The Mayor of New York wants Occupy Wall Street to just go away..While he initially declared that everyone had the democratic right to protest, it was always on the cards that the Mayor of New York was going to show his true political face when he realised that Occupy Wall Street wasn't going to be going away anytime soon.
Despite saying on Monday that OWS protesters were free to stay in Zuccotti Park (near Wall Street) indefinitely, Bloomberg is now trying to remove them.
He has suddenly announced that on Friday morning (New York time) the park will be 'cleaned' - which is an obvious ploy to shut down OWS.
That was made clear when Bloomberg added that after the 'cleaning' OWS protesters would have to 'follow the rules' which include 'no tents', 'no sleeping bags' and 'no lying down'.
This is a deliberate attack on people's right to assemble and, not surprisingly , OWS do not plan to cooperate with the Wall Street crony.
OWS also point out that they have a sanitation working group in operation within the park and say that if Bloomberg is really so interested in sanitation then he should allow the installation of portable toilets and more rubbish disposal facilities.
OWS is an occupation - it is not a Bloomberg- approved picnic outing.
Bloomberg has also recently been in the media defending his Wall Street mates, claiming that OWS was unfairly blaming "hard working" Wall Street employees for America's ills!
Cleaned - Cleaning - Cleansing - Cleansed
ReplyDelete"....defending his Wall Street mates, claiming that OWS was unfairly blaming "hard working" Wall Street employees for America's ills!"
ReplyDeleteOH JEEEZ ..where do you start with these...fracktards ??...first instinct is to laugh..then scream..then line the arrogant pricks up against a wall.
These guys( the banksters and their ilk..and that includes Bloomberg )behave like Genghis khan on P and the media leaves them alone but let one Occupier drop a banana skin or yell abuse and the media will be crawling all over them...more and more like Alice in Wonderland
One of the most glaring problems with the supporters of Occupy Wall Street and the "occupations" in other cities is that they suffer from a woefully inadequate understanding of the capitalist social formation — its dynamics, its (spatial) globality, its (temporal) modernity. They equate anti-capitalism with simple anti-Americanism, and ignore the international basis of the capitalist world economy. To some extent, they have even reified its spatial metonym in the NYSE on Wall Street. Capitalism is an inherently global phenomenon; it does not admit of localization to any single nation, city, or financial district.
ReplyDeleteAnother problem pervasive amongst OWS demonstrators is a general lack of historical consciousness. Not only are they almost completely unaware of past revolutionary movements, but their thinking has become so enslaved to the conditions of the present that they can no longer imagine a society fundamentally different from our own. Instead of liberation and emancipation, all they offer is vague "resistance" or "subversion."
Moreover, many of the more moderate protestors hold on to the erroneous belief that capitalism can be “controlled” or “corrected” through Keynesian-administrative measures: steeper taxes on the rich, more bureaucratic regulation and oversight of business practices, broader government social programs (welfare, Social Security), and projects of rebuilding infrastructure to create jobs. Moderate “progressives” dream of a return to the Clinton boom years, or better yet, a Rooseveltian new “New Deal.” All this amounts to petty reformism, which only serves to perpetuate the global capitalist order rather than to overcome it. They fail to see the same thing that the libertarians in the Tea Party are blind to: laissez-faire economics is not essential to capitalism. State-interventionist capitalism is just as capitalist as free-market capitalism.
Nevertheless, though Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy [insert location here] in general still contains many problematic aspects, it nevertheless presents an opportunity for the Left to engage with some of the nascent anti-capitalist sentiment taking shape there. So far it has been successful in enlisting the support of a number of leftish celebrities, prominent unions, and young activists, and has received a lot of media coverage. Hopefully, the demonstrations will lead to a general radicalization of the participants’ politics, and a commitment to the longer-term project of social emancipation.
To this end, I have written up a rather pointed Marxist analysis of the OWS movement so far that you might find interesting:
“Reflections on Occupy Wall Street: What It Represents, Its Prospects, and Its Deficiencies”