Every ruling class gets faced with a choice:

Negotiate, or be given terms that are final.



You see, '1%', you fucked up badly.  You had the people drugged by the media you control, and you bought them off with shiny electronics and Internet distractions, and seduced them with oil wars 'just wars', but you should have considered that once they saw Arab peoples use these toys to communicate and engage, your 99% would use them against you also.  No cops can be sent to assault a crowd without getting posted.  No 'mainstream' pundit in a suit that costs my month's gross can plausibly belittle the People anymore.  Nobody's going to turn off Twitter, Google, Facebook and the like, much less the whole Internet, because that's when you show you have lost.  And more of the '99%' are beginning to learn what the 99% in E.Europe learned in 1989: state power doesn't exist if we say so.

So, here's what you don't do: move jacked-up cops against the protesters.  Most of them are white, and young (you know, like voters' kids and grandkids...), and some are even war vets who've risked far more 'for their country' than any 'chicken-hawk' pundit or politician: get well, Scott Olsen.  Mayor Quan, you tool, you just pissed off the Marine Corps!  Sadly, you might still get away with treating Black Americans this way...  Never mind, you've rigged the game so their economic position is worse than before the Civil Rights Movement, as is their incarceration rate.

What you do, '1%', after you've drawn first blood, is you negotiate.  Fuck your pride, vampires; stow your vanity, parasites.  You know you are filth, even if you're sociopathic enough to not care.  You negotiate because there are only two other ways this can go: somebody's head on pikes - theirs or yours.  I wouldn't smirk: you are badly outnumbered.  Sure, you've bought Washington, the media, the police and the military... but mercenaries have an uncanny ease with switching sides, and people can be very odd about having flash-bangs thrown at their children.  FDR knew it, and he was no 'bleeding heart'.  Not many are who are born with a 'silver spoon'.  Back then they called it, 'The New Deal'.

I'm not sure I have faith that, "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice", but I do know people can hold grudges for generations, as the 20th century taught.  '1%', you can pay for social-justice or you can pay for security.  You won't care that security costs more and is evil, but you should care social-justice just works better, and will longer keep your neck in its present condition.  Remember, you '1%' need 'the Rule of Law' more than we do...

"Wall Street isn't Winning - It's Cheating" - Tiabbi

"How the Legal System Favours the 1 Percent" - Greenwald

"Wall Street Firms Spy on Protesters in Tax-Funded Center" - Martens

"Thirty Years of Unleashed Greed" - Scheer