Deborah's Journal

From E.D. Kain at Forbes: Police Response to Occupy Wall Street is Absurd

I feel as if I'm in a time warp, and events hearken not only back to my time protesting HUAC and then the Viet Nam War, and my early memories of my father's union-organizing activities (and the years in which our family was a target of a McCarthy investigation) but stories of anti-union violence, such as when Massachusetts militiamen with fixed bayonets surrounded a group of strikers during the Lawrence Strike of 1912, or the 1927 Columbine Mine Massacre, in which state police and mine guards fired into a group of five hundred striking miners and their wives, or the 1920 Anaconda Road Massacre, when deputized mine guards fired upon unarmed picketers. These may seem distant and irrelevant, but the principle and the potential abuse of power remain the same. Whenever people organize themselves (even in a disorganized way, but act cooperatively and for a mutual goal), they pose a threat to the entrenched establishment, and the greater the disparity between rich and poor, the more threatened and desperate and irrational those establishments become. So it's striking that an essay appearing on the blog of such a business-oriented publication as Forbes minces no words about what is going on.

Kain writes:
All across the country, cops are cracking down on protesters with force. I may be a critic of Occupy Wall Street, but the police are public servants, and public servants have no business treating the public this way.

Certainly pepper-spraying protesters while they sit calmly in a row like this is a gross abuse of power. It should have our collective blood boiling, whether or not we even agree with the protesters themselves.

Will Shetterly posted this same video with the title: Barack Obama, OWS is your Egypt: shame on you!