Regular readers of this site will know the name Stephen Lerner. For those who don’t, here’s a quick refresher: he’s the SEIU organizer whoThe Blaze revealed almost a year to the day as the man behind the early stages of the Occupy movement. Back then, he admitted to wanting to bring down financial institutions and collapse the system. Now he’s back with an op-ed in the liberal magazine The Nation, and he‘s outlining what’s coming next.
“Occupy has cracked open the door that lets us imagine that another world is possible,” Lerner writes, before bragging about the countless arrests of those within the movement. “Thousands of arrests, months of protest and acts of incredible personal risk and sacrifice have put inequality and Wall Street’s out-of-control political and economic power on center stage. As activity ratchets up this spring, the challenge is to get more people pushing that door open ever wider.”
So what does “pushing that door open wider” look like? How about organizing massive student loan strikes and crashing annual shareholder meetings.
Student loan strikes
Lerner justifies the strike idea like this:
Students and their families now have nearly a trillion dollars of debt, with average debt totaling over $25,000. The explosion in student debt is a direct outgrowth of the defunding of education in state after state. Unlike corporate and other debt, student debt is excluded from bankruptcy relief, strangling students for life. Reducing student debt load and the interest rates applied to it would save hundreds of billions of dollars in debt payments. It’s a first step to creating equal access to education and giving students a fair start without a lifetime burden.
Then he plants the seed:
There is growing interest in Occupy and student groups in a student debt strike. The banks can’t foreclose on a brain or a degree. If a critical mass of student debtors—a million or more—pledged to refuse to pay, it would create a collection crisis that could force negotiations about reducing student debt.
Key phrase: “it would create a collection crisis.”
Occupy Protesters bang drums in Zuccotti Park in November. (Photo: AP)
Crashing shareholder meetings
Student debt strikes are just the beginning, however. Lerner wants more, and that “more,” not surprisingly, involves greater collaboration with the unions.
“Starting with GE on April 25 in Detroit and moving on to Wells Fargo, Bank of America and dozens of other corporations in May and June, tens of thousands of people from Occupy, community organizations, unions and environmental groups will show up at the annual shareholder meetings of major corporations,” he explains. “Some people will be on the inside with proxies, and others will be massed in the streets, all delivering the message that it is no longer acceptable for giant, unaccountable corporations to decide the political and economic fate of the country.”
Key points: It’s starting April 25; it involves “tens of thousands” from unions and even environmental groups; and it will even involve people “on the inside.”
A member of the Occupy San Diego movement protests in front of the California Democrats State Convention Saturday, Feb. 11, 2012, in San Diego. (AP)
A movement in need of direction?
Lerner’s direction comes as the movement is awakening with fury — 73 were arrested at the movement‘s epicenter in New York City’s Zucotti Park over the weekend. And top-down direction seems to be what the willing Occupy foot soldiers are in need of. Consider that after the weekend fracas, the same problems of blurry vision and a lack of uniformity that plagued the movement in the fall sprang up once again.
“I’m really grateful to be part of a generation that wants change, ’cause we should all want change,” said Jennifer Campbell, a graduate student in documentary filmmaking at Hofstra University. “But I’m not sure what that change is, or if they know what that change is.”
“We’re going to keep going,” said Christopher Guerra, who has spent many nights at Zuccotti since the movement started last Sept. 17. He added, “It’s going to get interesting during the election cycle. We’re going to be more of a presence in the political world. I know we have a couple of people running for office.”
According to Mother Jones magazine, 10 candidates for House and Senate seats in the November elections have made Occupy part of their campaigns. They include Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren and Hakeem Jeffries, who is running for Congress in Brooklyn. But some Occupy supporters consider themselves anarchists who abjure electoral politics.
Sandra Nurse, a member of Occupy’s direct action working group, said she expects college students will have “a huge role to play this summer organizing around student debt.” She noted that the issue resonates both with students and with their parents and has the potential to broaden the movement. It‘s straight out of Lerner’s playbook.
But Ted Schulman, an Occupy protester who lives near Zuccotti, said his focus is the upcoming United Nation Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. He said he wants to “challenge the U.N. on what their vision of a green economy is.”
Harlem resident Kanene Holder said the movement is broader than any one issue. “This is not a beauty pageant,” she said. “We cannot homogenize this movement into one streamlined vision.”
“I understand the Occupy movement,” observer Brian Cummings of Iowa said. “I understand a lot of people’s frustration. I’m not sure how effective it is. … Nothing seems to be being accomplished.”
And that’s where Lerner comes in. In his conclusion, he embraced the confusion: “Emerging movements are complicated, exciting, messy, confusing and wonderful things to be a part of.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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