black women living there were sterilized without their permission. An estimated 3,406 Indian women were sterilized.[ California eugenicists in 1933 began sending their literature overseas to german scientists and medical workers, sparking the beginnings of Nazi Eugenics. In the end, over 65,000 individuals were sterilized in 33 states, in all likelihood without the perspectives of ethnic minorities. The US enacted a system of forced sterilization in Puerto Rico since its takeover by the US in 1989: a 1965 survey of of Puerto Rican residents found that about one-third of all Puerto Rican mothers, ages 20-49, were sterilized. 148 female prisoners in two California institutions were sterilized between 2006 and 2010 in a supposedly voluntary program, but it was determined that the prisoners did not give consent to the procedures. In Madrigal vs. Quilligan, many unsuspecting women were coerced to sign paperwork to perform sterilization, while others were told that the process could be reversed. None of the women were fluent in English. 10 latina women were sterilized, and the doctor was found innocent. 1,,3
• In the period following WWII, the US capitalist-controlled media, advertising, and consumer products industries propagandized and glorified the ideal of the housewife-consumer, in order to sell products, make labor space for returning soldiers, take advantage of women's unpaid labor in the home, and to help build a new workforce and potential army to combat the soviet union. This sparked an era of regression with respect to the feminist victories of the previous 50 years, and caused psychological damage and demoralization to an uncountable number of women. Women who remained in the labor force were primarily only allowed in subordinate positions such as secretaries, cleaning women, elementary school teachers, saleswomen, waitresses, and nurses. This is chronicled in the Feminine Mystique.
• US police officers routinely commit sexual assault and rapes: most go unreported, but over 1200 incidents, including over 400 rapes were committed over a 9 year period from 2005-2013.
• On November 25, 2017, Yang Song died after falling from a 4th floor balcony during a targeted police raid. Her personal messages revealed that in 2016, she was raped at gunpoint by an undercover police officer, and was subsequently harrassed, threatened with deportation, and then likely murdered by the NYPD.
• In May, 2019, Alabama lawmakers banned abortion in the state, providing no exceptions for victims of rape or incest. Those caught performing abortions will face up to 99 years in prison. The bill is part of a larger effort to overturn Roe vs Wade, a long-standing supreme court decision affirming a woman's right to choose. Alabaman women seeking abortions are now forced to travel across state lines, and hide everything about the procedure from friends and family, in order to avoid legal repercussions from their home state. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a federal suit against the state.
• In 2019, it was discovered that US Border patrol had been protecting rapes and abuse of its own members since the 1990s. In one instance, a trainee was forced to give oral sex to 5 officers, and then raped while she was unconcious. At least 35 instances of rape by officers was found.
• In September 2020, it was revealed that ICE had performed mass hysterectomies on immigrant women in several detention centers, reminiscent of the long-standing US policy of sterilization of black and brown women. 2

Workers and the Poor

• The American Revolution is falsely portrayed as being a social revolution. Carl Degler says (Out of Our Past): "No new social class came to power through the door of the American revolution. The men who engineered the revolt were largely members of the colonial ruling class." George Washington was the richest man in America. John Hancock was a prosperous Boston merchant. Benjamin Franklin was a wealthy printer. Edmund Morgan sums up the class nature of the Revolution this way: "The fact that the lower ranks were involved in the contest should not obscure the fact that the contest itself was generally a struggle for office and power between members of an upper class: the new against the established." Looking at the situation after the Revolution, Richard Morris comments: "Everywhere one finds inequality." He finds "the people" of "We the people of the United States" (a phrase coined by the very rich governor Morris) did not mean Indians or blacks or women or white servants. In fact, there were more indentured servants than ever, and the Revolution "did nothing to end and little to ameliorate white bondage."
• The 1787 US Constitution is falsely portrayed as a document representing an ideal of social and political equality, despite every framer being a rich white propertied man. Historian Charles Beard found that a majority of the framers were lawyers by profession, that most of them were men of wealth, in land, slaves, manufacturing, or shipping, that half of them had money loaned out at interest, and that forty of the fifty-five held government bonds, according to the records of the Treasury Department. Thus, Beard found that most of the makers of the Constitution had some direct economic interest in establishing a strong federal government: the manufacturers needed protective tariffs; the money lenders wanted to stop the use of paper money to pay off debts; the land speculators wanted protection as they invaded Indian lands; slave-owners needed federal security against slave revolts and runaways; bondholders wanted a government able to raise money by nationwide taxation, to pay off those bonds. Four groups, Beard noted, were not represented in the Constitutional Convention: slaves, indentured servants, women, men without property. And so the Constitution did not reflect the interests of those groups. He later wrote: "Inasmuch as the primary object of a government, beyond the mere repression of physical violence, is the making of the rules which determine the property relations of members of society, the dominant classes whose rights are thus to be determined must perforce obtain from the government such rules as are consonant with the larger interests necessary to the continuance of their economic processes, or they must themselves control the organs of government."
• In 1787, James Madison in the Federalist Paper #10, outlined the primary role of the US constitution, arguing that representative government was needed to maintain peace in a society ridden by factional disputes. These disputes came from "the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society." The problem, he said, was how to control the factional struggles that came from inequalities in wealth. Minority factions could be controlled, he said, by the principle that decisions would be by vote of the majority. So the real problem, according to Madison, was a majority faction, and here the solution was offered by the Constitution, to have "an extensive republic," that is, a large nation ranging over thirteen states, for then "it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength,and to act in unison with each other.... The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States." Madison's argument can be seen as a sensible argument for having a government which can maintain peace and avoid continuous disorder. But is it the aim of government simply to maintain order, as a referee, between two equally matched fighters? Or is it that government has some special interest in maintaining a certain kind of order, a certain distribution of power and wealth, a distribution in which government officials are not neutral referees but participants? In that case, the disorder they might worry about is the disorder of popular rebellion against those monopolizing the society's wealth. This interpretation makes sense when one looks at the economic interests, the social backgrounds, of the makers of the Constitution. Charles Beard warned us that governments-including the government of the United States-are not neutral, that they represent the dominant economic interests, and that their constitutions are intended to serve these interests.
• From 1786-87, Shays' Rebellion was an armed uprising in Massachusetts over dissatisfaction from returning veterans. The rural farming population was generally unable to meet the demands being made of them by merchants or the civil authorities, and individuals began to lose their land and other possessions when they were unable to fulfill their debt and tax obligations. This led to strong resentments against tax collectors and the courts, where creditors obtained and enforced judgments against debtors, and where tax collectors obtained judgments authorizing property seizures. It,and similar conflicts and unrest were pacified by the passing of the 1789 Bill of Rights. 1
• In the 1830s, after the accumulation of farmland by a few wealthy families, thousands of farmers forced to rent their land formed Anti-Rent associations to prevent evictions, culminating in the Anti-Rent War, a guerilla war between bands of sheriffs and farmers. The wealthy used sheriffs and deputies to evict thousands of returning civil war veterans unable to pay rent. The farmers had fought, been crushed by the law, their struggle diverted into voting, and the system stabilized by enlarging the class of small landowners, leaving the basic structure of rich and poor intact. It was a common sequence in American history.
