he violent police assaults on Occupy Movement encampments across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of the political class's venality. 
Occupy Wall Street protester Brandon Watts lies injured on the ground after police brutalized him during the eviction of OWS from Zuccotti Park (Allison Joyce/Getty Images).The violent police assaults on Occupy Movement encampments across the US are no coincidence. Occupy has touched the third rail of the political class's venality.
US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week.
- An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face;
- the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by [Lt. John Pike backed by] phalanxes of riot police went viral online;
- images proliferated of young women -- targeted seemingly for their gender -- screaming, dragged by their hair by [cavemen] police in riot gear;
- and the pictures of a young man, stunned and bleeding profusely from the head, emerged in the record of the middle-of-the-night clearing of Zuccotti Park.
But just when Americans thought we had the picture -- crazy police and mayoral overkill, on a municipal level, in many different cities(?) -- the picture darkened.
The National Union of Journalists and the Committee to Protect Journalists issued a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to investigate possible federal involvement with law enforcement practices that appeared to target journalists.
The [1%-preserving] New York Times reported that "New York cops have arrested, punched, whacked, shoved to the ground, and tossed a barrier at reporters and photographers" covering protests.
Reporters were asked by NYPD to raise their hands to prove they had credentials: when many dutifully did so, they were taken, upon threat of arrest, away from the story they were covering and penned far from where news was unfolding.
Other reporters wearing press passes were arrested and roughed up by cops, after being -- falsely -- informed by police that "It is illegal to take pictures on the sidewalk."
- In New York, a state supreme court justice and a New York City council member were beaten up;
- in Berkeley, California, one of our greatest national poets, Robert Hass, was beaten with batons.
- The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests.
To Europeans, the enormity of this breach may not be obvious at first. [The European] system of government prohibits the creation of a federalized police force and forbids federal or militarized involvement in municipal peacekeeping. More
