OpEds: Recovering from Authoritarian Simpatico Syndrome (ASS)

 

Witnessing the acts and utterances of Republican presidential candidates can be regarded as a helpful psychological exercise, a type of “exposure therapy” involving the development of methods used to bear the presence of unbearable people who insist on evincing the history of human ignorance, duplicity and insanity.

“I can’t go on; I go on.”–Samuel Beckett

All alive are tasked with the challenge of, not only proceeding through life despite these kinds of insults to common sense and common decency, but to make a stand, in one’s own unique way, against prevailing forms of madness and oppression.

As a case in point, within the mainstream narratives of the corporate media and that of both major political parties, one bears constant witness to palaver involving the nebulous tyrannies of “big government”; although, incongruously, one scarcely receives from those sources focused complaints and critiques (much less probing investigative reports or congressional hearings) directed at the excesses of the national security/police state and Military/Big Media/Prison Industrial Complex. The “big government” narrative is a misdirection campaign–a smoke screen serving to obscure corporate/military dominance of political life and its effects on the social criteria of everyday life in the nation. Accordingly, government is only as big as the 1% who own and operate it will allow it to be.

Therefore, due to the fact that elitist interests all but control the U.S. political class, in order to change government policies, a radical rethinking and revamping of the economic order of the nation must occur. Although, at this late date in the life of empire, change will have to come from the streets, from uprisings–by occupations–by a restructuring of the entire system, from its cracked foundation, to rotting support beams, to corroding particle board, to lousy paint job.

Yet, this will be an organic process…unpredictable, fraught with peril, freighted with the expansiveness of the novel, tinged with apprehensions borne of grief. But upheaval is inevitable because the present system is deep into the process of entropic runaway. And because uncertainty will be our constant companion, one is advised to make it an ally.  

The neoliberal capitalist order is on a path towards extinction. And it will, most likely, die ugly. But it has lived ugly as well. The system never worked as advertised…was more sales pitch than substance in its promise to increase innovation and deliver prosperity worldwide. Conversely, the set-up leveled enslavement to powerful interests by means of a 21st century version of company town despotism e.g., workhouses, sweat shops, unhealthy mining towns and industrial wastelands where the laboring classes are shackled by debt-slavery to company store-type coercion. 

This global company town criteria has inflicted sub-living wages, no benefit, no future jobs, yet the corporate state’s 24/7, commercial propaganda apparatus has the consumer multitudes of the U.S. convinced that they are “living the dream”. As a result, great numbers still believe their oligarchic oppressors actually believe their own lies about freedom, liberty and equal opportunity for all.

That’s right: Scheming princes simply love the peasants of their kingdom…They do, as long as those wretches continue to bow down in the presence of the powerful, do all they are commanded to do, and unthinkingly serve the interests of their vain, arrogant rulers. Absurdly, large numbers in the U.S. still claim the burdensome economic yoke they bear is a glittering accessory of freedom gifted to them by their privileged betters. 

Often, one hears the assertion: Although the U.S. is an empire, it is, in fact, a benign sort of empire…as far as empires go.

To the contrary, the nation’s post-Second World War, empire-building enterprise, as is the case throughout history with exercises in imperium, has leveled deathscapes abroad, corrupted the society’s elite and delivered anomie and alienation to the general population. From the soulless, dehumanizing nothingscapes of the U.S. interstate highway system and its resultant suburban project, to the douchescapes of hyper-commercialized pop culture, empire’s legacy is as pervasive as it is dismal.

And all delivered and maintained by trading in the bartered blood of the innocent abroad by mechanisms of imperial plunder while serving to create a gallery of heartless, authoritarian-minded, consumerism-addicted grotesques at home. One suspects this is the reason discussions involving the true nature of empire are not considered a subject fit for nice company.

Often, by attempting to adapt to the burdensome daily obligations and the spirit crushing, hierarchical structure of neoliberal capitalism, individuals will begin to internalize its pathologies. In the age of corporate state dominated media, to ensure the circular, self-reinforcing nature of the noxious narratives of empire remain in place, faux populist, conservative media talk show hosts, talking heads and rightist pundits–elitist bully boys and gals–i.e., the bigot whispers of the right–continually seed the dismal air with false narratives, contrived to misdirect anger and foment displaced resentments. 

