2,600 Activists Arrested Since Obama Took Office

An interesting report came out of Counterpunch.org earlier this year that documents the number of activists — from immigration activists to green activists — who have been arrested under the Obama Administration. This would tend to shed a new light on the rhetoric that Obama is an unabashed liberal (a notion many liberals I know would scoff at) and the report includes a detailed list of arrests. Here’s an excerpt:

Since President Obama was inaugurated, there have been over two thousand six hundred arrests of activists protesting in the US.   Research shows over 670 people have been arrested in protests inside the US already in 2011, over 1290 were arrested in 2010, and 665 arrested in 2009.   These figures certainly underestimate the number actually arrested as arrests in US protests are rarely covered by the mainstream media outlets which focus so intently on arrests of protestors in other countries.

Arrests at protest have been increasing each year since 2009.  Those arrested include people protesting US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Guantanamo, strip mining, home foreclosures, nuclear weapons, immigration policies, police brutality, mistreatment of hotel workers, budget cutbacks, Blackwater, the mistreatment of Bradley Manning, and right wing efforts to cut back collective bargaining.

After you take a brief look at the list, it doesn’t look this even includes all of the DREAMers who were arrested, which if you recall, we reported on when 16 were arrested in San Antonio. There were others arrested all over the country, including Indiana and many other places. I have a feeling that if you add the DREAMers, we’ll see an even bigger number.

So what do you say to that? Has the Obama era been one of uncompromising liberalism, or business as usual?

Follow Sara Inés Calderón on Twitter @SaraChicaD.