Occupy the Police State — TruthOut

In an interview with Truthout, Kolin [author of "State Power and Democracy: Before and During The Presidency of George W. Bush"] said with the emergence of the Occupy protests there is now "reason to hope that a mass-based progressive movement could challenge the power of an American police state."

Kolin said, as a concept, a police state is developed "to modernize state functions and concentrate control over society trough the creation of  specialized departments."

"This early form of the police state would evolve into the modern of the German word Polizeistaat in the 1930s," Kolin said. "As the modern police state developed it assumed many of the features that became hallmarks of the Bush and Obama administrations. What unfolded throughout the course of US history was the growth of a specialized state within a state, which monopolizes national security. That is defined as identification of and confrontation of enemies of the the state, which are obstacles to the expansion of state power."

Read it at TruthOut
Occupy the Police State
by Jason Leopold, Truthout | Report

Where is the president on this?

Kolin was highly critical of the Obama administration, during his interview with Truthout, for remaining completely silent as disturbing images of peaceful protesters, such as the University of California, Davis, students who were pepper sprayed by campus police as they sat with their arms linked, flashed across television screens and went viral on the Internet.

"We don't want a government that is representative of the one percent," Kolin said. "But the silence by this administration speaks volumes and indicates, to me, that this is a movement the government wants to crush."

One Democratic member of the House is speaking out, however, Here is Rep. Jerrold Nadler's  (D-NY) letter to AG Eric Holder asking for a full investigation of police action taken against Occupy Wall Street.

Kolin ends on a somewhat positive note (if one can call it that).

"A police state has now become a 'normal part' of the US government's function," Kolin said. "Nonetheless, keep in mind that police states are by their inherent nature dysfunctional. Whether or not such dysfunction is a hopeful sign of a revival of progressive mass democracy remains to be seen."

So we are living in a dysfunctional state and the hope is that we can get it together as a people to clear the decks and set the ship back on course. O happy day.