Zucotti Park - A Truth Lain Bare

Zucotti Park in New York City, formerly known as "Liberty" Plaza; that’s true, you can look it up; is the site of recent protests against what many Americans view as corporate greed. It's officially called "Occupy Wall Street." That greed was underscored, and a truth defined, this past week when the owners of Zucotti Park first demanded that the protestors be removed by New York Ciy’s Finest. These owners have received over $700,000 dollars of your tax money since 2001 for what is, essentially, a private park. This attempt to evict the people from the park for which they have been forced to pay, only serves to underscore the very point the protests are all about; corporate greed and the re-distrubution of wealth, through tax grants and loopholes, to those who need it least.

Think about the gall it takes to accept tax revenue, generated mainly by the people who can least afford it, to build a private plaza, change the name from “Liberty" Plaza, name it after yourself (John Zucotti - Chairman of Brookfield Properties in Canada) and then attempt to bar from its premises, the very class of people who provided the funding for the park in the first place. It’s patently absurd.

It's like the photograph above of three policemen clubbing a young man for "stepping off the sidewalk"; I remember the protests against the war in Viet Nam; same place, only 40 years earlier. That time, you couldn't find a cop, who didn't have his back turned, as the riveters threw down hot iron on the protestors. I was there. I remember.

So, let’s not forget, for one second, as we watch these events unfold, that the loudest protests against the protestors come from the bankers and the neo-cons, who are usually the first to decry the “redistribution” of wealth, but only when it comes to a program designed to help the neediest among us. And therein lies the truth – they just don’t care.