Report from the Wall Street bunker: Maybe we just need to appreciate the fun side of fascism

"They do it because they know they will get away with it."

-- Lawrence O'Donnell Jr., last night on The Last Word

by Ken

Howie passed this clip on to me, and I agree that this is something remarkable from friend O'Donnell, who occasionally has something of note to say. (He likes to position himself as a crusader, but most of the time his steely determination is channeled in defiant defense of the status quo.) And this is certainly an interesting and important issue he's broached. Here's a fuller version of the above quote from Lawrence O'Donnell Jr., from the above clip:

There's a Rodney King every day in this country, and black America has always known that. Everything those cops did this weekend to those protesters they've done to someone else when there were no video cameras rolling. They've done it, and they've gotten away with it. They know just how much assault and battery will let them commit. They know just how many false arrests their department will let them do. They know just how much lattitude their department gives them on abusing citizens. They do it because they know they can. They do it because they know, they know they will get away with it.

None of the officers who crossed the line this weekend will be disciplined in any way. None of them will be charged with the assaults and batteries that they committed. None of them will be charged with the false arrests. None of them will lose a day's pay. The police department doesn't need an investigation to figure out what happened this weekend. The department has already said the officers acted appropriately, case closed, that's it. If the department does by some miracle, by some chance, discipline anyone, anyone for what happened this weekend, I will immediately rewrite what would then be my mistaken presumption tonight that American police have once again gotten away with another crime against the American people they are sworn to serve and protect.

I'm not sure, though, that police misconduct is a central issue in the OccupyWallStreet protest situation, and you'll note that O'Donnell goes out of his way to make clear that he's not talking about this situation -- going so far to not name, until well into the piece, the city where this action took place. He further points out that the NYPD, far from being one of the country's worst police forces, is one of the best, and also that most of the cops have behaved judiciously. No, what he's interested in is the culture of nationwide tolerance for a high level of police misconduct.

A good issue, which under other circumstances I might have more interest in engaging. In my admittedly limited experience with local cops, whether consciously or not -- probably some of each -- they tend to think of themselves as not so much enforcing the law as maintaining order, which often means that they tend to view as the greatest threat to society civilians treating them with insufficient respect.

And you can be sure that the governmental and financial-industry muckety-mucks who are orchestrating the insane, criminal, profoundly anti-American response to the Wall Street protesters know perfectly well that if you throw enough cops into an area in which the protesters have been screwed so tightly into a state of such impossible immobilility, and challenge them strenuously enough to attempt to maintain a modicum of basic human dignity, eventually you'll get encounters that can pass for provocation, even if you have to invent the provocation, especially if you've got that contingent of riot-ready cops who feel not only entitled but obligated to assert their authority.

Which is, after all, the whole point of the government going fascist with this insanely disproportionate response to an action that (a) is totally and unambiguously legal and (b) has so far provided absolutely no indication of even the possibility of the tiniest threat to public order. Once you've got video of your gallant police officers acting as society's last line of defense against cutthroat Marxist-anarchist-hippie-dippie protesters set on bringing down civilization as we know it.

Because if your vantage point is, say, Bloombergian Billionaire, where mere millionaires are regarded as low achievers and people who scrape by on mere six-figure incomes are regarded as working stiffs, the notion that ordinary Americans have the right to gather just to voice anger and pain, to demand that the now-settled policy of ignoring them be reopened, can be seen as a mortal threat. Okay, a pathetically anemic mortal threat, but when you're a lonely billionaire, you're very likely no stranger to paranoia.

Mayor Mike himself has joked crudely about how if we're meant to the bankers, they'll stop lending money that could lead to the creation of jobs. Is it really possible that the man is so out of touch that he thinks his banker buddies have the slightest intention of doing so? I mean, after they showed their hand by greedily pocketing all the money U.S. taxpayers dumped into bailing them out? I have to believe that Mayor Mike knows this as well as I do. He's just . . . well, lying his privileged-class head off.

Hey, there are reasons why societies embrace fascism, and it's not just in the interest of the leaders who exploit their authoritarian perches. They count on people who love "order" to rally to their side, to embrace the fun side of fascism. Fascism can't exist without an existing public disposition to fascistic behavior.

You've probably noticed that I've hardly touched on the agenda of the OccupyWallStreet action. In good part this is because there isn't "an" agenda. It looks to me, from the outside, more like people who rightly feel desperately abused and powerless to do anything about it are taking the giant first step of demanding to be acknowledged.

We can talk more some other time about the nature and justice of the action and its tactical workability. But for now they're irrelevant. The government isn't entitled to an opinion of any of that. Those people's right to protest is as close to absolute as anything that exists in U.S. law.

Federal Hall, at the intersection of Wall and Broad Streets, diagonally opposite the New York Stock Exchange, is an insanely popular destination for visitors to New York from the U.S. and abroad. They love gamboling on those broad stairs and out onto the platform holding the statue of George Washington, and they love taking pictures of all the above. At the moment Federal Hall itself is still open, but access is only via the back entrance on Pine Street. Fencing forecloses access to the bottom of the stairs, cutting both the stairs and old George himself off from his countless foreign and domestic admirers.

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