Presidential Candidate Jill Stein Opposes Bloomberg Shut Down Of Occupy Wall Street

Earlier this morning, our writer Truman talked about of Barack Obama’s support for New York mayor Michael Bloomberg’s forced shut down of the Occupy Wall Street protest, giving Bloomberg and other mayors carte blanche to suppress political protest, regardless of protesters’ constitutional rights. American liberals who support the preservation of democratic freedoms are outraged at President Obama’s rapid abandonment of the occupation movement. Still, progressive activists are left with an important question: What alternative to Obama do we have?

Jill Stein, Green Party presidential candidate, has issued a statement in support of the Occupy Wall Street protest, opposing the eviction from Zuccotti Park.

John Andrews, advisor to the Stein for President campaign, explained to me that Dr. Stein “finds the developments very disturbing and is concerned with the appearance that the Obama Administration is supporting a nationwide effort to stifle the OWS protests”. In her official statement, Stein argues:

“The aggressive, needless police actions across the country against Occupy Wall Street (OWS) are an assault on civil liberties and an effort to suppress a much needed movement for economic justice and democracy. The courageous protesters who have stood up to intimidation by lethal force are standing up for us all.

In conducting these raids, public officials are suppressing rights of free speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of the press. Routinely, reporters were physically prevented from observing the raids. Many of those who managed to get in to the sites were reportedly intimidated or arrested. If access to public ways and public health and safety concerns were
significant, other non-military solutions were available to deal with them. The lack of such efforts belies the excuse that these concerns justified police raids.”

Stein’s statement identifies a key weakness in the official explanations of the forceful shutdown of the Occupy Wall Street protest: If cleanliness and public health were genuine problems, why didn’t the administration of Michael Bloomberg simply deal with those issues, as it does with the rest of the city of New York City? Bloomberg can deal with sanitation issues in the amazingly dense island of Manhattan. Surely, a non-confrontational solution to Zuccotti Park maintenance could have been devised.

Jill Stein understands that it’s not the occupation protests that are the problem. The real problem is that the most powerful financial elites in the nation have taken control of American government and are using it to increase income inequality. Stein has issued a challenge to Barack Obama: To stop providing support to local governments that are violating the constitutional rights of occupation protesters. Stein says to Obama:

“Income disparity in the US now exceeds that before the Great Depression. Thus, the anguish that compels protesters to sleep on the cold hard ground is not going away. The political parties of the 1% are showing signs of neither understanding the protest, nor acting to address the root economic causes. I challenge President Obama to forbid all Federal involvement in these disturbing violations of civil liberties, and to urge all elected officials to respect the right of citizens to peacefully assemble to petition their government for redress of the economic grievances caused by rule by the 1%.”