WW interview
Talking with ‘Bloombergville’ arrestee Sara Flounders
Published Jul 1, 2011 10:25 PM
By Dee Knight
Flounders, holding up sign, sits in with ‘Bloombergville’ resisters before being arrested.
WW photo: Brenda Ryan
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“Bloombergville,” New York
On June 28, as the New York City Council was scheduled to vote on a pro-banker,
anti-people budget deal, more than 100 residents of the
“Bloombergville” encampment marched around City Hall. They had been
sleeping on the sidewalk nearby for 16 days trying to stop Mayor Michael
Bloomberg’s impending cuts.
At the same time, an organized resistance group entered the City Council office
building across the street at 250 Broadway.
The marchers surged across the street to block the Council building in support
of the resistance group, who were sitting down in the lobby, chanting
“Stop the vote! Make the bankers pay! Stop the bankers’ budget! We
have a right to be here!”
Those inside locked arms to block the entrance as police began separating the
protesters and arresting them.
Outside, the crowd shouted “Let them go!” and “They say cut
back, we say fight back!” Police pushed a few of those taking part in the
inside action out the door. But the crowd in front surged forward to join those
inside. Then, as police started to take the handcuffed sit-in protesters out a
side entrance, the crowd outside met them, calling “Let them
go!”
They surrounded the two police vans the arrestees were being loaded into and
kept them from driving away. Police and protesters chased each other for two
blocks.
Protests continued into the night, preventing a vote on the budget until the
following morning.
WW spoke with one of those arrested, Sara Flounders. Flounders is co-director
of the International Action Center and a veteran of dozens, if not hundreds, of
protests, sit-ins, occupations, encampments and civil disobedience actions. She
was in the mass actions that shut down New York over Sean Bell’s murder
by the police. At that time hundreds of protesters closed all bridges and
tunnels into the city.
“The Bloombergville protest succeeded in postponing the budget
vote,” Flounders commented, “and in sending a strong message,
widely covered in the media, of popular resistance and opposition to this
pro-banker budget. It was part of a whole series of resistance actions —
from mass demonstrations by the unions to the 16-day encampment in front of
City Hall to the civil disobedience action before the budget vote.
“After our arrest the police planned to issue a summons for a minor
violation. But word came down from higher-up, after the initial paperwork was
already completed and we were almost out the door, to hold us for 24 hours and
send us down to the Central lockup.
“It’s almost entirely young Black and Latino people in the
prison.” Flounders observed. “That’s who the police target.
That’s the neighborhoods the cops are sent to and the arrest quotas
they’re given. To these youth I was ‘Grandma.’
“The whole system is set up to criminalize Black and Latino youth for
doing things that are absolutely part of urban life, but for which they are
particularly targeted,” Flounders continued. “They are run through
the system — fingerprinted, scanned, photos taken, etc. — and come
out with a record and a mug shot. That’s the racist way the courts,
police and jails function.”
Flounders said most of the people in the jail were “arrested for fare
card violations, having an open container on their own front stoop, being in a
city park after 10 p.m., smoking a joint — petty, petty
‘crimes.’ Each of them, to get out, has to plead guilty to
something, and of course they can’t afford a private lawyer. They get
just a few minutes with a court-appointed attorney.
“These prisoners were overwhelmingly friendly and enthusiastically
interested in the Bloombergville protest,” Flounders said. “They
respected the idea of being arrested for a cause, and for challenging the
repressive system.
“The Bloombergville encampment has been important,” Flounders
commented, placing it alongside “the experience of past encampments and
days of mass actions at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, the
Republican National Convention the same year in Minneapolis, the March for Jobs
tent city at the 2009 G20 in Pittsburgh, the 2009 Detroit Peoples’ Summit
encampment during a meeting of business leaders and CEOs, the Washington, D.C.,
encampments against the war and this winter’s mass takeover of the State
Capitol in Madison, Wis. — to mention a few.”
She added that this protest is “also part of the whole climate of current
confrontations in Greece, Spain and Britain, and the revolutionary change
brought about by the massive occupation of Tahrir Square in Egypt, which grew
into millions. There have been invaluable lessons. Millions are watching these
confrontations, the tremendous occupations in Wisconsin and the actions in
Trenton, N.J., last week.
“The question is how to continue the struggle and confront the
bankers’ agenda. They want to cut every desperately needed social program
in cities across the country, but to them two things are untouchable: the
billions of dollars in interest paid to the banks and the hundreds of billions
spent on war. It was really important that this budget attack not go down
without a struggle, and we need to continue the fight against all these
cuts.”
All 13 Bloombergville arrestees were released after spending 24 hours in jail.
Charged with trespassing, they were fined $130 each.
Flounders concluded with an appeal: “We urgently need to raise $1,700 to
cover the fines. Please contribute whatever you can, as soon as possible. All
are invited to a fundraiser on Saturday, July 9, to honor the Bloombergville
attorneys, who contributed their legal services, and also Picture The Homeless,
who guided the setup of our encampment and helped us keep it legal and viable
for more than two weeks.”
Make donations through PayPal; send to [email protected]. They must
come from a bank account or PayPal account; the group cannot accept
debit/credit card payments.
For more information about the Bloombergville protest, the Bloombergville 13
and the fundraiser, go to BloombergvilleNow.org.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
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