Vicious Cycle of Repression-Protest-Repression
The increasingly blatant cycle of government abuse of power leading to protest, which in turn provokes more abuses of power as the government tries to repress those who expose its original abuses has produced what appears to be yet another example: this time police brutality against demonstrators protesting against the anti-democratic, pro-corporate ALEC organization.
An obvious question in a democracy is why the police should be taking the side of an elitist organization in the first place.
Stop snickering. I know that is a naive question. The point is that we are beginning to think it is normal.
I suppose the next thing we will hear is that NSA data on the ALEC protesters has been illegally passed to the brutal Chicago police so they can continue to harass, torture, terrorize--as the case may be--those naive Americans who think they have the right to disagree with either government officials (e.g., in the case of North Carolina Moral Monday demonstrators) or private elitist organizations.
Government officials defending NSA spying on Americans have been tossing around an inane phrase recently - "connect the dots." The idea is that your Government has the right to steal all your private information in order to discover any linkage that may exist (relevant or not) between you and anyone that, frankly, anyone in the Government may ever, now or in the future, want to discover. (Remember the recent revelations about low-level NSA employees having the "right" to manipulate data acquired from domestic spying without even getting specific legal authorization.)
The American way of life is falling apart very, very fast. It is time to realize that terrorizing and torturing whistleblowers, abusing protesters, and exploiting fears of terrorism to expand the national security state and undermine Constitutional guarantees of civil liberties are all part of a single story: the undermining of democracy.