It seems an inescapable conclusion that Bloomberg prefers conflict to allowing what he would think of as a happy hippy fair.
The mayor described what happened in Egypt and Spain as "riots". It was ranking officers (more than one), not rank and file policemen, who attacked and maced the marchers below Union Square a week ago. And there was at least some complicity by the police in facilitating, if not leading, marchers onto the (illegal) roadway and away from the (legal) walkway on the Brooklyn Bridge yesterday.
Of course, there's also the contribution of simple stupidity:
"They call them New York's Finest... not New York's smartest" is an old nyork saying.
However, it really does seem that the city administration has a strong aversion to seeing a peaceful anarchy spreading out on the streets of the city. That could become too attractive and irreversible. They have apparently decided to nip it in the bud by creating violent confrontations instead. Ideally, I'm sure, they would like the gathering in Liberty Park to just fizzle out; but if it doesn't, they certainly don't want it to become a growing encampment of responsible citizenship.
We will see what happens to the encampment, but the economic crisis for which it has become a landmark won't be going away any time soon.
Thirty years ago, when the fever of the go-go eighties was just starting, I knew a young woman who had gotten a job with one of the (now defunct) big brokerage houses on Wall Street. One day she walked up to an older man who had been there for quite a while and asked him "what's going to happen?" He said, "I don't know, but...
when it's over, it will all be over."
Below is a brief history of how we got to "it's all over now".
That the rich get richer while the poor get poorer is hardly a coincidence. There was always the hope that as long as the pie kept growing nobody would mind. Of course, the pie kept growing in the US only as long as the people who were getting poorer were everyone else in the world.
In 1971, Nixon went to Rome and formally gave up the Brenton Woods agreement by which the rest of the world was obligated to devalue their currencies so that the dollar would remain at a value of $37 per ounce of gold. He did this specifically so that he could postpone losing the Viet Nam war for a couple of more years, but, like Bush more recently, he was probably only hastening the impoverishment of America which would have happened more slowly and less catastrophically anyway.
This was followed by Watergate and the "malaise" of the Carter years. But then the financial wizards found ways to maintain the appearance of some just-out-of-reach prosperity while maintaining growth in corporate profits.
The cornerstone of this stunt was for the Federal Reserve Board to "control inflation" by maintaining an artificially high rate of unemployment called the "Natural Rate of Unemployment". This rate was calculated to be just high enough to prevent workers from seeking "inflationary" raises and to gradually accept lower paying jobs.
Meanwhile, to maintain a growth in profits without real productive economic growth, they have been finding ways to bleed off the wealth this country accumulated after the second world war.
They started with "leveraged buyouts" where someone would take out a huge loan and buy a publicly held company with accumulated assets and take it private. Then they would use the assets to pay off their loans and take whatever was left for themselves. Next was the "Asian Tigers" and the idea that rapid growth in cheap-labor countries would lead to prosperity for all. When that collapsed in 1997, the analysts were openly saying that the only growing source of demand left in the world economy was US consumer credit. Then there was the stock market itself, the relatively minor internet boom, and the idea that automation had made an entirely new type of economy with no boom and bust business cycle. Then, of course, they wrung every cent out of US real estate.
And now it's all over. They've run out of tricks. We've been bled dry.
So the US is getting ready to join the long list of once-great nations. (A list, we may note, which includes many countries that have been in the news lately, including Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Greece, Italy, England and France all of whom took their turn at being the (known) world's super-power.)
Now we have to adapt to a slow-growth or no-growth economy. In the past decade the financial industry had grown to represent 40% of the economy. Without the promise of rapid profit growth it's hard to see what product they will be able to traffic in. We may have to, despite ourselves, move to a more rational, if more modest, economy.
Maybe this is the message of the no-Message OWS. Get real, stop pretending we're all rich and just having a temporary setback, and reorganize ourselves into a sensible and sustainable society.