TV News LIES

Since the Occupy Wall Street movement began in mid-September, protesters and reporters have been learning the hard way how diverse police departments handle large-scale street demonstrations — sometimes with rubber bullets, sometimes, as in Davis, Calif., with pepper spray in the face.

While police departments have deployed tear gas in cities including Denver, Seattle and on more than three separate occasions in Oakland, Calif., in response to Occupy street demonstrations, protesters in New York have been met with the sheer force of numbers, pepper spray, kettling nets to hold in crowds, and batons. Dozens have been hospitalized by a variety of crowd control tactics.

In the early months after the 9/11 terror attacks, America's visceral reaction was to gird for a relentless, whatever-it-takes quest to punish those responsible and prevent any recurrences.

To a striking extent, those goals have been achieved. Yet over the years, Americans have also learned about trade-offs, about decisions and practices that placed national security on a higher plane than civil liberties and, in the view of some, above the rule of law.

Retired Philadelphia Police captain Ray Lewis has joined Occupy Wall Street, calling the New York Police Department’s conduct “disgusting” and “totally uncalled for”:

Video...

What happens when a government builds a massive, unaccountable police apparatus to thwart infiltration by a foreign menace, only to see the society it's supposed to protect take to the streets for entirely different reasons?

It looks as though we may be about to find out. The Occupy protests have been mostly peaceful, with a few fairly dramatic exceptions. But the sight of a huge police presence in riot gear is always startling, and tactics that have been honed in Europe (such as "kettling") against anarchist actions have not been as common in the United States as elsewhere.

Gold­man Sachs, which re­ceived more sub­si­dies and bailout-re­lated funds than any other in­vest­ment bank be­cause the Fed­eral Re­serve per­mit­ted it to be­come a bank hold­ing com­pany under its “emer­gency sit­u­a­tion,” has used bil­lions in tax­payer money to en­rich it­self and re­ward its top ex­ec­u­tives. It handed its se­nior em­ploy­ees a stag­ger­ing $18 bil­lion in 2009, $16 bil­lion in 2010 and $10 bil­lion in 2011 in mega-bonuses. This mas­sive trans­fer of wealth up­wards by the Bush and Obama ad­min­is­tra­tions, now es­ti­mated at $13 tril­lion to $14 tril­lion, went into the pock­ets of those who car­ried out fraud and crim­i­nal ac­tiv­ity rather than the vic­tims who lost their jobs, their sav­ings and often their homes.

There is still time to correct these problems by 2012. This story is not just about Shelby County, Tennessee, where I believe the elections commission is competently addressing these problems for 2012. Last-minute dumps of new voter registration forms was a national problem in 2008, and across America voters reported that when they showed up to vote, their name was missing from the list.

The 2008 presidential election brought millions of new voters to the polls, with enthusiasm especially high among youth and minority voters. Yet in Shelby County (the home of the great city of Memphis), over 15,000 voters, disproportionately young or Black voters, were omitted from the list of valid voters at the time of early voting; by Election Day, the names finally made it to the list.