How bad does it have to get in this country...

[Selatius]

22. All unaccountable oligarchs would likely use extreme force at the very beginning of the conflict.

This necessarily would mean you'd see cases of police brutality against unarmed, peaceful protesters regardless if Occupy could marshal a group of 1,000 protesters or 10,000,000 protesters.

One of the ways an oligarch can remain king is to destroy anything and everything that cannot be controlled within his realm of power. Leave no unknown variables in your equation if at all possible. Accepting no dissent or protest would necessarily mean using excessive force as a matter of policy.

Our allies in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates generated good results by using extreme force against Shia protesters and blanket violations of their rights and drumming up charges against protesters in order to remove them off the streets and into jails and prisons and wherever else they can pen them up.

Our largest trading partner, China, is run by a military dictatorship that has remained in power precisely because it didn't tolerate protests in one city, much less several cities across China. By killing thousands at Tiananmen Square as the climax of a slow escalation between the state and the protesters, the Chinese Communist Party ensured that it would remain in power into the 21st century.

I'm not saying that the corporate oligarchs on Wall Street that buy our politicians are equivalent to our allies in places like Saudi Arabia or the UAE or our trading partners such as China, but if you can cut a big enough check to get people to work for you, you can also cut them checks to beat on people as well.

And before I end this post, I would say that there are very important degrees of repression that they would normally employ. Obviously, they're not resorting to mass executions, torture, and disappearing protest leaders at the very beginning of the protests because that's not necessary to crush an infant movement. Occupy is such a movement.

You move to that only when the usual police brutality, rubber bullets, tear gas, and mass arrests on trumped up charges isn't working. Then you slowly crank up the oppression machine. Cranking up the oppression too fast can cause a backlash of outrage, and the result is you end up like Gaddafi at worst and Bashar Al Assad at the least, a man who is now facing a full-blown civil war against his authority.