• In 1841, Dorrs's Rebellion was an armed insurrection against Rhode Island elites in order to give universal suffrage to factory workers and immigrants, previously only granted to those who owned land and had at least $134. Dorr had originally supported granting voting rights to blacks, but he changed his position in 1840 because of pressure from white immigrants, who wanted to gain the vote first. The "Dorrites" led an unsuccessful attack against the arsenal in Providence, Rhode Island on May 19, 1842. Dorr eventually disbanded his forces, realizing that he would be defeated in battle by the approaching militia, and fled the state. Governor King issued a warrant for Dorr's arrest with a reward of $5,000.1
• In 1874, Police charged and broke up a labor demonstration of unemployed workers in Tompkins Square, New York. One newspaper reported: Police clubs rose and fell. Women and children ran screaming in all directions. Many of them were trampled underfoot in the stampede for the gates. In the street bystanders were ridden down and mercilessly clubbed by mounted officers. 1
• The Great Railroad strike of 1877 was a nationwide strike in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Illinois, and Missouri, after the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O) cut wages for the third time in a year. The strike finally ended some 45 days later after it was put down by local and state militias, and federal troops, who murdered around ~100 workers or family members, and arrested ~1000 people. A newspaper recounting the situation in Chicago reports: "The sound of clubs falling on skulls was sickening for the first minute, until one grew accustomed to it. A rioter dropped at every whack, it seemed, for the ground was covered with them." The railroads made some concessions, withdrew some wage cuts, but also strengthened their "Coal and Iron Police." 1
• Throughout the late 1800s, robber barons and wealthy industrialists like J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, Jay Gould, and the Mellon Family, presided over the Gilded Age, a period of massive wealth and resource accumulation into a small number of hands. The wealthy capitalists pushed state and federal legislation to serve their interests, and succeeded in enlisting the police to serve their interests, including pushing farmers and Native Americans off their land. Henry George and others criticized the immense accumulation of property, pointing out that the lowest classes did not share in the gains of luxury and comfort.
• In 1886, Chicago police killed several workers, and arrested many more striking in support of an 8-hour work day. The next day, they then attempted to break up the strike, upon which an unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at police, killing several, in the Haymarket Affair. Four anarchists were tried and hanged without evidence, and their executions aroused a funeral march of 25,000 in Chicago. 1
• The Coal Wars were a series of armed labor conflicts in the US between striking workers, and the police and paid private security firms, between 1890 and 1930. Although they occurred mainly in the East, particularly in Appalachia, there was a significant amount of violence in Colorado after the turn of the century. Coal capitalists paid private detectives as well as public law enforcement agents to ensure that union organizers were kept out of the region, using intimidation, harassment, espionage, and murder. Mining families lived under the terror of Baldwin-Felts detective agents who were professional strikebreakers under the hire of coal operators. During that dispute, agents drove a heavily armored train through a tent colony at night, opening fire on women, men, and children with a machine gun. 1
• In 1892, the Homestead Strike was an industrial lockout and strike between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania steel workers, and the Carnegie steel company, who hired armed Pinkertons to act as strike-breakers. It culminated in a battle between strikers and private security agents on July 6, 1892.[ The battle was one of the most serious disputes in U.S. labor history, third behind the Ludlow Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain. After the thousands of rioters forced the encircled pinkertons to surrender, the US sent in national guard troops to suppress the strike, killing ~9 and arresting hundreds. 1
• During the late 19th century, the Pinkertons were a private security firm hired by the wealthy to infiltrate unions, supply guards, keep strikers and suspected unionists out of factories, and recruit goon squads to intimidate workers. The Pinkertons were also used as guards in coal, iron, and lumber disputes in Illinois, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia as well as the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921. After bad publicity, and the rise of organized labor by the 1930s, police forces and the national guard were required to suppress the labor movement. 1
• In 1894, the Pullman Strike was one of the bloodiest battles between police and workers in US history. The conflict began in Pullman, Chicago, when nearly 4,000 factory employees of the Pullman Company began a wildcat strike in response to recent reductions in wages, despite not reducing the rents or cost of goods in the company town. Debs and the ARU called a massive boycott against all trains that carried a Pullman car. It affected most rail lines west of Detroit and at its peak involved some 250,000 workers in 27 states. Thirty people were killed by the police. The federal government obtained an injunction against the union, Debs, and other boycott leaders, ordering them to stop interfering with trains that carried mail cars. After the strikers refused, President Grover Cleveland ordered in the Army to stop the strikers from obstructing the trains. Violence broke out in many cities, and the strike collapsed. Defended by a team including Clarence Darrow, Debs was convicted of violating a court order and sentenced to prison; the ARU then dissolved.1
• The Coal Strike of 1902 was a strike by 150,000 miners of the United Mine Workers of America in the anthracite coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. Miners struck for higher wages, shorter workdays and the recognition of their union. Although it was resolved with a modest pay increase (but a refusal to recognize the UMWA union), police killed several strikers. An immigrant striker named Anthony Giuseppe was found fatally shot near a Lehigh Valley Coal Company colliery in Old Forge; it was thought the Coal and Iron Police guarding the site shot blindly through a fence.[ Contemporary reporting describes three other deaths and widespread shooting injuries among strikers and Shenandoah police. [ On October 9, a striker named William Durham was shot and killed in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, near Shenandoah. He’d been loitering near the half-dynamited house of a non-union worker and disobeyed an order to halt.[ 1
• In the year 1904, 27,000 workers were killed on the job due to industrial accidents from poor have been few industries which have been immune.[1]. A long working conditions, in manufacturing, transport, and agriculture. In one year, 50,000 accidents took place in New York factories alone. Hat and cap makers were getting respiratory diseases, quarrymen were inhaling deadly chemicals, lithographic printers were getting arsenic poisoning. According to a report of the Commission on Industrial Relations, in 1914, 35,000 workers were killed in industrial accidents and 700,000 injured.1
• In 1912, immigrant workers began a Textile Strike in Lawrence Massachusetts, lead by the IWW, prompted by a two-hour pay-cut. The strike united workers from more than 40 different nationalities.[ Carried on throughout a brutally cold winter, the strike lasted more than two months, defying the assumptions of conservative trade unions within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) that immigrant, largely female and ethnically divided workers could not be organized. Lawrence police killed 2 people, beat a pregnant woman to miscarriage, and arrested >250. Congressional hearings followed, resulting in exposure of shocking conditions in the Lawrence mills and calls for investigation of the "wool trust." Mill owners soon decided to settle the strike, giving workers in Lawrence and throughout New England raises of up to 20 percent. Within a year, however, the IWW had largely collapsed in Lawrence.1
• In 1912, the Paint Creek Mine War was a violent series of confrontations between striking coal miners in West Virginia, and police. The confrontation directly caused perhaps fifty violent deaths, as well as many more deaths indirectly caused by starvation and malnutrition among the striking miners. In the number of casualties it counts among the worst conflicts in American labor union history. The strike was a prelude to subsequent labor-related West Virginia conflicts in the following years, the Battle of Matewan and the Battle of Blair Mountain. 1
