Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Did Bloomberg help the Occupy Wall Street protesters?

Matthew Yglesias comments on the situation at Zuccotti Park:
Cops poured into Zuccotti Park to forcibly remove the original Occupy Wall Street encampment. Naturally, people aren’t happy. But realistically I think this was the best possible endgame for the group. After all, there are only a few possible ways for a protest to end. One is something like this — the cops come in and get rid of people. A second is something like the Powers That Be sit down to negotiate an end to the standoff in a way that involves giving in to some or all of the protesters demands. The third is for the protests to simply fizzle out as people lose interest. One of the distinctive things about Occupy Wall Street was that it organized itself in such a way as to make option two impossible.
If the OWS protesters had been allowed to stay in the park then their movement would probably have faded away over the coming months as bad weather and rising crime made the occupation increasingly unpleasant.

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