Bugging Michael Bloomberg

 

 

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

 

One of my friends got censored on Youtube.

This is not the first time I have seen radicals lose their site – especially since google took over. Access to the internet and the ability to broadcast can be a dangerous thing to the power elite in our society and so any time anyone gets too dangerous, they get cut off.

My friend Susannah Troy has been taking on media mogul Michael Bloomberg and that is always a mistake.

He is one of the most dangerous people on the planet, part of the race of superior beings who sets policy for American culture, and with whom it is always dangerous to tangle.

Troy has been taking on NYU, New School, and Cooper Union in much the same way a previous generation took on West Side Highway and the evil expansion of Columbia University.

The curse of a radical is either to be ignored or laughed at, and she should take heart in that someone took her seriously enough to want to censor her.

Gandhi said the point of a protest was to get a reaction. The ultimate goal is to demonstrate through this reaction the true nature of our opponent, thus if the mayor of New York seeks to crush this small time protestor, he is demonstrating how much of a tyrant he is.

But the effect on such a small scale seems like a waste of time, and often causes radicals to become discouraged.

It is difficult to persist when the world powers seem stacked against you. Yet in this regard, Troy needs to take heart that if Bloomberg and his henchmen are reacting then something she had done has touched a nerve, and she should continue to do it, being wary not to delve so deeply as to inspire unwanted violence.

Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King put themselves and the lives on their followers on the line knowing that the sacrifice would be great, but in their case, so was the reward.

The only time you want to invoke the enemy’s violence is when there are witnesses to document it and the striking back serves as testimony in a greater moral trial.

With Bloomberg, who wants to find a final solution for poor people in New York, this time has not come, and the best we can hope to do is to show him for the monster he is without allowing him to hurt us too much.
Losing a Youtube account seems like a fair price for the reaction. The question is, where do we take the protest from here, and how to we force Bloomberg and his evil ilk into the next level where they reveal just kind of monsters they are?

 

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Burger King John called me the other night with yet another money making scheme. I met him on the overnight shift at Willowbrook Mall in the mid 1980s where I worked as overnight donut baker and he as the evening manager of the Burger King. He could never get his work done on time. Over the years, he went up and down, over and around with his drug problems, a strange symbol of the modern era, a Republican Reagan-lover so right wing we often could not speak on politics or risk full scale war.

I don’t talk to him often any more since his last relapse, although like most of us, he has never given up this basic values, even when he cannot live up to them, locked into the welfare state he hates, looking for get rich quick schemes.

He keeps looking for a quick fix to his failed life and calls me up asking for help I refuse to give him. In his latest effort, he wanted to know if I knew a hock shop where he could sell some gold jewelry, saying he had to buy a gift for his sister, and when I said I didn’t know one, he begged off, but hurriedly asked me not to tell his wife about this conversation.