• In 1914, The Ludlow Massacre was an attack by the Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel & Iron Company camp guards on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado, fighting for an 8-hour work day, better pay, and union recognition, as part of the larger Colorado Coalfield War. The national and camp guards killed 19-26 people, including two women and eleven children. To finish clearing out the camp, the Guard moved down from the hills with torches, set fire to the tents, and the families fled into the hills. In retaliation for Ludlow, the miners armed themselves and attacked dozens of mines over the next ten days, destroying property and engaging in several skirmishes with the Colorado National Guard along a 40-mile front from Trinidad to Walsenburg.[ The entire strike would cost between 69 and 199 lives. Congress responded to public outcry by directing the House Committee on Mines and Mining to investigate the incident.[ Its report, published in 1915, was influential in promoting child labor laws and an eight-hour work day. Historian Howard Zinn described the Ludlow Massacre as "the culminating act of perhaps the most violent struggle between corporate power and laboring men in American history". 1
• In 1914, Woodrow Wilson instituted the first modern draft (fighting without pay), since only 73,000 people volunteered (indicating low support for the war), and plunged American workers into WWI, widely regarded as an imperialist war between European capitalist powers over boundaries, colonies, and spheres of influence in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, in which millions were killed and wounded. Around 900 anti-war socialists such as Eugene Debs were arrested and imprisoned under the Espionage Act for "obstructing the recruiting or enlistment service."1
• In 1919, A massacre in Centralia Washington occurred when the city-supported American legion attacked IWW labor organizers, killing 6 people. Frank Everett, one of the wobbly organizers, escaped, was dragged back to town behind an automobile, suspended him from a telegraph pole, then locked him in jail. That night, his jailhouse door was broken down, he was dragged out,put on the floor of a car, his genitals were cut off, and then he was taken to a bridge, lynched, and his body riddled with bullets. Seven wobblies were imprisoned and sentenced to 25-40 years by city officials. The primary reason for this was that the growing anti-war labor movement was seen as a threat to capitalists in Centralia. 1
• In 1919, An IWW general strike took place in Seattle, Washington, in which dissatisfied workers in several unions began a strike to gain higher wages after two years of World War I wage controls. The strike was put down by the City's mayor, who called in federal troops and nearby police. 39 labor leaders labeled as 'Bolsheviki' were arrested, with Seattle's mayor Ole Hanson taking credit for ending the strike. He resigned a few months later and toured the country giving lectures on the dangers of "domestic bolshevism", earning $38,000 in seven months, five times his annual salary as mayor. After WWI, the IWW was largely dismantled. 1
• In 1920, the Battle of Matewan was a shootout between coal miners and the Baldwin-Felts detective agency, after they attempted to evict striking miners from company houses. Shooting of undetermined origins resulted in the deaths of two coal miners, seven agents, and the mayor, with Sheriff Sid Hatfield siding with the miners to defend them. Afterward, when the charges against Hatfield and 22 others for the murder of Albert Felts were dismissed, Baldwin-Felts detectives assassinated Hatfield and his deputy Ed Chambers on August 1, 1921, on the steps of the McDowell County courthouse in Welch, West Virginia. None of the Baldwin-Felts detectives was ever convicted of Hatfield's assassination: they claimed they had acted "in self-defense". 1
• In 1921, The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest labor uprising in US history and one of the largest, best-organized, and most well-armed uprisings since the American Civil War, resulting in the US army killing 50-100 strikers, and arresting ~1000 more. Private police planes even dropped mustard gas bombs on the strikers. In Logan County, West Virginia, some 10,000 armed coal miners confronted 3,000 lawmen and strikebreakers, called the Logan Defenders,[ who were backed by coal mine operators during an attempt by the miners to unionize the southwestern West Virginia coalfields. The battle ended after approximately one million rounds were fired,[ and the United States Army intervened by presidential order.
• In 1922, the Great Railroad Strike of 1922 was a 400,000 person-strong nationwide strike of railroad workers, with police and armed company guards killing 10 workers or their family members. Troops bolstered armed company guards in their work protecting railroad property and aiding in the defense and transportation of strikebreakers, thereby working to undermine the strike effort.[ 1
• In the late 1920s, during prohibition, the US treasury department, under orders from Calvin Coolidge's government, intentionally poisoned alcohol supplies leading to the deaths of at least 700 people, with thousands more suffering from alcohol poisoning from methyl alcohol. Public health officials responded with shock. "The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol," said New York City medical examiner Charles Norris, "[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible." Most of those sickened and dying were those "who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff." The program was finally ended in 1933. 1
• The Wall Street Crash of 1929, caused by a capitalist speculative bubble throughout 1920s, hit working families the hardest, and along with the Dust Bowl, resulted in the Great Depression, which had devastating social and economic effects on working people everywhere. Unemployment skyrocketed to 25%, poverty and hunger increased, and many families were displaced and forced to leave their homes in search of work elsewhere. The worsening material conditions gave rise to a large movement of industrial unionism (mainly the AFL-CIO), and many large strikes in which workers fought to regain their livelihood. This growing revolutionary movement scared American capitalists into making concessions, and was only pacified by the promises of FDR's social-democratic New Deal, which had the effect of preserving American Capitalism, and dismantling the growing labor movement. 1
• In the 1930s, the Harlan County War, was a series of coal mining-related skirmishes, executions, bombings, and strikes that took place in Harlan County, Kentucky. The incidents involved coal miners and union organizers on one side, organizing their workplaces and fighting for better wages and working conditions, and coal firms and law enforcement officials on the other. 1
• In 1932, A Bonus Army consisting of 43,000 poor WWI veterans and their supporters gathered in Washington, D.C. in to demand cash-payment redemption of their service certificates. Four troops of cavalry, four companies of infantry, a machine gun squadron, and six tanks assembled near the White House. General Douglas MacArthur was in charge of the operation, Major Dwight Eisenhower his aide. George S. Patton was one of the officers. MacArthur led his troops down Pennsylvania Avenue, used tear gas to clear veterans out of the old buildings, and set the buildings on fire. Then the army moved across the bridge to Anacostia. Thousands of veterans,wives, children, began to run as the tear gas spread. The soldiers set fire to some of the huts, and soon the whole encampment was ablaze. When it was all over, two veterans had been shot to death,an eleven-week-old baby had died, an eight-year-old boy was partially blinded by gas, two police had fractured skulls, and a thousand veterans were injured by gas. 1
• In 1934, sailors in San Francisco began a general strike known as the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike. Police attempted to break up the strike by shooting tear gas into the crowd, and charging the protesters on horseback. Police then fired shotguns and revolvers into the crowd, killing 6 workers, in an event known as "Bloody Thursday". A state of emergency was declared, and the governor sent in the california national guard and federal army soldiers with machine gun mounted trucks to assist vigilante strike-breakers. Over 150 workers were arrested. 1
• In 1934, in the midst of the worsening conditions of the great depression, 400,000 textile workers from New England, the Mid-Atlantic states and the U.S. Southern states, went on strike for 22 days. Deputies and armed strikebreakers in South Carolina fired on pickets, killing seven, wounding twenty others. State authorities aided by the national guard suppressed the strikes, killing and arresting dozens of picketers and strikers across the nation. Governor Blackwood of South Carolina called out the National Guard with orders to shoot to kill any picketers who tried to enter the mills. Other governors soon followed suit. Nate Shaw, a black alabama sharecropper on strike, was shot and arrested in late 1932, and served twelve years in an Alabama prison.1
