Geoff B notices that the way its playing out seems to take much of its direction, such as it is, from some rather infamous remarks by Stephen Lerner, a former SEIU official and, I’m willing to bet, a man who has the ear of many inside this Administration and inside the labor movement.
Unions are almost dead. We cannot survive doing what we do but the simple fact of the matter is community organizations are almost dead also. And if you think about what we need to do it may give us some direction which is essentially what the folks that are in charge – the big banks and everything – what they want is stability.
There are actually extraordinary things we could do right now to start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.
For example, 10% of homeowners are underwater right their home they are paying more for it then its worth 10% of those people are in strategic default, meaning they are refusing to pay but they are staying in their home that’s totally spontaneous they figured out it takes a year to kick me out of my home because foreclosure is backed up
If you could double that number you would you could put banks at the edge of insolvency again.
Students have a trillion dollar debt
We have an entire economy that is built on debt and banks so the question would be what would happen if we organized homeowners in mass to do a mortgage strike if we get half a million people to agree it would literally cause a new finical crisis for the banks not for us we would be doing quite well we wouldn’t be paying anything…
We have to think much more creatively. The key thing… What does the other side fear the most – they fear disruption. They fear uncertainty. Every article about Europe says in they rioted in Greece the markets went down
The folks that control this country care about one thing how the stock market goes what the bond market does how the bonuses goes. We have a very simple strategy:
* How do we bring down the stock market
* How do we bring down their bonuses
* How do we interfere with there ability to be rich…So a bunch of us around the country think who would be a really good company to hate we decided that would be JP Morgan Chase and so we are going to roll out over the next couple of months what would hopefully be an exciting campaign about JP Morgan Chase that is really about challenge the power of Wall Street.
And so what we are looking at is the first week in May can we get enough people together starting now to really have an week of action in New York I don’t want to give any details because I don’t know if there are any police agents in the room.
The goal would be that we will roll out of New York the first week of May. We will connect three ideas
* that we are not broke there is plenty of money
* they have the money – we need to get it back
* and that they are using Bloomberg and other people in government as the vehicle to try and destroy usAnd so we need to take on those folks at the same time. And that we will start here we are going to look at a week of civil disobedience – direct action all over the city. Then roll into the JP Morgan shareholder meeting which they moved out of New York because I guess they were afraid because of Columbus.
There is going to be a ten state mobilization to try and shut down that meeting and then looking at bank shareholder meetings around the country and try and create some moments like Madison except where we are on offense instead of defense
Where we have brave and heroic battles challenging the power of the giant corporations. We hope to inspire a much bigger movement about redistributing wealth and power in the country and that labor can’t do itself that community groups can’t do themselves but maybe we can work something new and different that can be brave enough and daring and nimble enough to do that kind of thing.
Other remarks from the full transcript:
We need to figure out in a much more through direct action more concrete way how we are really trying to disrupt and create uncertainty for capital for how corporations operate
The thing about a boom and bust economy is it is actually incredibly fragile.
There are actually extraordinary things we could do right now to start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.
Then if you add on top of that if we really thought about moving the kind of disruption in Madison but moving that to Wall Street and moving that to other cities around the country
We basically said you stole seventeen trillion dollars – you’ve improvised us and we are going to make it impossible for you to operate
Labor can’t lead this right now so if labor can’t lead but we are a critical part of it we do have money we have millions of members who are furious
But I don’t think this kind of movement can happen unless community groups and other activists take the lead.
If we really believe that we are in a transformative stage of what’s happening in capitalism
Then we need to confront this in a serious way and develop really ability to put a boot in the wheel then we have to think not about labor and community alliances we have to think about how together we are building something that really has the capacity to disrupt how the system operates
We need to think about a whole new way of thinking about this not as a partnership but building something new.
Of course, the problem with being a leftist ideologue marshaling useful idiots to agitate for the top-down change you hope to institute to enrich yourselves and your cronies, is that — at the end of the day — the kinds of people you have agitating for you are moronic useful idiots who are easily distracted by ancillary issues, like Jews, or frankenfoods, or free wi-fi.
And so they wind up sounding like what they are.
The myth is union guys used to beat up hippies.
But certain organizers of the American labor movement have always been…hostile to America. The American Legion had it right.
Can’t tell which is sadder: the incoherence of the protests or the failure by the protestors to recognize the incoherence of their protests. Either way, while nominally dangerous as mooing-moronic herds, I’m inclined to bemusement for now, and urge, with others, that prominent Democrats openly, deeply and heartily embrace their leftist street-folk, the sooner to put themselves out of business.
Who’s that crazy guy who’s been calling this what is it for a few years now? The one who’s pointed out a dozen or more of the commie revolutionary bastards with audio/video of them coming right out and saying what they plan to do? It’s right on the tip of my tongue.
sdferr: What is sadder is that this material at the protests is what they have to put forward as their public face. Now, this isn’t to say that there aren’t others elsewhere who aren’t so public and who are more dangerous than the OWS infantry, but I don’t want to go all conspiracy theory straight from my own head.
I need broadcasts over my fillings for that.
Mikey, they’re not hard to spot, and they’re out there. Uno. Dos.
Can we label the protestors Owwwies?
