The police made their OWN decision to cut the gang task force- they did that out of spite to avoid admitting they need to make real change and to admit they need to stop training their recruits to automatically freak out and go into "DefCon 1" every time they see a black person- even if they would remain perfectly calm and willing to listen to reason when they encountered a white person doing the exact same thing or being in the exact same situation.
Also, the City Council analogy doesn't work- we ELECT City Councils and thus have at least the theoretical possibility of holding them accountable. The police oppose any real efforts to change anything, and every police guild in the country categorically rejects the idea-and will always reject the idea- that anything in their treatment of people of color needs to change. They will only change if FORCED to change- there's no good reason to accept their idea that the public should have no means of holding them accountable, and there is no further justification for preserving qualified immunity for police who kill in the line of duty.
BTW nobody "venerates" everything the Cuban government does- what some people say is that there is no good reason to get rid of the non-damaging, non-repressive parts of what has been done in Cuba since 1959- release all remaining political prisioners, yes, end all remaining persecution of gays, yes, allow free speech and opposition parties, yes, but there's no good reason to replace free university education and healthcare with the overpriced, corporate American models. The last things Cuba would ever need is anything that is run the way American and multinational corporations do things., or the return of the arrogant, bigoted, vindictive Miami exiles to the mansions in Havana that they only owned because they'd screwed over the workers.
As to Venezuela, it's a mixed bag, but since the people of that country freely re-elected the Maduro government a couple of years ago- I'm personally no big fan of the guy.- isn't it time for the U.S. to let go of the idea that it's our place to force every other country in the Americas to make its economic system conform to ours, to make each of those countries go through the brutality of the austerity model we put ourselves through-with no benefit to anyone but the rich- in the Eighties, or what we imposed in far more brutal forms on Jamaica through the IMF in the Seventies or in Chile when we destabilized an elected socialist government and replaced it with a military junta that nobody, including most of the opponents of that government, had ever wanted put in power.
It's also worth noting that imposing the kind of austerity those of you who back "classical liberalism" and "economic libertarianism" imposed in the former Stalinist countries of what had been Eastern European has a lot to do with the fact that Poland and Hungary are now run by regimes that are all-but-fascist. Without the trauma of "shock therapy" economics- an approach its own author has now renounced- it is very unlikely that either of those countries would have governance like that now.
And Patrice Culours never described herself as "A trained Marxist"
What she said was that she was trained BY Marxist- not that she was trained to BE a Marxist- she said they trained her in community organizing, which is an entirely legitimate and decent concept which has no connection whatsoever with the extinct betrayals of socialism known as Stalinism or Maoism-ideologies that traditionally supported EXPANDING the police, not abolishing it, btw.
Finally, Marxism is simply a system of analysis- it is NOT synonymous with "Marxism-Leninism". I.E., Stalinism-Maoism, and calling oneself a "Marxist"_ I'm not, btw, I'm a nonviolent anarcho-syndicalist- is nowhere close to being an accomplice to the Great Purges, the Pact, or the Cultural Revolution.
What defines the Left, including the radical Left, in THIS century, is an absolute rejection of every brutal, repressive choice Stalin or Mao ever made. All of that is in the past, that those of this century's Left-including the handful who wear the hammer and sickle, all of whom are Trotskyists and thus part of the most anti-Stalinist Marxist tradition that ever existed- condemn all of that, and recognize that none of that is necessary to create anything even remotely resembling socialism.
So give it a rest- iif you're antisocialist, fine, you have the right to be- but it's ridiculous to use the sort of paranoid rhetoric that makes it sound as if we're back in 1961 and the Berlin Wall has just been bricked into place.