In turn, little bullies, out in the U.S. spleenland, rendered resentful and mean of spirit by the incessant humiliation leveled by a class-stratified, exploitive economic system take up these self-defeating talking points that serve the 1%.  Accordingly, when, for example, participants in the OWS movement question the present social and economic structure, these downscale denizens of oligarchic rule personalize the critique; their identification with the system is so complete that they feel as though they have been attacked on a personal basis. 

As a consequence, all too often, their defenses are raised and they return volleys of ad hominem attacks that serve to defend a status quo that demeans them. This psychological phenomenon could be termed Authoritarian Simpatico Syndrome (ASS)–a pathology suffered by personalities who have been traumatized by authority, but who endeavor to remedy the wounding and humiliation inflicted by a brutal, degrading order by identification with their oppressors.

To wit, the lack of outrage exhibited by the general public regarding the nations trudge toward a police/national security state. For example, the lack of deference displayed by city officials and local police forces regarding the First Amendment rights of OWS participants. 

First off, lets clear the pepper spray-fogged air on the matter: The vast majority of rank and file police officers do not now and, most likely, never will view themselves as part of the 99%. Simply stated, police officers identify with their fellow cops. The vocation, by its institutionalized, militaristic, tribal nature, creates a wall of separation between its insider members and outsiders i.e., the civilian population at large.    

 It is an act of self-deception to insist that rank and file police officers, the so-called blue shirts, might even be tacit supporters of the 99% movement.

Good luck with that. But don’t be surprised if your entreaties are answered in the form of concentrated mists of pepper spray. In fact, as of late, that is exactly the reply we have received from the police, many times over.

Most police officers do not much identify with civilians. They harbor fealty to their careers and are indoctrinated to evince unquestioning loyalty to the department. Or as Bob Dylan presents the case in verse:

“Because the cops don’t need you and man they expect the same”–from Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

On a cultural basis, after years of hyper-authoritarian indoctrination by mass media sources and political influences, few, among the general public and in the political realm seem willing to demand openness and accountability from law enforcement organizations.  All too often, police (and U.S. soldiers as well) are viewed by a large percent of the general public as selfless heroes, noble souls, protecting life and liberty. And no matter how much evidence accumulates to the contrary, this image holds. 

How is it that so many can cling to the illusion that cops and soldiers–grownups, armed with deadly weaponry, and who have shown themselves willing to engage in acts of state sanctioned violence and oppression–are innocent victims of circumstance? Have we, in this nation, lost the concept of free will?

How did the perspective of a people become so upside down that heavily armed, body armor-enswathed men and women wearing uniforms of state power are viewed as blameless innocents while those they perpetrate brutality against are somehow regarded as the aggressors in the situation…deserving of the violence inflicted upon them? 

Let’s have a reckoning with reality regarding the nature of the forces coalescing against OWS and other global movements aligned against despotism: Authoritarian personality types detest the sight of freedom; its inherent uncertainties make them damn nervous. By reflex, they have a compulsion to lower a jackboot on its neck.

Or, in the words of one officer tasked with the duty of stifling the public’s right to free assembly at a recent OWS protest staged at the Winter Garden atrium of Brookfield Properties, within the World Financial Center located in lower Manhattan, “Don’t get in my face. I have a gun on me, okay? I don’t want any people coming that close to me.”

In acts of social and civic resistance, regardless of whether one evinces a Gandhi-like position of nonviolence or adopts a Malcolm X influenced stance of “by any means necessary”, the enforcers of a corrupt authoritarian order regard any and all displays of dissent as an invitation to force dissenters face down on the pavement, zip-cuffed and bleeding, then be remanded into custody–or worse. 

At this critical point, it is imperative we let die our illusions involving the present order. Yet we must do so without becoming so disillusioned that we lack the resolve to remake the world. Often, we cling to fictions involving the benign nature of power because the act spares us angst. To the contrary, we must bear witness to the collisions of our illusions and the realities of the day, because it is from the debris created by these collisions that the world will be built anew.

Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website: http://philrockstroh.com/ or at FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000711907499

 

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OWS: Too Big to Fail

By Stephen Lendman, Senior Contributing Editor
[Annotated] 

Mother Jones magazine said participants represent “a horizontal, autonomous, leaderless, modified-consensus-based system with roots in anarchist thought.” In fact, they’re revolutionaries in the best sense of the term. 

They’ve “tap(ped) into the rising feeling among many Americans that economic opportunity has been squashed by corporate greed and the influence of the very rich in politics.”  

One protester’s sign read, “You can’t shut down occupation – We’re everywhere.” 

Another said, “You cannot evict an idea whose time has come.”

Still another lifted high read, “OCCUPY EVERYTHING.” 

In fact, it’s long overdue after decades of social injustice, heading America toward banana republicanization. 

Wealth disparity is extreme. Ordinary people are increasingly marginalized, exploited, and left on their own to survive, sink or swim. 

Jobs are harder than ever to find. Good ones paying living wages and benefits are disappearing. College students end up debt entrapped for life.

Super-rich crooks and corrupt politicians conspire to grab everything for themselves. Freedom is an endangered species. Growing poverty, hunger, homelessness and despair are increasing.  

Federal, state and local officials plan budget cuts instead of help. Human deprivation isn’t discussed in high places, only ways to grab more wealth and power. In plain sight, America’s no longer fit to live in. Neither are other Western countries, depriving the many for the few. 

Targeting Wall Street, corporate greed, and power brokers in high places, OWS protesters demand change. 

November 17 marked two months of activism. Occupy Wall Street.org called it a “Historic Day of Action for the 99%.” 

In New York, over 30,000 rallied. NYPD estimated 32,500. Likely it was thousands more, the most anywhere in America so far on one day. Protesters sense “a powerful and diverse civic movement for social justice is on the ascent.”

Hopefully they’re right. One protester spoke for others saying:

“Our political system should serve all of us – not just the very rich and powerful. Right now, Wall Street owns Washington. We are the (left out) 99%, and we are here to reclaim our democracy.”

Dozens of other cities participated nationwide and globally. #Occupy Police got involved. They call themselves part of the 99%. An anonymous sergeant said, “I’m a cop and I support the ideal of Occupy. We’re on the same team.”

[Editor’s Note: Despite the frequent instances of unnecessary violence and brutality, often a result of precisely the same tensions and prejudices that burden America at large, the police are workers, too, and many quietly refuse and still many more will refuse to carry out the most extreme repressive orders issued by the ruling class at a certain juncture. OWS should maintain a firm but open dialog with the police, exempt of facile demonization, as morally and tactically counterproductive, seeing them as human beings also caught in the maws of a monstrous system.  Indeed, the police and the army are by definition working class, 99% class, occupations, and in any social conflict, while afflicted by loads of indoctrination and a semi-military structure, they find themselves in the middle protecting, de facto, an unjust status quo that oppresses their fellow workers, too. Sooner, rather than later, fractures will appear, reflecting their real-life experiences in society at large.  The Facebook page for OccupyPolice is at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Occupy-Police/175588792526859?sk=info .  Their new website is at http://www.occupypolice.org/  ]

A web site logo read, “We are the 99% protecting 100%.” Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis joined New York’s OWS and got arrested. He vowed to stay involved when released. He doesn’t fear arrest, he said, when people are starving or freezing to death on streets. 

“All the cops are just workers for the 1%, and don’t even realize they’re being exploited,” he said. “As soon as I’m let out of jail, I’ll be right back here, and they’ll have to arrest me again.”

Occupy Marines(OccupyOMC) are involved, saying they’ll “support the movement. We will support demonstrators with organization, direction, supply and logistics, and leadership.”  They feature a logo saying “Semper Occupare.” [Reported Business Insider: Last week’s dressing down of the NYPD by Marine Sergeant Shamar Thomas at Occupy Times Square has started a movement of its own….Thomas unleashed on the police at length about the use of abusive tactics on unarmed civilians and the YouTube video of the exchange went viral.

Since then, #OccupyMARINES has sprung up, calling for former Marines to don a civilian uniform and join the Occupy protests.  OccupyMARINES have now called on veterans of other branches of the military to lend their support to help “talk sense” to police and recruit them into supporting the Occupy movement.  Read more: http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-10-23/news/30312652_1_youtube-video-dress-code-cargo-pants#ixzz1eGmV2Q3W —Eds]

They also highlight Operation Returning Freedom, including a New Common Sense Charter for equality and participation in government for change. They represent the 99%’s “collective conscience” against “oligarchic” America.

Occupy Veterans, Veterans for Peace, Occupy Writers, and Occupy Filmakers are involved. So are people from all walks of life who care and want change. Fordham University Professor Paul Levinson said OWS represents direct democracy. Cornell University Professor Cornel West called it a “democratic awakening.”

Over 1,000 writers signed an online petition, saying:

“We the undersigned writers and all who will join us, support Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy Movement around the world.”

Celebrities are involved, including folk singer Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, [Michael Moore], and Arlo Guthrie.

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek said:

“They tell you we are dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think things can go on indefinitely the way they are. We are not dreamers. We are awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare.” 

World systems analyst Immanuel Wallerstein calls OWS “the most important political happening in the United States since the uprisings in 1968….” 

Conditions are right. Accurately calculated, not Census data based on a long out-of-date threshold, poverty in America affects 100 million or more and rising. Unemployment’s at 23%. Over 26 million Americans wanting work can’t find it. Nothing’s being done to help them.

Every social measure shows Depression-level human need. America’s middle class is its working poor. People everywhere in need are mad. Global protests show it. 

“It doesn’t really matter” what spark ignited things. They’re happening, growing, and inspiring others because real grievances demand addressing responsibly at a time politicians are turning a blind eye.

Asked what they wanted, people said long denied justice. Even the initially dismissive New York Times said “(e)xtreme inequality is the hallmark of a dysfunctional economy, dominated by a financial sector that is driven as much by speculation, gouging and government backing as by productive investment.”

It was a remarkable admission by the nation’s leading establishment broadsheet – wealth and power’s longstanding voice. 

According to Wallerstein, “(t)he movement has become respectable,” but with that comes “danger.” Already, federal, state and local overt and covert counterattacks are apparent.

Success also breeds other problems, including a “diversity of views.” At issue is not becoming “the Scylla of being a tight cult….too narrowly based, and the Charybdis of no longer having a political coherence because it is too broad.” 

No simple way exists to avoid either extreme or other  pitfalls. One is lack of leadership, including a national voice like Martin Luther King for civil rights. Another is a coherent, unified message, focusing on what matters most.

It’s not enough to denounce Wall Street and corporate greed. Key is demanding real solutions and sustaining  long-term struggle. This one’s the mother of them all.

Most important is returning money power to public hands where it belongs. Without it, little else is possible long-term. 

It’s vital to make banking a public utility, break up too-big-to fail giants, close or nationalizing insolvent ones, establish laws and regulations with teeth, and prosecute crooks when they’re caught, especially high level ones so everyone knows grand theft won’t be tolerated.

Other key issues include ending corporate personhood, getting money out of politics, ending duopoly power and imperial wars, making corporations and the rich pay their fair share, and forcing government, in fact, to be of, by and for everyone, not solely for America’s privileged like now.

None of this can happen short-term. Decades perhaps are needed to transform today’s America into a socially just new society. In other words, little is accomplished by achieving things part way. Total change is needed. Softening today’s system won’t work. It never did before and won’t now because gains are easily lost. 

Wage slavery replaced its chattel antecedent. Hard won labor, civil, and social gains are gone or on the chopping block to disappear. So aren’t voting rights when corporate-controlled machines do it for us, yet does it matter under a duopoly money-controlled system offering no choice whatever. 

Wallerstein believes “the movement (may go) from strength to strength.” Perhaps it can “force short-term restructuring of what the government will actually do to minimize” real pain people experience.

Longer-term perhaps people will address capitalism’s “structural crisis (and) the major geopolitical transformations” now occurring “in a multipolar world.” 

Even if OWS wanes, its legacy will last, like “the uprisings of 1968….” Better times are possible. Change never comes easily or quickly. Enough committed people can make a difference. OWS “is making a big difference.”

Indeed, building a global movement is significant. Key though is giving it legs in the face of exhaustion, winter cold, police repression, and political leaders paying it little more than lip service so far while they slash social justice programs to continue serving wealth and power interests at the expense of all else.

