[Generally speaking, US fascism is closer than you think. That is, it's
already here, celebrating its tenth anniversary with pepper spray,
swinging nightsticks, entrapment, arbitrary arrest and strict obedience
to the paymasters. Not BP or Exxon in this case, but Wall Street itself,
the 1% in suits, ties and blazers. The mystery on the street was, who
are these dudes in the white shirts and why do they cut loose so
savagely on the protesters? The answer may well be that they are paid
even more directly than by the recent $4.6 million "gift" of JP Morgan
Chase to the New York Police Foundation. If Pam Martens is right, the
answer is that they're paid $37 an hour -- and like Smedley Butler in
the good old days, they're gangsters for capitalism.]
www.counterpunch.org/2011/10/10/financial-giants-put-new-york-city-cops-on-their-payroll
Who Do the White Shirt Police Report to at Occupy Wall Street Protests?
Financial Giants Put New York City Cops On Their Payroll
by PAM MARTENS
Videos are springing up across the internet showing uniformed members of
the New York Police Department in white shirts (as opposed to the
typical NYPD blue uniforms) pepper spraying and brutalizing peaceful,
nonthreatening protestors attempting to take part in the Occupy Wall
Street marches. Corporate media are reporting that these white shirts
are police supervisors as opposed to rank and file. Recently discovered
documents suggest something else may be at work.
If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to
privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of
dollars in bailouts from taxpayers. One of the ingenious methods that
has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani
administration in New York City in 1998. It’s called the Paid Detail
Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street
corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order
up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a
pastrami on rye.
The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension
benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs
and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer,
not the corporation.
New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per
hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000
in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of
$11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The
program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.
The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, his uniform
and gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemming from the
police personnel following illegal instructions from its corporate
master. Lawsuits have already sprung up from the program.
When the program was first rolled out, one insightful member of the NYPD
posted the following on a forum: “… regarding the officer working for,
and being paid by, some of the richest people and organizations in the
City, if not the world, enforcing the mandates of the private employer,
and in effect, allowing the officer to become the Praetorian Guard of
the elite of the City. And now corruption is no longer a problem. Who
are they kidding?”
Just this year, the Department of Justice revealed serious problems with
the Paid Detail unit of the New Orleans Police Department. Now
corruption probes are snowballing at NOPD, revealing cash payments to
police in the Paid Detail and members of the department setting up
limited liability corporations to run upwards of $250,000 in Paid Detail
work billed to the city.
When the infamously mismanaged Wall Street firm, Lehman Brothers,
collapsed on September 15, 2008, its bankruptcy filings in 2009 showed
it owed money to 21 members of the NYPD’s Paid Detail Unit. (A phone
call and email request to the NYPD for information on which Wall Street
firms participate in the program were not responded to. The police
unions appear to have only scant information about the program.)
Other Wall Street firms that are known to have used the Paid Detail
include Goldman Sachs, the World Financial Center complex which houses
financial firms, and the New York Stock Exchange.
The New York Stock Exchange is the building in front of which the Occupy
Wall Street protesters have unsuccessfully tried to protest, being
herded behind metal barricades, clubbed with night sticks, kicked in the
face and carted off to jail rather than permit the last plantation in
America to be defiled with citizen chants and posters. (A sample of
those politically inconvenient posters and chants: “The corrupt are
afraid of us; the honest support us; the heroic join us”; “Tell me what
democracy looks like, this is what democracy looks like”; “I’ll believe
a corporation is a person when Texas executes one.” The last sign refers
to the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal
Election Commission, giving corporations First Amendment personhood,
which allows them to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections.)
On September 8, 2004, Robert Britz, then President and Co-Chief
Operating Officer of the New York Stock Exchange, testified as follows
to the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services:
“…we have implemented new hiring standards requiring former law
enforcement or military backgrounds for the security staff…We have
established a 24-hour NYPD Paid Detail monitoring the perimeter of the
data centers…We have implemented traffic control and vehicle screening
at the checkpoints. We have installed fixed protective planters and
movable vehicle barriers.”
Military backgrounds; paid NYPD 24-7; checkpoints; vehicle barriers? It
might be insightful to recall that the New York Stock Exchange
originally traded stocks with a handshake under a Buttonwood tree in the
open air on Wall Street.
