By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
I love the smell of tear gas in the morning. Well, not LOVE exactly, but reading about attempts to curtail and confine the Occupy movement across the country — most particularly in Oakland — sure brings back memories. Of course, back in the day, the establishment had yet to figure out how to render protesters deaf, dumb and moot with “kettling,” a herding maneuver that produced the holding debacle known as ‘Guantanamo on the Hudson’ during the 2004 Republican National Convention. Protesters were corralled out of earshot and eyesight of the event itself, with more than a hundred detained in wet and miserable conditions on New York’s Pier 57. Millions in reparations were eventually paid by the state of New York. Many believe we saw a redux of that maneuver on the Brooklyn Bridge at the beginning of the month, with more than 700 purposely directed into an illegal area where they were sure to be arrested. A class action suit has been filed.
This kind of crowd control was developed by authorities to handle the random outbreaks that protesting citizens have so rarely participated in these last few decades. At the end of the last century, occasional outbursts seemed to startle the establishment, which had been lulled by a population gone listless and compliant. As the public mostly disapproved of group activities that mainstream media described as mob-like, cop shops and city governments felt free to make short work of dissent. Keeping a lid on dissenters was a primary goal of government even before Homeland Security became touchstone for all national threats and increased the public sector by hundreds of thousands of employees.
According to a Kindle offering by Will Bunch, entitled October 1, 2011: The Battle of the Brooklyn Bridge:
The trend actually began after 1999, when chaotic street protests against a World Trade Organization confab in Seattle rocked the Establishment; police departments responded with widespread use of a tactic called “kettling,” in which a blue wall of law-enforcement officers will surround a large group of protesters and let them boil in an enclosed “kettle” for hours; sometimes the demonstrators are arrested, and sometimes they are merely deprived of their freedom to move about. Either way, the goal is through discomfort (i.e., lack of food or opportunity to use a bathroom) and frustration to not only quell a current protest but to make citizens think twice about taking to the streets in the future — regardless of what it says in the Bill of Rights.
It’s astounding to me that so many people seem shocked that the police, representing a hyper-sensitive establishment, are quick on the trigger to use extreme force against perceived threats to authority. During Bush’s tenure, for instance, we constantly heard about approved corridors, holding stations and a no-nonsense approach to protests. The Bushies were extremely vindictive, arresting people for t-shirts they disapproved at public meetings and going after employees for bumper stickers. Leftie voices raised in complaint were uniformly ignored.