Flashback to Fall: Occupy Revisits Zuccotti Park After New Arrests

If you were to travel past New York's Zuccotti Park on Thursday evening, it would have looked a bit like it did last fall, as Occupy Wall Street protesters rallied there after six of them reportedly got arrested while protesting Bank of America. Completing the late 2011 motif, "hipster cop" Rick Lee apparently made the scene as well. A Ustream broadcasting the action at Zuccotti showed protesters clustered on the Zuccotti Park stairs while Flickr pictures show police massing around a small crowd in the middle of the park. Organizer Austin Guest said about 200 people showed up (Gothamist put the number closer to 50) and six were arrested in total, one while crossing the street in front of the Bank of America branch in lower Manhattan where they had their protest and five while sitting on the living room furniture the occupiers set up at the branch. On Twitter, frequent Occupy tweeter @DiceyTroop said police had also impounded two of their vehicles.

The protest against Bank of America, which activists say is "a morally and financially dead 'zombie bank' poised to shock the entire global economy into crisis," is the campaign Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibbi has been active in. His big feature on the bank's problems came out on Wednesday; in it, he called B of A "a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we'll all be paying for until the end of time." The bank just passed a Federal Reserve stress test, but Taibbi made the case that it hasn't cleaned up its act since the federal bailout four years ago.

Zuccotti Park Owners, Brookfield Properties, Owe City $139,000

Mayor Bloomberg may have been on the side of Brookfield Properties during the violent raid on Occupy Wall Street in November, but now it's looking like the Mayor will want to distance himself from the owners of Zuccotti Park.

According to the city's Finance Department, Brookfield Properties and its parent company owe $139,000 in unpaid business taxes dating from 2006 to 2009.

Councilman Jumaane Williams, who was wrongly arrested this summer while attending the West Indian Parade, and was arrested again during an Occupy Wall Street protest at the Brooklyn Bridge, pointed out the blatant irony in Brookfield's financial woes:

Occupy Wall Street has been talking about economic disparity...and here's Brookfield Properties, which has worked with the mayor to keep the messengers out, not paying their share.

A spokesman for Brookfield Properties disputed the claims and said the company would be in communication with the city's finance department to work through what they deemed as an error.

Others on the list of city debtors include the Philadelphia Eagles, Rev. Al Sharpton, and the law firm Binder and Binder.

Brookfield, which reportedly owns 6.2 million square feet in midtown and 12.8 million square feet in Lower Manhattan, was at the center of controversy during the city's Occupy Wall Street demonstrations when protestors took over Zuccotti Park to pitch tents for encampment.

At the start of the protests in October, Bloomberg dismissed protestors and insisted that neither Occupy Wall Street nor Brookfield Properties were topics of the Mayor's "pillow talk." However, that quickly changed as protestors gained momentum and national attention, and Bloomberg ordered hundreds of police officers to evict protestors during the middle of the night.

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Source: Huff