Unions join Occupy Wall Street protests, police unleash brutality

Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

While unions have voiced their support for the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement previously, including the Transport Workers Union Local 100 which fought against the NYPD’s commandeering of buses to transport protesters, union workers finally showed up to march today.

The New York Times reports that on Wednesday multiple prominent unions joined the OWS demonstrators by the thousands and some labor leaders are envious of what the movement has been able to do so far.

The A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s executive council expressed unanimous support for the protests on Wednesday and one official said that union leaders had been receiving questions from local members as to why there was no organized labor presence at the OWS demonstrations.

The Transport Workers Union, the United Federation of Teachers, The United Auto Workers, and the Service Employees International Union all participated in Wednesday’s march.

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On Wednesday night around 8 PM, eight protesters were arrested near the intersection of Broadway and Wall Street after activists began moving from the sidewalks into the road.

Then around 8:30 PM several more protesters were arrested at State and Bridge streets. While details were not immediately available, the police reported that one demonstrator assaulted an officer.

Scroll to the bottom of the post for updates and videos of the police brutality that occurred later in the night.

Apparently numerous union leaders lamented that their own protests during the last two years have not been able to capture the attention that the OWS demonstrations have, even though they drew much larger numbers.

The media coverage of the OWS movement has been much more intense than the coverage of any recent labor protests, like one last October in Washington that assembled more than 100,000 people.

However, some union leaders have voiced concerns that the unions might be seen as attempting to co-opt the movement which would thus alienate the protesters and organizers originally responsible and then unravel the demonstrations.

According to the New York Times, the leaders are attempting to develop a somewhat symbiotic relationship with the OWS protests.

The NYT reports that, “union leaders maintain that they can help each other — the weakened labor movement can tap into Occupy Wall Street’s vitality, while the protesters can benefit from labor’s money, its millions of members and its stature.”

One must consider the fact that the structures of unions and the Occupy Wall Street movement are completely diametrically opposed.

Unions are hierarchical organizations, have leaders who “often have sizable personalities and like the limelight” according to the New York Times and the OWS movement is mostly leaderless without a strict hierarchy that is more conducive to the democratic process.

Some, like George Washington University professor Michael Kazin, are saying that the OWS protests could benefit from the unionized institutional presence without pointing to what exactly the “institutional presence” would really do other than “really help them.”

The mainstream media is making a conscious effort to make this into a partisan issue, thus undermining the power of the movement by dividing people over petty political issues.

This is being done with the help of Republicans like Herman Cain who called the OWS demonstrators “un-American” at a book signing in Florida according to AP.

Similarly, CBS reported that Mitt Romney called the protests a form of “class warfare” when speaking at a Florida retirement community.

However, these protests and what they represent are neither “un-American” nor “class warfare”. In reality they are the culmination of decades of exploitation and corruption at the hands of the private Federal Reserve and the Wall Street elite.

Cain falls back on the tired Republican rhetoric which says the OWS activists are “basically saying that somehow the government is supposed to take from those that have succeeded and give to those who want to protest”.

Except the Occupy Wall Street movement doesn’t represent a movement fighting for wealth redistribution, it is a movement that is fighting for equitable ability to gain wealth to begin with.

It is not fighting for taking “from those that have succeeded” to give to those who have not, it is fighting for people to be able to have the opportunity to succeed to begin with.

In today’s world of American corporatism and total collusion between corporations, banks, Wall Street and government, it is increasingly harder for Americans, especially young people, to succeed.

The pigeonholing tactics utilized by Republicans and the mainstream media is not at all accurate.

A spokesman for the allied movement of Occupy Boston, Gunner Scott, told ABC that, “We have students and young people, and the unemployed. But we also have families and the self-employed, who can make their own hours. It’s broader than anarchists and hippies.”

With unions joining the movement, it is even harder to marginalize the protests by pretending it only represents a tiny fringe group.

Hopefully more activists and groups will realize that by banding together they can make a true impact. If only conservative groups and others with diverse goals could join, then the mainstream media and politicians would have even more difficulty demonizing the movement as some kind of anarchist hippie-fest.

This would not be incompatible with the movement, as Columbia University political science professor Dorian Warren shows in saying, “There’s no one leader. It’s not top-down. It’s much more democratic, much more ‘open-source.’”

Both conservatives and liberals are being exploited by the banking elite and the criminals on Wall Street and until people realize that this is equal opportunity economic rape, the mainstream media will continue to be able to demonize the movement.

UPDATE: It is now clear that the initial reports from the mainstream media were woefully downplayed. Videos of indiscriminate beatings handed out by police, pepper spraying and more have emerged. I will update this post with them as I find them. If I miss one please e-mail me at admin@endthelie.com or just leave a comment here.

Here is an image of an NYPD officer attacking the crowd with pepper spray:

Even more disturbing is this footage of a police officer apparently happy about the prospect of giving his nightstick a “workout.” This was allegedly filmed before the beatings began. If true, that means this was a premeditated act of brutality against Americans exercising their right to assemble and speak freely.

The fact that this officer was so happy about it makes it that much more disgusting.

Fox News in New York is also reporting on the incident, although they’re saying that the protest turned violent when the crowd surged against the barriers. With police macing anyone and everyone, attacking journalists and anyone in their reach with nightsticks, possibly in a premeditated effort, who would you say is the violent party?