Homeland Security Kept Tabs on Occupy Wall Street

From Rolling Stone:

The five-page report – contained in 5 million newly leaked documents examined by Rolling Stone in an investigative partnership with WikiLeaks – goes on to sum up the history of Occupy Wall Street and assess its "impact" on everything from financial services to government facilities.

And

It’s never a good thing to see a government agency talk in secret about the need to “control protestors” – especially when that agency is charged with protecting the homeland against terrorists, not nonviolent demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceable dissent. From the notorious Cointelpro operations of the 1960s to the NYPD’s recent surveillance of Muslim Americans, the government has a long and disturbing history of justifying the curtailing of civil liberties under the cover of perceived, and often manufactured, threats ("the potential security risk to critical infrastructure). What’s more, there have been reports that Homeland Security played an active role in coordinating the nationwide crackdown on the Occupy movement last November – putting the federal government in the position of targeting its own citizens in the name of national security. There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for "continuous situational awareness" and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.

More here.

I'd say I'm outraged, which I am, but it just seems so pointless.

The government, no matter which party is in control, is always necessarily right-wing. I mean, the government is hopelessly intertwined with capitalism. The government has the legal monopoly on violence. The government is about control and order. These are all right-wing values. And that's why, even though they say they hate the government, you'll never see this kind of harassment against the Tea Party or its ilk. Ultimately, the right wing loves the government; they just want it to be more true to itself, more capitalist, more violent, more controlling. So the government loves the right, and the right loves the government. Government harassment of this variety, for the most part, is aimed only at the left.

Indeed, there is a very long history of US governmental subversion against groups and individuals who oppose capitalism, violence, or governmental control. Union busting, the blacklisting of anybody in the entertainment business who liked Karl Marx, FBI surveillance of Martin Luther King, the extrajudicial killing, murder really, of Black Panther Fred Hampton while he slept in his home. It goes on and on. Just click the Cointelpro link above for more on this. The government hates the left and wants to destroy it. Always.

That's why raging against this DHS move against OWS, and its possible coordinating with local governments to take the movement down, strikes me as pointless. This is how it works. Right wingers can protest and demonstrate all they want, without impediment, because, in reality, they support the government. Left wingers already have two strikes against them just for being leftists. Actually trying to change the power structure by appealing to popular sentiment is the third strike, which is when the gloves come off.

I'd call it anti-American, which in many ways it is, but then when has America really been true to its own principles?

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