Is purposely being unveiled a little at a time, each time with increasing menace. They are giving us a glimpse of what may lie in the future so when the monster is released the masses will not react en-masse like a hoard of fire ants. Our scared, selfish, individualist (carefully nurtured for sometime by consumerism) nature will keep us from rising up and using the only effective weapon the people have against 'tyranny' - the people.

Palin is an interesting choice. To overcome my ignorance I've come to think of the establishment as practically omnipotent - nothing happens by chance - incompetence is not something they are it is something they USE as a ruse. In this light, she could be used in one of 2 ways 1) Anti-abortion 24/7 until Nov. The "do you want to kill babies?" campaign. 2) As an out for the republican party. They see they are going to get flattened in November and even Diebold can't overcome the landslide so they are resigned to letting the other team (same owner) take the reigns so they can save face ('we fucked up and lost because of Palin') and live to fight again in 2008.

Interesting times.

The Empire Strikes Back:
Police Repression of Protest From Seattle To L.A.
By Paul Rosenberg
Written For The LA Independent Media Center
August 13, 2000

pdf; link at sig

And, yes. I confirmed that the author is the same Paul Rosenberg who blogs for Open Left.

I would remind a number of people here, responding to some voices which have never been heard from before now, that a healthy skepticism is exactly that; ie, healthy.

On the internet no one knows you're a dog.

While I won't disagree that this is all really depressing, it's really more the status quo than a deviation. It's just in the age of modern handheld videocams and such that there's a lot more evidence. That, and these things are happening in an urban setting make them more accessible to the general public, or at least greater numbers of witnesses.

During the '90s, when I was involved with the Cove/Mallard and Otter/Wing Earth First! campaigns, toward the end, the US Forest Service was bringing FS police that we called 'Super Freddies' that had sub-machine guns and full body armor to extract protestors who were sitting in trees, and had built various stands and such to obstruct road-building in these pristine areas. The same violence was used, or worse. But it happened in the backwoods of Idaho (quite literally) and most people never saw nor heard of it.

The only saving grace was that those Super Freddies were lousy in the woods. Wrong tool, wrong time. I still marvel that no one was shot.

And yes, the protestors were non-violent. Extremely so, or they'd be dead.

The left wing and the right wing just have the same shrill sound to them.

If you listen closely, the right is shouting "kill, kill!" and the left is shouting "holy shit, run!" It only sounds the same if you have your hands over your ears.

There are people out there with dying relatives, who just lost their jobs, or are ill and poor, who have been violated in one of the daily mundane violations of civil rights that occur outside of the purview of political demonstrations. The left should be their logical ally. But all they hear is you screaming at them, on top of all their problems.

You flatter me. I've been trying to get people to listen to me scream at them for 15 years, and I just don't have the knack for it that people like Glenn Greenwald do.

But that aside, what are you getting at here? I'm not very smart and my reading comprehension is terrible, so please bear with me. As far as I can tell, your message is basically that a bunch of apathetic, short-sighted blunderbrains are too oppressed to be concerned about oppression, and resent the inconvenience of having to see the evidence before their very eyes every time one of these unfortunate little incidents comes up.

Did I get that right? Am I missing some nuance again?

A day may come when this all stops being such a surprise every time it happens, and it won't be too soon, but it will take some hard weaning from wishful thinking.

In a nutshell: "Authority must be maintained."

At any cost.

The struggle we've been going through for many years now boils down to: Whose authority?

Those who set out to disobey Authority have been labeled miscreants, delinquents, revolutionaries, anarchists, communists, terrorists and so on. They've been gassed, bludgeoned, rounded up en masse, hauled away in busses, processed, released, though a few have been made examples of and wound up in prison for some time. Only a few, though.

And many, many, many individuals who never intended to cause trouble (apart from free exercise of their civil rights, which is frequently "trouble" for Authority) have found themselves caught up in the middle of Actions carried out by Authority against disobedience, and they have had their rights as citizens trampled, they've been bludgeoned, gassed, rounded up and processed just like some of the disobedient ones, and in the fullness of time, the civic authorities involved have found it meet to pay out sometimes very large sums of money to settle the lawsuits brought against them for the aggressive and indiscriminate actions of their Law Enforcement Authorities.

And we have learned that not all disobedience of Authority is what it seems to be, that in some cases, perhaps many, violent actions and destruction of property purportedly conducted by dissidents have been provoked or actually done by agents of Authority in the interests of precipitating an excuse for Action, roundups, noggin-busting, gas releases, roundups, etc. How often this is the case is hard to say, but it does happen, and any time violence and destruction accompanies citizen protest or disobedience of Government Authority, we should keep that in mind.

We've learned that when lawyers and journalists are detained in the process of maintaining Authority and curbing delinquency and disobedience, lawyers and journalists (well some of them) tend to get up in arms. Good for them.

We've also learned that Progressive mayors and civic officials are just as likely to approve heavy-handed police action to maintain Authority as any right wing whacko authoritarian you can name. This complicates the notion of a Progressive Movement somewhat, so long as that Movement refuses to own up to its internal authoritarianism.

Ultimately, it's about who controls Authority and how it is to be imposed, not so much whether Authority should be or shall be imposed.