Why Occupy Protestors Should Consider NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg Public Enemy #1

NYPD Struggles With Occupy Protestors

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg symbolizes everything the Occupy Wall Street movement stands against: rich people spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy elections, using power to infringe on the liberty of common Americans, hoarding tens of billions of dollars, and using influence to underhandedly change laws when it suits their political ambitions. It should not be surprising that such a politician would, instead of being proud of hosting a peaceful display of just political dissent, order the Occupy Wall Street protests crushed by an Israeli advised police force using anti-terrorism tactics.

When Michael Bloomberg first took office as the Mayor of New York City in 2002, he proudly proclaimed that he was philosophically in lockstep with the majority of New Yorkers who supported the two-term limit law. When NYC politicians facing ejection from office put forth legislation that would increase term-limits, Bloomberg used his first veto as Mayor to quash it. After the veto he called the councilmen who supported the legislation “disgraceful,” and said it would be wrong to extend term limits because it amounted to changing the rules for personal gain. The two-term limit law dates back to 1993 when the voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum to combat cronyism and corruption. In 2006, Bloomberg scoffed at the thought of a politician being irreplaceable, saying ”My experience in business has been, whenever we’ve had somebody who was irreplaceable, their successor invariably did a better job, and I think change is good,” he said. “Yes, you throw out an occasional good person, but you also throw out a lot of people who have just gotten stale and take it for granted, haven’t had any new ideas, so on balance I’ve always been a believer in term limits.”

Flash forward to 2008, and Bloomberg is now faced with his own ejection from office. All of a sudden the two-term limit law he so resoundingly supported for more than a decade doesn’t sound so good anymore. Instead of putting it to the voters through a referendum, which would be customary in a situation like this, Bloomberg decided to use his financial and political influence to bully the city council into changing the law to allow him a third term on a fast-track basis. Michael Bloomberg subsequently spent $100 million of his own money to win his third mayoral campaign, which added to the $160 million he spent on his first two campaigns.

Under Bloomberg’s tenure, the city of New York has become one of the least free cities in America. There are now 1,000 militarily equipped anti-terrorism agents in New York City. The NYPD has even acquired radiation detectors so sensitive they can see if a person has had radiation treatments recently. In fact, Ray Kelly, the New York City police commissioner, admitted that they often stop people on the street and question them only to find out they recently had a medical procedure. Kelly proudly boasts that you can’t walk a block in Lower Manhatten without being filmed by a surveillance camera thats feed goes to a secret location. Bloomberg and Kelly intend to increase their camera arsenal by 50% in the near future. The $150 million surveillance system is so powerful that it can search for a suspicious person by description. In a demonstration, the NYPD typed in search for red shirt into the computer, and all of the people walking around the targeted area who were wearing read shirts popped up on surveillance screens. The commissioner said, “Part of the strategy is to put force on display. At random, 100 police cars will swarm part of town just to make a scene. It happens with complete unpredictability. Cops signal subway trains to stop to be searched. And sometimes they hold the trains until they’ve eyeballed every passenger.”

In Max Blumenthal’s piece titled ‘From Occupation to Occupy: Israelification of American Domestic Security’  he wrote : “Given the amount of training the NYPD and so many other police forces have received from Israel’s military-intelligence apparatus, and the profuse levels of gratitude American police chiefs have expressed to their Israeli mentors, it is worth asking how much Israeli instruction has influenced the way the police have attempted to suppress the Occupy movement, and how much it will inform police repression of future upsurges of street protest. But already, the Israelification of American law enforcement appears to have intensified police hostility towards the civilian population, blurring the lines between protesters, common criminals, and terrorists. As [Avi] Dichter said, they are all just “crimiterrorists”. 

It should be noted that Police commissioner Ray Kelly visited Israel on multiple occasions, including a visit in 2009, which Blumenthal claims was to support the internationally condemned murder of innocent Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Force. In a visit in 2010, Kelly attended a racist gathering in which a Jewish academic, Martin Kramer, claimed that the blockade of food and medicine to civilians in Gaza was helping to reduce the numbers of “superfluous young men of fighting age.” He also said that, “If a state can’t control these young men, then someone else will.” The NYPD now has its own Israeli advised intelligence agency. In fact, the ties between Israel and the NYPD have become so deep under Bloomberg that NYC now has police officers in Abu Dhabi and Tel Aviv “gathering intelligence.” One has to question whether Bloomberg used his power and influence to win a third office so he could continue to help his Israeli friends militarize and Israelify the NYPD.

The Anti-Defamation league, which is based in Bloomberg’s city, now boasts on their website of lobbying the FBI to force new agents to undergo a Jewish history course and visit a holocaust museum before they can wear a badge. Many former Israeli police officers have been hired to run security operations at New York shopping malls and airports, which has led to unjust racial profiling.

In 2011, Michael Bloomberg boasted, “I have my own army in the NYPD- the seventh largest army in the world.” He also said, “I have my own state department. We have the UN in New York so we have entree into the diplomatic world that Washington does not have.” Under Bloomberg, the NYPD was recently caught illegally spying on innocent Muslims, and even building databases on where they buy groceries and watch their sporting events. It should be noted that no illegal wiretapping or databases have been conducted or created on Jews or Israelis, who were caught video taping and dancing in celebration after the September 11 attacks.(See Dancing Israelis) This fact may have something to do with Bloomberg’s close association with Israel. In fact, one of his first foreign visits after becoming Mayor of New York City was to Israel.

It should also be noted that Bloomberg evicted Occupy Wall Street protestors shortly after The Emergency Committee for Israel (an arm of the Israeli government) falsely accused the movement of being “anti-semitic.” Bloomberg’s police force used anti-terror tactics learned from Israel to destroy the Occupy Wall Street protest at Zuccotti Park.