Think it's any coincidence...

(Editor's note: If you could help Mrs. JP and I weather another month so we could make the rent after the holidays, we'd surely appreciate it. Doing so in any amount would certainly help keep online fine programming blogging such as this.)

...that Michael Bloomberg's thugs are forcing the #OWS protesters to wheel around their library and pet supplies in shopping carts like homeless people? It's not coincidence and it's not even ironic: It's by design. And Wall Street and city officials are probably making their fat asses jiggle with amusement that they've reduced the protesters to pushing their belongings around like bag ladies.

But when you stop and think about it, this manufactured irony just underscores what Wall Street's been doing to the 99% for decades. And what better way to convey a message and protest of world-consuming greed and arrogance than to look the part?

And Zuccotti Park and, at night, Foley Sq. are becoming a cross between war zones and protest sites in Third World countries. How much is Wall Street beginning to resemble downtown Tehran during the riots of June 2009, with unarmed people getting attacked by ebony-garbed basij thugs? How much does it look like a war zone when medics with red crosses taped to their bicycle helmets have to tend to the wounded?


And how much more like a Third World country does the richest area in the developed world have to look when people have been deprived of their only shelter, deprived of their safety and deprived of their dignity in a microcosm of what Wall Street's been doing to the bottom 99% all these years and decades?

And like Ahmadinejad's thugs after Iran's "elections" 2 1/2 years ago, the NYPD and Bloomberg's office and police departments literally from coast to coast are nakedly making up the rules as they go along. Now in NYC, you can be arrested for driving without your headlights and wipers on, especially if you're caught driving a wikileaks truck rumored to be carrying blankets. No search warrant? No problem! We'll just confiscate the whole fucking truck!

They want to deprive OWS of shelter, of literature, they want to reduces us all to the level of transients just blocks away from their offices? Fine. We'll be glad to play the part. And let the entire world take notice.

(Addendum: If someone would be so kind as to tell me who linked to me, I'd appreciate it. But someone linked to this post and I'd like to know who.)