• In 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act remains an anti-worker law intended to dismantle and break up labor unions (around 1/4 workers were in unions at that time). It was passed by capitalists as a response to the post-WW2 strike wave of 1945-46, as more than 5 million workers went on strike during the labor upsurge of returning soldiers. The Taft–Hartley Act prohibited jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. It also required union officers to sign non-communist affidavits with the government. Union shops were heavily restricted, and states were allowed to pass right-to-work laws that ban agency fees. Furthermore, the executive branch of the federal government could obtain legal strikebreaking injunctions if an impending or current strike imperiled the national health or safety. The amendments required unions and employers to give 80 days' notice to each other and to certain state and federal mediation bodies before they may undertake strikes or other forms of economic action in pursuit of a new collective bargaining agreement. Anyone opposed to the act was labeled a communist, in the rising red scare initiated by McCarthy. 1
• From 1947-56, beginning with a 1947 Truman Executive order that required all federal civil services employees to be screen for "loyalty", a second Red Scare took place with senator Joseph McCarthy at its head, accusing large numbers of people of being communist infiltrators and homosexuals, resulting in hundreds of imprisonments and some 10,000-12,000 people accused losing their jobs. The primary targets of such suspicions were government employees, those in the entertainment industry, educators and union activists, who McCarthy publicly targeted through the anti-communist House of Un-American Activies Committee (HUAC) hearings or public statements. The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs.[ In many cases simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired.[ In the context of the Cold War, McCarthy framed homosexuality as a dangerous, contagious social disease that posed a potential threat to state security.[ 1
• In May, 1970, the Ohio national guard shot and killed 4 college students, and wounded 9 others in the Kent State Shootings. Some of the students who were shot had been protesting the Cambodian Bombing Campaign, which President Richard Nixon announced during a television address on April 30. Other students who were shot had been walking nearby or observing the protest from a distance. There was a significant national response to the shootings: hundreds of universities, colleges, and high schools closed throughout the US due to a student strike of 4 million students, and the event further affected public opinion, at an already socially contentious time, over the role of the United States in the Vietnam War. 1
• In 1981, the union PATCO (Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization), went on strike for better working conditions, pay, and a shorter work week. The union was decertified, declared illegal, and the strike broken by the Reagan Administration. It is considered one of the last death throes of the US labor movement. 1
• In 1983, a mostly latino workforce lead the 3-year long Arizona Copper Mine Strike of 1983, in which the police, national guard, and Arizona governor assisted in one of the largest strikebreaking incidents of the 1980s, ending with the Phelps Dodge Corporation replacing most of the workers and decertifying the unions. Miners were subject to undercover surveillance by the Arizona Criminal Intelligence Systems Agency, to identify strikers engaged in violence, with the governor sending 325 National Guard soldiers to Morenci, and increasing the number of state policemen there to 425. Meanwhile, the local government passed injunctions limiting both picketing and demonstrations at the mine. The Arizona copper mine strike would later become a symbol of defeat for American unions
• In 1985-86, Hormel workers went on strike in Austin Minnesota, due to a cutwage from $10.69 to $6.50 and significantly reduced benefits. After six months, a significant number of strikebreakers crossed the picket line, provoking riots in Austin. On January 21, 1986, the Governor of Minnesota, Rudy Perpich, called in the National Guard to protect the strikebreakers. The strike ended in June 1986, after lasting 10 months. Over 700 of the workers did not return to their jobs, refusing to cross the picket line. In solidarity with those workers, the boycott of Hormel products continued for some time. Ultimately, however, the company did succeed in hiring new workers at significantly lower wages. 1
• In 1988, a founder of Food Not Bombs, Keith McHenry, was one of nine volunteers arrested for sharing food and literature at Golden Gate Park on August 15, 1988.[ In the following years, Keith was arrested over 100 times for serving free food in city parks and spent over 500 nights in jail. He faced 25 years to life in prison under the California Three Strikes Law but in 1995, Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Commission brought about his release.[ 1
• In 1988, Police charged a tent city/homeless center in Tompkins square, arresting and clubbing protesters, injuring 35 people and arresting 9 more. "It's time to bring a little law and order back to the park and restore it to the legitimate members of the community," said Captain McNamara. "We don't want to get into a situation where we under-police something like this and it turns into a fiasco." Protesters held up signs saying "Gentrification is Class War". 1
• In 1996, Congress signed into law the deceptively titled Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which capitalized on a demonization of the poor as being lazy (in reality there was a lack of jobs, and low-wage work proved unable to sustain most families), in order to dismantle welfare benefits. Its aim was to force poor families receiving federal cash benefits (many of them single mothers with children) to go to work, by cutting off their benefits after two years, limiting lifetime benefits to five years, and allowing people without children to get food stamps for only three months in any three-year period. 1
• From 1980s to the present day, Justice for Janitors Campaigns (a group fighting against the low wages and minimal health-care coverage given to janitors worldwide) in the US have been the target of police arrests and crackdowns. On November 20, 2006, a few days after dozens of strikers and their supporters were arrested by Houston police while engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience
• Since January, 2013, over 21 US cities have enacted legislation to restrict giving food to the homeless, such as requiring expensive permits to discourage food donations in public spaces, or direct police intervention. In Tampa FL, on January 9th, 2017, police arrested 7 volunteers of Food Not Bombs and 1 homeless person to prevent them from distributing food. 1
• In 2014 in Flint, Michigan, the city exposed over 100,000 residents to high levels of lead in the drinking water due to insufficient water treatment in the Flint Water Crisis. A federal state of emergency was declared in January 2016 and Flint residents were instructed to use only bottled or filtered water for drinking, cooking, cleaning, and bathing. At least six have died from Legionnaires disease from the poisoning. As of 2017, the crisis is ongoing. Residents are instructed to continue to use bottled or filtered water until all the lead pipes have been replaced, which is expected to be completed no sooner than 2020. 1
• In March 2015, former US Marshal and DEA agent Matthew Fogg reported in an interview that DEA agents were instructed not to enforce drug laws in richer, white areas. His superior state, “You know, if we go out there and start messing with those folks, they know judges, they know lawyers, they know politicians. You start locking their kids up, somebody’s going to jerk our chain.” He said they’re going to call us on it, and before you know it, they’re going to shut us down, and there goes your overtime. 1
• In January, 2016, Philip “Mitch” Brailsford, a police officer in Mesa Arizona, killed Daniel Shaver, after someone called in a report of him holding a gun (which turned out to be a pellet gun), out of a hotel window. Brailsford was charged for second-degree murder, and acquitted by a jury a year later. After his acquittal, the court released the graphic bodycam footage showing Daniel Shaver crawling on his hands and knees and begging for his life before he was brutally murdered. After giving contradictory commands, such as telling Daniel to cross his legs, put his face down in the carpet, put his hands behind his head, and crawl towards them, the officer said, "I’m not here to be tactical and diplomatic with you. You listen. You obey... If you move, we’re going to consider that a threat and we are going to deal with it and you may not survive it".1, 2
• In January 2017, LA county sherriff Neil Kimball, assigned to investigate a sexual assault against a 14 year old girl, tied up and raped the victim, then attempted to intimidate the witness and the family from coming forward, even threatening them at some point during the horrific ordeal. He faces a maximum of only 3 years in prison, and will likely serve less.
