NYPD: Sneaky Fucks

Clever. Clever, but a little bit dickish, too. NYPD tells drunks to camp out with OccupyWallstreet.

Justin Elliot at Salon:

The NYPD is reportedly telling drunks to hang out in Zuccotti Park, apparently as a way to undermine the credibility of Occupy Wall Street.

Harry Siegel reports:

But while officers may be in a no-win situation, at the mercy of orders carried on shifting political winds and locked into conflict with a so-far almost entirely non-violent protest movement eager to frame the force as a symbol of the oppressive system they’re fighting, the NYPD seems to have crossed a line in recent days, as the park has taken on a darker tone with unsteady and unstable types suddenly seeming to emerge from the woodwork. Two different drunks I spoke with last week told me they’d been encouraged to “take it to Zuccotti” by officers who’d found them drinking in other parks, and members of the community affairs working group related several similar stories they’d heard while talking with intoxicated or aggressive new arrivals.

…

“He’s got a right to express himself, you’ve got a right to express yourself,” I heard three cops repeat in recent days, using nearly identical language, when asked to intervene with troublemakers inside the park, including a clearly disturbed man screaming and singing wildly at 3 a.m. for the second straight night.

Dude. I knew Bloomberg & crew were assholes, but this boils down to a very sneaky attempt to paint the Occupiers as substance abusing indigents looking for handouts, which is NOT what OccupyWallstreet is about. The Occupiers are protesting economic injustice and the total ass-raping perpetuated by the 1% on the other 99% of us. Actually it does occur to me that there would be considerably fewer homeless folks in NY and elsewhere had our Galtian Overlords on Wallstreet not blown up the fucking economy in 2008.

Actual economist says "job creators" destroy jobs too!

From an NPR interview with professor Justin Wolfers from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania:

WOLFERS: Small businesses, firms that are just starting out, a bunch of them succeed, and a bunch of them fail. If we only count the success, which would be the wrong thing to do, we'd say they create an enormous number of jobs. But, you know, how difficult it is to start a successful small business. And so sure, they're doing a lot of hiring in total. But they're also doing a lot of firing as well.

BLOCK: Interesting, too, that a lot of small businesses are so small that it's essentially one person. It's maybe an independent corporation, or someone who's self-employed could be a small business?

WOLFERS: Yeah. And so this is actually one of the parts where the rhetoric of small business, I think, really leads us astray. If you actually look at the data, what we mean by small businesses, what they actually are, they're things like real estate agents or my hairdresser. They're lawyers; they're doctors. You talk to these folks, do they have any interest in innovating or bringing new products to market or any of the things we think of as being the engine of economic growth? The answer is no. My dry cleaner likes to take my clothes and then give them to me four days later. Most small businesses don't even have ambitions of being the engines of economic growth, or the engines of jobs.

Gee, I thought that the all powerful John Galt like Job Creators™ could do no wrong and were the engine of the economy and that we should all bow down before them like the groveling serfs we really should be.

Or... maybe there is nothing inherently righteous in running a business. Oh, yeah. Business is about making money, not creating jobs.