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Authority in the US

What is the deal with authority in this country? It seems like across the country there are people in power who are using force to try and harm the Occupy movements. Here is one example that seems to be similar to others I've heard reported:

Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked.

What happened next?

Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.

What was the need for that? What was the need for Bloomberg to break up the OWS movement in the park near WS? These people are just sitting/standing around and peacefully (for the most part) protesting. Its not like they are doing what Penn State students did and rioted. That was against the law. What OWS and other Occupy movements are doing is legal. Yet they are being punished for it.

I have to agree with Glenn Greenwald that this is a systematic thing going on with this country. Politicians, apparently even Deans of colleges, and the police forces they control have little regard for normal people who want to exercise their rights to speech and assembly. Those are fundamental rights for a democracy. And ours shouldn't be any different. Yet it is. Just imagine if the same things would have happened to tea party protests. The right would have completely flipped their shit. Why? Because well off, older, white people would have been the victims. Not younger people and those who range from fairly well off to poor.

I think those characteristics of the people of the Occupy movements is the reason these things are happening. These are people who don't have much political clout. If they did they wouldn't need to be protesting. And since their only real political power is to use their numbers advantage, the politicians are threatened and try to put it down because they know if they can get rid of it there are few other course of action for the people to exert political influence. But if it were people like the tea partiers, they are hesitant because they rely on their campaign donations. Though with Bloomberg that doesn't even matter because of his vast wealth, which is probably another reason he ordered the police to shake things up.

I hope the protesters are strengthened by these acts of violence against themselves. Because those acts are just another example of how backwards our justice system is and how our entire system is geared towards a few at the expense of the many. And we won't change that unless the protestors stick together and people like us support them.

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