I mean, damn, they have plenty of minority members on the Council.

What the hell were they thinking?

Oakland is a tinderbox, just waiting for a flame.

Did they not observe the past election?

Unfortunately, for $250K Oakland will implement some 'tactics' and 'results'.

This will not end up as planned.

I worry that DHS know full well that Oakland is a petri dish for much of what shall follow, activism-wise, and are pushing -just- to see what occurs (so they may prepare). Speculation, of course, but then again, DHS claimed to not have spied on Occupy from day one, and they had indeed done so, or worse.

The East Bay is crammed with up-armored vehicles and all kinds of cops-become-SWAT shit.

Oakland is the perfect proving-ground. There is no more fertile ground for some really incendiary action.

They will use this to crank down hard on any 'protest' action(s).

THEN what to do?

All of these communities have spent their gvt-mandated money on up-armor.

There has been billions of dollars spent on community security.

I live in a town of less than 9K.

We've got them, fucking crazy trucks bearing death. And this in in an up-scale town.

This is bad business, FWWM.

It's like the powers that be have already decided to give up on bread and circuses in favor of naked repression.

Why? Do they know about bad things coming down the pike, about scarcities and uncontrolled environmental devastation?

Or have they simply gotten so greedy that they don't want to share any of it? It's all My Precious, and any shred that goes to someone else is their personal loss.

The repression of the late 60s was at least based on something tangible -- on massive demonstrations and riots and chaos in the streets. There's nothing approaching that now.

So what are they afraid of?

Something is very wrong.

And that's a superb question: Have they factored the food crisis into their plans.

The gun fetishists are also preparing for mass uprising -- either a race war, or starving masses fleeing the cities, or locust-like incursions of illegals, or they don't know what -- but that doesn't mean they're not deluding themselves.

So is the same true of the government and do they have the same kooky belief system, or is the official paranoia actually based on evidence?

Remember that the war on drugs goes back to Nixon and was one of the ways he tried to consolidate extra-judicial power. Our skyrocketing incarceration rates began under Reagan and were justified by the same law-and-order mentality. These things are not recent.

Moreover, the repression that is going on now seems to be tied less to old-fashioned fears of mass uprisings than it is to the desire of civic leaders to keep their cities safe for gentrification and the business interests of the 1%.

Meanwhile, the drug war is fading. The crime rates of a couple of decades ago are being blamed on a temporary wave of lead poisoning. And Occupy seems to have shifted to a strategy of avoiding direct confrontations and focusing on radical community organizing.

So the real question at this point might be one of who's fooling whom?