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Occupy Wall Street isn’t about real estate, and its signal achievement was not assembling shivering sleepers in a park. The high ground that the protestors seized is not an archipelago of parks in America, but the national agenda. The movement has planted economic inequality on the nation’s consciousness, and it will be difficult for any mayor or police force to dislodge it.
– Nicholas Kristof, New York Times, November 20, 2011

An Iron Law

The wealthy masters’ governmental agents and servants reserve the right to brutally attack popular protest when and where Democrats claim nominal authority no less than where and when Republicans hold top elected offices.[[1]]. An iron unstated law holds across the much-bemoaned “polarization” of the American one-and-a-half party system. It is fine, this law holds, to call for more freedom and democracy in officially designated enemy and non-allied states like the former Soviet Union, China, Venezuela, and Iran (today). But Americans who question the nation’s unelected and interrelated dictatorships of money and empire at home had better prepare to be smacked down when they manage to receive popular support. If authorities deem that standard methods of derision, denunciation, and media disappearance (invisibility) are insufficient for defeating domestic dissent, those who would bring democracy to the “homeland” (a revealing term, to say the least) from the bottom up had better keep an eye out for the night-riders of the 21st century police state. They may come face-to-face (well, face-to-Darth Vader visor) with the high-tech billy clubs of American government’s well-fed right hand, which grows stronger despite (and in accord with) the neoliberal starvation of “the left hand of the state” (Pierre Bourdieu) – the parts of the public sector that help and support ordinary people..

Military Policing in Democratic-Run Homeland Cities and on Liberal Campuses

The hold of the iron law has been demonstrated in the recent armed-force repression of the Occupy Movement in a number of predominantly Democratic-run cities and at the outwardly liberal University of California. The assault that has received the most national attention took place in Manhattan’s Zucotti Park, birthplace and epicenter of the national and global movement against economic inequality since Occupy Wall Street protestors first claimed the space on September 17, 2011. It was an ugly affair. An eyewitness account from the Naked Capitalism blog last Tuesday suggests a totalitarian state operating under the orders of the .001 percent financial chieftain-turned-New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg