Recent FBI documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justine Fund under the Freedom of Information Act indicate that the FBI and Homeland Security have been conducting widespread surveillance on members of the Occupy community aimed at implicating them in some sort of illegal or terrorist activity.
Why? This is an organization that has proven itself peaceful and with intentions toward public justice.
The answer is simple. The FBI and Homeland Security have been illegally acting as militant extensions of the corporate banking structure in this country.
This is not the first time this accusation has come to light but now it comes from the files of the FBI itself. I first ran into this kind of activity when on a visit to the Occupy demonstrations in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan. When I tried to walk down Wall Street I encountered barriers meant to keep vehicular but not pedestrian traffic from using the street. When I went around them, I was stopped by a man in civilian dress who instructed me that I couldn’t use the street.
When I asked him on whose authority he made the statement, he told me that I was in the middle of a police operation. So I asked him if he was a cop and in the ensuing standoff I discovered that he was an off duty police officer. Though he refused to admit to it, it soon became obvious that the financial community was hiring off duty police officers to intimidate the peaceful young people who were gathered to denounce Wall Street’s destruction of the American economy.
He was somewhat put off because I was old, white and well dressed and was even more put off when I informed him that, as was my right, I was going to walk down a street, that despite his claim, was not currently under police activity. He threatened to stop me but I informed him that since he wasn’t, by his own admission, in uniform or on duty, he had no right to keep me from doing anything, legal, that I wished, and at that moment I wished to walk down Wall Street. I pointed to a half dozen uniformed cops across the street and told him that if he touched me I would bring charges against him. He knew that even if the charges didn’t stick, which they wouldn’t in our current police state, he would face departmental sanctions. He backed off, but it was obvious that under different circumstances and with a younger, less confident opponent he would have acted very differently.
Though very different examples, both situations show that the Federal agencies, as well as local & state police departments have been acting as de facto arms of the corporate world. For too long now we have had to put up with our authority figures acting to interrupt and intimidate peaceful demonstrations against the exact forces that have been hurting our country. This is not Soviet Russia, communist China, a Middle Eastern or a South American dictatorship. We are entitled to peaceful demonstration to show our objections to those who would corrupt our society. That our President seems to be backing this kind of totalitarian activity is a disgrace.
We didn’t elect Barak Obama to become Joseph Stalin. We elected him because we thought he had the intelligence and moral stature to understand these situations and back those who were trying to help the country rather than those who were trying to steal from it.
The fact that the NDAA still hasn’t been completely repealed is a national disgrace. What kind of totalitarian state are we indulging when Americans can be arrested and held without charge, indefinitely? This is exactly the kind of crap that King George pulled and look what happened with that.
The president is fighting to control gun sales but his domestic surveillance policies and the NDAA give credence to the gun nuts wail that they need guns to protect themselves from totalitarian government actions. Are they really wrong? When the government acts like Big Brother, and gets away with it, this is no longer America; this is some half-baked tropical dictatorship where people disappear in the night and if we give them reason, the gun nuts will be waiting in their homes, armed to the teeth to defend themselves from that midnight knock at the. Right now, our government is making it look like they aren’t altogether wrong.