Fingerprinting the poor?

Friday, January 06, 2012

I have to pick my cat up from the vet so I am not taking the light rail this morning and so have time to listen longer to the news stations and to the most recent rants of Mayor Bloomberg about how the poor ought to be fingerprinted.
I keep thinking: Why doesn’t he just tattoo numbers on their wrists so he can keep track of them, until he find some more permanent solution?
Bloomberg is an economic Nazi.
He doesn’t hate blacks or Jews, he hates poor people – especially if they’re cluttering up a city he sees as an economic engine.
Gypsies and others who do not fit into the exploitation system have no place in his world, only like the Nazis of old, he hasn’t figured out a way to get them out of the city.
If someone isn’t feeding the tax monster or getting his or her pocket picked by the tourist industry, then they are not welcome in New York. But how do you get rid of a city which once embraced immigrants and the working poor?
Nelson Rockefeller – considered a moderate Republican – came up with a series of laws so odious that ordinary people caught with minor amounts of drugs went to jail for outrageous periods of time.
Rudy Giuliani perfected the use of law enforcement as means of slum clearance by arresting people for minor offenses in the theory that petty criminals would be kept from more serious crimes.
These strategies helped clear the inner city, making it acceptable for white middle class to move back, but the prisons are already overburdened and cost a lot of money, especially with Obama’s mass exportation of immigrants. And building and operating new jails is just too expensive a solution these days when guards are unionized.
Like the Nazis of old, Bloomberg has come up with schemes of his own for relocating the homeless – even offering to buy them the tickets, not on transports to Palestine as the Nazis once planned, but to any place other than New York.
Holocaust experts note that there are steps leading to the final solution – a pattern that the Nazis only perfected, but did not invent. People are singled out somehow, stripped of their economic foundations, isolated, and then exterminated.
Rockefeller, Giuliani, Bloomberg had reasons for establishing their policies. I worked in New York City for most of the 1970s and lived there for a time as well so I knew just how out of control drugs and crime were.
But enforcement was inconsistent. While poor blacks went to jail for drug crimes under Rockefeller, the social elite openly abused drugs in places like Club 54. While street vendors did unfairly compete with established businesses in the 1980s, under cutting their prices, this was partly due to the exorbitant fees the city charged for someone to do business and the outrageous rent and lack of commercial rent control that forced established business to rip off the public with high charges.
Bloomberg excuses his fingerprinting of the poor saying that this prevent fraud for people collecting food stamps, this at a time when his friends on Wall Street and his pals in the banking industry, get away with murder by stealing billions.
Madoff went to jail, partly because he stole from the wealthy. Most of the super rich Bloomberg calls his friends aren’t finger printed and get away with a lot more than food stamp fraud.
Where is the justice?
Why isn’t Bloomberg buying those people tickets to the nearest state prison?