Hmmm
People are beginning to notice that some of the worst abuses against the right to ‘assemble and petition for the redress of grievances’ are in cities with Democrats for mayors and governors. Are they on a special mailing list telling them that ‘hippie punching’ is the approved policy in the party?
It has been noted that while the local affiliates of ABC and CBS had live feeds on the march protesting the destruction of Occupy Oakland, both feeds were cut off just as the marchers encountered the police line. Strange coincidence that… must be why there is no video of ‘the protestors throwing rocks and bottles’ … [/sarcasm]
6 comments
Violent police crackdowns are the only chance this movement has.
It elevates their media profile, Frederick, but there is a lot of anger out there that needs to be addressed if things are going to get better, and the message of the protests is getting through to many disparate groups who normally would have little in common.
I view OWS (and to a lesser extent the teabaggers) as a symptom. People are seeing that things are getting worse for most people while certain people (the 1% in particular) thrive, and they don’t know what to do about it, so first thing they start doing is complain about it — the OWS protests. The oligarchs are betting that putting down the OWS protests with force will make everything okay for them, but the problem with that notion is that OWS is a symptom, not a cause. That pressure is going to keep building underneath until either there is an explosion and Very Bad Things happen, or the oligarchs are forced to impose a police state so blatant and obtrusive that the notion of America as a free country would be ludicrous to even the ill-informed. OR the oligarchs could come to their senses and realize that their current route is to either the guillotine or irrelevance (because the end game of police states is always the secret policemen taking over — see, e.g., Vladimir Putin in Russia, and the imprisonment or exile of many of the Russian oligarchs who crossed swords with him) and return back to the New Deal regime of regulation and taxation that served the nation so well in the period 1945-1981, but that would require our oligarchs to be smart, and due to inbreeding, they’re not all that smart anymore…
– Badtux the Waiting-for-the-explosion Penguin
These are the people who followed the rules and expected the system to work. They did everything people told them to do, and ended up with nothing. They aren’t just ‘Net surfers, they read.
They have figured out the game is rigged, and they want it fixed. They want the America of their parents and grandparents, when hard work and education provided you with a living.
If something isn’t done to ‘treat the symptom’, all hell will break loose, with uncertain results.
all hell will break loose, with uncertain results.
I’ll go a little further than that. The results won’t be “uncertain”. They’ll be *disastrous*, for both the 1% and the 99%. I’m not aware of a violent revolution that has ever had a good outcome. And before someone says “but… but… the American revolution!”, that wasn’t a revolution, that was a war of secession by the governments of the American colonies against their mother country. Completely different thing altogether.
You’d think that our oligarchs would see that the course they’re on is going to lead to this disaster, but our oligarchs are by and large *STUPID*. They got their position on top of the heap not through merit, but by going to the right school and knowing the right people or by being a member of the lucky sperm club (a.k.a. the Paris Hilton Syndrome), not be being smart. There’s a few exceptions of course, but (shrug). It’s not many. Of the five hundred richest people in America, I doubt that there’s more than two dozen that have the slightest clue, the rest are as dumb as Excise but think they’re geniuses because they managed to take a lot of money and turn it into a lot more. What’s that joke about being born on 3rd base and thinking they hit a triple?
– Badtux the Apocalyptic Penguin
There is too much firepower on all sides for this to be anything but a disaster. At any point there is going be an incident that will the final straw, and we will be back to the riots. There was a riot in Rochester, NY, and things have never really recovered, so I would assume it is the same for the other cities that have experienced the same thing. People will go into survival mode, and anarchy will take over the country.
Our so-called leaders don’t seem to understand how near we are to the abyss.