The mayor and City Council welcomed Occupy L.A. to take
over the grounds around City Hall without any limits on how long they stayed or
how many protesters joined in the encampment so under their doctrine of full
cost recovery they should be paying to repair the damage and for all the
salaries of all the city workers involved from start to finish.
They charge us for all the costs involved in trash
collection, sewer services, water and power, which includes an 18.8 percent
profit to the general fund.
So it is only right that they reimburse the police,
general services, parks and other departments from all their costs, including
overtime and regular wages since they were pulled from their jobs to clean up
the mess the mayor and council – not the occupiers – caused.
Declaring the occupation was merely an exercise in free
speech, they gave the protesters blanket and unequivocal support in a formal
resolution and boasted over and over how their treatment of the protesters
proved they are the true liberals unlike the leadership of every other city in
the nation.
But when the damage was done, the public was getting
increasingly upset over protest and occupiers from northern cities were
starting to migrate to L.A., they pulled the plug in an elaborately planned,
staged and executed eviction operation.
They called it a brilliant example of “constitutional
policing,” by which they meant they didn’t commit blatantly unlawful acts like
shooting pepper spray in the protesters’ faces, brutally beat them with batons
or otherwise engage in violence against people who were just as orderly as they
were.
What they did do that deserves a lot more examination and
discussion was to treat people exercising their First Amendment rights like
terrorists.
Undercover cops worked inside the encampment for weeks taking
down names and shooting pictures of protesters who would get special attention
when the brigade of 1,400 cops descended from all directions and rounded up
nearly 300 of the occupiers.
They were left standing in line waiting to be booked for
up to seven hours with plastic handcuffs so tight their hands turned purple.
They were held for three days jammed into overcrowded
cells and hauled into solitary confinement of they complained too loudly about
how they were treated or begged for soap or a toothbrush.
Bail for a minor charge of failure to disperse was set at
the maximum of $5,000 and some were released on condition they stay away from
City Hall.
It was “constitutional intimidation” intended to chill
many of the occupiers in their exercise of the First Amendment and stain their
records with criminal convictions. Perhaps the ACLU will rediscover it is an
organization that fights for people’s civil liberties and will document exactly
how this went down for the purposes of suing the city.
Whatever you think about the occupiers, there isn’t a
shred of evidence to suggest that they are terrorists.
It never should have come to this. The reason it did is
because of the city’s leadership so they should pay the full cost of every
aspect of the whole operation.
The mayor has more than 200 staffers serving him; each
Council member roughly 20. They need to eliminate as many of those unnecessary
jobs as it takes to pay the bill.
After all, few if any of those 500 staffers serve the
public; they serve the politicians.
