Oakland Police Riot: The Imperial Boardroom Strikes Back
 I had the honor of talking with Cindy Sheehan tonight, recording an
interview for her radio show, which I believe will air on Sunday. She
made mention of the "police riot" -- as she aptly phrased it -- in
Oakland Tuesday night, as a Democratic administration moved in with gas
and other weapons of war to clear the streets of American citizens
taking part in the Occupy movement.
Scott Olsen: In critical condition with fractured skull
Ms. Sheehan also noted the
fact that the Occupy movement's terminology about "the 99 percent vs.
the 1 percent elite" is not entirely accurate; far too many of the 99
percent are serving as willing tools of the 1 percent -- in the police
forces, in the media, even in the general public, where you can always
find plenty of people eagerly genuflecting to the high and mighty, even
as they and their own families and communities sink deeper into the
mire.
The Oakland debacle is a prime example of this, as cops --
putative public servants whose pay scales put them deep into the 99
percent -- waded into the Occupy citizens, breaking heads and driving
away the very people trying to stand up for their interests.
The New York Times reports
on one victim of these first strike-backs by our panicky overlords. And
he is a most telling victim indeed: a military veteran, who had served
two tours in the imperial war of aggression in Iraq, then turned against
the War Machine and joined that stalwart band of humanity's patriots,
the Iraq Veterans Against the War: (See original for links and video.)
Two veterans groups say that a
protester who was badly wounded in Oakland on Tuesday night is a former
marine who is now hospitalized with a fractured skull.
According
to Iraq Veterans Against the War, the protester, Scott Olsen, is a
member of their group who left the Marines in 2010, after serving two
tours in Iraq. In a statement, the group's executive director Jose
Vasquez, claimed that Mr. Olsen "sustained a skull fracture after being
shot in the head with a police projectile while peacefully participating
in an Occupy Oakland march," on Tuesday night. Mr. Vasquez added that
Mr. Olsen, a systems network administrator in Daly, Calif. "is currently
sedated at a local hospital awaiting examination by a neurosurgeon."
A
series of bloody photographs that appear to show Mr. Olsen after he was
wounded were posted on the San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media
Center's site, Indybay.org. Those images show that Mr. Olsen was wearing
a brown military shirt with his last name on the front. Jay Finneburgh,
the photographer who shot the images of Mr. Olsen, wrote on Indybay:
"This poor guy was right behind me when he was hit in the head with a
police projectile. He went down hard and did not get up. The bright
light in the second shot is from a flash-bang grenade that went off a
few feet from us. He looks like he might be a veteran. he was eventually
taken to highland hospital." ....
We will see more, much more of this. You can smell the fear in
the boardrooms (and in their bought-and-paid-for extensions, the
government offices) around the world, as our mighty statesfolk flail at
the global economic meltdown their own policies have unleashed -- with
no other answer than to keep imposing "austerity" measures, one after
another, destroying the societies they've feasted upon for so long. And
has there even been such a gaggle of fourth-rate poltroons, of shallow,
witless, gormless goobers as the leaders of the "developed" world these
days? Sarkozy, Cameron, Merkel, Berlusconi, Obama ....? It's like the
last tribal council on Easter Island. All they have left are lies,
delusions -- and brutality.
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