Taking a page from dying Middle Eastern autocracies, Frankfurt's authorities tried to ban protestors from its downtown, so Blockupy Frankfurt decided to provide a real-time demonstration of what democracy is all about.
In other news, the imperial barbarism of the Terror War hits home in Chicago (full details are here). Notice how the police officers know and even revel in the history of the 1968 police riots. Not even Assad's shabiya are this shameless.
Note also the politics of racialization: the protestors were white. If they had been citizens of color, they would've been arrested during the auto stop and given bogus tickets for hundreds of dollars.
This is not paranoia speaking. Full disclosure: I'm a perfectly ordinary-looking, middle-aged white guy with multiple college degrees, and I was randomly stopped on the road earlier this year by a crass, power-hungry Illinois cop fishing for drug convictions.
My skin color and polite demeanor meant that I got off with a warning. But it was a nasty experience.
No amount of theoretical insight really prepares you for the violence of the neoliberal state: the cruelty and viciousness of its low-level authorities, the pompous officiousness of bill-collectors and agencies demanding money you don't have, the dismal rhetoric of following contractual law -- the same law the 1% routinely bend, break or simply disregard.
The lower this Empire sinks into the water, the more desperate its efforts to charge everyone for air to breathe. Ken Levine's Rapture came oh-so-close to naming neoliberal empire for the madness it indeed is before being side-tracked by the Rand cultists (they're symptoms rather than the prime movers of the system), let's just hope Irrational's next game will hit its target.
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