« BACK  |  PRINT

RS

MEMBER DIARY

Union Bosses Express Outrage Over #OccupyEvictions: “We are the 99%*.”

*Fact Check: Unions only represent 11.9% of the American workforce.

By: LaborUnionReport (Diary)  |  November 15th, 2011 at 09:30 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, the New York Police Department finally began to restore the rule of law by “evicting” the Neo-Communist vagrants and squatters occupying lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park for the last nearly two months. This comes after similar ousters occurred across the country.

Although the squatting trespassers didn’t go quietly as dozens ended up occupying handcuffs and the occupiers even stormed nearby Trinity Church before being repelled.

Late Tuesday afternoon, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Michael Stallman ruled that New York can stop protesters from bringing camping equipment into Zuccotti Park.

According to the NY Daily News:

The anti-camping rule appears “reasonable” to maintain safety and hygiene at the epicenter of the nationwide movement, Stallman wrote.

The protesters “have not demonstrated that they have a First Amendment right to remain in Zuccotti Park, along with their tents, structures, generators and other installations,” he wrote.


Although protesters, who were represented by TWU attorney, Arthur Schwartz, lost their ability to continue camping, they were, according to the New York Times, allowed back into their former encampment.

Staying true to his usual rant-filled rhetorical form, in a press release, AFL-CIO boss, Richard Trumka blamed politicians “acting on behalf of the 1%” before reminding readers to participate in the the #OWS-AFL-CIO’s ‘Tax & Spend Day of Action‘ on Thursday. Then, just to ensure he maintained his creds with his #OccupyProgeny, Trumka ended his release reiterating the “we are the 99%” slogan.

[Actually, unions only represent 11.9% of the American workforce, but accuracy and truth has long ago been abandoned among the union elite.]

Here is AFL-CIO Boss Trumka’s press release:

Dear ,

They can take away the tarps and the tents. But they can’t slow down the Occupy Wall Street movement.

There have been police raids on Occupy Wall Street in Oakland, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Denver; Albany, N.Y.; Burlington, Vt.; and Chapel Hill, N.C.—and now, last night in New York’s Zuccotti Park—orchestrated by politicians acting on behalf of the 1%.

But the 99% is undaunted. Occupy Wall Street’s message already has created a new day. This movement has created a seismic shift in our national debate—from austerity and cuts to jobs, inequality and our broken economic system….

The Occupy Wall Street movement has been committed to peaceful, nonviolent action from its inception. And it will keep spreading no matter what elected officials tell police to do. But that doesn’t mean these raids are acceptable. In fact, they are inexcusable.

As former Secretary of State Colin Powell put it, these protests are “as American as apple pie.” Americans must be allowed to speak out against pervasive inequality, even if the truth discomfits the 1%.

The AFL-CIO will do everything in our power to make sure the free speech rights of these peaceful protesters are protected.

Click here to find a Nov. 17 bridge action near you.

And click here to send a message of solidarity directly to the Occupy Wall Street protesters—Working America will deliver it this week.

We are the 99%.

In Solidarity,

Richard L. Trumka
President, AFL-CIO

[Emphasis added]

A little further uptown, George Grisham, President of 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, emailed his union members in outrage:

Sisters and Brothers,

As you know by now, the 1 % struck back in the middle of the night. Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered a military-style assault—using pepper spray, tear gas, attack shields, and batons–on the peaceful protesters of Occupy Wall Street in Zucotti Park. Hundreds of people were arrested, some were beaten or otherwise attacked, including one member of the New York City Council.

When lawyers representing OWS secured a court injunction ordering that Zucotti Park again be opened to OWS, the mayor ignored the court. The situation is very fluid. But one thing is certain: We cannot allow this to pass. [Emphasis added.]

Like his cohort at the AFL-CIO, Gresham called on supporters to attend the November 17th Tax & Spend Day of Action.

Now, following Thursday’s Day of Action, the #OccupyWallSt movement will be all but finished until next Spring. As a result, union bosses and their new-found friends in Guy Fawkes masks, can go to work planning their next occupation.

Eventually, though, after all they’ve invested in taking over the #OWS movement, unions will likely start asking for union dues. After all, other than protests and buying politicians, what else are today’s unions good for?

______________

“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

Image credit.

Tags: , , ,

COMMENTS

POSTING RULES  |  LOGIN TO COMMENT  |  REGISTER TODAY
  • blooch

    Justice Stallman. Be a shame if anybody occupied it.”

    Seriously, Your Honor. I hope you prepared your family and neighbors for what is sure to come.

    If I were an aspiring reporter or blogger, I know where I’d be tonight.

  • kowalski

    Page 199

    Thus there may be a great increase in selfishness, a great decline of interest in government and society as a whole, and a rise in the more childish forms of individualism and in the more antisocial forms of concern for self and perhaps immediate family. Thus, paradoxically, the technological, highly productive society, by demanding less of the individual, may decrease his economic frustrations byt increase his aggressions against society. Certainly here would be fertile soil for what has come to be known as alienation.”

