Addendum to Critical Thinking

Addendum to “Critical Thinking”

In yesterday’s blog I concluded with the following paragraph, inferring that there was a concerted effort by politicians to divert attention from the reasons for the OWS movement onto police brutality by having senior officers in departments, who have no business being involved in the actual policing, indulging in a less than professional manner, such as the “white shirt” in the NYPD and the Lieutenant at UC Davis.  Both of them sort of went bonkers with the pepper spray.

Relative to this last incident, which by far is the most serious, was the thought that since the majority of these supposed police brutality incidents at Occupy events have been perpetrated at the instigation of the politicians in office, or at least by the upper management of police departments, if they are not a deliberate attempt to divert attention away from the actual reasons for the Occupy movement by throwing police under the bus.  For some even so-called liberal pundits, it has worked.  They spend an inordinate amount of time talking about so-called police brutality and not nearly enough on the corrupt system that pits the 1% against the 99% in the first place.

Of course today there was an article on Reader Supported News, titled The ‘Crackdown on Occupy’ Controversy, written by Naomi Wolf, Guardian UK, 12/3/11.  I will be mentioning a “Verheyden-Hilliard”.  This is Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the DC Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.

This is a 10 page article, but well worth reading in its entirety.  Please do so.  Here I will quote three of four of Wolf’s final paragraphs in the article.

“But as far as my central argument goes, I stand my ground.  I have here presented additional evidence that NYPD and federal authorities coordinate efforts in the surveillance and arrest of OWS supporters.  I have presented what appears to be DHS’s own non-denial, as of this writing, of potential lower level staff involvement.  The oversight role of DHS by specific congressmen, as specified clearly on DHS’s own website is clear.  I argue still the congressmen and women have a confirmed financial interest in the status quo, which individual Occupy members’ first 100 answers to me about their agenda would directly threaten.”

“My analysis about the various forms of collaboration between DHS and local law enforcement is “on firm footing”, confirms Verheyden-Hilliard, “and the record will speak for itself as it comes out.  The whole last decade has been about the integration of law enforcement on a vertical level.”

There is a house on fire, and it is ours.”

During the Bush administration, there was a concerted effort to only employ those who were in sympathy with the objectives of that administration.  This has been documented too many times for me to attempt to post them all here.  Since Wolf cites the fact that DHS would like to narrow the investigation to only senior staff at DHS, it would appear that lower staff were likely involved in this coordination effort.  All across the country the crackdown on OWS occurred all at once, so to speak, with subsequent incidents of police misbehavior.  This is what I meant by “throwing the police under the bus”.  The low-level officers apparently were acting mostly professionally.  But by upper-level personnel indulging in less than desirable behavior, it has smeared the reputation of all of our first responders.  And taken the emphasis off of the legitimate concerns of OWS, and onto manufactured police brutality.

This is not only really sad, but disgusting!