Posted by LaborUnionReport (Diary)
Saturday, November 19th at 1:45PM EST
Did it really need to take two months for New York City Mayor Bloomberg to figure out that unions have hijacked the #OccupyMovement? Most sane observers knew that from the very start when when the Transport Workers Union in New York endorsed the squatters in Zuccotti Park, opening the flood gates for other unions, the Democrats, and the institutional Left to climb on board.
Since then, unions have provided paid protesters, legal representation, money, advertising, and even offered their property to the #OWS movement.
What began as a Neo-Communist movement that allegedly only had the goal of destroying capitalism has now become a full-fledged, union-financed class war with the very real goal (in coordination with Democrats in Congress) of instituting tax increases, along with the it’s-only-a-matter-of-time global system of taxation, beginning with the so-called Robin Hood Tax.
Now, so thoroughly have the unions hijacked the #OWS movement that the SEIU even stole the ‘We Are the 99%’ slogan in its endorsement of Barack Obama’s re-election. Unsurprisingly, the SEIU did so without even bothering to ask permission of the Occupy protesters. [Note the pre-printed 99% t-shirts on SEIU bosses as they were arrested on Thursday.]
Now, after two months of coddling the anarchy-like protesters, the SEIU and CWA appear to be asserting themselves as the new leaders of the #Occupy Movement as they plans the next union-funded event: the Occupation of Capitol Hill.
According to an interview with the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, the SEIU’s Mary Kay Henry and her union cronies are planning the effort to take back the Capitol on December 5-9:
The coalition — which includes unions like SEIU and CWA and groups like the Center for Community Change — is currently working on a plan to bus thousands of protesters from across the country to Washington, where they will congregate around the Capitol from December 5-9, SEIU president Mary Kay Henry tells me in an interview.
“Thousands of people have signed up to come to Capitol Hill during the first week in December,” Henry says, adding that protesters are invited to make their way to Washington on their own, too. “We’re figuring out buses and transportation now.”
One idea under consideration — pending various permitting and other logistical issues — is to have a series of tents set up on the lawn outside the Capitol, each representing a state, with the number of unemployed in each state prominently displayed. But the optics are still being worked out.
One goal of the protests, Henry says, is to pressure Republicans to support Obama’s jobs creation proposals. More generally, the aim is to highlight Congress’s misguided obsession with the deficit and overall inaction on unemployment.
As the #OWS matures into an election campaign for Barack Obama and Democrats, the original propagators of the #OWS movement are bound to realize they’ve been both hijacked and had by union bosses bearing gifts. Until then, however, the Woodstock-feel of the #OWS movement will continue its putrid and semi-organic co-existence with union bosses in purple shirts and pin-striped suits.
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“Socialism has no place in the hearts of those who would secure the fight for freedom and preserve democracy.” Samuel Gompers, 1918
Cross-posted on LaborUnionReport.com
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