Tag Archives: Michael Bloomberg

Bloomberg Averts Zuccotti Park Showdown as Occupy Wall Street Goes Global

By:  Friday October 14, 2011 9:15 am

A sign in Zuccotti Park on Thursday. (photo: NLNY, Creative Commons license)

At the end of the day yesterday, the burning question was whether New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg would send the New York Police Department into Zuccotti Park this morning to clear it of protesters under cover of a request from the owners of the property (although used as a public park, the property is privately owned).  This morning, we learn that the property owners and Bloomberg have backed down, postponing for now the planned cleaning which had been put forward as the reason for potentially clearing the park.  From CNN:

The New York mayor’s office said Brookfield Properties, the owners of Zuccotti Park, told the city late Thursday the scheduled cleaning is off for now and “for the time being” they are “withdrawing their request” made earlier in the week for police assistance during the cleaning operation.

“Our position has been consistent throughout: the City’s role is to protect public health and safety, to enforce the law, and guarantee the rights of all New Yorkers. Brookfield believes they can work out an arrangement with the protesters that will ensure the park remains clean, safe, available for public use and that the situation is respectful of residents and businesses downtown, and we will continue to monitor the situation,” Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway said.

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John Brennan, the Intelligence Community’s One Man Justice Department

By:  Thursday September 15, 2011 5:19 pm

Matt Apuzzo has a story describing three different responses to growing concerns about the CIA-on-the-Hudson.

There’s Rush Holt, who unfortunately is no longer on the House Intelligence Committee and therefore has limited ability to look into this:

“I believe that these serious and significant allegations warrant an immediate investigation,” Holt wrote.

[snip]

Holt, who previously served on the House Intelligence Committee, said he never remembers being told about the CIA partnership or the programs the NYPD was running.

[snip]

Holt asked for a special prosecutor because he wanted both the civil rights issues and the NYPD-CIA collaboration to be investigated, his office said.

So Holt, who suggests he should have been informed of the NYPD spook program but wasn’t, suggests one means of oversight never happened.

There’s Mike Bloomberg, who has been Mayor for almost the entire post-9/11 period and therefore ought to have exercised some oversight over this program:

In New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg was asked Thursday about the CIA’s investigation and whether he thought the partnership violated any laws.

“How would I know?” Bloomberg replied. “They’re doing an investigation. That’s what — if I knew, I’d be happy to tell them. But my guess is no.”

Surprisingly, Bloomberg hasn’t thought of consulting one of NY’s own lawyers, or one of the thousands of lawyers inhabiting NY, to find out whether the partnership was legal. A smart guy like Mayor Mike and he claims not to even know how he might find out if the program were legal. Rather than finding out, though, he’s just gonna guess.

And then, finally, there’s John Brennan, the guy who apparently did the targeting for Cheney’s illegal wiretap program and also was personally involved in one of the whistleblower cases the Obama Justice Department is prosecuting, who cites his intimate knowledge of the program as his basis for being sure there’s no problem.

President Barack Obama’s homeland security adviser, John Brennan, who was the deputy executive director the CIA when the NYPD intelligence programs began, said he was intimately familiar with the CIA-NYPD partnership. He said that agency knew what the rules were and did not cross any lines.

Call me crazy. But I think there’s a third reason to support Holt’s call for an independent prosecutor. Not only is Obama’s DOJ personally involved, but his top Homeland Security advisor was involved in this mess, too. Given the White House’s past involvement in shutting down DOJ investigations pertaining to the Brennan-era CIA, I’d say we need someone free of that chain of authority.


Break with the Bankers

By:  Wednesday November 4, 2009 6:27 am

In the calm before yesterday’s election night storm, Howie Kurtz took a moment to engage in his favorite hobby, obsessing about Democratic men’s penises.

If any of the candidates are patronizing hookers, Chris Matthews has the right guest. Eliot Spitzer, on the set.

But Matthews may in fact have had the most logical guest on to interpret last night’s results. As Digby concluded last night,

At this point, the only thing that seems obvious to me is that the super wealthy just aren’t as popular as they used to be. Even in New York City.

You see, regardless of his own considerable fortune and whether he has paid for sex, Spitzer had this to say yesterday (presumably before Bloomberg almost failed to buy a city):

Imagine this: by next spring, an intellectual consensus will have emerged that the concentration in the banking sector that developed from the 1980s until the crash of ‘08 was misguided. Voices as disparate as Former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, meta- investor George Soros, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page will be in agreement on this point.A few brave souls on the Right — recognizing that the Republican Party has been bereft of ideas in its attacks on President Obama — will then try to re-define a populist, conservative attack by asserting that the White House has been captured by Wall Street. Real populism and change, they will argue, will come from the Republican, not the Democratic, party.

The power of such an attack from the Right should not be underestimated. There will be a huge first mover advantage that goes to the candidates who grab the real banner of attacking the structure of Wall Street as having been the root of the crash of ‘08.

[snip]

So the simple question remains: why aren’t we focusing on the problem that got us here in the first instance — the scope, range, and size of the mega-institutions whose risk taking has so far inflicted only enormous harm on our economy? If the Republicans pick up this issue before we do, the elections of 2010 could be even worse than we are now fearing.

The teabaggers failed yesterday, but there’s every reason to believe they will be more successful at mobilizing anxiety and frustration in Florida. And they’ll be doing it all the while downplaying Dick Armey’s considerable financial largesse.

If the teabaggers can then turn their energy into a focus on Wall Street, I do believe they’ll be successful in coming years. Particularly if the Administration continues to coddle the bankers.

Update: Speaking of Spitzer, Gawker has the journalist/flack emails from the first days that scandal broke.