Since Bloomberg the XVI decided he was going to take away Occupy Wall Street protesters' constitutional rights to peaceably assemble and to petition their gov't for redresses of grievances against it cowardly in the night, beating up and arresting a city councilman featured last night on Countdown, there has since been a knee jerk reaction around here assuming that any questions or suspicions about whether the Department of Homeland Security was involved are supposedly beyond question and automatically off bounds.
We know for sure Oakland Mayor Jan Quan and Mayors across the U.S were involved, but the federal government we don’t have the answers yet; the examiner article’s anonymous source is yet to be revealed but when it comes to the cries and denies of “Anonymous!” the track record is pretty piss poor as far as denial goes to say the least, so the downright dismissal is pretty childish.
We’ll find out for sure, soon. DHS does take its orders from Washington D.C ultimately up to the President. As some will hopefully learn below the intelligence apparatus changed to involve local law enforcement since 9/11, particularly in NY. Yes this actually happened. And yet somehow DHS's involvement is a crazy CT and absolutely beyond question even though you can't deny it either? You know what’s maybe more crazy? Not paying attention to the massive shift and militarization of our police departments since the drug war and even more since 9/11.
NYPD CIA Anti-Terror Operations Conducted In Secret For Years
I’m not going to call people crazy like I have heard from others lately, but I will say some are condescendingly ignorant celebrating their own ignorance on this subject.
Militarizing the Police: How the Drug War and 9/11 Led to Battle-Dressed Cops Cracking Down on Peaceful Protests: 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.
Recall that six short weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the US congress passed the PATRIOT Act, a sweeping expansion of domestic and foreign intelligence-gathering capabilities. This legislation gave the government the ability to easily search all forms of communication, eased restrictions on foreign intelligence-gathering at home, gave itself greater power to monitor financial transactions and created entirely new categories of domestic terrorism to which the PATRIOT Act's expanded powers to police could be applied.
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.
A little more than a week after the PATRIOT Act was passed, President Bush created the Office of Homeland Security to "develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks" and a year later, the Department of Homeland Security was established by the Homeland Security Act of 2002.
Today it is the third-largest government agency, after the departments of defence and veterans' affairs. Aside from the billions the federal government spent on its own agencies, it has disbursed many billions more to various state and local police agencies, ostensibly for the purpose of fighting the terrorist threat.
snip
Former San Jose chief of police Joseph McNamara raised these alarms as early as 2006 in the wake of the Sean Bell shooting in New York. He pointed out that the effects of the drug war and 9/11 had led to "an emphasis on 'officer safety' [where] paramilitary training pervades today's policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn't shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed".
Likewise, in the name of "officer safety", the Taser became a common tool in everyday policing, deployed with little knowledge of the effects, and a tendency to Taser first and ask questions later. But over the course of the past decade, the body count grew as it became more and more obvious that tasers were sometimes as deadly as the guns they purported to replace.
Digby spells out the reality for those that have actually paid attention. I have to say at this point, given all the lame cries that “people were absolutely sure anonymous WH sources from Politico regarding the public option weren’t real," it’s actually much more likely at this point going by the track record. Not only that Richard Engel showed just how much NY has become a national Security state with direct apparatus from Washington D.C in the 9/11 special he did with Rachel Maddow:
A Decade of Destruction
Or if that’s not good enough you could watch the WaPo investigative piece:
Top Secret America
That’s right, courageous old ladies like Dorli Rainey and pregnant women are being maced in Seattle, but so many are sooo concerned about how the 1%, which would include the President and his department, being asked tough relevant questions.
What is behind this "concern" is derision towards anyone asking the question. Because we know if anything, our government has never been involved in anything like this except always from Herbert Hoover to J. Edgar Hoover to Nixon to GWB to Obama who’s not too concerned about this since he expanded on these programs while voting to reauthorize the Patriot Act while he was in the Senate which was set to expire.
Mayors such as Bloomberg spend millions of dollars in "policing" said peaceful assemblies and given that all state budgets are strained yet hundreds of police officers are often brought in from other nearby jurisdictions, who's paying for it? It’s a worthy question that should arouse more attention than “Protect our leaders from tough questions they don’t want to answer!” One would think if one really cared about the 99% like many here claim to BUT(always with that qualifier like I have principles BUT. Yeah, BUT you don’t), that these questions would be welcomed. Funny. Except it’s not at all.
All while the Super Oligarchy for and by the 1% are working on a plan just how to tell us we need to slash budgets/services al la austerity. There’s never any money for education or health care or safety nets, yet there's always money available for police state activities protecting the 1% interests. There’s never a new tax on Wall Street to feed the President's ignorance on the federal budget via shared sacrifice and those peas we're supposed to eat. It’s always on the backs of the 99% BUT the president “feels our pain.” We heard that before in the 90s before Clinton went on a free trade and deregulation spree while revealing what he and Obama both truly believe in behind the scenes and always have as 1%ers.
For Bloomberg XVI and others in leadership, amazingly the money is always available to police the 99 percent exercising their right to peacefully protest their government and to drag them away while destroying their personal property in the dead of night. Why is that in this budget crunch? The president doesn’t know this, but state budgets are like a family’s budget and the federal budget is NOT like a family’s budget at all so states are either really really good with resources(doubtful) or there is some kind of funding from the Federal Government DHS or otherwise from your tax dollars to destroy OWS.
The fact that this question does not arouse the passion in about half of this community is quite revealing. I mean, I know you care, BUT maybe you don’t. Maybe politicians are what you care about BUT you can’t really say that so you then call people crazy that ask these highly relevant questions until we have all the answers.
We'll find the answers eventually. Bloomberg hasn't won. He thinks today's massive non violent action won't happen because of his cowardly Zuccotti eviction, however right now it is happening as scheduled. I am concerned about defending and supporting the 99%, not BUT anything. THE 99% STRAIGHT UP! You see, that's the difference.
I don't make excuses for this Oligarchy and I don't support the Oligarchy. But I do support this OllieGarkey diary and you should too to get a live update as #OWS is on the march!
JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, people want their country back!