Mayor Billy? The Reverend is running for office in NYC
In an attempt to save the final remaining uncommodified public spaces in New York City from corporations, theatre activist Bill Talen, aka Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping, is running for mayor.
“This may be a canvass upon which to dramatize the kinds of things we’ve talked to you about today,” Talen said after making the announcement that he is considering running during the January 18th edition of the Hour of Power, a weekly webcast he co-hosts with Savitri D, “reclaiming parks for the First Amendment, for our enjoyment of wonder, to get the corporations and the rich people out of there.”
Under the administration of Michael Bloomberg, privatization has flourished and is now threatening previously untouched spaces with long community histories. The Northside Pavillion in Union Square Park was at the center of the civil rights, suffragette, abolition and union movements and now runs the risk of being turned into an upscale for-profit restaurant.
Meanwhile, several small businesses operating in the historic Coney Island amusement park are facing eviction at the hands of developers and the only entity with the power to stop it is the City of New York. As the Bloomberg administration and his rivals in the upcoming election don’t seem to want to do anything to stop this gentrification, the Rev may very well be stepping into the political arena to do just that.
“It seems like the policy of the Bloomberg administration is that when parks have rich people living around them they become privatized and they become a front yard of the rich people,” Talen observed, “and when poor people live around the parks they become criminalized and if you accidentally walk through the park at the wrong moment you get arrested in their sweeps.”
Since this announcement, he has begun campaigning and even promised to shut down Wall Street.
Talen is probably best known for retail interventions at places like Starbucks, The Disney Store and Victoria’s Secret and the 2007 Morgan Spurlock produced film What Would Jesus Buy?
