ATLANTA, GA, February 15–Rejecting much of the bosses’ liberalism over the past year, the working class has taken direct action against the building of Cop City, destroying vehicles, damaging banks, and erecting a tent city to try to stop the construction of this urban warfare  training center. Within the context of 19 protesters being arrested and charged with terrorism,  the Atlanta Police Department (APD) murdered Latin worker Manuel “Tortugita'' Teran during a raid to clear the encampment.
After weeks of militant multiracial fightback led by Black and Latin workers, the APD released body camera footage of the killing. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Atlanta’s killer kkkops, and politicians claim that Tort shot cops first, and thus, “deserved” to die. However, Tort’s family in Panama and friends in Atlanta called it: the police shot each other first and used it as ammunition to shoot at workers occupying the forest and killed Tort with 13 shots in the crossfire.
For the last two years, working-class fighters have occupied the Atlanta forest in protest of what fighters call ‘Cop City,’ a 85-acre $90 million police training facility through an Atlanta forest. Police forces from Atlanta to Israel will learn how to squelch working-class rebellion, especially any fightback led by communist fighters like Progressive Labor Party (PLP).
With bosses in the U.S, China, and Russia ramping up for World War III, and the U.S. bosses sinking deeper into crisis the last thing they need is militant multiracial working class rebellion in the urban centers.
The desperate rulers will need fascism to discipline the working class and will need to build more kkkop cities to keep workers in check as they spend trillions oiling their war machine while workers are pushed into starvation and homelessness. Black liberal mayors across the U.S. are proving they are the best candidates for the job.
Black-led city attacks Black workers
Georgia is a key state in the battle to win workers to pledge allegiance to the U.S. The bosses plan to build Cop City in “South River Forest,” called the Weelaunee Forest, “one of Atlanta’s largest remaining green spaces, a prime example of environmental racism. The forest encompasses a three-hundred-acre, city-owned tract of land that sits in a poor and predominantly Black” part of Atlanta (New Yorker, 8/3/22).
After the police murder of George Floyd in 2020, Atlanta workers responded with mass antiracist protest, marching toward and smashing the headquarters of U.S. liberal news media– the CNN building.
Keisha Lance Bottoms— former mayor of Atlanta and now part of  the Jim Crow Biden administration—supports Cop City and openly shamed the protestors’ militancy and left her position to make way for liberal misleaders like Mayor Andre Dickens, Senator Reverend Warnock and Stacey Abrams.
“Most of the residents in neighborhoods around the forest are Black and municipal planning has neglected the area for decades. The plans to preserve the forest and make it a historic public amenity were adopted in 2017 as part of Atlanta’s city charter, or constitution. But the Atlanta city council wound up approving the training center anyway…” (The Guardian, 1/23)
The bosses want to ensure that they have a militarized and functioning force to attack the working class. The U.S. ruling class and bosses all over the world want to be prepared for the international uprisings that will spring up in the wake racist police murders.
Liberal politics and police murder
PLP stands with the protests against Cop City. With Cop City now being green-lighted, it is more urgent than ever that PLers connect the struggle to what’s happening locally and internationally. Antiracist leaders are calling protests the week of February 19-26.
For our class to smash racist police terror, workers around the world must commit to building a Party that will organize and shape struggle, galvanize it and focus it, and push for communist revolution.