It’s New Year’s Eve. No, it’s Occupy Times Square!

As I popped out of the subway at Times Square, Saturday at 5 PM, I was immediately hit by that blast of New Year’s Eve-size crowds. Only this time, it was October 15, and within the crowd’s roar came the rhythmic, dynamic chants of Occupy Wall Street, this time, “We see something/So we’re saying something,” bless their giant hearts, crowds of thousands on each side of Seventh Avenue chanting, surrounded by an army of cops—on foot, motorcycles, horses, in cars, trucks, loaded for bear, guns, yellow plastic bracelets, night sticks, batons, the works, a giant Sikorsky-size helicopter above. “Happy Occupy Times Square.”

I looked up for the crystal ball that would fall from the sky, but there was none, no countdown, no network cameras, no Dick Clark embalmed in make-up, as I floated to the crossing, noticed it was blocked by metal stanchions. I asked the officer if I could cross to the other side. “No, he said, you’ll have to walk north to 44^th or 45^th Street.” So I did, and was stopped by the huge crowd at 44^th Street, decided to settle in, squeeze through the crowd to the stanchion. Sacré bleu!

On the other side of Seventh Avenue, there were an equal number of protesters waving their wonderful slogans in the chill breeze. I think someone should publish a book of their chants, secular poetry for the New Police State. A soldier held a sign “2^nd TIME I’VE FOUGHT FOR MY COUNTRY, FIRST TIME I’VE KNOWN THE ENEMY.” The rhythm of the crowd and chants was like an ocean. It just took you in its current. You talked to strangers and they talked to you, as if you were old friends against the system and knew all about it.

“You, you can’t paste that sign to the fence,” the big cop said, as a protester was unfurling still another banner. “Why not?” the protester asked. “Because you can’t. Now, if you don’t want to get arrested, don’t do it.” Reluctantly, the kid backed off, rolling up the sign for later usage. Trust me, he would. And I can’t describe the sense of camaraderie that existed. We were all instant friends in a second, this old guy me, all these young pretty women, and their sturdy boyfriends, one family, staring down the big blue wolves . . . with a few exceptions.

An elderly, quite haute couple walked up to me, and the woman (who had more wrinkle work done on her face than the New York Thruway) asked, “We’ve got an affair to get to, can we cross here?” Holding the invitation to my eys, she said, “We’re going to the Algonquin.” Ah, the old Algonquin, home to the famous writer’s circle of past years. Only now it was a Marriott on 44^th Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. And I doubt that any scrubby writers were still there drinking and bullshitting about revolutions in Spain, Ireland, Greece or Portugal.

Then, her husband stepped up in his dark cashmere overcoat, white shirt, red tie, blue suit, and said, “We’ve got to be there.” “Don’t ask me,” I said. “Tell the cops you’re rich and they’ll let you through.” Disgusted, he took his wife’s hand and conversed briefly with the officer. Sure enough the stanchion was pulled back enough for the two to comfortably pass through, and they half-ducked across the street to the collected boos of the crowd. Later, there were two Ritchie Rich haute dressed women who were allowed to pass through the stanchions from the other side of Seventh Avenue. “There’s someone you got to know so you get the go.” Yeah. “There’s someone you got to know so you get the go,” fo’ sure!

At some point, the flow of traffic downtown stopped. There was a flashing of lights uptown towards 47^th Street. And all of a sudden a cordon of a hundred or so motorcycles roared by, heading uptown. My new buddy Jeff said, “I wonder what’s going on there.” Obviously anxious, he asked me several times in the next 15 minutes. It wasn’t until Sunday morning that I received an email from a friend of my 22-year old son, Tom Ketchum, who was down there with another friend and saw it all. Here it is, the names changed to protect the innocent . . .

“Jerry, I was in the heart of the action this evening at Times Square near the TKTS booth. Michael Moore was across the street. The cops barricaded the marchers up from Washington Square between 7th and 6th on 47th street, not letting them enter the square. They violently arrested some of the people from the on-coming march, and then removed the barricades in one area, sending cops on horseback into the crowd, trampling on a few people in the front, ‘to get everyone to move back’ but really to intimidate. Other onlookers saw a woman bleeding from the head. I was right across the street with Jim Sims and Dino Carlo; we saw all of this happen. I just can’t believe it, what the NYPD is doing to peaceful demonstrators.

“A bit later on, the PD brought out their orange fish nets, and it appeared as though they were getting ready to “Planet of the Ape” us, which is when we decided to leave. The great question is ‘Who are they protecting? Hope that now’s our Arab Springing.’”

He continued, “The link below is of a group of young people who decided to close their accounts with CitiBank, not wanting to let the bigwigs have their money anymore. I believe there were 24. They were locked inside the bank until the cops arrived, and this is some of what happened—if the link is broken you can copy and paste into your URL.”

What happened, if the link gets broken, is that the cops showed up, manhandled the depositors, prevented them from closing accounts, and beat up one young woman who resisted, lifting her, feet kicking, into a paddy wagon screaming.

So, what in hell was this? Where did Citibank get off calling the cops to throw its depositors in the can? This was the Police State Plus in capitals. But then, as you’d have it, Sunday morning I came upon an article written by Susan Madrak: Who Really Owns The NYPD? Turns Out It’s Not Such A Rhetorical Question. All of us down at Times Square had really been asking the same question. Where would the huge amount of overtime for so many cops come from? So, here’s what Madrak writes, I wrote last week about the “multi-million dollar contribution to the NYPD from JPChase,” but it turns out the corporate influence goes much deeper than that.”

Here’s how deep it goes says Susan, “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.

“New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee [sort of like a tip] 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 [All italics mine]. 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.” I’ll bet they have. But here’s some more to chew on . . .

Apparently the city doesn’t bother to insure the NYPD for liability, saying it’s cheaper to shell out for settlements. (Here’s a guy who was strong-armed by those private detail cops for daring to attempt to use the bathroom during a 9/11 tribute at a Yankees game. Wonder how much that cost the city? In the past decade, the NYPD has paid almost a billion dollars in legal settlements.

“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?

“ . . . 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.)”

But there’s more, folks, the best part is coming. “Other Wall Street firms 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.” Is that really a surprise given the premise?

“ . . . 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. . . . ’” We have surrounded the city so don’t make a move.

“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?”

It turns out, “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.”

How about that? Now New York, America, just like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and everywhere our tentacles reach, is subject to be invaded by mercenaries: the Paid Police Detail. Move over Blackwater, X2, Halliburton, even Homeland Security, now we have the Paid Police Detail. You don’t even have to take a test to get in. Just be an armed soldier of fortune, ready to hunt, beat up and kill down protesters throughout the country. If this doesn’t get you out on the street to Occupy Your Town, you must be dead from the brain down. Now we know who we thought these cops always were: the enemies (not the protectors) of the state.

Whatever halo the NYPD had from deaths on 9/11 and from its NYPD first responders who contracted all kinds of illness, that halo, despite those brave men’s efforts, are fading fast and leaving a dark hole in the justice (or injustice) system. And bless these young heroes who have poured in from all over the country to stand up to Wall Street corruption, metastasized all over America and the world, preparing for the massive cutting to rid the body politic of this cancer. We are the 99%ers. Woe to the 1% and its minions. It’s beginning to feel like a revolution!

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.