• On July 19th, 2017, Police arrested 155 demonstrators on capitol hill, for protesting a republican-lead health care dismantling initiative by Mitch McConnell, by occupying republican offices. Authorities said demonstrators were warned “to cease and desist with their unlawful demonstration activities” before police made arrests. Police arrested 80 people for the same charge on July 10th. 1
• On August 15th, 2017, Police arrested 7 anti-racist activists for toppling a confederate statue in Durham, North Carolina. From New York to California, demonstrations have been organized since the death of Heather Heyer, who was protesting a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. Many demonstrators connected with each other through public Facebook events. 1
• On December 24th, 2017, Police officers shot and killed an unarmed suspected car thief, Amanda lee jones, and a 6 year old boy, Kameron Prescott, in Bexar County Texas. Kameron Prescott is the youngest and 957th person killed by US police in 2017. Bexar County Sheriff Salazar is quoted as saying, “Right now, what I’m dealing with is a tragic accident that led to the death of this young man.” Young man was used instead of 6 year old boy.1,2
• On December 28th, 2017, Police in Wichita Kansas murdered an innocent man, 28-year-old Andrew Finch who was the recipient of "swatting" (where someone falsely reports an emergency to draw police to an address). The bodycam footage shows that the killing was entirely unjustified. The "swatter", Tyler Rai Bariss, has a long history of such pranks, 1,2
• In January 2018 in Camden New Jersey, a 33 year old police Detective Rafael Martinez Jr raped and impregnated a 15-year old girl.. He negotiated a plea deal in which he only serves 5 months of probation, with no prison time. 1
• In 2019, a Phoenix Arizona resident, Jim Stauffer, learned that the body of his deceased mother, Doris, who died in 2014, was one of many bodies sold to the US army used for "blast testing". He had checked "no" on the paperwork for medical tests involving explosions. “She was then supposedly strapped in a chair on some sort of apparatus, and a detonation took place underneath her to basically kind of get an idea of what the human body goes through when a vehicle is hit by an IED.” Stauffer is one of many plaintiffs named in the suit against Biologic Resource Center and its owner Stephen Gore. Gore pleaded guilty to running an illegal enterprise in 2015, but was sentenced to serve probation.
• In February 2019, an 11 year old was arrested by police after refusing to say the pledge of allegiance. The teacher then asked “Why if it was so bad here he did not go to another place to live,” “They brought me here,” the boy replied. Polk County Public Schools spokesman Kyle Kennedy insisted the 11-year-old “was arrested after becoming disruptive and refusing to follow repeated instructions by school staff and law enforcement.” The sixth grader was then taken to a juvenile detention center, charged with disrupting a school function and resisting arrest without violence.
• On December 5th, 2019, police opened fire on a busy highway in Miramar Florida, while in pursuit of 2 jewel thieves who stole $3k of jewelry, killing the kidnapped UPS driver, the two thieves, and an innocent 70-year-old bystander in traffic. The graphic video shows complete negligence for the hostage, and surrounding drivers, all to recover some stolen jewelry. On a GoFundMe page that had raised more than $100,000 by Friday evening, Roy Ordonez wrote that his brother, the UPS driver, had been gunned “down like a criminal by the Florida police.” He asked people to share the fundraising page to “make people aware of trigger-happy police officers.” “They could have killed many more people, could have been one of your loved ones,” Roy Ordonez wrote. “Please don’t let my brother’s death be for nothing. Police need to be held accountable.”
• FBI, and local police routinely ally with racists to target left wing activists. One conference on "radical left wings gangs in america", fittingly enough is held yearly in Quebec City, home of far right groups like La Muete, whose members include knife attacks, and the Quebec city mosque shooting where a gunman killed 6 people during prayer. Federal agents performed a key role in getting Nazi and Klan formations to collaborate with police, and each other.
• In the modern day, 20,000 to 40,000 people die every year because of lack of universal health care or health insurance. On average, that's 300,000 over the last decade. 1
• Although the US economy produces more than enough food to feed those in poverty, UNICEF, RESULTS, and Bread for the World estimate that 15 million people die each year from preventable poverty, of whom 11 million are children under the age of five. In addition, The US has a comparatively terrible social support system to fight poverty and prevent deaths: "approximately 245,000 deaths in the United States in the year 2000 were attributable to low levels of education, 176,000 to racial segregation, 162,000 to low social support, 133,000 to individual-level poverty, 119,000 to income inequality, and 39,000 to area-level poverty" (sources). That is 2 million people every 10 years in the US alone.1
• Rising Housing prices from real estate speculation have skyrocketed to the point that an epidemic of hidden homeless has arisen: families who live in their cars, or on the street, but who still work. In most US cities, such as LA, it's illegal to sleep in your car overnight. 1/3rd of all renters pay half their income towards landlords. Even in mid-size cities like Boise Idaho are experiencing a surge of homelessness as of 2019.
• In addition to artificial housing crises, the US has high numbers of homeless, despite the fact that there are, ~6 houses for every homeless person. Instead of human planning and intelligent distribution of resources, the US ruling class upholds the market as the "the most efficient way of allocating resources".
