This week, Washington has been playing host to the annual winter meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which has filled the Capitol Hilton at 16th and K streets with civic leaders from around the country.
Also in town this week, you might have read, is Occupy Congress, a massing of members of the Occupy protests from around the country. And with Occupy D.C.’s home base at McPherson Square, the mayors’ conference a block away is making for an easy target.
For the past two days, groups of a few dozen protesters have rallied outside the Hilton’s 16th Street entrance, inveighing against their mayors from North Carolina to Florida to California and everywhere in between.
On Wednesday, waiting by a bus bound for the White House, where the mayors would have a meet-and-greet with President Obama, Skylar Winslow stood on the cold, windy sidewalk calling out Mayor Bob Buckhorn of Tampa, Fla. Winslow said Buckhorn has refused to meet with the local Occupy group, which camps out in a privately owed park.
“He hasn’t been kind to protesters,” Winslow said. After months of his complaints about education and housing falling on deaf hears, he said, he’s finished with his hometown and has joined Occupy D.C. for the foreseeable future:
“I’m not going back to Tampa. Ever.”
Headed toward a bus, Mayor Joe Adame of Corpus Christi, Texas, said his government had met with local occupiers several times. None of his constituents appeared to be in the crowd of protesters, though.
Today, the crowd was a bit larger, still fewer than 50, but enough to compel Metropolitan Police Department officers and hotel security guards to barricade the front entrance. After showing credentials multiple times, hotel representatives allowed reporters in through the K Street side door.
Phillip Benoit, of Tucson, Ariz., was leading a chant against about Mayor Jonathan Rothschild. Benoit, tall, bearded and wearing sunglasses, said the Occupy group there had been kicked out of two different parks since starting last October. A self-employed computer technician by trade, Benoit said he started camping out to protest homelessness. He came to Washington earlier this month and is planning on staying a while.
“Wall Street is important because that’s where they’re buying,” Benoit said, “and D.C. is important because that’s where they’re selling.” He did not specify precisely what is being bought and sold.
John Penley, a former photojournalist who joined Occupy Wall Street early on, was waiting for New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whom he said he’d like to confront about some of the tactics used by the New York Police Department against both protesters and journalists covering the protests. Penley, 60, said he lost his job as a legal assistant before Occupy Wall Street began, and joined the movement because he was frustrated that as a 60-year-old Vietnam veteran, there were few job opportunities for him.
“This country does not support veterans,” he said, a large U.S. flag draped around his shoulders. When asked what he would do if he saw Bloomberg at the conference, Penley was quite direct.
“I wouldn’t say anything to him,” he said. “I would throw the flag over him and scream, ‘Mayor Bloomberg, you do not represent the 99 percent. You represent the 1 percent and you have turned the NYPD into the most brutal police force.’ “
Bloomberg is set to make his only scheduled appearance at the conference tomorrow as part of a session on education reform.
According to the Examiner’s Aubrey Whelan, a group of protesters attempted to stop Oakland Mayor Jean Quan from leaving the hotel by jumping on the hood of her taxi, but they seem not to have succeeded.
