Thread by @NelStamp

I wasn’t just only at #OccupyWallStreet I actually put in work on the ground unlike some folks on twitter dot com. I’m also a lifelong New Yorker who grew up under Mike’s tenure as mayor. And this is a 🧵 about Michael Rubens Bloomberg 1/

Ok, so Bloomberg gets elected to Mayor in 2001, as a Republican. This is two months after 9/11 I was a freshman in high school and my school was in Manhattan (just giving you context) this is years after a Giuliani administration (Im sorry y’all)

Bloomberg comes into office while being the one of the world’s 🌍 richest men. Financial, software, data & mass media company that is named Bloomberg. This stapel is the Bloomberg terminal, a software system providing financial data that is used widely in finance 3/

Ok so, he comes in it’s very shortly after 9/11, as a way to “rebuild” the city him and then Gov Pataki lobby the CEO of Goldman Sachs to move HQ across from ground zero by promising over a billion dollars in state tax and city tax breaks. 5/

Seriously though, remember recently when everyone fought Amazon? Bloomberg decided that it was way more important to give a billion dollars away to GOLDMAN SACHS for them to move to Lower Manhattan. (This is really tweet 5/)

Fast forward to negotiations w/ transit workers union. In 2002 he mocks transit workers by riding a bike into the city with a subtle we don’t need you dig. In 2005 the TWU decided to strike rightfully so & Bloomberg handled it poorly. 6/

google.com/amp/s/www.nyda…

FYI that daily news story is not the best but tbh I can’t find all the in depth articles because the internet was not strong then.

Now before I get into the crazy stuff he pulls, I want to talk about why people “like” him. He bans smoking indoors in NYC in 2002, he raises taxes on cigs, he says we’re going to make hybrid taxis. All band-aid solutions to long term wealth inequality problems in NYC. 7/

When I entered politics in October of 2008 shortly after the financial crisis, Bloomberg pulled something crazy.... he extended himself term limits, therefore being allowed to run for Mayor for a 3rd term. He changed the rules because he could just for himself.

Back to 2002 the NYPD implemented the Stop-question-and-frisk program. Aka Stop And Frisk. They began publishing data in 2003. Michael Bloomberg supported the program behind Ray Kelly - NYC two time Police Commissioner.

Stop & Frisk was a policy of the NYPD to stop, question & frisk people based on whatever that officer could think of that day. Btwn 03-13 hundreds of stops were made per year. And in 2011 double the population of latinx & black youth of the city were stopped & frisked.

Shout out to organizations like @changethenypd and @NYCLU who did years of work fighting this wild policy that was being used as a tool to uphold racism in our city.

Ok on to the movement that started on 9/17/2011 I remember when I arrived but that’s for a different 🧵. Ok so we take over the park and we’re clearly creating a thorn on the side of the downtown. But we didn’t know how big we were going to get.

Bloomberg’s NYPD violently attacked us at #OccupyWallStreet & it totally backfired. We had thousands of people coming out everyday. In October Bloomberg himself came down to the park to serve us an eviction notice, because we need to get the park clean.

The eviction notice said if you don’t get this [public-private] park clean by x date you will be evicted from the park. I’ve been served an eviction notice previously & the mayor of the city of NY decided to come himself & deliver one which is on brand for being a part of the 1%

So what did we do, we cleaned up the park had thousands of people including elected officials & our current mayor ready to risk arrest. We didn’t get evicted and I got to read the statement from Bloomberg to the park.

And they used Brookfield a massive real estate company that owned Zuccotti Park as the entire wedge even though the company wouldn’t have that land without the city.

Unfortunately it doesn’t end there Bloomberg organized a call of mayors and police forces across the country to all remove occupations on the morning of November 15, 2011. It was violent it included mass amounts of pepper spray and the NYPD brutalizing lots of folks.

Back to Stop & Frisk things get so bad that @NYCLU has to release an app for when folks get stopped & frisk. People are being locked up for nothing but also creating severe trauma in communities and heightening tensions btwn community & police.

After Ramarley Graham is shot & killed in his own home in February 2012, labor unions, the party, community organizations band together to put on The Silent March to End Stop & Frisk.

WHILE THIS IS ALL HAPPENING. Post 2002 under Bloomberg’s administration begins an era of unprecedented NYPD Muslim Surveillance. The NYPD’s demographic unit legit has mapped areas predominantly occupied by “ancestries of interest”

Ok so I am going to get into gun violence stuff here. Yes he’s given masses amounts of money away as a rich individual. If groups want to take that I got no shade on them. However stop & frisk was a part of his combating gun violence rhetoric.

And I do not see him fit to be President after he made NYC reach it’s height of economic inequality, racial profiling and giving away billions to the wealthiest corporations the very ones that had to be saved by the government during the financial crash.

This 🧵 is only a fraction of the damage that was done but in my book. If you buy your way into everything, you support & defend racial profiling and religious surveillance, you give tax breaks for wealthiest you really shouldn’t be in the White House.

Oh and how did we fight Bloomberg with stop & frisk we had 50K people march in the streets with #SilentMarchNYC and tours truly was the lead organizer.

nytimes.com/2012/06/18/nyr…

And @changethenypd led the way to finally pass a Community Safety Act right before Bloomberg’s term ended.

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