I hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving holiday and avoided any injuries in the mad Black Friday shopping rush. I've been in Sun City, AZ this week visiting my parents, along with my sister and her two kids (although my nephew was here only a day before heading off to his father's wedding in Flagstaff and then back to college in Texas). Our day got off to a good start with a Packers win over the Lions to remain undefeated, followed by a nice big, traditional Thanksgiving dinner and then a couple games of dominos. The rest of our time has been dominated by more eating, chatting, and watching football, as there isnt much motivation among any of us to go out and do things other than hang out at home. I will be here until Wed., when I fly back to LA and plan to return to the downtown hotel I've been staying in for the past month. I figure I will stay there as I start searching for an apartment and looking for a new car, two activities I hope to complete in December so that I have time to get settled and reorganized prior to the start of spring semester classes in January.
Reports from OccupyLA are that the camp is going to be evicted next week, although the city has apparently indicated that it will give the Occupiers 72 hours notice before coming in to tear down the camp. There have been some conversations between city officials and OLA representatives about finding an alternative space for the Occupiers to stay in, with reports of an offer for space in an office building somewhere as well as some empty spaces where they could set up a camp, grow food, and presumably stay indefinitely. Information on the OLA website suggested that some Occupiers were not happy that others were involved in these negotiations, and now I think the General Assembly has decided not to make any move and instead force the police to force them out of their City Hall encampment. This makes sense to me, as I think one of the primary benefits of this movement, if not necessarily an explicit intention, is exposing the repressive tactics of our government and clarifying that things aren't all that different in America than they are in all the other countries where the government uses force and violence to quiet if not eliminate the voice of dissension reflected in a populist protest movement. While Wall Street and the banksters are the primary focus of the Occupiers anger and demands for reform, an equally troubling aspect of life in the US over the last decade is our slow creep towards fascism and the imposition of a police state. As one of the signs at the OLA camp says, the police are the defenders of the 1%, and to the extent that they carry out the wishes of the rich and powerful to quell the protest movement, they are as much a part of the problem as the banksters themselves.
LA Occupiers have acknowledged that their relationship with the city government and LAPD has been pretty good, and that the city has all in all been fairly supportive of the movement. But if, in the end, they act like all the other cities and PDs around the country that have forcibly removed protestors from their encampments, it will render any previous goodwill all but meaningless and expose them as people with power using that power to keep the powerless in their place. America is demonstrating that we have evolved to the point where our Constitutional rights to assembly and free speech exist only to the point that we agree not to cause any inconvenience to those with power. I mean, the whole concept of a "free speech zone," which has been around for a few years now, is indicative of how these rights have been abridged over the years. When government tells us where and when we can assemble and speak our minds freely, and prevents us from doing so when it doesn't fit into their version of what is appropriate or tolerable, then we have in fact already lost those rights. These rights are supposed to be "inalienable," as Jefferson argued in the Declaration of Independence, which means they are rights that exist independent of any government, and that should not be abridged by any government. By trying to limit these rights, by specifying when and where we can exert them, those in power are aiming to renege on the freedoms that our founding fathers tried to embed in the Constitutional republic form of government they created for the new American nation. It seems to me that this should be troubling to all Americans, but it is clear that there are plenty of folks who think it is OK for government to crack down on the protestors and prevent them from acting on their Constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms in order to maintain the peace and quiet and calm and order of business as usual.
Maybe I'm sounding kind of alarmist here, turning into a black-and-white issue something that really should be analyzed in terms of shades of gray. Maybe. But maybe not. History suggests that countries - eg Nazi Germany- can step-by-step move towards greater and greater fascism while the people sit around and tolerate it because each of those steps looks reasonable under existing circumstances and doesn't seem to be a very big deal in the grand scheme of things. So, if the police use pepper spray in the process of making it easier to drag the Occupiers out of their camps, we shouldn't be too concerned because (pick your rationalization) a) it is necessary to prevent the protesters from becoming violent, b) it is better than using guns and bullets, c) the protestors deserve it since they are trouble-makers and anarchists, or d) as Fox News' blonde bimbo Megyn Kelly argues, pepper spray is just a food product anyway, so what's the big deal?! (I signed the online petition demanding that dear Megyn get pepper-sprayed, so that she can experience first hand just how tasty it really is!)
