<div align=center><em>Action is my duty <br> Reward is not my concern</em></div> - Picture by picture. Blog by blog. Media story by media story.

With police departments across this country violating the fundamental rights of Occupy Wall Street protesters and brutalizing peaceful activists, we have this statement emerging from the Obama administration:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/12/09/iron... /

State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said that the United States supported the right to peaceful protest in Russia as it does “anywhere in the world.”

“We expect that those demonstrations will remain peaceful on behalf of all parties, whether they’re the demonstrators or whether they are those keeping social order,” she said.

“So our expectation is that if there are protests, that they will be peaceful and that they will be allowed to proceed peacefully,” Nuland said.

So if the Oakland vs. Moscow picture is not trying to set up a false dichotomy – if it's not trying to argue that state repression now only happens in America, what's the argument it's trying to make?

It's this: the repressive police tactics many Americans have come to expect from regimes such as Putin's is now showing up on our own public streets and in our public squares, and that fact is revelatory. That fact is undeniable. That fact is an argument for an awakening.

By threatening the corporate institutions controlling this country's political class, Occupy Wall Street has elicited the type of massive, institutional police crackdowns the likes of which my generation has never seen.