Public Safety Canard Used To Beat Down OWS Protesters

The recent, coordinated, authoritarian crackdowns against Occupy Wall Street protesters are now being justified on the grounds of "public safety", yeah, that's the ticket.  They've been trotting this excuse out quite a bit and testing it out to see if people will buy this baloney.  Considering that the 1% exploiters could not care less if the Occupy Wall Street protesters were put up against a wall and shot, I doubt that they have any particular concern for the safety and health conditions in the parks.

It's far more likely that these raids are being done for the "safety" of the 1% exploiters, who don't want to see this movement grow any bigger as election season draws near. Plus, seeing protesters camped out in the park over Thanksgiving might actually humanize them and make people feel sorry for them.  People might conclude that these protesters are actually committed to their causes, unlike astroturf Tea Baggers who are bussed in by the Koch brothers for a few hours and then dropped back off at their trailer parks like yesterday's garbage.

However, it might be SAFER to KEEP protesters where they are, instead of forcing them to disperse. Firstly there is a risk that the police will use excessive force, embarrassing the police and causing sympathy for the protesters, as it already has when they used excessive force against Iraq War Veteran Scott Olsen, who has just now gotten out of the hospital.

Secondly, remember the story that I told about a fictional guy named Oscar Occupado.  What would Oscar Occupado do, I wonder?  Once Oscar is beaten up by police and thrown out of the park, he is likely to be roaming the city, perhaps looking for a little payback. As I previously noted, he might start to play things a little smarter wearing a hat and sunglasses and a hoodie.  He might decide to help fix some of the locks on the doors of banks, but accidentally squirt superglue in them, by mistake, instead of oil.  He might decide to buy a pay-as-you-go phone and call in hundreds of overzealous "warnings" all over town.  He might accidentally drop pockets full of roofing nails on busy city streets and highways, because he can't afford to fix the holes in his pockets.  Forced out of the park, he might accidentally start fires in dumpsters or near trees that are close to power lines, trying to stay warm or cook dinner.  More sophisticated people might accidentally start broadcasting on the wrong radio frequencies with portable transmitters, only trying to tell people about their plight.  This kind of equipment might even inadvertently end up jamming cellphone signals.  Or Oscar could run out of gas and get his old junk car accidentally stuck on railroad tracks, slowing down the engines of commerce.

I guess the point is that all this could probably be avoided if you let these people stay where they are at, in an essentially harmless state.  If you rile them up then it is more likely to do harm than good.