Publictakeover's Weblog

Occupy Updates: Extreme Police Violence in Berkeley, With Calls for a Strike; Harvard Protesters Shut Out of Harvard Yard | AlterNet

I’m not sure what Mayor Bloomburg did to earn the status of University Presidents, but I heard the tv show in the morning yesterday when I was flipping channels before Democracy Now.

What Lauren Kelley overlooks, however, is one glaring implication.  Bloomburg dismisses the Occupiers with one grand gesture of dismissal.  He then blurts out the real reason:  he doesn’t believe in democracy.

It’s a whole bunch of people that are just disinf-disaffected. They don’t know what’s wrong. They say, ‘we don’t know what we want but we want it now,’ which I think is as good a way of saying it as anything. That it’s not their job to solve the problems, it’s the job of the government and the press and those of us that have some insight on how policies affect people.

Just because he disagrees with the protesters, doesn’t mean they don’t know what’s wrong.  Bloomburg is in the 1%.  It’s painfully obvious he’s dismissing the movement in Liberty Square from a combination of hubris, honest ignorance, and deep fear.  He’s not offering anything like principles in defense of his criticism of the protesters.

What’s more, by saying that the protesters want the elites to–or the elites rightfully should–solve our problems without any input by the 99%, he’s only emphasizing the veracity of the occupiers’ stance.  He’s admitting not only that he doesn’t understand the occupiers’ demands, but that he doesn’t care.  Like the blind leading the blind, Mayor Mike insists that he and his 1% cronies are the only ones with the “insight” to work out society’s problems for the common good.

The more he slimes over toward “shut up the dumb demonstrators,” then the more he shows the world just how much he and “government and the press and those of us that have some insight on how policies affect people” are the real obstacle to equality.

He doesn’t believe in it.

via Occupy Updates: Extreme Police Violence in Berkeley, With Calls for a Strike; Harvard Protesters Shut Out of Harvard Yard | AlterNet.