No one is able to say, because shutting down these camps has been deemed a matter of National Security.

The sale of all the equipment should bring in something.
/s

without the federal government directly or indirectly shouldering the costs.

A phone call to Congressman Peter King’s office might shed some light on this.

http://homeland.house.gov/press-release/king-statement-chairman-waldens-legislation-reallocate-d-block-public-safety

Here’s a plea for small Government http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Ranger_Division#.22One_Riot.2C_One_Ranger.22” rel=”nofollow” (expense)

Whoever pays it will not come from the 1%, their money is sacred!

Just another war. Money is no object.

Peter King speaks.

“They’re low-life dirtbags. They should have been cleand out long ago.”

“A cesspool of disease.”

“The outcasts of society.”

And if they were willing to spend that kind of money on just ending homelessness in LA, and related things, there would be no need for “illegal camping” to begin with.

(There are permanent homeless encampments all over downtown LA, and have been for years. The police routinely ignore them all. Apparently protest must be stopped, not camping.)

I watched Ustream feeds from 8:30 last night ’til about 5:00 this morning…very freaky. The Occupiers were clearly intent on peaceful action, and would have gone along quietly, save for a few who went limp or sat in trees, if 140 police had showed rather than 1400. 1400 police, 15 city buses, dozens of squad cars and motorcycles, two or three fire engines, the LA bomb squad, haz-mat suits and DNA swabbing of arrestees. But LA doesn’t have enough money for social programs…Hell, they don’t have enough money to fix pot holes. The cops destroyed every piece of property they laid hands on, and Villaraigosa showed after nearly all was said and done to boast about his cops…not a word about the Occupiers…not one word. The money for this will more than likely come from the most vulnerable social programs in the city…those that benefit children and the mentally ill. Props to Freedom, OprahShow and Sky Adams for hanging tough on the video/audio feeds, doing the corporate media’s job for them.

LA’s skid row is iconic, ugly dangerous and permanent…the cops dump the mentally ill and indigent there, have been for years, no, decades.

OT: Niall Ferguson on MSNBC. What an asshole.

1,400 is Battalion size.

LA mobilized a battalion. Jeebus.

According to WSJ, it isn’t too big of an impact (overall).

Broken down city by city, the numbers are more or less in line with the cost of policing major public events and emergencies. In Los Angeles, for example, the Michael Jackson memorial concert cost the city $1.4 million. And Atlanta spent several million dollars after a major snow and ice storm this year.

Other cities were not too concerned about mounting costs, with officials saying they budget for events like these.

“Public safety and providing essential services is what we do. So the first thing we’re going to do is handle the situation, and any situation that comes up,” Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway said. “So yes, this has been significant and it’s been going on for many days, but really in the broad scheme of things, it’s not something that we aren’t prepared to deal with.”

“Our view is that unexpected things happen,” said Sonji Jacobs, spokeswoman for Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed. “Occupy Atlanta is something that folks didn’t necessarily see coming, but the good news is that we have flexibility in our budget.”

Overall, the city spent nearly $652,000 on the protests, paying for everything from overtime for police officers and firefighters to running its mobile command center. The city has $56 million in its reserve fund.

In New York City, the police department has spent $7 million in overtime on the protests. But that’s small change given the department’s $4.5 billion budget, which allots money for emergency overtime. Last year, the NYPD spent about $550 million on overtime.

Costs were far lower in Boston than City Council President Stephen Murphy initially predicted last month, when he said police costs for providing security at Occupy Boston for October would be as high as $2 million, based on what a police commander at the scene of mass arrests told him.

The city of Boston has spent $575,000 in overtime through mid-November to pay officers policing Occupy Boston. That’s about 2 percent of this year’s $30 million police overtime budget.

Sunday night was a dress rehearsal for last night – a chance to gauge the number of supporters turning out and to fine tune police strategy.

Last night was a chance for the police to clear the park, but also to practice and prepare for other bigger protests to come.

7 cops per arrest. Riot gear for peacefull protesters. America! Fuck yeh!

Thank Dawg our President and State Dept are urging the Egyptians to use restraint.

I heard someone on tv make the point the other day that OWS should not get sidetracked by protestors vs. police debates.

The bigger point seems to be that the goals of the Occupy movement should be presented in a way that most of the officers can identify with. Most of these police officers deal with the everyday problems created by the excessive greed and abuse of the system that all workers and recently unemployed deal with.

I wonder why the haz mat suits. What did they think the occupiers had in their tents and bags?
I haven’t read an estimate of how many people were there at midnight. Anyone hear a figure? Just wondering what the cop to protester ratio was last night into this morning.

Forgot to add link, story from AP, for example:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2011/11/23/occupy-protests-cost_n_1109695.html

American exceptionalism has come to mean the ability to celebrate freedom and democracy without really having either.

Meh. You’d think governments would learn their lessons, but peaceful citizens keep have to teach them. Moon the police…. yeah yeah … moon the police :-)

Their official claim is that they were worried about “staph infections”.

