Occupy the Police State

Lisa Simeone · Dec 8, 2011

Occupy the Police State

"The
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silence by this administration speaks volumes and indicates, to me, that this is a movement the government wants to crush."
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"It's eerily disturbing how history is once again repeating itself," Kolin said, as he watches law enforcement, which he noted is beginning to look increasingly "like a civilian branch of the military," and local government officials are "trampling upon the rights of citizens and doing so in ways that are becoming more violent," in order to "repress dissent."
Kolin was highly critical of the Obama administration for remaining completely silent as disturbing images of peaceful protesters, such as the University of California, Davis, students who were pepper sprayed [7] by campus police as they sat with their arms linked, flashed across television screens and went viral on the Internet.
"We don't want a government that is representative of the one percent," Kolin said. "But the silence by this administration speaks volumes and indicates, to me, that this is a movement the government wants to crush."
. . . While we wait for those answers, Kolin, a political science professor at Hilbert College in Buffalo, New York, has done a masterful job of tracing the origins of the "political repression of mass-based movements" and the rise of the "police state" in his exhaustively researched book, "State Power and Democracy: Before and During The Presidency of George W. Bush. [5]" (Click here [6] to read an excerpt.)
In an interview with Truthout, Kolin said, in all police states, "and Germany in the [1930s] is the classic example, they develop by crushing democracy."
The goal of a police state, Kolin said, is to "to modernize state functions and concentrate control over society through the creation of specialized departments."
It was Watergate, Kolin said, that became a "dress rehearsal" for the police state under which US citizens currently live.
"There was cause for optimism with the Church Committee hearings exposing the criminality of the Nixon administration," Kolin said. "But again, as I discuss in my book, the reform that came out of the Church Committee that actually made a police state more possible was the creation of the secret [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance] court, which for the first time, made government surveillance legal. Then, president after president sought to reassert their power post-Watergate in domestic and foreign policy."
Kolin's book ends on a disappointing note. He predicted the Obama administration would "correct the self-destruction of the Bush police state through piecemeal reforms."
. . . Instead, Obama executive power grab went further. To cite one example, the president authorized the targeted assassination of a US citizen living in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was suspected of inspiring failed terrorist attacks against the US and being a top member of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Awlaki, despite his US citizenship, was not entitled to due process under the Constitution, the administration concluded.
. . .
Kolin said Awlaki's assassination underscores that Democrats and Republicans "fall in line when it comes down to certain issues."
"Democrats march in lockstep with their Republican counterparts," Kolin said. "We saw that during the Bush administration and we're seeing it again when it comes to economic and national security issues under Obama. I don't see much difference between the two parties. I really don't."
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Lisa Simeone · Dec 9, 2011

I'm going to give this its own thread, but for anyone still reading this one, take a look -- from Techdirt:

Breaking News: Feds Falsely Censor Popular Blog For Over A Year, Deny All Due Process, Hide All Details...
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...r-deny-all-due-process-hide-all-details.shtml

Lisa Simeone · Dec 12, 2011

How Elite Media Strategies Marginalize the Occupy Movement
by Jackie Smith

Despite popular and media images, extensive research documents the fact that mass movements are by and large nonviolent in nature. Some, such as the Indian Nationalist movement and the U.S. Civil Rights movement embraced nonviolent principles for moral and spiritual reasons, while many others are largely pragmatic. Also, most research on protest shows that when violence occurs, it is virtually always initiated by authorities. While McVeigh is correct that often individuals or small groups take advantage of mass protests and initiate violence, it is important to recognize that activists themselves—including those in the Occupy Wall Street movement-- have developed and advanced strategies to minimize risks of violence and to isolate individuals using such tactics.
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Occupy the Police State

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