Acting on behalf of the wealthy and powerful interests of Wall Street, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended his decision to clear out Zuccotti Park, where protesters have staged a camp out that has captured the attention of the nation in order to highlight the injustices and inequities of American-style capitalism.
Mayor Bloomberg claimed that conditions in the park had become intolerable, and that “public health and safety” determined his decision. However, he also announced that the park would reopen tomorrow morning, raising doubts that the conditions of the encampment in the public park were to blame. More likely, Bloomberg’s close ties with Wall Street pressured the billionaire to use his official position to deny the Occupy Wall Street movement its constitutional right to peaceably assemble.
This is not the first time Bloomberg has used the coercive powers of the state, as well as the notorious tactics of the NYPD, to deny democratic protesters their constitutional rights on the streets of the Big Apple. In 2004 his administration and the NYPD came under fire for mishandling the Republican National Convention protests around Madison Square Garden. Thousands of people were arrested in broad and unjustified sweeps of the city streets under the guise that “law and order” must be imposed in order to provide security against the threat of terrorism.
Many of those arrested were either innocent bystanders watching the protests from sidewalks, or people out shopping, or New Yorker’s walking home from work. I was personally jailed 46 hours, first at Pier 57 where a bus terminal was turned into a holding pen, and then at the city’s notorious central jail called “the Tombs.” The New York Civil Liberties Union and National Lawyer’s Guild later launched a class action suit against the city, which has been bogged down in a legal quagmire. Hopefully, the Occupy Wall Street movement will receive much needed legal aid from the armies of unemployed lawyers who have lost their jobs because of the greedy fucking pricks running Wall Street, our country, and the global economy into the ground.
Occupy Wall Street is a small movement fronting a gigantic cause for the rest of us. Mayor Bloomberg and has now established a precedent that other cities are likely to follow. In the name of “public health and safety,” the constitutional rights of Americans to protest government incompetence and inaction concerning the causes and consequences of the recession will be ignored and undermined. In the name of cleaning up some shit on the sidewalks, they will be asked to tolerate more shit flowing downhill as their incomes shrink and profits flow uphill.
The use of state violence to deny this constitutional right is a gross injustice that Americans are likely to tolerate, leaving them vulnerable, yet again, to future collusions between the state and wealthy individuals in which they bear the costs, socially, economically, and politically.
What is to be done? #occupycongress