Zuccotti Park, Michael Bloomberg, and the 1% Police State: "Wherever there's a cop beatin' a guy..."

By Michael J.W. Stickings

As you know, Michael Bloomberg ordered his NYPD thugs to clear Zuccotti Park the other night. As James Downie wrote at WaPo:

Early Tuesday morning, New York police raided and evicted the Occupy Wall Street encampment in Zuccotti Park in southern Manhattan. The behavior of the NYPD and the mayor's office, in ordering this brazen action while blocking the press and the public from reporting on the eviction, is a disgraceful display of unnecessary force on a protest that for the most part has behaved lawfully and respectfully throughout its two-month existence.

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The offered reasoning for the eviction? The same canard as the last time Bloomberg wanted to sweep away protesters: "public health and safety." Never mind that Occupy Wall Street has continually cleaned the park itself, or that health experts who have visited the park have pronounced it sanitary, or that even Bloomberg could cite only one incident that threatened public safety in his statement about the eviction. No, such "facts" were turned away, just as the police sought to turn the media's cameras elsewhere. All this while, as Matt Taibbi put it last week, "in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes." Nobody arrested the bankers for pushing fraudulent loans and subprime mortgage investments, or the ratings agencies and government regulators that neglected their duties and helped Wall Street crash the global economy. But putting tents in a public park? Time to bring out the batons and pepper spray.

As hard as the NYPD and New York City's government might try to obscure the truth though, one truth remains: At 1 a.m. this morning, in the heart of New York City, protesters exercising their constitutional rights to free speech and assembly were swept away by the state, while that state also did all it could to prevent media coverage. No matter what one may think of the occupiers or their cause, nothing they've done justifies blockading the press or ignoring court orders. Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and other New York leaders who ordered the eviction should take a long, hard look at their handling of the occupation. This morning's action may not be what a police state looks like, but it's certainly how one begins.

Indeed it is. I've praised Bloomberg in the past, particularly for his eloquent handling of the Park51 Islamic community center ("Ground Zero mosque") controversy, but this is bullshit. The OWS protests have been overwhelmingly peaceful (and clean), including in New York City. Yes, there have been a few instances of inappropriate behavior, but the right (and the defenders of the status quo generally) have held the rare exceptions up to impugn the entire movement. And ultimately, while Bloomberg and others have defended the First Amendment right to free speech (and assembly), they put their foot down -- and clamp down -- whenever the threat to their wealth and authority gets a little too real.

This is how the 1% stays in power. They tolerate you, and then they crush you.

Thankfully, though, the protests will continue, if now without tents and sleeping bags. (And maybe being evicted from Zuccotti Park, even only temporarily, was the best thing to happen to OWS.) The fight must go on.

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A while back, I posted the incredible version of "The Ghost of Tom Joad" Bruce Springsteen does with Tom Morello. The original -- perhaps Springsteen's best song on his best album -- is also great, though. It's slower, quieter, acoustic, more haunting. Here's The Boss performing it the way it was first meant to be:

Now Tom said "Mom, wherever there's a cop beatin' a guy

Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries
Where there's a fight 'gainst the blood and hatred in the air
Look for me Mom I'll be there
Wherever there's somebody fightin' for a place to stand
Or decent job or a helpin' hand
Wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free
Look in their eyes Mom you'll see me."

Obama both right and wrong about Tea Party / Occupy Wall Street comparison (but mostly wrong)

By Michael J.W. Stickings

ABC News:

President Obama, who has become a target of the Occupy Wall Street protests sweeping the country, today embraced the economic frustration voiced on the streets and said in an exclusive interview with ABC News that his vision for the U.S. economic system is best suited to resolve protesters' concerns.

"I understand the frustrations being expressed in those protests," Obama told ABC News senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper in the interview to air this evening on ABC News "Nightline" from Jamestown, N.C.

"In some ways, they're not that different from some of the protests that we saw coming from the Tea Party. Both on the left and the right, I think people feel separated from their government. They feel that their institutions aren't looking out for them," he said.

Not that different? Huh. Well, sure, superficially they're somewhat the same -- or, that is, if you look at them superficially. Both are, supposedly, grassroots movements expressing populist frustrations directed at the establishment, whether political or economic.

But the Tea Party has been bankrolled by the establishment, and specifically by conservative organizations with a partisan agenda, hence the ease with with with the Tea Party and the Republican Party have basically co-opted each other. While efforts have been made to make it appear as if the Tea Party, or the various groups that loosely make it up, are independent, the truth is quite different. Meanwhile, the Occupy Wall Street movement is truly populist and anti-establishmentarian. Democrats are more or less aligning themselves with its interests and objectives, more less than more, but it's clearly not a partisan tool, or a movement with decidedly partisan aims, partly because the Democratic Party is in bed with Big Finance as well, if not necessarily to the degree the GOP is.

The Occupy Wall Street movement can't just be dismissed, as much as various elites (political, media, etc.) tried to initially. The reason is that it reflects genuine discontent with the system, with the elites that control the U.S. economy and allow the 1% to control the 99%. The Tea Party reflects discontent as well, but it's a libertarian, anti-government discontent that implicitly and effectively enables these elites to keep doing what they're doing. Not all Tea Partiers may understand this, but their "hands off my money" agenda would allow those in the private sector with power to accumulate even more power by removing the one institution that actually tries to, or at least has the power to, keep those elites in check, namely, the federal government. Sure, you can pay less in taxes to a skeleton government, but then what? Then the elites have you even more firmly by the balls.

It doesn't help that Obama has been a president for Wall Street, bailing out the big banks and surrounding himself with a Goldman Sachs economic braintrust. And his policies thus far have been directed not at the 99% but at protecting the 1%, whatever his occasionally populist rhetoric. This is one of the great disappointments of his presidency. He may be more centrist technocrat than change-we-can-believe-in progressive, and may have been so all along (even if so many of his supporters misunderstood him), but nonetheless the fact that he has focused his priorities on the elites of credit and capital over the people who have been severely abused by those elites is beyond even what most cynics, justifiably or not, expected.

It's all well and good that the president understands the frustrations that people are expressing, but... so what? What is needed is action, and he has shown himself unwilling to do what needs to be done to fix a system that is sick at its core, that enhances the plutocracy of the few while leaving the many to suffer at their hands.

Obama said the most important thing he can do as president is express solidarity with the protesters and redouble his commitment to achieving what he described as a more egalitarian society.

Then fucking do it, Mr. President. And show you mean it. You have history on your side, and votes to win, and the men and women occupying Wall Street, unlike the Teabaggers, seek to rescue America from those who would destroy it.

This day in history - May 1, 1894: Coxey's army reaches Washington, D.C.

By Richard K. Barry

 

On May 1, 1894, "Coxey's Army," a protest march of unemployed workers led by Jacob Coxey, a populist leader from Ohio, arrived in Washington, D.C. The march took place in the second year of a four-year economic depression, which was the worst in United States history up to that time and prior to the Great Depression considered the worst the U.S. had ever experienced.

The intention of the march was to protest unemployment caused by the "Panic of 1893" and to press the government to create jobs by building public works projects.

Economic instability was largely attributed to railroad overbuilding and questionable financing, which created bank failures and a credit crunch.

Railroad bubble. Housing bubble. Pick your bubble.

And then, of course, there was that whole bimetallism thing, but that's too much to go into here.

Although the march was a failure in attaining immediate goals, it did contribute to a process that led to unemployment insurance in the future Social Security Act.

Memo to Republicans: Markets have always been far from perfect and government intervention has frequently been required to help make things right.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost.)