New York — The scripted excuses provided by mayors around the country to justify their police-state tactics in rousting peaceful occupation movement activists from their park-based demonstrations now stand exposed as utter nonsense, and, given their uncanny similarity in wording, can be clearly seen as having been drawn up for them by some hidden hands in Washington. the same can be said of the brutal tactics used.

If Mayor Jean Quan in Oakland, or Mayor Mike Bloomberg in New York, had been genuinely concerned about the health and well-being of the people in the encampments in their cities, they would not have dispatched police suited up in riot gear and armed with pepper spray and big clubs into the camps in the dead of night, as each did, and as other mayors are doing. They would not have used tear gas and guns firing projectiles like so called “bean bags” and rubber coated bullets, as police in Oakland reportedly did on several occasions — weapons that can cause severe injury and even death on occasion, especially when fired at close range.

They would not have stormed encampments that are known to have pregnant women, children and even babies living in them.

Rather, they would have come in during broad daylight, peacefully, and accompanied by health inspectors and other personnel who could to try to help solve any problems.

In Bloomberg’s case, if he really cared about the safety and well-being of the protesters, he would have long ago had the city set up a bank of port-a-potties near Zuccotti Park, so protesters could relieve themselves without having to foul the streets. And he would certainly not have barred demonstrators from setting up tents, forcing people, in increasingly harsh weather, including one heavy unseasonal snowstorm, to survive under plastic tarps laid on the cold flagstones over their sleeping bags.

If public safety were seriously an issue, as Quan, Bloomberg and the other mayors have also tried to claim, police would have been told not to direct vagrants and people with mental problems from around the city to head for Zuccotti Square, as New York’s Police Department was caught doing. Instead of acting like thugs and an occupying force penning in demonstrators, police would have worked out a coordinated system with demonstrators to help protect those in the park from any sexual predators or mentally unbalanced persons who might have entered the park to cause trouble.

Actually, the regions in and around the encampments have never been safer than they are now with all those demonstrators on hand. Take Center City in Philadelphia. The area on Dilworth Plaza and around City Hall has always been a scary place to find one’s self alone at night because so few people actually live there, making lone pedestrians up on the street or down in the tunnels of the train station or subways easy targets for muggers, rapists and thieves. The same is certainly also true of downtown Oakland and of New York’s financial district. If there have been crimes committed by people in the encampments, they are few and far between and mostly minor, and it is almost a certainty that overall crime and especially violent crime is down significantly in the areas where the protests are being staged.

There can be no real justification for the growing number of paramilitary police assaults against the occupation camps.

These coordinated assaults on the Occupation Movement are clearly happening not for the reasons stated, but because the ruling elites, particularly the powerful bankers and financiers on Wall Street, and the Obama administration in Washington, are frightened by the growing popularity of the protests, by the movement’s rapid spread to cities across the country, large and small, and to the resonance that chants like “We’re the 99 percent!” and “Banks got bailouts! We got sold out!” are having among the general population of the United States.

Bloomberg and Quan, and the mayors of other cities from Atlanta to Dallas to Portland to Seattle and back to Boston who have been unleashing their police forces on peaceful protesters in their jurisdictions, have been doing the movement a great favor by brutally attacking protesters’ right to demonstrate and present their grievances. The corporate media, which at first tried to ignore the occupations, have had to cover the assaults — even if they misreport them. And the images of idealistic young people being thrown on the ground, hammered with batons, and sprayed in the face with pepper spray, are deeply upsetting to most ordinary people. Workers are increasingly angered and aroused, and many are touched by the support for their struggles being manifested by the young student demonstrators.

And importantly, the enemy of the public is being given a face.

No longer is it just a bunch of unidentified and overly aggressive cops. Now it’s clear that it is the mayors, and whoever it is in the background who is giving them their marching orders, who are instructing the cops to go in and bust heads.

Mayor Bloomberg — a man reportedly worth $19.5 billion, up a staggering $1.5 billion over the last year while other Americans are becoming poorer — is in fact the perfect symbol of what is wrong with today’s America. Having this greedy “one percenter” issue the marching orders to the police in New York makes it absolutely clear what this repression is about.

With this wave of assaults, the Occupation Movement is being forced to shift gears — to move out of the cramped spaces to which it has been confined and to become an uprising for economic justice, instead of just an occupation as an act of protest. Zuccotti has been reoccupied, but the movement is busting out of the police barricades that surround the square.

Perhaps a group of young musicians standing on a street cornerat 66th and Broadway just off Lincoln Square in New York City, just off Lincoln Square in New York City, doing a “mic check” routine at 11 pm the evening after the police assault on Zuccotti Plaza, said it best with their sign, which read: “Nostalgia for the Student Protests of the Past Dies Here!”

