By DON McINTOSH, Associate Editor
The Occupy Wall Street movement, nine weeks old as of Nov. 19, has the nation’s attention. Yet much of the news media continues to focus on problems in the encampments or conflicts that erupt when authorities try to evict occupiers — instead of on the economic and political problems that brought the movement about.
Jim Oliver, a participant in Occupy Portland, made that point Nov. 11 in front of a national audience on the PBS NewsHour. Sitting next to Portland Mayor Sam Adams, Oliver was asked by interviewer Jeffrey Brown if occupiers planned to heed Adams’ Nov. 12 deadline to clear out of Chapman and Lownsdale parks.
“The mainstream media has been talking a lot about petty crimes,” Oliver replied, “in an effort to detract from the message of the Occupy movement. We’ve been staying focused on our message of social change, trying to call attention to who the real criminals are in our society — people like Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, [who] gave himself a $19 million raise last year while thousands of Americans are being thrown out of their homes.”
“We are petitioning our government for a redress of grievances, as is outlined in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” Oliver said. “The goal of the Occupy movement is to make systemic changes in the economic and political systems in this country that are failing the 99 percent of Americans who see our wealth decreasing as the wealth of the 0.01 percent of Americans who control policy in this country increases.”
Such messages explain why organized labor — from the local rank-and-file to top national leadership — continues to support Occupy.
“Sustaining this movement is something that should be important to every progressive ally that they’ve made,” says Jessica Giannettino, Oregon AFL-CIO field organizer — who was one of a handful of unionists to overnight with the Portland occupation early on. “Their message resonates. It echoes one that we’ve been saying for a long time.”
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Joe Digman is an organizer at Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 503. Through his staff union, he’s secretary-treasurer of Communications Workers of America (CWA) Local 7901. But for 20 years, Digman was a stock broker at Dean Witter (now part-owned by CitiGroup) and later A.G. Edwards (now part of Wells Fargo.) So Digman has a background in finance, and a message to deliver.
“You hear, especially among the left and labor, that [Wall Street] is all crooked and corrupt and it’s going to be a disaster for working people,” Digman said. “You hear all this hyperbole. I’m here to tell you: It’s way worse.”
“Most of the money invested in companies is not from wealthy individuals; it’s pension funds,” Digman told the Labor Press. “But the people that really run the corporations, management … are running it to enrich themselves, not to defend or enrich shareholders. They’re there every day. They’re running the game. Is it unreasonable to think that they would run the game for themselves?”
On Nov. 9, Digman was one of hundreds of people around the United States to lead a “teach-in” that was developed by the group Rebuild the Dream and organized by MoveOn.org. Entitled “How the 1% Crashed the Economy,” the teach-in explained that since the 1970s, Wall Street has influenced politicians to rewrite the rules — to cut taxes on wealth and to allow banks to merge until they became “too big to fail.” Now it’s time to come together to reverse that, Digman said.
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For Steve Hughes, the answer is banking local. Hughes is state director of the Oregon Working Families Party, a union-backed third party which has called for the state government to pull its money out of the big banks. Hughes argues that the big Wall Street banks actually hurt local economies, and calls their local branches, “deposit-collecting agencies.”
“Their job is to funnel those deposits upward through the corporate structure, generally to out-of-state interests. What a big box store is to retail, big banks are to banking: They pull the money out and up, and it goes to their investment priorities.”
These days, that often means economic expansion in China, Hughes said.
“So you have these big banks taking our wealth, funneling it upward, then reinvesting it into industries that are killing our domestic jobs.”
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In Sandy, Oregon, there’s a home where James Irvine Jr. used to live. Irvine, a union millwright with Carpenters Local 96, once built a conveyor system at Portland airport, and made $75,000 a year rebuilding turbines at Bonneville Dam. But he lost work in the economic crisis that began with the collapse of mortgage securities, and he fell behind on his Chase Bank mortgage. Irvine says he navigated the Chase bank bureaucracy to apply for a home loan modification, but the bank didn’t come through for him. Instead, Chase foreclosed and sold the home at auction. Now Irvine, his wife and their 10-month-old daughter share a room in the home of his mother-in-law.
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On Nov. 13, police forcibly evicted Occupy Portland participants from Chapman and Lownsdale parks, by order of the mayor. Adams said he was forced to act because of an increase in crime around the encampment and drug overdoses in the camp — though he attributed the problems not to the activists who organized the camp but to “folks who have added themselves in to the original organizers.”
But the Occupy movement seems likely to continue in Portland, as elsewhere. Organizers were planning major actions for Nov. 17 — a demonstration at the Steel Bridge promoted by the national AFL-CIO, and an audacious plan by some to commit civil disobedience and shut down local branches of Wall Street banks for a day.
Occupy, the idea, seems only to be spreading. On Nov. 2 there was a general strike of sorts in Oakland, California, which had resolutions of support from several local public employee unions; large picket lines, and sympathy from union longshore workers, slowed activity at the port. College campuses increasingly are witnessing their own occupations. It’s only a few steps from there to occupying workplaces, as workers did at General Motors in Flint in 1936 and at Republic Window and Door in 2008.
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On PBS News Hour, host Jeffrey Brown listened as Occupy Portland’s Oliver made his points about big bank greed.
“Yes, we’ve talked a lot about that on the program,” Brown said, “and I appreciate your bringing it up again, but again I want to ask … are you going to clear the parks?”
“We intend to maintain our occupation,” Oliver replied, “in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and with working class Americans who are being thrown out of their homes all across the country.”
