Surviving Capitalism (Not) : Wall Street Protesters Complain of Police Surveillance

We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Monday, March 12, 2012

Wall Street Protesters Complain of Police Surveillance

Click here to access article by Colin Moynihan from The NY Times.

Even the NY Times can no longer ignore the growing police state in the US. Still, they can always manage to find people to make naive statements like this in order to frame the event as an anomaly:

“The N.Y.P.D. surveillance does not appear to be limited to unlawful activity,” said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “We count on the police, of course, to be on the lookout for terrorists and terrorism, but to think you could be on that continuum just by going to a peaceful protest is nuts.”

Of course, the whole point of creating the terrorist climate of fear by engineering the 9/11 event and all the police/FBI designed entrapments of "terrorists" was to create the conditions for a police state.

Here is another example, this time from the other leading publication (Washington Post) of the ruling One Percent admitting that police state methods have been and are used against environmentalists :

Even as environmental and animal rights extremism in the United States is on the wane, officials at the federal, state and local level are continuing to target groups they have labeled a threat to national security, according to interviews with numerous activists, internal FBI documents and a survey of legislative initiatives across the country.

However, the article frames environmental activists as "extremists" and presents the FBI's view that police state methods are successful against "extremists" by causing the decline in these "extremest" activities. Unfortunately, the writer can only cite a few vague examples of the most aggressive forms of actions taken by environmentalists.