In his testimony, the NYSE executive Britz states that “we” did this or
that while describing functions that clearly belong to the City of New
York. The New York Stock Exchange at that time had not yet gone public
and was owned by those who had purchased seats on the exchange –
primarily, the largest firms on Wall Street. Did the NYSE simply give
itself police powers to barricade streets and set up checkpoints with
rented cops? How about clubbing protesters on the sidewalk?
Just six months before NYSE executive Britz’ testimony to a
congressional committee, his organization was being sued in the Supreme
Court of New York County for illegally taking over public streets with
no authority to do so. This action had crippled the business of a
parking garage, Wall Street Garage Parking Corp., the plaintiff in the
case. Judge Walter Tolub said in his opinion that
“…a private entity, the New York Stock Exchange, has assumed
responsibility for the patrol and maintenance of truck blockades located
at seven intersections surrounding the NYSE…no formal authority appears
to have been given to the NYSE to maintain these blockades and/or
conduct security searches at these checkpoints…the closure of these
intersections by the NYSE is tantamount to a public nuisance…The NYSE
has yet to provide this court with any evidence of an agreement giving
them the authority to maintain the security perimeter and/or conduct the
searches that their private security force conducts daily. As such, the
NYSE’s actions are unlawful and may be enjoined as they violate
plaintiff’s civil rights as a private citizen.”
The case was appealed, the ruling overturned, and sent back to the same
Judge who had no choice but to dismiss the case on the appellate ruling
that the plaintiff had suffered no greater harm than the community at
large. Does everyone in lower Manhattan own a parking garage that is
losing its customer base because the roads are blocked to the garage?
Some believe that Wall Street is given special privileges and protection
because New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg owes his $18.1 billion
in wealth (yes, he’s that 1 percent the 99 percent are protesting) to
Wall Street. The Mayor was previously a trader for Salomon Brothers,
the investment bank made famous for attempting to rig the U.S. Treasury
market in two-year notes.
The Mayor’s business empire which bears his name, includes the awesome
Bloomberg terminal, a computer that houses enormous pricing data for
stocks and bonds, research, news, charting functions and much more.
There are currently an estimated 290,000 of these terminals on Wall
Street trading floors around the globe, generating approximately $1500
in rental fees per terminal per month. That’s a cool $435 million a
month or $5.2 billion a year, the cash cow of the Bloomberg businesses.
The Bloomberg businesses are run independently from the Mayor but he
certainly knows that his terminal is a core component of his wealth.
Nonetheless, the Mayor is not Wall Street’s patsy. Bloomberg Publishing
is frequently in the forefront of exposing fraud on Wall Street such as
the 2001 tome “The Pied Pipers of Wall Street” by Benjamin Mark Cole,
which exposed the practice of releasing fraudulent stock research to the
public. Bloomberg News was responsible for court action that forced the
Federal Reserve to release the details of what it did with trillions of
dollars in taxpayer bailouts to Wall Street firms, hedge funds and
foreign banks.
Police Commissioner Ray Kelly may also have a soft spot for Wall Street.
He was formerly Senior Managing Director of Global Corporate Security
at Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc., the Wall Street firm that collapsed into
the arms of JPMorgan in March of 2008.
There has also been a bizarre revolving door between the Wall Street
millionaires and the NYPD at times. One of the most puzzling career
moves was made by Stephen L. Hammerman. He left a hefty compensation
package as Vice Chairman of Merrill Lynch & Co. in 2002 to work as
Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters for the NYPD from 2002 to 2004.
That move had everyone on Wall Street scratching their head at the time.
Merrill collapsed into the arms of Bank of America on September 15,
2008, the same date that Lehman went under.
Wall Street is not the only sector renting cops in Manhattan.
Department stores, parks, commercial banks and landmarks like
Rockefeller Center, Jacob Javits Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral have
also participated in the Paid Detail Unit, according to insiders. But
Wall Street is the only sector that runs a private justice system where
its crimes are herded off to secret arbitration tribunals, has sucked on
the public teat to the tune of trillions of dollars, escaped prosecution
for the financial collapse, and can put an armed municipal force on the
sidewalk to intimidate public protestors seeking a realignment of their
democracy.