    The Occupy movement is composed at is core of people who don’t need to be there. They’re hurting other people because of their selfishness. They’re antisocial and they’re highly technological. They’re deeply alienated and selfish. They’re self-alienated. Anarchists don’t have an interest in government, they have an interest in anti-government. The rest of their buddies are collectivists. What is most astonishing about these people is that from coast to coast, society has PAID for them. They just reject it.

    • kowalski

      “Demanding” of the Occupiers that they don’t abscond away with someone else’s property, live in their own filth, and keep Manhattan up at night, all night, every night. It has taken him two months to declare the basic limits of living in a civilized society – in New York City. What a disgrace.

  • goformitt

    Seems to me your responses are exceptionally harsh. While I agree many in the Occupy movement couldn’t articulate a very interesting critique of economic issues, I can certainly understand some of what frustrates them.

    I think more than anything, they are scared and frustrated. Frustrated by what they perceive as a society tilting in favor of corporations at the expense of the individual, and scared that life’s economic opportunities are diminishing for them: High unemployment, student debt with capitalized interest ballooning, etc.

    We saw how the Tea Party got attacked, often times without merit, by the press, DKos, etc. Why stoop to that?

    I don’t know how successful the Unions will be, but they appear to be trying to co-opt the #OWS message. But didn’t the status-quo GOP try to do the same with the Tea Party?

    Anyway, I wouldn’t hurl too much vitriol at a bunch of kids acting out.

    • http://www4.webng.com/rickbull/lostlucky/ rickbull

      I see reporting of events with a bit of partisan, tongue-in-cheek humor thrown in to keep the diary moving.

      If you want to see vitriol, go back to the NYT the day of the House vote on the healthcare debacle–you remember: the day that the tea party members were accused of spitting on members of the CBC. I have never seen ANY diary on RS rise to even one-tenth of THAT level of vitriol.

    • Adjoran

      These are no trumped-up charges against “kids acting out.” There have been deaths, rapes, assaults, thefts, destruction of property, disease, defecation on sidewalks and police cars, running off homeless people for lining up for free food, and causing thousands of dollars in losses for the shops, cafes, and other small businesses in the area – not to mention the layoffs.

      This is no tea party. These are criminals, violent and immoral and unsanitary.

      If their socialist professors indoctrinated them against capitalism and cooperations, that’s not our problem. How stupid are they walking around with smart phones, designer jeans, Nike hats, iPads, etc.? Not one of them could survive a week without something acquired from a corporation.

      The first day they refused to comply with the law, they should have been removed.

      • pttx333

        Agree with you 100%.

    • renl57

      You’re going to sing a different tune when these OWS protesters show up at a Romney rally and try to heckle your candidate off the stage and keep him from speaking.

      That’s what they already did to Michele Bachmann. And that wasn’t even a campaign rally, but a Veterans Day commemoration.

      And that’s what the far left did to Hubert Humphrey in 1968: Because of his support of the Vietnam War, these “protesters” showed up at every one of his campaign rallies and literally prevented him from speaking–and denied those gathered there their own right to listen.

      The problem with the far left is that they think that no one else has a right to assemble or speak in public except them.

    • johnt

      but I’ll get over it.

  • hwgood

    the responses to different protests in different places.
    These protestors asking for a socialist system say what’s happening now is horrid and evil. What about the treatment of protestors of a socialist government asking for freedom?
    Tiananmen Square.

    • nathanalbright

      If a democratic government (like, say Great Britain or Israel or the United States) acts harshly against protestors, any violence against protestors is a violation of rights. But Communist governments like the Soviet Union (in the past) and China today get a pass because as socialist governments they are automatically given credit by the useful idiots of the left here for having the well-being of the common people in mind, so it has to be troublesome agitators that are at fault, not the corrupt authoritarian regime itself.

      • renl57

        …about the common good and fighting for the working class and fighting against economic or racial injustice,

        then you can literally get away with murder.

        • nathanalbright

          If it worked for Stalin’s potemkin gulags in Siberia and Mao’s near-genocidal cultural revolution in China, why would it be any different on the left today?

  • johnt

    which coincidentally is the structure of his brain. But neither he or the rest of the fascist left is prepared or willing to give up power, after all, there’s so much more to destroy.
    Do not by any means look forward to a peaceful 2012, the animals have more in mind for us than an occcasional demo or occupation.

  • Next93

    the local newsies insist on giving these people legitimacy, but I’ve been walking over to the”encampment”a couple of times a week and taking pictures from the skyway.

    the most people i’ve counted there was 30. last week it was 11. meanwhile, tens of thousands of people walked past quietly trying to get by in a tough economy.

    the last time, I welled through ay street level. there was a guy steaming there with a hand-lettered sign that read “we are the 99%”, I was tempted to stop and try to explain to him that he AND the voices inside his head didn’t constitute 99% of 2.

    I may go back next week with my own sign saying “you don’t represent me”

  • publious