New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggested that the Occupy Wall Street protesters represent a broad-based irritation with the government and the state of the nation, but denied that the protesters have the coherence of a movement, beyond their common desire to have government “solve the problems.”
“If you take a look at the group [of people] in this one park that we have, it’s a whole bunch of people who are just disaffected,” Bloomberg said today on Morning Joe. They don’t know what’s wrong; they say, ‘we don’t know what we want, but we want it right now’ — which I think is as good a way of saying it as anything [and saying] that its not their job to solve the problems,” he added.
“[The protesters think] its the job of the government and the press and those of us that have some insight on how policies affect people [to solve the problems],” he added, noting that “they want to be able to have something change so that their lives are going to be better, and they express it by camping out and yelling and screaming and that sort of thing.”
Asked if the protesters constitute “a legitimate movement,” Bloomberg demurred and emphasized the incoherence of the Occupiers. “Its not — I don’t know what a movement is,” he said. “If you have 200 people in the park you’ll have 200 different things they think is wrong, so there is no leadership, there is no one thing [they protest].”
He compared the protests to the Tea Party movement. “The commonality is — it’s the same thing with the Tea Party and how consumers behave and businesspeople behave — we have uncertainty, things aren’t going the way we want, and nobody seems to be able to fix them or at least try to fix them seriously,” Bloomberg concluded.
You can see video of his remarks on the protests below.
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