[Peace-discuss] SEIU & Obama vs. OWS

[C. G. ESTABROOK]

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Co-opt-upy Wall Street?

December 02, 2011	

By Danny Lucia

Danny Lucia's ZSpace Page


THE OCCUPY movement's November 17 day of action, which followed a week  
in which protest camps were attacked in nationally coordinated police  
raids, marked the two-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street (OWS).  
The day of action protests across the country made it clear that  
police repression will not silence our movement.

But repression has a subtler cousin named co-optation, who also made  
an unfortunate appearance that day. It's an early sign of what will  
surely be an increasing trend as we enter an election year, something  
that I've only rarely heard talked about at Occupy events--but read  
about incessantly in media reports about them.

New York City activists from OWS spent weeks planning the November 17  
day of action alongside organizers from unions and community  
organizations, including the Service Employees International Union  
(SEIU). But when the Occupiers showed up for the day's culminating  
rally and march over the Brooklyn Bridge, they found a completely  
different event from the one they had planned.

Instead of a series of platforms for coordinated "people's mics" that  
had been agreed to at planning meetings, there was a blaring sound  
system, an emcee and a series of people pre-selected to tell their  
stories.

Instead of the plan for a "lightly marshaled event" in which  
protesters would be led to the pedestrian path of the bridge, but free  
to go wherever they wanted, there were hundreds of marshals working  
alongside riot cops to keep the streets clear. Like the sound system  
and the emcee, these marshals were provided by the SEIU. (Don't be too  
hard on the marshals, by the way--many of whom are hard-working union  
organizers who may well have hated their assignment that night.)

According to one OWS activist, a lot of the people running the rally  
with their headsets and two-way radios tried hard to ignore the gazes  
of organizers with whom they had spent countless meeting hours not  
mentioning any of these plans for what actually took place.

For most protesters, the SEIU takeover of the event probably only  
registered as a series of oddities. Why were people shouting "Mic  
check!" over a deafening sound system? Why were marshals chanting,  
"Whose streets? Our streets!" as they worked with police to keep us on  
the sidewalks?

The effect was like a clueless dad trying to use his daughter's new  
slang. But the organizers from OWS knew what was taking place.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WHY DID the SEIU take over the march? Let's back up first to consider  
the context.

It's true, as the OWS website declared after the raid on Zuccotti Park  
a few days before, that "you can't evict an idea." But you can steal  
it. You can empty it of its content until all that's left is a slogan  
that used to mean something.

For example: "We need a leader willing to fight for the needs of the  
99 percent." That's SEIU President Mary Kay Henry announcing the  
union's early endorsement of a presidential candidate in 2012: Barack  
Obama, the largest recipient of Wall Street campaign contributions in  
the history of the world.

A few days later, the SEIU announced plans for a rally in Washington,  
D.C., because "congressional supporters of the 1 percent blocked  
President Obama's latest job proposals." I support more rallies for  
jobs, of course, but you know that the SEIU will not be issuing any  
criticisms of Obama's job proposals as too little and much too late.

And the name of this early campaign rally in D.C.? "Occupy Congress."  
Glenn Greenwald, America's bullshit detector laureate, wrote:

Having SEIU officials...shape, fund, dictate and decree an anti-GOP,  
pro-Obama march is about as antithetical as one can imagine to what  
the Occupy movement has been. And pretending that the ongoing protests  
are grounded in the belief that the GOP is the party of the rich while  
the Democrats are the party of the working class is likely to fool  
just about nobody other than those fooled by that already.

It's not going to be easy for the Democratic Party to take in a  
movement that was born in response to watching Barack Obama sell his  
soul to the One Percent. Add to that the difficulty of maintaining  
support from all the people who defend the Occupy movement even as  
Democratic (big D, not little d) mayors repress the tens of thousands  
who are actually occupying.

Portland Mayor Sam Adams went so far as to refer to the police raid he  
ordered as a chance for Occupy Portland to "evolve in order to reach  
its full potential"--which conjured up images of a future martial law  
episode of Portlandia with "fair trade" rubber bullets and organic  
pepper spray.

With spokespeople of this caliber, it might seem like the Democrats  
wouldn't have a prayer with the Occupy movement. But there's more than  
one way to co-opt a movement.

Which brings us back to what the SEIU was doing on the night of  
November 17.

No matter how disappointing the Democrats have been in defending  
working people from the budget-cutters and social reactionaries--much  
less promoting positive measures to make unions stronger--organized  
labor will be devoted to electing Democrats in 2012. Union leaders may  
be happy to see the mass mobilizations of the Occupy movement, but  
they don't want them to get too militant--and they want the movement's  
enthusiasm benefit their drive to elect Democrats next year.

Thus, the SEIU's marshalling operation to make sure Occupy  
demonstrators didn't take the streets on November 17 is connected to  
the union leadership's devoted support of Obama and the Democrats.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

WE HAVE reached a new phase of Occupy Wall Street. The movement is no  
longer skipping from one success to another. The One Percent has  
regained its footing and carried out a well-designed plan to break up  
our many of our encampments with paramilitary raids in the dead of  
night, accompanied by media hype about dangerous and unsanitary  
conditions.

And now we can see that the Democratic Party is fielding its most  
experienced forces, whose aim is to steer the movement toward the safe  
terrain of electoral politics.

In the face of these and other challenges, what do we have? Only the  
most dynamic American protest movement in generations--one that has in  
the past several months spread across the country and connected with  
dozens of existing struggles. We can confront the threat of co- 
optation as surely as we can challenge repression.

The solution is not to turn away from organized labor, whose  
participation in OWS in New York City has been one of the movement's  
biggest strengths.

 From the beginning, Occupy gave an infusion of energy to various  
union struggles around New York City. And in turn, the Occupy  
encampment in Zuccotti Park and its meetings and protests were infused  
with increasing numbers of union members who have been waiting years  
for this movement.

In the process, people who had never come in contact with the labor  
movement have built up activist relationships with unionists that  
aren't going away--and union members from different unions formed new  
networks that can be put to use in the battles ahead, whether they  
have to do with labor or the right to free speech or any other issue.  
These relationships built in the struggle will be important in  
maintaining the vibrancy of the Occupy movement, even if union leaders  
hope that they can control it and channel it toward the voting booth.

Yes, unions are complicated. Their members have a power to shut down  
vast chunks of Corporate America--but their leaders are insulated from  
the class war by their stake in the status quo and their relationship  
to one of the two major political parties of the One Percent, the  
Democrats.

What we do know is that OWS has breathed new life into a labor  
movement that has been in an almost entirely uninterrupted retreat for  
decades. At the rank-and-file level, the Occupy movement was a  
lightning rod for many people who have been looking for a way to take  
action. And even moderate union leaders gave important support to  
Occupy--for example, the overnight mobilization in October when Mayor  
Michael Bloomberg first tried to break up the OWS encampment.

Continuing that engagement with labor will be important for the future  
of the Occupy movement. And within unions, it will serve as a counter- 
weight against officials who want labor to go back to mobilizing only  
for the polls--rather than for the protests that have galvanized  
people around the country in a long overdue struggle against the One  
Percent.


From:	Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL:	http://www.zcommunications.org/co-opt-upy-wall-street-by-danny-lucia

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