• US conservatives and authorities have systematically dismantled labor unions over the past few decades, and by 2011 fewer than 7% of employees in the private sector belong to unions. The number of major work stoppages fell by 97% from 381 in 1970 to 187 in 1980 to only 11 in 2010., The accumulating weaknesses were exposed when President Ronald Reagan—a former union president—broke the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike in 1981, dealing a major blow to unions. Union membership among workers in private industry shrank dramatically, though after 1970 there was growth in employees unions of federal, state and local governments., The intellectual mood in the 1970s and 1980s favored deregulation and free competition. Numerous industries were deregulated, including airlines, trucking, railroads and telephones, over the objections of the unions involved. Republicans, using conservative think tanks as idea farms, began to push through legislative blueprints to curb the power of public employee unions as well as eliminate business regulations., Union weakness in the Southern United States undermined unionization and social reform throughout the nation, and such weakness is largely responsible for the anaemic U.S. welfare state.,1
• US authorities have a long history of murdering striking workers fighting for better conditions, dating back to the 1800s, up to the present day. According to a study in 1969, the United States has had the bloodiest and most violent labor history of any industrial nation in the world, and there have been few industries which have been immune. A long list of these deaths and disputes can be found here, and this article on the Labor History of the US.
• An analysis of 2016 data showed that 8 men control as much wealth as half of the world's population. Those 8 men are Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Carlos Slim, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Amancio Ortega, Larry Ellison and Michael Bloomberg, and are collectively worth $426 billion. 1

Prisoners

• Many companies in the 1800s were guilty of using prison laborers, such as the Tennesee Coal Iron and Railroad company. In 1891, the prison workers struck, overpowered the guards, and other neighboring unions came to their aid.
• In September, 1971, prison guards killed George Jackson, a black Marxist and member of the Black Panthers in San Quentin prison (who had served 10 years of an indeterminate prison sentence for a $70 robbery), after he attempted to free himself and other inmates. Outrage over this, terrible prison conditions, and mistreatment by white prison guards, caused the Attica Prison Riot, in which 33 inmates and 10 prison guards were killed, and sparked dozens of prison riots across the country. In Attica, 100 percent of the guards were white, prisoners spent fourteen to sixteen hours a day in their cells, their mail was read, their reading material restricted, their visits from families conducted through a mesh screen, their medical care disgraceful, 75% were there as a result of plea bargaining, and their parole system inequitable.
• In the 1978 case Houchins v. KQED, Inc. the supreme court ruled that the news media do not have guaranteed rights of access to jails and prisons. It ruled also that prison authorities could forbid inmates to speak to one another, assemble, or spread literature about the formation of a prisoners' union.1
• The Crime bill of 1994, signed into law by Bill Clinton, increased the size of the US prison industry, and dealt with the problem of crime by emphasizing punishment, not prevention. It extended the death penalty to a whole range of criminal offenses, and provided $30 billion for the building of new prisons, to crack down on "super predators", a term used by Hillary Clinton to refer to remorseless juvenile criminals. 1
• On May 23rd, 2014, a mentally ill inmate at a Dade county correctional facility near Miami FL was tortured to death by prison guards. Darren Rainey was serving a two year sentence for cocaine possession when he was forced into a locked shower by prison guards as punishment for defecating in his cell, says one inmate. Once Rainey was inside the shower, guards blasted him with scalding hot water as he begged for his life. Investigators determined that there is not enough evidence to charge the guards. 1
• On Oct 25th, 2014, a mentally ill inmate, Michael Anthony Kerr, at the Alexander Correctional Institution in Taylorsville, NC, died of thirst after being denied water during a 35-day solitary confinement. Prison officials have said since Kerr’s death six months ago that they would investigate the events that led to his death, but no report has been issued and officials have not said when one would be. 1
• A black-site interrogation warehouse in Chicago called Homan Square, is notorious for sexual abuse, torture, and dissappearances of its prisoners. The main interrogator, Richard Zuley, applied torture techniques he learned at Guantanamo bay at Homan Square1, 2, 3
• A photo surfaced of a November 2019 training class for prison guards in west virginia, showing 34 trainees doing a nazi salute. Only 3 people have been fired. A large number of prison workers, and populations in prison-towns, are white supremacists.
• On Jan 26th, In Mississippi state penitentiary, an inmate was found hanging in his cell, in a string of deaths in the prison. This is the 12th death within a single month.
• The US system of bail (the practice of releasing suspects before their hearing for money paid to the court) has been criticized as monetizing justice, favoring rich, white collar suspects, over poorer people unable to pay for their release. 1
• A grand jury is a special legal proceeding in which a prosecutor may hold a trial before the real one, where ~20 jurors listen to evidence and decide whether criminal charges should be brought. Grand juries are rarely made up of a jury of the defendant's peers, and defendants do not have the right to an attorney, making them essentially show-trials for the prosecution, who often find ways of using grand jury testimony to intimidate the accused, such as leaking stories about grand jury testimony to the media to defame the accused. In the murders of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, all of whom were unarmed and killed by police in 2014, grand juries decided in all 3 cases not to pursue criminal trials against the officers. The US and Liberia are the only countries where grand juries are still legal. 1
• Over 90% of criminal trials in the US are settled not by a judge or jury, but with plea bargaining, a system where the defendant agrees to plead guilty in return for a concession from the prosecutor. It has been statistically shown to benefit prosecutors, who "throw the book" at defendants by presenting a slew of charges, manipulating their fear, who in turn accept a lesser charge, regardless of their innocence, in order to avoid a worst outcome. The number of potentially innocent prisoners coerced into accepting a guilty plea is impossible to calculate. Plea bargaining can present a dilemma to defense attorneys, in that they must choose between vigorously seeking a good deal for their present client, or maintaining a good relationship with the prosecutor for the sake of helping future clients. Plea bargaining is forbidden in most European countries. John Langbein has equated plea bargaining to medieval torture: "There is, of course, a difference between having your limbs crushed if you refuse to confess, or suffering some extra years of imprisonment if you refuse to confess, but the difference is of degree, not kind. Plea bargaining, like torture, is coercive. Like the medieval Europeans, the Americans are now operating a procedural system that engages in condemnation without adjudication." 1
• In the present day, ICE (U.S._Immigration_and_Customs_Enforcement), the police tasked with immigration enforcement, operates over 200 prison camps, housing over 31,000 undocumented people deemed "aliens", 20,000 of which have no criminal convictions, in the US system of immigration detention. The camps include forced labor (often with contracts from private companies), poor conditions, lack of rights (since the undocumented aren't considered citizens), and forced deportations, often splitting up families. Detainees are often held for a year without trial, with antiquated court procedures pushing back court dates for months, encouraging many to accept immediate deportation in the hopes of being able to return faster than the court can reach a decision, but forfeiting legal status, in a cruel system of coercion. 1, 2
• The War On Drugs, a policy of arrest and imprisonment targeting minorities, first initiated by Nixon, has over the years created a monstrous system of mass incarceration, resulting in the imprisonment of 1.5 million people each year, with the US having the most prisoners per capita of any nation. One in five black Americans will spend time behind bars due to drug laws. The war has created a permanent underclass of impoverished people who have few educational or job opportunities as a result of being punished for drug offenses, in a vicious cycle of oppression. , 2