What’s funny is that they’re appealing to the corporatist in chief. You think Obama wants to do something about Godman fucking Sachs, little guys? They’re mostly 20 somethings from middle class families rebelling for a reason they’re not too sure about.
Yep, Pablo. This has got cloward-piven all over it.
That bitch has been dreaming of this for 45 years.
On a number of web sites people are saying that Wade Rathke was the one who said quote above however it was his friend Stephen Lerner. Right after the tape came out in March, Rathke wrote a “defense” of Lerner which had these points.
This defense seems more of an admission that they are planning an action like the one we see now.
Today Richard Trumka weighed in in support of the protesters. An article in the Financial Times notes support from SEIU, the teachers union and the transit workers union. FT has weird policies on quotes and links so if that one doesn’t work try this and click the first link.
NPR has this observation in a piece on the protests.
I see this as the latest attempt by the left to “astroturf” their own “TEA Party”. They have studied the previous failures and are using Madison as the new model it appears to me.
Pablo – you aren’t coming over my fillings so it doesn’t count. (Heh.)
I don’t think old Frances Fox Piven could actually lead any kind of an uprising, and if the OWS people are any indication, I’m right. I’m not saying she doesn’t want to, much as the Trix Rabbit wants to steal cereal, I’m just questioning her competence at actually doing something concrete.
C’mon MikeyNTH, help a guy out! Owwwies!
Think “leading from behind”, Mikey. And think Soros.
Oh Soros? Yeah, he could hire it. That’s what you do when you got bucks like him. That’s where someone like a Lerner would go. But not to a FFP, wouldn’t be worth your time (and you just know she smells like mothballs).
Okay sdferr. The OWS are outside playing hippie protestors and one punched another in the shoulder and he dropped his tripple soy mocha latte and he yelled “Owwwie! I hate you Zeke! I’m going to tell our generic autonomous non-leader and have it brought up at the evening all-inclusive gathering! You suck!”
Can we label the protestors Owwwies?
I’m sure there are a lot of vegetarians and vegans in the group, and I saw one ordering a tossed salad, so I think they would like to be known as “salad tossers”.
Oh, but she can make the seals bark, Mikey. See #2.
So she’s accomplished what an 18 year old camp counselor has?
I’m impressed.
No I’m not, that was a lie. I’m not impressed by these ostensible foot soldiers of the revolution nor their leaders. If they got 1/100th of the oppression they decry they’d empty their bowels. Anyone with any sense wouldn’t want to be near them (probably not downwind either).
These guys are a distraction at best, ignorable at worse. If you were wondering where the Madison protestors went when that finally wound down, I think they’ve been found.
I can be convinced otherwise, but I don’t see the OWS as being anything more than a mastabutory mob with delusions of fulfillment, revolution, and free bong hits. They’ll hang around, mooch off of the local businesses and lefties, inspire some unintentionally hilarious posts at Kos and DU, and eventually wander away to the next rally against “the man”.*
*I never thought the Grateful Dead performed a useful function, but they did by keeping this freak show on the road following them and away from normal people.
Oh, I don’t expect them to succeed. But they’re damn sure going to try and they’re just getting started.
Now, now, don’t speak ill of the Dead.
Organizations like MoveOn are challenged by some few of the OWS organizers, but welcomed by a majority, or so it seems. Unions are of course pulling many of the strings. Anonymous is fully engaged; they are mostly anarchists. OWS as a group is jelling to become as far-Left as any group operating in America today, with their goal and payoff the unwitting destabilization of this Republic.
They have three doors to choose from: the far-Left, which opens to Communism; Anarchy (the Mad Max ending), or to join us to rebuild this Republic based on our founding documents, which just so happens to be the goal of the TEA Party.
I don’t think the majority of them have the smarts to realize that the third choice is their only sane choice. If the far-Left succeeds in capturing the helm of this movement (which is going to accrue huge numbers), then Katy bar Door 1, and we’ll just have to meet ’em in the middle.
“Occupy Wall Street”, for the left, roach motel or monkey trap? Both?
<blockquotePresident Michael Mulgrew of the United Federation of Teachers, the sole bargaining agent for most nonsupervisory New York City public teachers with 200,000 members, said he was proud to support the demonstrators.
“The way our society is now headed it does not work for 99% of people, so when Occupy Wall Street started … they kept to it and they’ve been able to create a national conversation that we think should have been going on for years,” Mulgrew said.
[…]
Occupy Wall Street and its offshoots have clear strains of liberal economic populism — a powerful force in U.S. history during times characterized by economic stress. That said, it would be a mistake to label or tie the movement to a specific agenda, said Susan Olzak, a Stanford University sociology professor.
“It’s difficult to classify a social protest movement early on in its history,” Olzak said. “Clearer goals could eventually emerge, but there’s no guarantee.”
She added, “Many movements fizzle out. Others become more organized. (But) “I think we run a risk (by) taking a snapshot at any one point in time and trying to categorize the movement in any one way based on that snapshot. The only way to study these protest movements is to follow them over time.”>
The Big-Mouthed Anarchist is in an evolutionary conundrum – their large mouth (which allows them to swallow pretty much anything) comes at the price of decreased brain capacity.
Although some look on this as an advantage, I strongly disagree.
But quietly.