Rebellion in the Air: Quan's Quackery and Bloomberg's Bullshit
The scripted excuses provided by mayors around
the country to justify their police-state tactics in rousting peaceful
occupation movement activists from their park-based demonstrations now
stand exposed as utter nonsense, and, given their uncanny similarity in
wording, can be clearly seen as having been drawn up for them by some
hidden hands in Washington.
Zuccotti Park after Tuesday's police assault, and Wall Street two mornings later, as OWS responds to the eviction
The same can be said of the brutal tactics
used.
If Mayor Jean Quan in Oakland, or Mayor Mike Bloomberg in New
York, had been genuinely concerned about the health and well-being of
the people in the encampments in their cities, they would not have
dispatched police suited up in riot gear and armed with pepper spray and
big clubs into the camps in the dead of night, as each did, and as
other mayors are doing. They would not have used tear gas and guns
firing projectiles like so called "bean bags" and rubber coated bullets,
as police in Oakland reportedly did on several occasions -- weapons
that can cause severe injury and even death on occasion, especially when
fired at close range. They would not have stormed encampments that are known to have pregnant women, children and even babies living in them.
Rather, they would have come in during broad daylight,
peacefully, and accompanied by health inspectors and other personnel who
could to try to help solve any problems.
In Bloomberg's case, if he really cared about the safety and
well-being of the protesters, he would have long ago had the city set
up a bank of port-a-potties near Zuccotti Park, so protesters could
relieve themselves without having to foul the streets. And he would
certainly not have barred demonstrators from setting up tents, forcing
people, in increasingly harsh weather, including one heavy unseasonal
snowstorm, to survive under plastic tarps laid on the cold flagstones
over their sleeping bags.
If public safety were seriously an issue, as Quan, Bloomberg and the
other mayors have also tried to claim, police would have been told not
to direct vagrants and people with mental problems from around the city
to head for Zuccotti Square, as New York's Police Department was caught
doing. Instead of acting like thugs and an occupying force penning in
demonstrators, police would have worked out a coordinated system with
demonstrators to help protect those in the park from any sexual
predators or mentally unbalanced persons who might have entered the park
to cause trouble.
Actually, the regions in and around the encampments have
never been safer than they are now with all those demonstrators on hand.
Take Center City in Philadelphia. The area on Dilworth Plaza and
around City Hall has always been a scary place to find one's self alone
at night because so few people actually live there, making lone
pedestrians up on the street or down in the tunnels of the train station
or subways easy targets for muggers, rapists and thieves. The same is
certainly also true of downtown Oakland and of New York's financial
district. If there have been crimes committed by people in the
encampments, they are few and far between and mostly minor, and it is
almost a certainty that overall crime and especially violent crime is
down significantly in the areas where the protests are being staged.
There can be no real justification for the growing number of paramilitary police assaults against the occupation camps.
These coordinated assaults on the Occupation Movement are
clearly happening not for the reasons stated, but because the ruling
elites, particularly the powerful bankers and financiers on Wall Street,
and the Obama administration in Washington, are frightened by the
growing popularity of the protests, by the movement's rapid spread to
cities across the country, large and small, and to the resonance that
chants like "We're the 99 percent!" and "Banks got bailouts! We got
sold out!" are having among the general population of the United States.
Bloomberg and Quan, and the mayors of other cities from
Atlanta to Dallas to Portland to Seattle and back to Boston who have
been unleashing their police forces on peaceful protesters in their
jurisdictions, have been doing the movement a great favor by brutally
attacking protesters' right to demonstrate and present their grievances.
The corporate media, which at first tried to ignore the occupations,
have had to cover the assaults -- even if they misreport them. And the
images of idealistic young people being thrown on the ground, hammered
with batons, and sprayed in the face with pepper spray, are deeply
upsetting to most ordinary people. Workers are increasingly angered and
aroused, and many are touched by the support for their struggles being
manifested by the young student demonstrators.
And importantly, the enemy of the public is being given a face.
No longer is it just a bunch of unidentified and overly
aggressive cops. Now it's clear that it is the mayors, and whoever it is
in the background who is giving them their marching orders, who are
instructing the cops to go in and bust heads.
Mayor Bloomberg -- a man reportedly worth $19.5 billion,
up a staggering $1.5 billion over the last year while other Americans
are becoming poorer -- is in fact the perfect symbol of what is wrong
with today's America. Having this greedy "one percenter" issue the
marching orders to the police in New York makes it absolutely clear what
this repression is about.
With this wave of assaults, the Occupation Movement is being
forced to shift gears -- to move out of the cramped spaces to which it
has been confined and to become an uprising for economic justice,
instead of just an occupation as an act of protest. Zuccotti has been
reoccupied, but the movement is busting out of the police barricades
that surround the square.
Perhaps a group of young musicians standing on a street
cornerat 66th and Broadway just off Lincoln Square in New York City,
just off Lincoln Square in New York City, doing a "mic check" routine at
11 pm the evening after the police assault on Zuccotti Plaza, said it
best with their sign, which read: "Nostalgia for the Student Protests of
the Past Dies Here!"
The '60s are over. It's the '10s now and rebellion is in the air.