The ’60s are over. It’s the ’10s now and rebellion is in the air.

Hard Times is a disturbing film that puts a face to the unemployment crisis in America in a rather effective way. At times, talk radio broadcasts play over footage of the principals as they trundle off to another day of staring down their own obsolescence. Over the airwaves, voices of people like Rush Limbaugh can be heard exhorting his listeners about the evil of unemployment benefits and how such programs only encourage procrastination and sloth.

In America today, we are told that unemployment now hovers at around nine percent, while other sources insist that those statistics are underreported and are closer to 12.5 percent. At nine percent, we are confronted with a situation where one in eleven working Americans is without an income. At 12.5 percent, we are talking about one in eight.

The rest of us try to go about our business. We wish those who are suffering our very best. We hope that they succeed in finding work. We are grateful, on a daily if not twice daily basis, to have jobs and to be able to pay our bills and to support our families. Then we put our heads down and try not to think about what it would be like to be one of those unemployed people. Especially the long term unemployed.

It is somewhat easier to sidestep the raw helplessness of one in eleven or even one in eight. It’s similar to the way we sidestep the homeless or indigent on the street, believing that they got there like a leaf falls from a tree; as if they belonged there through some law of nature, and that we are not responsible in any way. Nor are any of our decisions. But what happens if unemployment reaches twenty percent? What would it be like for one in five Americans to be in serious, bordering on irreversible, financial trouble? How do you overlook one in five people in contemporary society?

We have learned many lessons in the past three years. One important lesson, I believe, is that bailouts of major corporations in any and all industries is counterproductive to long term economic health. And not simply direct infusions of cash as loans, tossed like gargantuan life preservers, in moments of greatest perceived dread. I’m talking about the bailouts the US government gives major corporations every day. The excessive fees forced on customers by certain banks, not to mention the predatory lending practices of the mortgage industry (coupled with the remarkably stupid borrowing of certain homeowners).

Another example is that we have no high speed rail in this country. Typically, you fly or you drive. So airlines are free to tack on fees to remain profitable the way that oil companies are free to manipulate oil production, and thus the price of gasoline. You bailed out the airlines every time you did not demand more effective, intermediate range travel, i.e. high speed rail. You bailed out the oil companies every time you watched (were you watching?) as American troops went to Iraq to fight a war for oil. You bail out American business, and help them maintain an often false veneer of profitability, every time you send nearly every member of the current Congress back to Washington. Maintaining US corporate profitability is the single goal of this Congress. Because that is what the corporations who own the Congress paid for when they bought the Congress.

Every thing I have put forth here, I have heard articulated from the Occupy Wall Street movement. Some of it was not news to me. I have grown up in the latter half of the 20th Century. When the Greatest Generation was replaced by the greediest generation and what was known as the Protestant Work Ethic became a quaint chestnut. The definition of success became getting the most for doing the least. It became about getting away with what you can and the only issue was getting caught. Which pretty much defines the Wall Street culture of today. Never have the world’s greatest financial markets been controlled by such dangerously short-sighted people as they are today. And never has this country been cursed by a more incompetent and derelict Securities and Exchange Commission as we are today. In the wake of 9/11, America attacked a perceived terrorist community with all it had. In the wake of some of the worst financial scandals in US history, the SEC took a dive, throwing the fight in the first round.

Occupy Wall Street people understand that not only are more difficult times possibly around the corner, they know that the current government will likely do as it has historically done, which is to protect the rich and powerful at the expense of the long term interests of the middle class. Some of the most financially successful people in America continually remind us all that capitalism is a contest. There are winners and losers. And the winners want to enjoy their success and they want the losers to keep it down. The noise of the vanquished is spoiling the victors’ fun.

OWS talks a lot, too much in fact, about One Percent versus Ninety Nine Percent. As if success itself were a crime. That’s a mistake. But what OWS has helped to remind me is that One in Five is a far more unsettling ratio. Twenty percent unemployment. In the 21st Century United States.

There won’t be enough cops any where in this country to rip down all the tents that are going to pop up in places you never imagined if we hit that figure. That’s what OWS has taught me.

In my next post, let’s talk about how Ray Kelly is running for Mayor of New York and how he’ll never get there without paddy wagons full of Wall Street money, which is why he had the boys hose down Zuccotti Park.

ALEC BALDWIN grew up in Massapequa, Long Island, where his father was a high school teacher for twenty-eight years and his mother raised six children, including his sisters, Beth and Jane. Alec is the eldest of his brothers, Daniel, William, and Stephen Baldwin, all of whom are actors in film and television.