• Ramping up since the 1980s, the term prison–industrial complex is used to attribute the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies. Such groups include corporations that contract prison labor, construction companies, surveillance technology vendors, companies that operate prison food services and medical facilities, private probation companies, lawyers, and lobby groups that represent them. Activist groups such as the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) have argued that the prison-industrial complex is perpetuating a flawed belief that imprisonment is an effective solution to social problems such as homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy. 1
• The US currently operates a system of slave labor camps, including at least 54 prison farms involved in agricultural slave labor. Outside of agricultural slavery, Federal Prison Industries operates a multi-billion dollar industry with ~ 52 prison factories , where prisoners produce furniture, clothing, circuit boards, products for the military, computer aided design services, call center support for private companies. 1, 2, 3

Pervasive

• The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited naturalization to immigrants who were "free white persons of good character." It thus excluded American Indians, indentured servants, slaves, free blacks, and later Asians. 1
• The Alien and Sedition Acts, signed into law in 1798, originally made it harder for an immigrant to become a citizen, but was later used during WWII by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to imprison Japanese, German, and Italian aliens during World War II, with continued use after the war by Truman to imprison and deport people. 1
• The Immigration Act of 1924 was a United States federal law that limited the annual number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States as of the 1890 census, down from the 3% cap set by the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which used the Census of 1910. The law was primarily aimed at further restricting immigration of Southern Europeans and Eastern Europeans, especially Italians and Eastern European Jews. In addition, it severely restricted the immigration of Africans and outright banned the immigration of Arabs and Asians. According to the U.S. Department of State Office of the Historian the purpose of the act was "to preserve the ideal of American homogeneity". The new quotas for immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe were so restrictive that in 1924 there were more Italians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Lithuanians, Hungarians, Portuguese, Romanians, Spaniards, Jews, Chinese, and Japanese that left the United States than those who arrived as immigrants.1
• In 1933, The Business Plot was a political conspiracy in the United States. Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler claimed that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization with Butler as its leader and use it in a coup d'état to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1934, Butler testified before the United States House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the "McCormack-Dickstein Committee") on these claims. No one was prosecuted.1
• Prior to WWII, under the banner of "Fitter Families for the future", many US states practiced eugenics, in the form of forced sterilizations, euthanasia, and better baby contests. After the eugenics movement was well established in the United States, it spread to Germany. California eugenicists began producing literature promoting eugenics and sterilization and sending it overseas to German scientists and medical professionals. By 1933, California had subjected more people to forceful sterilization than all other U.S. states combined. The forced sterilization program engineered by the Nazis was partly inspired by California's. The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs, including the one that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.
• From 1945-70s, Scientists working under the Manhattan Project and the US atomic energy commission injected hundreds of US citizens with plutonium, including children and pregnant women. In Nashville, pregnant women were given radioactive mixtures. In Cincinnati, some 200 patients were irradiated over a period of 15 years. In Chicago, 102 people received injections of strontium and caesium solutions. In Massachusetts, 57 developmentally disabled children were fed oatmeal laced with radioactive tracers in an experiment sponsored by MIT and the Quaker Oats Company. In none of these cases were the subjects informed about the nature of the procedures, and thus could not have provided informed consent. During atomic testing, US soldiers and families who lived downwind from the blast were deliberately exposed to nuclear bomb blasts and radiation. 1>
• In 1950, the US Navy secretly infected over 800,000 residents of the San Fransisco Bay Area with Serratia marcescens, a human pathogen known to cause urinary and respiratory infections, during Operation Sea-Spray, in one of the largest human experiments in history. The residents of the area were not informed, making the event a serious violation of the Nuremberg Code on medical ethics. In the following month, 11 residents checked in at a local hospital with a rare urinary tract infection (one patient, Edward J. Nevin died as a result), and the area saw a spike in pneumonia cases. The military tested biological agents on US citizens in at least six other similar tests causing a variety of symptoms such as whooping cough throughout the 50s and 60s in Florida, the Midwest, New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. 1
• In 1953, the CIA begins Project MKUltra, a human testing program. Experiments on humans were intended to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations and torture, in order to weaken the individual to force confessions through mind control. MKUltra used numerous methodologies to manipulate people's mental states and alter brain functions, including the surreptitious administration of drugs (especially LSD) and other chemicals, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, as well as other forms of psychological torture. The scope was broad, with research undertaken at 80 institutions, including 44 colleges and universities, as well as hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies. Many subjects died under testing, or committed suicide. Others such as Frank Olson were murdered for threatening to expose the program. 1
• Beginning in August, 1956, COINTELPRO (a portmanteau derived from COunter INTELligence PROgram) was a series of covert, and often illegal, projects conducted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) aimed at surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting and disrupting domestic political organizations. COINTELPRO resources targeted groups and individuals that the FBI deemed subversive, including anti-Vietnam War organizers, activists of the Civil Rights Movement or Black Power movement (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Black Panther Party), feminist organizations, anti-colonial movements (such as Puerto Rican independence groups like the Young Lords), and a variety of organizations that were part of the broader New Left. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover ordered FBI agents to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, neutralize or otherwise eliminate" the activities of these movements and especially their leaders
• In January 1961, the US air force accidentally dropped two nuclear bombs on North Carolina, each of them 250x the strength of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima, and one of them came very close to detonating. This was covered up for nearly 50 years. In 2013, the US finally admitted the coverup and released the classified documents. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara stated: "By the slightest margin of chance, literally the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted." The estimated death tolls would have been 28,000 dead with 26,000 people injured.
• In 1968, the CIA implemented Operation CHAOS, a spying program targeting Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, Women Strike for Peace, and Ramparts Magazine, in an effort to tie vietnam anti-war protests to foreign intervention. CIA agents went undercover as student radicals to spy on and disrupt campus organizations protesting the Vietnam War. In total, Operation CHAOS contained files on 7,200 Americans, and a computer index totaling 300,000 civilians and approximately 1,000 groups, with no foreign interventionism found. The operation was halted after the watergate break-in, and exposed a few years later. 1
• In 1976, the US tested Agent White, a powerful pesticide developed by Dow Chemical, in Cherokee county, North Carolina. Within 3 years, the rate of cancer deaths leapt to 60% above the national average.
