WHEN PUSH COMES TO SHOVE

Third in a series, meant to be freely copied, printed, distributed. No credit required. Plagiarism greatly appreciated.

Push always comes to shove when the issues are power, property and the continued flow of the mean green that produces the bulge in a banker's pants that says both that he's happy to see you and he has a gun in his pocket.

So first the whining, sniveling billionaire mayor of New York [an imposter, imported from Boston as if the disaster of the 2004 American League Championship Series wasn't enough punishment for the errors of our ways in tolerating the Steinbrenners for 30 years] announces that the OWS protests are not "productive" as they threaten two of the three pillars of NYC's pre-apocalyptic economy-- banking and tourism. The other pillar, as yet unthreatened by those camped out in lower Manhattan, is real estate.

In a bit of psychotic doublespeak worthy of the idiot-hero of capitalists everywhere, Ronald Reagan, the mayor states: "The protestors that are trying to destroy the jobs of working people in the city aren't productive."

What a man of the common people, what a fighter for the working stiff our mayor is, as long as the stiff is taking down a seven figure income, utilizes limousines, and subscribes to the Bloomberg news feeds.

When in 2008, the men and women working at the Stella D'oro bakery in the Bronx went on strike against that company's attempt to cut wages and benefits, the mayor wasn't making pronouncements about the "unproductive" attitude of the owners, Brynwood Partners. The mayor wasn't complaining about the fact that between 1991 and 2008, the various owners-- Nabisco, Kraft, Brynwood had reduced employment 80 percent, destroying some 400 jobs of working people in New York.

When the NLRB found that the company had improperly refused to bargain with the workers' union, our mayor didn't send in the police to restrain the Brynwood Partners, to teach them a lesson at the end of a cop's baton. He didn't express his outrage that these owners, these outside agitators based in Greenwich, Ct. could so trample on the image of this wonderful city.

When Brynwood Partners announced, directly after the workers had won the strike, that it would be closing the Bronx factory, destroying 134 jobs, did the mayor take a time out to denounce that unproductive action of the owners? Why even ask?

In the "recession" that "ended" [!] in June 2009, over 8 million jobs were lost. Since the start of the recession more than 2 million homes have been foreclosed upon or are in the foreclosure process. Housing construction and related services which accounted for 1/6 of the US GDP prior to the contraction is now at 13% of GDP. Poverty rates are increasing and one-fifth, 20% of the children in the United States are born into poverty.

So...who's destroying whom? Who's zoomin' who around here, and around the world?

We know that every time Bloomberg opens his mouth he's speaking as the representative of that billionaires boy's club. And we know that behind, or now as push comes to shove, in front of that boy's club stand the ranks of the cops with their billy clubs.

While the bankers go home to their gated communities, their spokesman turns NYC into a "penned-in" community.

The police will be ordered to move against the OWS demonstrators, and we must move to counter the police.

Our response requires students across the city, in high schools, colleges, universities to walk out of their classes.

That their teachers walk out.

That transit workers refuse to handle vehicles commandeered for and by the police.

That teamsters hot cargo deliveries to all city agencies except hospitals, fire departments, libraries, and the various welfare agencies.

Our response requires that the working people organize themselves against this government of, by, and for financiers.


October 10, 2011