Angry Residents, Businesses Plan Anti-Occupy Wall Street Protest
Downtown residents and business owners angry that their neighborhood has been occupied for two months by the Wall Street demonstration are staging a protest of the protest Monday, declaring that City Hall has let it get out of control. Angry over all-day drumming, people urinating and defecating on the streets and verbal attacks from protesters, organizers say they will rally at City Hall Monday to send officials a message.
"Laws are clearly being violated and we simply want them enforced," Lower Manhattan resident Linda Gertsman told NBC New York.
Exasperated residents and businesses said they are "pursuing all options," including lawsuits against the city, the mayor and the private company that owns Zuccotti Plaza, the encampment headquarters.
Organizers of the anti-Occupy protest posted fliers downtown that say "Mayor Bloomberg is helping them stay."
The Occupy Wall Street movement began with a few people on Sept. 17 and has grown to hundreds who have made Zuccotti Park, a small plaza along Broadway, their home.
Businesses have complained for weeks that the encampment is causing them to lose money, although a few have made money off the protests, as donors from all over the country have sent food from nearby restaurants to the movement.
Mark Epstein, owner of Milk Street Cafe on Wall Street, said his business has suffered and he has had to lay off people in recent weeks.The protest has been, he says, "a fiasco."
Han Shan, a member of Occupy Wall Street's community relations working group, said he and others in the encampment are trying to be better downtown neighbors.
The group recently worked out daytime drumming hours with the local community board, and secured some portable toilets for protesters to use.
But, he told the New York Times, “at the end of the day, it’s an occupation. We didn’t ask permission to be there and we don’t want to. It’s about bigger, broader issues.”
Bloomberg has gone back and forth between criticizing Occupy Wall Street and defending it, saying recently that protesters were largely law-abiding and did not bother anyone.
"If you go one block away from this park, you would never know it exists," he said last week. "It's just literally -- in any direction, one block away -- there's just nothing."
- NBC NY*****
Our Bill of Rights guarantees us the right to lawful assembly, but this bullshit hasn't been lawful since Day One. No permits, disruptions to businesses, drugs, thefts, violence, rapes, spreading of disease, and generally just being a pain in the ass.
Now the cities that are being occupied are bitching and moaning that it's gotten out of hand.
Well, who in the fuck LET it get out of hand? Had the cities gone in and cleared that shit (literally) out when it was just starting, then they wouldn't be having the problems they're having today.
I sat here this weekend and watched Portlands' PD get ready to clear the camps at midnight Saturday, but there were so many fucking hippies that they knew they'd have widespread rioting and destruction if they tried, so they backed off instead of making a statement by going in, clearing the fucking parks by force and locking these wannabe revolutionaries up.
The cities indulged them and now they've got a bigger problem than they know what to do with.
You reap what you sow.
