Wall Street protests reveal slice of America's barely tamed brutality

[marmar]

Wall Street protests reveal slice of America's barely tamed brutality
Pepper spray, Swat teams and judicial torture. This barbarity is ever present – but rarely so visible – in American life

Ed Pilkington
guardian.co.uk, Monday 26 September 2011


One of the hardships of life as a reporter in New York City is that you so rarely get credited with the kind of heroism shown by colleagues in Helmand, say, or Baghdad. The assumption is that you're spending time drinking gin martinis on the roof of Soho House (I prefer vodka) or dining at the Grand Central oyster bar (try the Rhode Island Cuttyhunks, they're sumptuous), rather than dodging bullets in Tripoli.

I'd like to think that over the past few days perception of my job as a soft landing has started to change, and that its true nature as a tough, dangerous and – yes – heroic posting has begun to emerge. Take the events over the weekend in Wall Street. Admittedly, I wasn't there, but that's not the point. I could have been.

The protests were a lament for a nation in which, despite the 2008 meltdown, the financial system remains largely unregulated, where 46 million Americans live below the official poverty line, and where inequality is greater now than at any time since 1929. That's hardly the stuff of revolutions: you can read Paul Krugman make a similar point every week in the New York Times. And in the land of the first amendment you'd think it was OK to shout it out in the street, even if that street is Wall Street.

Not according to the two white-shirted senior NYPD officers captured on video. The film shows a small group of women protesters, who are doing nothing menacing at all, having been kettled by police. As they stand there fenced in and defenceless, the two white shirts walk up to them, hold out a pepper-spray canister and zap them straight in the face. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/sep/26/americas-barely-tamed-brutality

[Katashi_itto]

1. The mask is coming off us.

[polichick]

2. That's exactly right. Scary in the short run but probably best in the long run.

[bemildred]

3. Word. nt

[Demeter]

4. This Lesson from the 60's Is Being Relearned by the Next Generation

just as the power abuses were relearned by the present generation of psychopaths from their McCarthy/ OSS / Nixon/Reagan/Kissinger/ etc grandsires.

[bemildred]

5. Things are starting to remind me of 1968 more as time goes on.

Not the same facts, but the same smell and feel.