We may be learning a lot more in the future about the tactics Wall
Street and the NYPD have deployed against the Occupy Wall Street
protestors. The highly regarded Partnership for Civil Justice Fund has
filed a class action lawsuit over the approximately 700 arrests made on
the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1. The formal complaint and related
information is available at the organization’s web site,
www.JusticeOnLine.org.
The organization was founded by Carl Messineo and Mara
Verheyden-Hilliard. The Washington Post has called them “the
constitutional sheriffs for a new protest generation.”
The suit names Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Kelly, the City of
New York, 30 unnamed members of the NYPD, and, provocatively, 10 unnamed
law enforcement officers not employed by the NYPD.
The lawsuit lays out dwhat has been curtailing the constitutional
rights of protestors for a very long time in New York City.
“As seen in the movements for social change in the Middle East and
Europe, all movements for social justice, jobs, and democracy need room
to breathe and grow and it is imperative that there be a halt to law
enforcement actions used to shut down mass assembly and free expression
of the people seeking to redress grievances…
“After escorting and leading a group of demonstrators and others
well out onto the Brooklyn Bridge roadway, the NYPD suddenly and without
warning curtailed further forward movement, blocked the ability of
persons to leave the Bridge from the rear, and arrested hundreds of
protestors in the absence of probable cause. This was a form of
entrapment, both illegal and physical.
“That the trap and detain mass arrest was a command-level-driven
intentional and calculated police operation is evidenced by the fact
that the law enforcement officials who led the demonstration across the
bridge were command officials, known as ‘white shirts.’ ”
In April 2001, I was arrested and incarcerated by the NYPD while
peacefully handing out flyers on a public sidewalk outside of the
Citigroup shareholders meeting – flyers that warned of growing
corruption inside the company. (The unlawful merger of Travelers Group
and Citibank created Citigroup and resulted in the repeal of the
Glass-Steagall Act, the depression era investor protection legislation
that barred depositor banks from merging with high-risk Wall Street
firms. Many of us from social justice groups in New York City had
protested against the repeal but were out maneuvered by Wall Street’s
political pawns in Washington.)
Out of a group of about two dozen protestors from the National
Organization for Women in New York City, Rain Forest Action Network, and
Inner City Press, I was the only person arrested. There was no civil
disobedience occurring. Rain Forest Action Network was handing out
fortune cookies with prescient warnings about Citigroup and urging
pedestrians to cut up their Citibank credit cards. The rest of us were
peacefully handing out flyers.
Chained to a metal bar inside the police precinct, I was grilled on any
crimes I might know about. I responded that the only crimes I knew
about were listed on the flyer and apparently, in New York City, one
gets arrested for disclosing crimes by Wall Street firms.
A mysterious, mature, white shirted inspector who ordered my arrest on
the sidewalk, and refused to give his first name, disappeared from the
police report when it was filed, blaming the arrest instead on a young
police officer. Citigroup is only alive today because the Federal
government inserted a feeding tube into Citigroup and infused over $2
trillion in loans, direct investment and guarantees as the company
veered toward collapse.
The NYPD at the time of my arrest was run by Bernard Kerik – the man
President George W. Bush later sent to Iraq to be the interim Interior
Minister and train Iraqi police. The President subsequently nominated
Kerik to head the Department of Homeland Security for the entire nation.
The nation was spared of that eventuality only because of an illegal
nanny popping up. Today, Kerik is serving a four year sentence in
Federal prison for a variety of criminal acts.
The New York Civil Liberties Union filed a Federal lawsuit on my behalf
(Martens v. Giuliani) and we learned that the NYPD had arbitrarily
established a policy to arrest and hold for 72 hours any person
protesting in a group of 20 or more. The case was settled for a modest
monetary award and the repeal by the NYPD of this unconstitutional and
despicable practice.
Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years. She spent the last
decade of her career advocating against Wall Street’s private justice
system, which keeps its crimes shielded from public courtrooms. She has
been writing on public interest issues for CounterPunch since retiring
in 2006. She has no security position, long or short, in any company
mentioned in this article. She can be reached at [email protected]
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