Public Health and Safety

As we reported last week, the Occupy Wall Street camp down at Zuccotti Park was raided in the early morning hours of Tuesday, November 15th. The occupiers were removed from the park, either obeying a city ordinance to clean the area, or disobeying the ordinance and removed forcibly by police. When the cleaning was done (tents, books, their personal belongings trashed or packed up and taken to a holding area where they could be picked up later), the occupiers were allowed to return, but no longer could bring tents or sleeping bags back into the park with them. The city, and notably Mayor Michael Bloomberg, rationalized their decision citing the encampments dangers to public health and safety. I wish the Mayor, and other city officials, were more concerned with risks to public health and safety in other areas of the city.

To Mayor Bloomberg's credit, I will say that his concern for public safety in this situation seems synchronous with some of his other social and political stances. He is a large voice in the Mayors Against Illegal Guns campaign, and generally believes lax gun laws in urban environments leads to higher rates of crime and homicide. Though Republican, Bloomberg is not a climate science denier. He believes global warming is a serious threat to people, our children, and our world. Couple these things with his reasoning to effectively shut down the Occupy Wall Street camp, and it's easy to draw the correlations of his concern for the safety of the public. However, it still was not right to trash constitutional rights of citizens.

But more importantly here, we must ask the Mayor, or any right-wing pundit who seems to have no problem reporting and parroting the Mayor's excuse for raiding the camp: why does this "threat" to public health and safety of the Occupy Wall Street camp bear any more danger to lower Manhattan than crime in other parts of the city? Why doesn't the Mayor send a military-style police force into Bed-Stuy, Chelsea, or Midtown to "clean" that part of the city? Why doesn't the Mayor send a military-trained police force into the subway system to clean the crumbling platforms, the filth-covered drainage gutters between the tracks, or the rust-streaked white tiling on the walls? Most importantly, why aren't the police invading the buildings down at Wall Street not to arrest and disperse Occupiers, but to raid the offices of commercial banks whose practices are a threat to the public health and safety of America, whose packaging of mortgages into derivatives collapsed the economy, who skirted and lobbied Washington to waterdown Dodd-Frank so they could build another economic bubble just to see it pop again, to get bailed out and to hemorrhage even more money from the poor and middle class? The people on Wall Street represent a clear and present danger to the public health and safety of New York City, Mr. Bloomberg. Just ask Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, since he told the Congressional panel investigating the causes of the financial meltdown that "crises" should be expected "every five to seven years." If you take into account that every crisis only serves to hurt the poor and middle class while the rich get more well-off, then it seems to me like these crises are planned and actually the financial sector hopes for them. They get the bailout. America gets the bill.