The real answer was to intimidate the Occupiers. They could pepper-spray with wild abandon and not get any on their own.

Get real. Money is no object. The 1%ers will stop at nothing to protect their positions of power and privilege.

DHS ?

Interesting that Villaraigosa’s website is no longer accepting questions.

It’s because Peter King, the Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, says Occupy is a “cesspool of disease.”

They didn’t use any pepper spray and they had already gotten rid of or arrested the occupiers. No one to intimidate at that point.

They are some fine German comments if I ever saw them, in the dehumanization of the ” others” .

Should add that OccupyPhilly went down last night, too.

Dick Cheney delivering a batch of anthrax?

Peter King’s Gestapo scored a twofer.

How much cheaper would it be to pull of at high noon?

Why not daylight ?

Bears repeating. What an asshole.

Peter King is the individual most responsible for the nationwide crackdown of Occupy. Why is he getting a free pass from the progressive blogs?

The Los Angeles City Council passed a $6.9 billion budget last summer.

Looks like 1400 officers on OT would be about .01% of the budget. Locals can expect to pay about that much more in taxes next year.

That question really answers itself, doesn’t it?

Maybe because anyone who knows anything already recognized the guy as a fascist asshole a long, long time ago.

Peter King is the Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security. It has been reported that any coordination of DHS and local police departments must be approved by his committee.

It has also been reported that the only level above this committee is the President.

Heh, now we FINALLY get to see what they really mean by the words war on poverty.

I’m STILL confused. Didn’t the president swear to “preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the Unuted States”????? Perhaps I was unclear in exactly when that would start during his term of office. OTOH, maybe it’s Biden’s job when the president is out of the country. Seems to ME that a lot of civil rights are being violated, breached or ignored in the OWS peaceful (until the police arrive) protests.

In addition to the millions Oakland has spent on police riots large and small, they are currently spending $540,000 for a one-month contract to their favorite private security firm, VMA (whose website is so secure you can’t even get into it). Meanwhile, nearly three in ten school-aged children in Oakland (those who still have schools to attend) live in poverty and come to school with toothaches or without eyeglasses.

Across the Bay, Occupy SF has just rejected the Mayor’s offer to move them to a shuttered school property in the Mission for which the city planned to pay the school district $2,500 per month. The Mayor was unavailable to meet with homeless families who gathered at City Hall to demand he address the issue of 2,200 homeless schoolchildren in his city. The Director of SF’s Human Services Agency said he wouldn’t call it an emergency or crisis situation.

Having trouble with the link above, here it is again: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/30/MNAU1M5NMO.DTL

I thought this was a Homeland Security training/testing mission for tactics and equipment used in controlling mass unrest. Isn’t Napolitano paying for all of this.

Indeed. Very cunning linguists, those guys.

You might be interested in my breakdown of the Seattle Police Dept costs. These numbers are for October, but last time I checked the rate of expenditure was constant.

You’re right about that. Logically, it would seem like a good pressure point. But this guy is impervious to pressure. Very safe seat in Suffolk County. And he likes to be an known as an unreasonable fascist asshole.

I’m glad he’s not really Irish. That would be embarrassing.

In the good ol’ days only our foreign policy was hypocrisy. Nowadays we’ve decided that our domestic policy needs to fit that parameter too. Let “freedom” ring indeed!

But, let’s not hold the DEMOCRATIC Mayor of LA accountable. Who knows how bad it would be if a Republican were in office.

The man behind the curtain is the Fed Reserve/International banking elite

Dennis Kucinich is riding in on a white horse, Where are the 99? Where is Mikey Big Trouble?? Dennis is going over the wall without looking back. Attention People: The Movement is in Motion. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/11/29/kucinich-federal-reserve-has-captured-control-of-our-government/

Awesome video of Dennis K speaking the truth that has been so well hidden. The American people are being used like mules. We must not stop till the FED IS GONE. LAST CHANCE TO GET THIS COUNTRY’S SOVEREIGNTY BACK FROM INTERNATIONAL BANKERS. Kucinich is one of few fighting for US. Rally behind DENNIS. Rally behind the NEED act.

Not only is DK speaking the truth, he has written a plan.

NEED act – link your peeps up.
http://www.youtube.com/user/DJKucinich#p/u/0/BYGuactD1-U

Here’s an awesome video on FED RESERVE topic. Amazing foresight BY Aaron Russo .
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAYGWp8V9II&feature=bf_play&list=FL87vr2xwsbZWfaVhXvbr7ZQ

I called the Mayor’s office spokesman (213/978-9721). Woman manning the phones says the city is paying for it, “just like any other protest.”

Jon, did you call the city and what kind of response did you get? Or was your headline rhetorical? As an aside, I actually think if you are going to post this kind of article, one has a responsibility to do a little digging rather than flame throwing

todd