Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Author: Jamelle Bouie.
The Occupy Movement has been a courageous grassroots effort both in the US and around the world to resist the:
- degradation of democracy,
- destruction of human rights,
- strengthening of oligarchies,
- creeping infiltration of daily life by military industrial complexes powered by the international financial community, and
- the disregard and exploitation of most of the world by the 1%.
Right on, Occupiers—including the Occupation Democracy group recently camped out in Trafalgar Square in London!
Occupying for democracy, peace, and justice, even in what are supposed to be the world’s leading democracies, has become a very risky business because of the other form of occupation taking place—military occupation, the insidious product of the militarization of the police.
The armed soldier—whoops, I mean the armed police officer—in today’s photo above was on duty in Feguson, MO, last August in a Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) vehicle, increasingly used along with military-style weapons in operations considered high risk and beyond the capabilities of regular, uniformed police, who apparently cannot handle pro-democracy protesters, including college professors such as Cornell West.
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Author: Jamelle Bouie.
A recent article in the Daily Kos tells us that since 2006,
“police departments have acquired 435 armored vehicles, 533 planes, 93,763 machine guns, and 432 mine-resistant armored trucks- $4.3 billion worth of equipment.” Ask yourself both who is being threatened by all this weaponry and who profits from those purchases.
Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology