Forum Post: The Villian OWS has been waiting for

This story originally appeared at Truthdig [1]. Robert Scheer is the author of The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street [2] (Nation Books).  -------------------------------------

In the pantheon of billionaires without shame, Michael Bloomberg, the Wall Street banker turned busines-press lord turned mayor, is now secure at the top. What is so offensive is that someone who abetted Wall Street greed, and benefited as much as anyone from it, has no compunction about ruthlessly repressing those who dare exercise their constitutional “right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances”

You would think that a former partner at the investment bank Solomon Brothers, which originated mortgage-backed securities, a man who then partnered with Merrill Lynch in the high-speed computerized trading that has led to so much financial manipulation, would have some sense of his own culpability. Or at least that someone whose Wall Street career left him with a net worth of $19.5 billion would grasp the deep irony of his being the instrument for smashing Occupy Wall Street, the internationally acknowledged symbol of opposition to corporate avarice.

But only in America is the arrogance of the superrich so perfectly concealed by the pretense of democracy that the twelfth-richest man in the nation can suppress dissent against corporate rapacity and expect his brutal actions to be viewed not as a means of preserving his own class privilege but as bureaucratically necessary to providing sanitary streets. Cont’d at http://www.fourwinds10.net/siterun_data/peace_freedom/patriotic_statements/news.php?q=1321645747

"Hey Bloomberg,Beware, Liberty Park Is Everywhere!"