Off to an impressive start, what’s ahead for OWS isn’t known. Given the state of today’s America and where it’s heading, the stakes are too high for failure. There’s no turning back now!

Contributing Editor Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.  

Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.       

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Eviction and Enlarged Freedom

Charles M. Young, This Can’t Be Happening

Occupy Wall Street is driven out of Zuccotti Square by brutal police action, but is not going away

After watching the Packers beat the Vikings on Monday Night Football, I had insomnia, so it was kind of an accident that I checked my email at 2 a.m. and discovered the police were clearing Zuccotti Park. Everyone had been expecting an eviction since it all started on September 17, but not expecting it at that particular moment. On my cell phone, there were several frantic texts from Occupy Wall Street begging for community support. So I hopped on a slow subway and arrived at Chambers Street about 3 a.m.

The conspicuous silence of Obama in the face of police brutality against lawful protestors—in fact his conniving behind the backs of the people to undermine the Occupy movement—is characteristic of the treachery of the man and the Democratic party culture he represents.

About a half mile north of the park, I was alone on the sidewalk for a couple of blocks. The only indication that something might be wrong was the racket of several helicopters with spotlights. Walking down Church Street, I ran into little clumps of stragglers who described a scene in which hundreds of police in full riot gear arrived at the park and presented a demand that the occupiers pack up their stuff and leave. If they did that, the police said, the occupiers would be allowed to return in a few hours without tents or tarps, after the park was cleaned. Bloomberg had tried that transparent ruse before, so a violent police eviction ensued with dozens of arrests, pepper spray and baton whacking, as the occupiers linked arms and tried to hold their space. Bloomberg and his cops also promised that everyone would get their belongings back after the eviction. But this also was a transparent ruse, as the the police tossed everything, including the 5000-book library, randomly into dump trucks that were in all likelihood destined for a landfill or garbage scow.

“Hey, there goes my tent!” said a kid at the corner of Fulton and Church, pointing at an overloaded dump truck roaring by about 3:30 a.m.

“Heil Bloomberg! This is Nazi Germany, not America!” said one guy giving the Nazi salute to dozens of cops.

“Hey, there are people being shot in the head right now in Egypt,” said another guy.

“That’s supposed to make me feel better about this?” said the first guy.

“I’m just saying that calling the cops Nazis isn’t non-violent communication,” said the second guy, obviously a graduate of the Non-Violent Communication Workshop in the park.

“Do the cops look like SS troops or not?” said the first guy.

At the corner of Cortlant Street and Broadway, one block north of the park, an impromptu general assembly of about 100 people was debating tactics in front a long line of police.

“Mic check!” said a woman.

“Mic check!” said the crowd.

“We move north!” said the woman.

“Mic check!” said a young man.

“Mic check!” said the crowd.

“We don’t move! No retreat! No retreat! Occupy Wall Street!” said the young man.

“Mic check!” said the woman.

“Mic check!” said the crowd.

“There are people massing in Union Square! We need to move en masse! We need more people!” said the woman.

“We need to stay here and bring the Union Square people south! No retreat! We need to hold this corner!” said the young man.

About half the crowd moved a half block north on Broadway with the woman, then looked confused and came back. The police were unloading more and more steel barricades to pen the demonstrators as armored school buses drove toward the park to pick up all the arrests.

“Have no illusions!” yelled a tall older man who was holding a wrinkled red flag with some gold stars on it. “The ruling class is afraid of us! We have unleashed a worldwide revolution! They must try to crush us! That’s who they are! Tell me what a police state looks like!”

“This is what a police state looks like!” said the crowd.

After the chant died down, I asked the guy what country his wrinkled red flag represented.

“Fuck you,” he said. “Tell me what a police informer looks like!”

I told him I wasn’t a police informer or with the corporate press.

“I don’t care who you’re with. Do your homework, asshole,” he said. I noted he was holding a copy of the China Daily, so the flag was probably from the People’s Republic.

“Lenin said the police are the iron fist of the bourgeois state!” the guy yelled at the crowd. “Any time the workers go on strike, the police are there to support the boss. They are not your friends! Freedom in America is a pile of crap!”