• In 1987, FBI agent Jack Ryan was arrested for refusing to investigate non-violent activists. He lost his job in September 1987 ten months short of retirement. He was thus ineligible for a full pension and had to live in a homeless shelter. In a report by the LA Times, he stated his belief that the Bureau could reinstate him to a position which would not conflict with his personal beliefs that U.S. involvement in Central America is "violent, illegal and immoral."1
• In 2004, during a protest at the republican national convention, over 1,800 people were arrested. They were held at Hudson Pier Depot at Pier 57 on the Hudson River, a three-story, block-long pier that has been converted into a temporary prison, described as overcrowded, dirty, and contaminated with oil and asbestos. People reported having suffered from smell, bad ventilation, and even chemical burns and rashes. In 2014, the city was forced to pay $6.4 million to 430 individual plaintiffs. $6.6 million was paid to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by 1,200 additional people. 1,2
• The Espionage Act, a federal law that allows imprisonment of anyone who interferes with military operations or recruitment, was used to imprison socialists and dissidents for speaking out against WWI, and involuntary conscription, as well as modern activists speaking out against the US police state. In 1919, Eugene V. Debs, a popular socialist candidate for president was imprisoned for his anti-war speeches. Among those charged with offences under the Act are German-American socialist congressman and newspaper editor Victor L. Berger, labor leader and four time Socialist Party of America candidate, Eugene V. Debs, anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, former Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society president Joseph Franklin Rutherford, communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Cablegate whistleblower Chelsea Manning, and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden.
• Between 1850 and 2011, according to the World Resources Institute, the United States was the source of 27 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions causing global warming; the European Union, 25 percent; China, 11 percent; Russia, 8 percent; and Japan, 4 percent. These emissions have led to the emergence of large-scale environmental hazards to human health, such as extreme weather, ozone depletion, increased danger of wildland fires, loss of biodiversity, stresses to food-producing systems and the global spread of infectious diseases. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 160,000 deaths, since 1950, are directly attributable to climate change. Many believe this to be a conservative estimate. To date, much less research has been conducted on the impacts of climate change on health, food supply, economic growth, migration, security, societal change, and public goods, such as drinking water, than on the geophysical changes related to global warming.1,2
• In 2010, Chelsea Manning was imprisoned under the espionage act for a series of leaks which embarrassed the US government, including the July 12, 2007 Baghdad airstrike, Afghan War documents, Iraq War documents leak, US diplomatic cables leak, and the Guantanamo Bay files leak. The leak was, in Manning's Words: "possibly one of the most significant documents of our time, removing the fog of war and revealing the true nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare". 1
• The 2010 US diplomatic cables leak by Chelsea Manning revealed a pervasive policy of using US ambassadors as spies, supporting dictatorships, spying on the UN, strong-arming for US companies abroad, and disrupting nuclear disarmament talks. The scope of these leaks touches every country the US has a relationship with, and they are better detailed here.
• Since 2012, the US military has a state-run and funded astroturfing campaign to manipulate public opinion online, and spread pro-US propaganda through government funded sockpuppets, called Operation Earnest Voice.
• In 2013, Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor, leaked secret NSA documents exposing a world-wide network of surveillance lead by the US, in the Global surveillance disclosures. Some NSA programs revealed were PRISM (which collects the e-mail, voice, text and video chats of foreigners and an unknown number of Americans from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple and other tech giants), UPSTREAM, in which the NSA made deals with fiberoptic undersea cable companies to spy on emails, web pages, and phone calls across continents, GENIE, in which smartphone manufacturers of iphone and android bundled spying programs, and XKeyScore, which allowed NSA agents to help build a "fingerprint" of a target by watching their emails, traffic to and from website, and track associations. The Washington Post revealed that the NSA has been tracking the locations of mobile phones from all over the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones. In the process of doing so, the NSA collects more than five billion records of phone locations on a daily basis. This enables NSA analysts to map cellphone owners' relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phoneusers who cross their paths. Australia (ASD), Britain (GCHQ), Canada (CSEC), Denmark (PET), France (DGSE), Germany (BND), Italy (AISE), the Netherlands (AIVD), Norway (NIS), Spain (CNI), Switzerland (NDB), Singapore (SID) as well as Israel (ISNU), were found to be spying on their own citizens, and sharing that data with countries and businesses 1
• Despite claims from US political figures that they "support the troops", there is a 100+ year long history of experimentation on US troops —from nuclear tests to psychotropic drugs—as well as knowingly exposing them to deadly poisons, from sarin gas to Agent Orange. Most damning is that the hundreds of thousands of veterans seeking help from the government for the side-effects are always met with lies and denial. 1
• In 2017, Wikileaks published a series of CIA leaks titled Vault 7. The files, dated from 2013–2016, include details on software capabilities of the agency, such as the ability to compromise smart televisions smartphones, including Apple's iPhone and phones running Google's Android operating system, as well as operating systems such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. By adding malware to the Android operating system, the agency can gain access to secure communications made on a device. A program called "Weeping Angel", is claimed to be able to use Samsung smart televisions as covert listening devices, allowing an infected smart television to be used "as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the internet to a covert C.I.A. server" even if it appears to be off. 1
• In June 2017, the FBI arrested Reality Winner, an NSA contractor, shortly after The Intercept published an article describing Russian attempts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, based on classified National Security Agency (NSA) documents leaked to them anonymously. She is currently in jail for "willful retention and transmission of national defense information", and was denied bail. 1
• On July 23rd, 2017, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against Washington DC police, after police sexually abused protestors arrested during Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, when hundreds were arrested. A complaint by four plaintiffs charges officers stripped them, grabbed their genitalia and inserted fingers into their anuses while other officers laughed. One of the plaintiffs, photojournalist Shay Horse, said, "I felt like they were using molestation and rape as punishment. They used those tactics to inflict pain and misery on people who are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty." In a statement, D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department promised an investigation but defended its officers' actions, saying all arrests on January 20 were proper. In December, 2017, all the charges against the J20 protesters were dropped. 1
• The Paradise papers, first made public on November 5th, 2017, are a leak of 1.4 TB of electronic documents relating to offshore investments, detailing the secrets of the world's elites hidden wealth. The leaks implicated hundreds of the wealthiest people and companies on the planet in financial schemes. According to the papers, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Disney, Uber, Nike, Walmart, Allianz, Siemens, McDonald's, and Yahoo! are among the corporations that own offshore companies, as well as Allergan, the manufacturer of Botox. Some people implicated in tax avoidance schemes are Prince Charles and Queen Elizabeth II, President of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, Rex Tillerson, Paul Allen (Microsoft), Bono, Carl Icahn, Sheldon Adelson, George Soros, and 3 former canadian prime ministers.1, 2
• Police repression against minorities and the poor have been increasing in the last few years, leading to the establishing of several online databases, such as this one by the washington post documenting shooting-deaths by police, and killedbypolice.net. US police shot and killed 952 people in 2017, 963 people in 2016, and 991 in 2015.
• In August 2019, while awaiting an impending trial, infamous predator and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, was found "suicided" in his cell, after being placed on suicide watch. Epstein was a close associate of two US presidents (Clinton and Trump), British Royalty (Prince Andrew), and many global celebrities. Authorities claim he killed himself after guards were absent from the area. His death ensures that no further investigation will ensue, uncovering underage prostitution rackets used by the world's rich and powerful.
• In 2020, it was revealed that the Swiss company, Crypto AG, which provided secure communications services to ~120 governments throughout the 20th century, was secretly ran by the CIA and West German Intelligence. The CIA and later NSA were able to read encrypted communications for many countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Italy, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Jordan and South Korea.