Keith Olbermann, who some of you will remember from “Countdown” on MSNBC, and now on Current TV, is on a roll here on the topic of police violence toward OWS. (Thanks to KevinNevada for the link).
There’s some historical context in this rant by Olbermann that is so far being largely ignored by the MSM (so what else is new in the United States of Amnesia?) and that is this; whenever the country lurches too far to the right we get this kind of thing happening, this is nothing new, and the conservatives leading the charge toward deregulation and slashing taxes on the wealthy (and even, in the case of both Pauls and now Gingrich floating the idea that Child Labor Laws and so on are “stupid”), along with a full court press to roll back social programs that are overwhelmingly popular are once again overreaching. They always do.
The tragedy is that sooner or later someone will get killed, they always do, on the way to them realizing that the US is not a far-right Nation, it is indeed a Centrist Nation, and the zealots on the far right, having dragged the political center all the way over to their side of the court, have deluded themselves as to where the center really is.
They always do.
Thanks for the posting.
Olberman puts Mayor Bloomberg into a precisely positioned historical context here, with Lord Grenville, Gov. Wallace, Mayor Richard Daley in ’68 and other such geniuses.
I could add: whomever within the UC Police, probably top management at the university’s head office, who re-wrote the ‘rules of engagement’ for dealing with sit-in protests on the ten campuses. Heads are rolling and will continue.
Campus police have to deal with the students every day. Like any police force, they can only operate with the consent of the population. Force alone cannot do the job and that is doubly true of a university police force.
BTW, one root of that particular problem, and others with UC these days: about ten years ago, the university’s central office was moved away from the Berkeley campus, where they were accountable to the students of the flagship campus, to some extent – to an office building in downtown Oakland, miles away from Berkeley.
There has been a tendency towards cluelessness every since.
It seriously smacks of the incompetence and arrogance of the king and parliament the colonies resented.