When police start to routinely use pepper spray, tasers, rubber bullets, batons, and other violent, riot-squad tactics on peaceful, passive, defenseless, law-abiding citizens whose only "crime" is exerting their Constitutional rights at a time and place to the disliking of those in power, there is something fundamentally wrong in this country and Americans should bloody well recognize that this is one more sign of a subtle shift in society reflecting our steady progress down the road to fascism. and it's not just the protestors. Police regularly use violence on citizens in situations where it is unnecessary and/or unwarranted. Just this week, a 61 year old man in Virginia, disabled and hard of hearing, fell off his bike in a parking lot. An onlooker, fearing he was drunk, called the police, who arrived as the man was riding away. When the cops called after the man, he didn't respond, so when one of them saw him take something out of his pocket and put it in his mouth (good god, a piece of candy maybe!), he decided to taze the poor fellow! The guy falls off his bike again, and by the time they get him to the hospital, he's dead. Well done, Mr. Police Officer. Killing an old deaf guy just because you thought he was ignoring you, and put something in his mouth that you didn't know what it was.
And there's another story this week of a cop tasing nine times a guy who he already had in handcuffs. They figure that since the guy stopped twitching after the seventh shock, that he was probably already dead for the last two. Seriously, how have we reached the point where police officers in the normal course of doing their duty think it is reasonable and appropriate to use violence as the first course of action on people? These are not isolated incidents -- I read stories like this all the time, enough of them that I've even thought it would be worth putting a red pin on a US map to identify the location of each act of unwarranted police brutality that occurs over the course of the year, just to show how pervasive it is. When there is a widespread belief among police that they have the right to use force on the citizenry whenever they feel it serves their purposes, we are operating in a de facto police state. If we're not there already, we are surely sliding down that slippery slope. And the violent repression of the Occupiers in cities around the country is hopefully making this obvious to more and more Americans.
For anyone interested in further elaboration of the above issues, here are some other commentaries:
http://www.alternet.org/occupywallst/153170/%22how_could_this_happen_in_america%22_why_police_are_treating_americans_like_military_threats/?page=entire
http://endthelie.com/2011/11/25/s-1253-will-allow-indefinite-military-detention-of-american-civilians-without-charge-or-trial/#axzz1epTjFXQZ
(Referring to a new Senate bill that has just been introduced, an excerpt from this article says: "If these provisions are enacted, it would give the federal government the explicit power to imprison civilians, including American citizens, indefinitely with no charges or trial. This would include individuals apprehended both inside and outside of the United States, meaning that this could give the federal government the ability to openly detain American citizens for their entire lives without so much as a single charge.")
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/nov/25/shocking-truth-about-crackdown-occupy?INTCMP=SRCH
(In the context of the Oakland mayor's admission that the Dept of Homeland Security had participated in a conference call to advise the mayors of 18 cities regarding "how to suppress" the Occupiers in their cities, this article points out that "Our system of government prohibits the creation of a federalised police force, and forbids federal or militarised involvement in municipal peacekeeping.")
The bottom line here is that there is good reason to be concerned about the attitude of our government - federal as well as local, including the police as agents of the state - regarding the use of militarized police force against the populace even when the people are not engaged in any kind of violent or destructive behavior. I've just read online that the mayor of LA has now given the Occupiers a deadline of midnight Sunday to evacuate, and that the Occupiers have already determined that they won't leave by then. So the confrontation looms, and now the whole world will have it's eye on how the police handle the situation. I'm disappointed that I'm not there, to watch first hand how it all goes down. I hope some people are on hand to document the police action and get video of any violent methods that might be utilized. Given the generally positive relationship that has existed between LAPD and the Occupiers, it would be nice if the police could maintain a peaceful, respectful stance if and when they forcibly remove the people, tents, and equipment from the encampment. One way or another, this could well be a watershed moment for the movement, shaping how it unfolds from here on out. We'll see how it goes, we don't have long to wait!
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