***

The purpose of a park, said Fredrick Law Olmsted, is to give the public “a sense of enlarged freedom.” He thought that people who live in cities need their freedom enlarged because being separated from nature by cement and large buildings makes them feel oppressed.

Olmsted was America’s first and most visionary landscape architect. He designed Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn, among many other projects. He also wrote one of the primary historical documents about slavery, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, 1953-1861. So he knew something about parks, and he understood that, along with separation from nature, being oppressed also makes people feel oppressed.

Fredrick Law Olmsted was a 19th century liberal.

Barack Obama is a 21st century liberal.

On Tuesday night, October 25, Obama was on the Tonight Show making cutesy jokes about wanting his wife to hand out candy instead of dried fruit for Halloween. “The White House is going to get egged if this keeps up,” he told Jay Leno. He said that while the police of Oakland were assaulting demonstrators with flashbang grenades, tear gas and rubber bullets for the crime of exercising their Constitutional right to assemble and voice their objections to America’s lethally corrupt ruling class.

Obama’s former chief of staff, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, has evicted Occupy Chicago several times from Grant Park. With hundreds occupations going on around the United States and the world, violent evictions from parks are happening every day, from Honolulu to Portland to Denver to Austin to Richmond to Atlanta. And in the wee hours of November 15, even the symbolic center of the whole movement was evicted from Zuccotti Park. If Obama cared about enlarged freedom, his minions wouldn’t be snuffing it. Obama could stop the evictions with a couple of unambiguous sentences of support for Occupy Wall Street at a press conference.

“The public has an absolute Constitutional right to assemble in public parks for political demonstrations,” he could say. “Any mayor or governor who disagrees will be sued by the Justice Department, and I will send the military to protect demonstrators.”

In 1957, Dwight Eisenhower did just that. He sent the 101st Airborne to LIttle Rock to protect black children who were trying to enlarge their freedom by integrating a school and getting the same education as white children. Occupy Wall Street is a similar historic moment. It picks up where the civil rights movement left off with the assassination of Martin Luther King. In the last year of his life, King was preaching about the connection of class to war, racism and poverty. Nobody of King’s prominence has made that connection since he died.

Obama certainly hasn’t. It would offend his campaign contributors. Obama barely mentioned Wisconsin and never went there when his supporters were losing their union rights and needed him. Along with the rest of corporate wing of his party, he prefers a strong Republican presence in Congress because it makes it easier for corporate Democrats to appear sane while they sell out progressives. Progressives make Obama look bad when he gives Wall Street what it wants, which is no regulations and no indictments for stealing trillions of dollars.

Occupy Wall Street makes Obama look even worse, because it reminds everyone that just because Obama can do Bill Cosby schtick, it doesn’t make him a more decent human being than his war criminal predecessor.

In two months, Occupy Wall Street has made economic inequality the issue of this era, as racial inequality was the issue of the 50s and 60s. Occupying parks has spread all over the world, just as occupying lunch counters once spread over the South.

Yes, I am arguing that economic inequality is at least as destructive as racial inequality. Both segregate human beings in unnatural ways, and both have life stunting, even lethal consequences. History and social science have proven over and over that more egalitarian cultures are happier. Only sociopathic frauds like Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman and their descendants would argue otherwise. To occupy a park and demand economic fairness in the face of rioting police and bribed politicians is the moral equivalent of going South with the Freedom Riders.

It should also be said that for the past two months, Occupy Wall Street has been the most entertaining place in New York City. You could go there at any time of day or night and have a great conversation about things that matter with people you never met before. Compare that with any other city park, and look at the joggers wearing their earphones, the dogwalkers glancing at their watches while Fido relieves himself. Occupy Wall Street has been an open forum. It is a theater of enlarged freedom, and that is exactly why our rulers want to shut it down.

Last week I happened to catch Mayor Bloomberg on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “What’s it all about?” Mika Brzezinski asked with the sort of originality and acumen that one associates with ruling class nepotism.

“It’s about the First Amendment,” said Mayor Mike.

“Wow,” I thought. “Could it be that he’s going to let Occupy Wall actually occupy Wall Street?”

It was a weak moment on my part. I thought Mayor Mike might have learned something since 2004, when hundreds of thousands of people marched against President Bush during the Republican convention and he denied them a permit to have a rally in Central Park. His excuse? All those demonstrators would hurt the grass. Unlike, say, the hundreds thousands of music fans who turned out for Billy Joel or Simon & Garfunkel or the Philharmonic on the Great Lawn.

So when Mayor Mike, who is worth $19.5 billion, says that the First Amendment protects speech, but not “the use of tents and sleeping bags to take over a public space,” remember that he also thinks grass is more important than the First Amendment.

He thinks his right not to look at a hippie in a sleeping bag near the New York Stock Exchange outweighs the Constitution.

The demonstrators in 2004 should have just marched up Eighth Avenue and occupied Central Park. Occupy Wall Street is Mayor Mike’s karma. It’s not 2004 anymore.

As I write these words, a judge has apparently ruled against the demonstrators on tents and sleeping bags, but they have been allowed back into the park where they are celebrating. I won’t miss the tents that much. It’s the open forum that matters. That’s where I’m going, for as long as it takes. I want my enlarged freedom.

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Militarising the police from Oakland to NYC

If the infrastructure of a police state is created, it’s only a matter of time before those aggressive powers are used.

The US has actually been militarising much of its police agencies for the better part of three decades, mostly in the name of the drug war. But 9/11 put that programme on steroids.

It was one of the greatest expansions of government police power in history, an expansion which, after some tweaking, has been mostly validated by the congress and reaffirmed by the courts.

Campus police with M-16s

More often, it created new surveillance opportunities for non-terrorist activity. In one notorious case from 2006, it was revealed that Homeland Security had given the remote Alaskan village of Dillingham (population 2,400) $202,000 to purchase surveillance cameras in order to track alleged terrorist activity.

‘Pain compliance’

The Soft-Kill Solution – New Frontiers In Pain Compliance“. He recounts a 60 Minutes investigation into a new weapon to be used for what the military said was “crowd control in Iraq”.

The idea that sometimes the threat was so great that authorities had no choice but to set aside even deep cultural taboos was promulgated by the most powerful people in the nation.

Today we are in a different world.

Economic justice

Certainly the government seems to have been preparing for such confrontations for some time now.

We have essentially normalised torture and created a high-tech police apparatus with more capability than any military in history. Human nature suggests that if you build it, they will use it.

Heather Digby Parton writes the liberal political blog Hullabaloo.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

 

Source:

Al Jazeera

Featured on Al Jazeera

 

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OAKLAND CLASH FIERCE: Marine Vet wounded, tear gas & flash-bang grenades thrown in downtown Oakland (VIDEO)

NOTE: PLEASE SEE OUR ADDENDUM, A FIRSTHAND REPORT BY JOSHUA HOLLAND
A BROADER SEGMENT OF AMERICANS of all races and classes (except the top) are beginning to taste police repression for the first time. It’s clear that the ruling orders think that the two-pronged approach, intimidation and co-optation, will succeed in controlling this burgeoning movement. While some will undoubtedly stop open participation, many will go on putting pressure on the system, as it is the system’s core dynamic that created the crisis and it’s not ready to abandon it any time soon. Watch video below

 

Six First-Hand Observations From Last Night’s Chaos in Oakland

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

I spent most of yesterday in Oakland bearing witness to a hectic day of protests that featured a good deal of violence. Here are some observations.

Again and Again

I heard this spiel blasted over loud speakers so many times last night that I have it memorized:

This is Sgt. Whatever with the Oakland police department. I hereby declare this to be an unlawful assembly. You must leave the area of such-and-such (mostly 14th Street and Broadway) immediately. You can disperse via X street, heading in X direction (mostly 14th Street heading East). If you do not disperse immediately, you will be subject to arrest, regardless of your purpose. If you do not disperse immediately, chemical agents will be used. If you do not disperse immediately, you will be subject to forcible removal, which may result in serious injury.

Missing the point

The Costs of Eviction

Oakland’s Justification Rings Hollow

Oakland has effectively banned overnight protests within the city. As I wrote last week, this is, on its face, unconstitutional in the context of a movement whose defining act of political expression is occupying public space over an extended period of time.

Self-policing

Where Does This End?

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