Occupy Wall St. Prepares for Crackdown -- Will Bloomberg Try to Tear It All Down?

"If Bloomberg really cared about sanitation here he wouldn't have blocked portapotties and dumpsters."

On Thursday afternoon Occupy Wall Street called an emergency General Assembly down at Liberty Plaza to deal with the announcement that Friday will see a cleanup of the park by the City, starting at 7 am. Representatives of Brookfield, the company that owns the park, said in the clean-up notice that everything left behind will be thrown away. On Thursday it was also revealed that Brookfield had sent a letter to police commissioner Ray Kelly asking the NYPD help clear out the protestors. A group of New York civil liberties lawyers warned the CEO of Brookfield that forcing protestors from the park violates their first amendment rights, stating, "Under the guise of cleaning the Park you are threatening fundamental constitutional rights. There is no basis in the law for your request for police intervention, nor have you cited any. Such police action without a prior court order would be unconstitutional."

The densely packed crowd is aware that reports are circulating that they will not be allowed to bring any gear back into the park after it's been cleaned, and they are discussing next steps.

"We have been self-governing and self-organized and taking care of our space," the woman facilitating the GA calls through the people's microphone earlier today. "Today we clean to call their bluff." The sanitation team is calling for all hands to clean the park, and indeed all morning volunteers have been picking up trash with gloved hands. The willingness of the protesters to embrace such tasks is part of the reason they’ve been successful in camping out for nearly a month.

Occupy Wall Street, as many have noted, isn’t just a protest, it’s a reclamation of public space, a new commons for people who feel left out and left behind by the current system. Arun Gupta, editor of the Indypendent and one of those who helped create the Occupied Wall Street Journal newspaper, says, “You have this uncommodified radical public space right in the heart of global capital. There is no money being exchanged, and that's remarkable in a city that is kind of the height of the idea that we exist to consume.”

He points out that the people claimed the space, and from there came up with the idea of the “We are the 99 percent” slogan that has taken hold across the country. “The mere presence itself,” in the square, he notes, “became almost the politics of it. It's through the space that we can bring real democracy into being.”

Symbolically snatching that space back just shouting distance from the New York Stock Exchange and holding on to it would be protest enough, but inside that space the protesters guilt a model for the communities they’d like to see. They created infrastructure, and the infrastructure they chose to build stands in stark contrast to the hacking and slashing at public infrastructure spending done over the last 30 or so years and rapidly accelerated in the age of austerity.

“People who couldn't afford food or health care, that's no longer the case. They can come here and get what they need,” says Red, a street medic at the medical station. “It's probably my favorite part of this movement.”

Red explains that the medical station is staffed by anywhere from five to 12 people at a time, some of whom are EMTs or trained medics, others are nurses or doctors. “We have five or six doctors that rotate in and out,” he says, “They work for free, sometimes they stay up all night.”

The medical station can't provide every bit of health care that people might need, of course—it's hardly set up for surgery or treatment of serious illnesses. But they're surprisingly well stocked, with donations from 1199 SEIU and the National Nurses United as well as supplies bought with cash donations. In a country that still balks at the idea of “socialized medicine,” having a place where one can get a free doctor visit is all too rare.