When the Hammer Falls Everywhere, Hammer Back

A funny thing happened on the evening of Dec. 1, after the Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act with amendments allowing the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil by military authorities. Conservative groups, including both Tea Party and Libertarian factions, reached out to Occupy and progressive groups to suggest joint efforts to work for the impeachment of every senator who had signed on to the so-called "Levin-McCain Compromise," which really was a blanket surrender to military law-enforcement power. The movement is like a miniature, grassroots version of the wider "Kick Them All Out" campaign, to simply remove everyone from Congress and start over.

If the end-of-year exasperation begins to sound like nihilism at its least useful, there's a reason for that. The wheels have fallen off the great machine of empire, and there is simply nowhere left to go but dissolve the body-politic of the great republic.

This past week, we lived through an example of that when the Occupy Colorado Springs movement-in-exile went to Venetucci Farms to challenge Gov. Hickenlooper while he dedicated a solar farm. Now, don't misinterpret this, SunShare is a great little startup that is encouraging cooperative solar gardens for shared photovoltaic electricity use, and Colorado Springs Utilities is to be commended for signing up to the concept. The intent of the mic-check was not to pick on Venetucci or the solar garden, but to chase down a governor who has been denying his partial responsibility at unleashing the goons of the Denver Police Department on state-land encampments. (Even former city employees now charge the DPD with having a culture of violence). The mayors of Colorado Springs and Denver, Republican Steve Bach and Democrat Michael Hancock, are equally to blame for being just like the mayors and city councils of most major U.S. cities who are quashing dissent.

In fact, I lost a few friends at Venetucci when I said that in 2011, liberal Democrats have been as much to blame for repression as conservative Republicans. Too bad if they don't get it. It's time to bring the system down.

Colorado Springs Raid, and a Statement of Principle

Well, the city government dragged its collective feet about extending the Occupy permit in Colorado Springs for another 30 days, but they sure didn't waste any time calling the cops to tear down the encampment at 1 a.m. on the morning of Nov. 21, once they decided not to extend the permit. This is the pattern that has been followed around the country, thankfully without arrests and violence in Colorado Springs, but always with intimidation and subterfuge. What we can be sure of, as I wrote in my last post, is that the hand of the federal government in the form of Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security is obvious. What we should mourn is that city, county, and state officials are ready at all times to use government-sanctioned violence - and that multiethnic liberal Democrats are just as ready to use that violence as conservative white-male Republicans.

Will the model for the United States be Egypt, where violence escalates on all sides, or Greece, where the government tries to pretend the shuffling of parties for an "acceptable" government for the EU actually matters, even as the street explodes and Greece becomes ungovernable? In either event, the bickering between Republicans and Democrats matters as little as the ruminations of the "supercommittee" on the deficit. Maybe if Repubs and Dems could both be on a Supercommittee, members of Occupy and Tea Party could both be on a SuperLynchMob, with pitchforks and torches at the ready. Because it sure looks like there is little worth saving in government as we know it.

Let's make a simple statement here: Now that Forbes magazine itself (the Voice of Capitalism in its most conservative form) has come out against the use of heavy-handed tactics nationwide, I think it's safe to say that if you believe in the methods used for Occupy takedown, you are simply wrong. It's nice to live in a country of freedoms where you have the right to be wrong, but never doubt that you are flat-assed wrong. And speaking of never doubting....

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." - Margaret Mead