The OWS movement's resiliency has been on numerous occasions tested over the last eight weeks. Between commercial and municipal propaganda, disproportionate police crackdowns, heavy weather, and voluminous arrests, the OWS is not going away. In spite of the largely dismissive nature of the media's initial coverage, and its continual framing of the OWS as a middle finger in the face of traditional American values, the movement's staying-power legitimates its very existence. What once was seen by many as an effigy symbolic of misunderstood angst and misdirected energy is rapidly earning recognition as an organism that lives and breathes, with blood that runs red and voices that speak. Its stalwart presence has attracted the attention of those who otherwise avoid the rabble-rousing fray.
With staying power comes recognition, and with recognition comes parasites. The Democratic Party and the SEIU, who recently endorsed Obama for 2012, come specifically to mind. I saw an ad the other day which featured Mary Kay Henry, the national president of the Service Employees International Union. She states:
We know what's really important. We know that after a decade of tax breaks for the rich and out-of-control gambling on Wall Street, things have gotten much harder for working Americans. We know that if these problems aren't taken care of now, the next generation will have it even worse.
We know that we need to create good jobs here at home so that workers can support their families, young people can get a good start in life, and everyone can have a shot at the American dream.
We know that health care, elder care and other vital services must be available for all our families.
We know there needs to be a pathway to citizenship for every immigrant worker.
We know that something has to be done.
President Obama is looking to turn things around, but he needs support from all of us to be heard over his wealthy opponents, people who seem to believe that the only thing wrong with the economy is that they have to share it.
Like Glen Greenwald, whose piece on the endorsement is worth reading, I was disgusted, as well as concerned. On healthcare, Obama folded early on the single-payer system that on the campaign trail he vowed to pursue. Taking it off the table before the negotiations began, Obama opened the door to a mandate that ensures perpetual profit for the healthcare industry. On immigration, Obama's pursuit of undocumented immigrants has led to more deportations and ruptured families than his predecessor, George W., could ever have dreamed of. On jobs, while the President's recent unpassable bill is worthy of note, he appointed Jeffrey Emmelt as his go-to jobs advisor, a man who's made a bundle privately and for the company that he chairs, General Electric, outsourcing more than half of his domestic labor force overseas. And let's not forget Geitner, Summers, Rubin et al., primary players in the practice of disaster capitalism, scum who at the moment it would aggravate me too much to discuss. Moving onward, Obama's Win The Future is nothing more than a heinous WHAT THE FUCK to Americans uneasy with what it would take to transform the nation into a more cordial setting for big business, all the while using China as both a model for success and our main economic antagonist, a country whose human rights record is about as upright as Mother Mary's virginity is pure. And Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the triumvirate of programs that for a long while underpinned the moral platform on which the Democratic Party claimed to speak? Remember, it was just last July when the President beat the Republicans to placing them squarely on the chopping block of brutal austerity. I won't go into the wars, the assassinations, the surveillance, the tax breaks for the rich (of which Obama is the present owner), the imperial outreach to the East Pacific, the I-don't-give-a-fuck refusal to comply with the War Powers Act during the Libya fiasco, Gitmo, straddling the fence on Egypt, continued arms sales to Bahrain, etc. An entire catalogue of high crimes and misdemeanors that should make Obama as unelectable among progressives in the coming race as Vienna Sausage is inedible at dinnertime.
The impulse to suck the blood of a popular phenomenon is instinct among our political and corporate elite. It's what transformed Justin Beiber from a prepubescent know-nothing into a mega-celebrity at the vanguard of the pop-cultural know. It's what made movies out of Jackass. What won a war out of post-9/11 melancholy and rage. And yes, despicably and sadly, it may just win Brand Obama another four years. But at what cost to the OWS does the SEIU posture its sentimental connection?
Critics are already more than happy to point out that the OWS is less grassroots than Astroturf. Folks of Bloomberg and Guiliani ilk and their Murdochean friends suggest that unions, who, needless to say, have had a troubled three decades in the American body politic and imagination, are underwriting the activists' actions with loads of cash that make all the occupying possible. To those suspicious of the movement's purposes, it’s a tenable theory, and when the SEIU starts bussing folks down to D.C. in the name of the OWS to push for financial reforms, will they be so far off? Tea Partiers who might have begun to recognize something familiar to them in their progressive counterparts- namely, dissatisfaction over the shakedown of their dreams - won't again have the chance to identify and act on their shared experiences. Worse yet, the OWS will come to be seen as a hired, populistic gun whose barrel is aimed and trigger pulled by the Democratic Party. After all, this was the Tea Party's story: a big fucking gun loaded and greased by Mr. and Mr. Koch.
Channeling OWS energy into the morass of partisan politics is a surefire way to kill what hope any of us have for meaningful change in this country's direction. I sincerely doubt that the occupiers themselves would ever stoop so low as join ranks with somebody with as much blood on his cash-grabbing hands as Obama and his corrupt, commercial party. That said, the reality of the OWS's political leanings is unable to keep up with the pace of public perception, and the endorsement of Obama by a major union who's co-opted the jargon of the OWS is the most efficient way of forming that perception into a reality. Obama needs to be seen as representing the 99% if he wants to be reelected; on the other hand, the survival of the 99% requires the very opposite.
As Greenwald writes: "if you believe that the wealthiest class anti-democratically controls political institutions (an indisputably true premise), then it makes little sense to expect specific new bills or even individual candidates inserted into that system to bring about much change."
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