[Peace-discuss] Obama's cops

[C. G. ESTABROOK]

NOVEMBER 22, 2011
5
Which Side Are You On?
Obama’s Pepper Spraying Cops
by DAVE LINDORFF
The growing number of video clips and photos showing police in Darth  
Vader-like riot gear assaulting peaceful demonstrators with everything  
from tear gas and mace to truncheons, point-blank shots with beanbags  
and rubber bullets, and of course the ubiquitous fist and club, have  
made a bad joke out of claims that America is either the land of the  
free or the home of the brave.

Scott Olson, a veteran of America’s Iraq War, suffered a severe brain  
injury that nearly killed him, and left him with difficulty speaking,  
thanks to a shot to his head by an attacking police officer in Oakland  
who was firing teargas canisters from a gun-like weapon. Olsen is  
lucky to be alive and will hopefully recover over time. A comrade,  
veteran Kayvan Sabehgi, who was retreating from advancing police that  
same night with his hands tucked in his pockets, can be seen being  
chased and so brutally beaten by another attacking thug cop that he  
had to be hospitalized for treatment of a lacerated spleen, although  
the cops left him writing in agony in a cell for hours before sending  
him to the hospital.

Old women, pregnant mothers-to-be, and even children have been hit  
with pepper spray, teargassed and terrorized by police goons in New  
York, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Sacramento, Dallas, Chicago,  
Boston and elsewhere in what is almost certainly a coordinated attack  
on the Occupy Movement being run out of Washington.

Americans have been watching these scenes of cops assaulting peaceful  
demonstrators in shock. They are used to seeing this kind of thing  
going on in Latin America or the Middle East or Asia, and our own  
government would always make noises of protest. Now it’s happening  
here at home.

President Obama, meanwhile, has remained shamelessly silent about this  
police-state behavior by the nation’s local police forces, all of them  
armed and armored with the aid of Federal Homeland Security grants,  
and working on the basis of “intelligence” collected by federally- 
funded Fusion Centers” and federally- run Joint Terrorism Task Forces.

This is the moment that Obama, who faces an election in less than a  
year, has to demonstrate whether he is the president of the banks that  
have so lavishly funded his first campaign, that continue to pour  
money into his current re-election campaign, and that are urging this  
crackdown on protests, or the people — especially the young people —  
who worked so hard to put him into office in the first place.

The thuggish attacks on the peaceful protesters of the Occupy Movement  
are even more brutal than were many of the attacks on the Civil Rights  
Movement marchers of the 1950s and ’60s. The only thing lacking right  
now from those dark days are the murders and the dogs, but no doubt  
we’ll be seeing those thing’s next, as the movement demanding economic  
justice for the 99% and punishment for the 1% builds momentum.

Back in the 1950s, an earlier president, former Gen. Dwight D.  
Eisenhour, witnessing the atrocities of local police in Arkansas and  
other jurisdictions, did the right thing. He ordered out the National  
Guard to defend the civil rights of young black people who wanted to  
be able to attend public schools and colleges, and those week-end  
soldiers defended the people and the Constitution and kept the cops  
and their dogs at bay.

Now President Obama must do the same thing. Whether or not his  
Department of Homeland Security and his Justice Department have been  
orchestrating the attacks on demonstrators in the Occupy Movement,  
Obama must now order out the Guard and instruct them to defend the  
protesters and the Constitution. It would be a welcome new assignment  
for the Guard, which for the past decade has been wrongly shipped out  
of the country to help wage imperialist wars on Iraqis and Afghans.

If he does this, he instantly wins back the army of young people who  
once worked so tirelessly for his historic election in 2008. If he  
doesn’t do it, and allows the brutality and the thuggishness to  
continue to escalate, his reelection hopes are toast, and deservedly so.

The Obama presidency has been one of the greatest disasters for  
progressives in modern history, as a man who ran for office promising  
change and a new respect for the Constitution, almost immediately  
picked up where his predecessor had left off, escalating the country’s  
illegal wars, enlarging the share of the nation’s wealth going to the  
Pentagon and to the secret intelligence services, shoveling money to  
the biggest banks, endorsing the torture abuses at Guantanamo and at  
the many CIA black-sites around the world, authorizing the summary  
execution of American citizens abroad, and ignoring the looming  
catastrophe of global climate change.

It took some time, but out of this wreckage and betrayal, a movement  
has arisen, led by young people — many of them the very young people  
who worked so tirelessly for Obama. Now they are boldly demanding a  
government that works on behalf of the majority, not of the rich and  
powerful.

For their efforts, they are being assaulted by a police force that has  
been turned, over the last decade of a fraudulent, trumped-up “War” on  
Terror, into a kind of American Gestapo, that “polices” communities  
with assault weapons, breaks into homes wearing masks, beats and  
gasses people without even bothering to arrest them, kills unarmed  
citizens with impunity, and considers criticism of its actions  
tantamount to a crime in itself, meriting assault and/or arrest.

Obama has overseen and even been the author of much of this disaster,  
but he still has a choice at this point: Either put an immediate stop  
to this outrage, by inserting the National Guard between these thugs  
in blue or black, and the people, and start listening and responding  
to the demands of the Occupy Movement, or go down to defeat next  
November as the man who buried American democracy and freedom.

DAVE LINDORFF is a founding member of ThisCantBeHappening!, the new  
award-winning independent online alternative newspaper. He is a  
contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion,  
forthcoming from AK Press. 
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