Occupy Underground

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?