"The legal system has been grotesquely deformed in most cities to, in essence, shut public space to protesters, eradicating our right to free speech and peaceful assembly. The goal of the corporate state is to criminalize democratic, popular dissent before there is another popular eruption. "
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/17583-locking-out-the-voices-of-dissent-arrests-demonstrate-restrictions-on-right-of-assembly
Of course, Chris is correct, and as seen in Philadelphia and the UCD police district, this process started much earlier than the Occupy brutalization. The first obvious attack on public spaces came at the end of the 20th century with the hand-picked exclusive steering commitees to redesign (aka "improve") public spaces. The lie was to assert that the common citizen must be excluded from all deliberations of policies because only experts and hand picked consumers can properly redesign public spaces.
However, our corporate rulers had a simultaneous goal for public spaces, and that was the final disempowerment and isolation of citizens from one another. It manifests itself as commodification of public spaces. It is the redesign of human culture into the consumer only model.
Recently, I had an excellent discussion with activists about the isolation and individualization of members of society eroding our ability to think of the public good, as people, not rulers, had done since the beginnning of tribal societies. Of course in urban areas, it is in the commons that healthy human interaction and culture develops which empowers us and reinforces the notion of the common good. As the revolutionairies in Turkey understand in the protection of Gezi park, without a commons, we descend into individualized isolated wretches unable to conceive of or stand up for the common good. (My volunteer work in Clark Park, long ago, was based on this understanding of culture.)
So with all of the massive problems herding us toward tyranny and extinction, I agree, that freeing our formerly public spaces is perhaps the most important single goal for activists, and all other hope for the future can only come with the liberation and democritization of our public spaces.
