New York’s Mayor Bloomberg (formerly Republican, now Independent) has been holding aloof on endorsing either candidate for president. But after Hurricane Sandy’s climate-change-fueled might slammed into his city this week, Bloomberg has decided that the issues of climate change and global warming are too important. And he has announced his endorsement of President Obama for […]
New York | Austin | Houston | Portland | San Francisco | Tampa New York: To kick off a national day of action, Occupy Wall Street took to the streets of Manhattan to try to blockade the New York Stock Exchange (much as the NYPD had blockaded them two days ago). They managed to outflank police […]
This is just nuts. Have Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies been helping to coordinate the actions against Occupy Wall Street over the past week? According to an anonymous Justice Department source, the Feds helped the mayors of Occupy cities plan their raids for maximum effect and minimum fallout. These included: Seek a legal reason to […]
The sun came up this morning over a Zuccotti Park that had been scrubbed clean of the Occupation. Meanwhile, a few blocks away, Occupy Wall Street carried on with its regular morning General Assembly, this time at Foley Square. The park is dead, but the movement lives on. Mayor Bloomberg says Occupy Wall Street had 2 […]
As of right now, public officials are vastly more intimidated by the power of Wall Street than by the power of the people, and so they do the bidding of the former group, rather than the latter.
The über-goal of Occupy Wall Street is to empower people to intimidate government officials even more than the ownership class does. If that can be achieved, then the movement will succeed merely by surviving. Wall Street, after all, hasn’t got a list of demands that it makes one protest at a time; it exerts constant, unyielding pressure on the engines of power and arranges to continue to bully policymakers in perpetuity. If the Occupy movement expands and persists, it can conceivably arrange to bully policymakers even more fiercely. That would result in the achievement of real democracy, and all of the policy goals that implies.
The movement that started it all, on Wall Street’s marble doorstep, rejoiced this morning after Mayor Bloomberg backed down from his order for them to unilaterally disarm.
But some people’s feelings must have been hurt… as a couple of “White Shirt” police got nasty on demonstrators. A legal observer was run over by a scooter and arrested for trying to get it off his foot; another cop was filmed punching a protester from behind.
Remember those enhanced interrogation techniques the US military used against suspected terrorists? Sleep deprivation, enforced standing for hours? Well, New York Mayor Bloomberg is bringing those techniques to the Occupy Wall Street encampment.
A federal judge has stopped Mayor Bloomberg’s attempt to clean up the air in New York City by using fuel-efficient hybrid taxis.