A Sharp Eye for Irony — Journalist Robert Scheer Castigates Billionaire New York Mayor Bloomberg’s Ruse to Cleanse Society of the Occupy Movement — a Lesson in How the American Plutocracy Uses Our Laws against Us

© 2011 Peter Free

 

17 November 2011

 

 

Switching the toggle of our perceptions can be revealing — journalist Robert Scheer saw something important that I completely missed

 

Being a former police officer and Patrol watch commander, I sometimes fail to see the irony of allegedly necessary actions from law enforcement.

 

For example, supportive though I have been of the Occupy Movement, I haven’t closely enough questioned authorities’ statements that peacefully removing protesters from supposedly unsanitary situations is necessary in order to preserve the “public health.”

 

Having been on the law enforcement side of a number of legitimate demonstrations, I know how easily they can be taken over by “professional” protesters and anarchist-like rabble.  You may recognize these types — disorder for disorder’s sake and opposition for jelly-brained defiance’s sake.

 

But my experience-based perspective can be a blind spot.

 

Robert Sheer — a “liberal” thinker of merit — presented contrary view regarding New York Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to roust the Occupy Movement encamped in Zuccotti Park.

 

His analysis illustrates how the Plutocracy gets its way by using “Law” against those who oppose the inequitable status quo.

 

The contrast between Scheer’s humanitarian view and my “order maintenance” one capably illustrates the difficulty of properly balancing societal regularity against the socially necessary disorder of civil protest:

 

In the pantheon of billionaires without shame, Michael Bloomberg, the Wall Street banker-turned-business-press-lord-turned-mayor, is now secure at the top.

 

What is so offensive is that someone who abetted Wall Street greed, and benefited as much as anyone from it, has no compunction about ruthlessly repressing those who dare exercise their constitutional "right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" that he helped to create.

 

© 2011 Robert Scheer, The Villain Occupy Wall Street Has Been Waiting For, Huffington Post (17 November 2011) (paragraph split)

 

 

Scheer’s case against Mayor Bloomberg

 

In seeing Bloomberg only as a Mayor (a public servant), I completely overlooked the problem posed by who he actually is — a billionaire who profited from the intensely inequitable economic system that currently rules the United States.

 

I missed the disturbing irony involved in the Mayor’s use of our plutocratic system’s legal apparatus to stomp the voice of the Occupy Movement — which, in essence, only wants to inject humanitarian fairness back into a culture that most Americans agree has gone off the rails.

 

Robert Scheer’s essay points out that Mayor Bloomberg derided Occupy’s message even before he rousted the protesters from the park:

 

“It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp."

 

It is mind-boggling that Bloomberg still hypes the canard that the banks were forced to reap enormous profits from toxic securities.   It is an embarrassing, dishonest position when the record of banker fraud in creating the housing bubble is so well documented in Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuits.

 

That he blames the victims of the securitization swindles and then orders the arrest of those who dare speak the truth is a tribute to his belief in the enduring power of the big lie.

 

© 2011 Robert Scheer, The Villain Occupy Wall Street Has Been Waiting For, Huffington Post (17 November 2011) (paragraph split)

 

 

The Mayor’s arguably very dirty hands

 

Scheer is infuriated by the facts that:

 

(a) Mayor Bloomberg’s own business-oriented news service participated in the bankers’ swindle by failing to do its journalistic “due diligence” in exposing the industry’s corruption

 

and

 

(b) Bloomberg increased his wealth by $4.5 billion during the first year of the recession, which wiped out so many Americans’ pitiful assets.

 

 

“So what do you think now, Pete?”

 

Plutocrats are adept at using wealth and institutional power to rob the rest of us of our wallets, purses and freedoms.  Fear of disorder can lose us Liberty.

 

In regard to the balance between civil disobedience and order maintenance, it may be that the burden of creative protest  falls on “we” who attempt to disrupt the oligarchy we are subject to.

 

Presenting a moving target — in the way Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. did with their “rope a dope” tactics — may be the only ethically tolerable way to achieve emancipation from the plutocratic yoke.

 

 

The moral? — Rope a Dope our way to better days

 

A constantly erupting and randomly moving (peaceful) “Freedom Insurgency” avoids becoming an easy legal target.

 

Plutocracy can be defeated, provided that we are alert to its coy, disingenuous, and deceitful use of our own laws against us.