Raise the Hammer

Mark State:
While you are careful with your words, your bias is shown by the last few lines, which should have been placed first:

I'm sure they'd rather have been home with their wives and kids and sipping a cool drink on the balcony or in the backyard next to a simmering bar-b-que than dressing up in armour and facing a shouting abusive crowd

Are you kidding? With all that overtime to be had? With all that special training/ expertize to absorb? With all those cool new toys like sound cannons to play with? Isn't that what they joined the police force to do? The security business is a very good business to be in these days, no?

In trying to lay ALL (most of) the blame at the feet of protesters, either we have to conclude you are a right wing law and order Bush (?) kinda guy or you are just a little naive. A few questions:

Why did the expense shock us, if not the extreme disparity between the past and the present?

What would expenditures have been say in the 50s if a bunch of leaders came to town?

Why was the G20 meeting in a major city anyway? Was it to put/keep us in our place? To show the new globalist flag? To assert its dominance?

If there is more truculence now, why is that? Do you want to blame it on the left? Why is Grassroots so upset? Is it just the influence of TV cameras?

Maybe there is a trend here that you are not recognizing (or are a part of) as whole populations get fleeced instead of just a company or an industry. Would you prefer that people just act through their democratic institutions? What institutions are those? Do we vote for the IMF or the World Bank? Or the UN, or the COP (the proposed Climate Treaty administrator)? Do our politicians control the money supply or central banks? Can we even influence Harper when he resides inside the PMO instead of Parliament, dealing not in bills, but in omnibus bills? What's the difference if we replace our elected representatives with other representatives from the same corporate donor lists? With an incumbent reelection rate of 78% (in Canada, higher at the municipal level, 94% in US), what does an election even mean? You, yourself are facing this. Which is why I posted previously on Athenian lottery based democracy.

Not that I condone violence. But what's with the ransacking of our democracy and our protections and what would you have us do instead, given those changes? Seems like one leads to the other, no? So why not try to shine the spotlight on the folks that made the changes in the first place, before things get any worse?
Bob Innes