Los Angeles Mayor Anthony Villaraigosa has instructed city agencies to estimate costs incurred by the Occupy L.A. protesters, and said that budget cuts will likely be necessary to absorb the high costs.
Among other expense, the park in front of City Hall was completely destroyed. Repairs to the lawn are likely to exceed $400,000, and the cost for police to evict the Occupy L.A. encampment/trash dump came to over $700,000.
Expenses for removing the graffiti and obscenities from the marble walls of City Hall and the park trees and the cost of draining 3,000 gallons of water from what amounted to a small swamp in a catch basin and treating it for hazardous materials is still to be estimated. Hauling away over 30 tons of trash and debris will cost the city over $500,000 alone.Then there's the cost of incarcerating and trying those protesters who refused to leave.
It was Mayor Villaraigosa and the Democrat dominated L.A. City Council who welcomed Occupy LA,passed a resolution applauding what they were doing and allowed them to break the city's laws with impunity for two months. They only could be bothered to do anything about it when the encampment because an actual health hazard.
And now, they expect the citizens of Los Angeles to pay for their malfeasance an dereliction of the job they were elected to do.
Not only are they unworthy of staying in office, but they ought to be made to pay for cleaning up the mess they made out of their own pockets.
Simply disgraceful.
How ironic!! The OWS protesters are/were primarily net recipients of government benefits meaning that by and large these people received much more from the government than they pay in taxes. Now because of their actions there benefits get decreased. Just what were they protesting for? More government benefits? Not to have their government benefits reduced? If so, it would seem their actions have had the exact opposite result!!
ReplyDeleteGenerally America has not been in the habit of discouraging protests. As such, I'm not sure what it would accomplish by getting the politicians to pay for this, however, I think they should have seen this coming from the quality of people at these protests. As such, I'd suggest forcing the OWS protesters to clean up their messes, at gun point if necessary. As for the costs, have the OWS protesters pay for it first out of their personal funds and after this is exhausted reduce their government benefits by the amount needed to cover the costs. If this is still insufficient, at that time the politicians can pay the remainder of the bill.
I agree with you that these people are unworthy of office. Actually this would apply to pretty much all elected officals and government bureacrats. Politicians of both major political parties with few exceptions aided, abetted, and encouraged the OWS people at all levels.
Why did they do this? I suspect the answer is one or more of the following. 1.)Much of the protests appear to be centered on the actions of Wall Street and alleged corruption and greed in this sector. The real problem, however, is not Wall Street but is government regulation run crazy and the tendency of regulators to sieze de facto control of the private entities they should be regulating. Essentially government officials are more than happy to support any thing that directs attention away from them. 2.)Some of the politicians are very likely simply ignorant. After all what is more American than protests of things we don't like. They simply did not take the time to understand the nature of the protests.
In contrast to OWS, tea partiers generally are net tax payers meaning that what they pay in taxes generally exceeds what they receive in government benefits. Also, since the tea party protests are generally directed at government they must be actively discouraged and both major political parties will do so to whatever extent possible.
How long can a government last that neglects the interests of those who pay its bills? Essentially right now the tea partiers make a sizeable portion the folks who are paying the taxes that allow government to run. Another major source of funding comes from the Chinese and others who lend the government money to further help fund its operations. At some point, those who pay for the government to operate will very likely demand an accounting from said government and may remove it from power by force if necessary.
Should the tea party people rise up violently if necessary, how will the military respond? Should the Chinese use force to force to force the US Federal, State, and Local governments to reign in spending there is probably not much the military can do to stop them. It doesn't have the man power, the proper technology, and its not deployed correctly. When will our forces be redeployed to defensible positions? At least by a redeployment we would have a fighting chance to defend our nation.
Getting this done will require real leadership. Unfortunately we seem to lack this right now. The people who currently run things can't seem to see past the next election!! It seems that such thinking may have backfired on the folks running LA. By having to cut government services because of what they actually encouraged they may have placed their chaces at re election jeporady. Truly ironic!!