May Day 2012: Easter for Occupy Tacoma and Its Kin?

Fr. William J. Bischel S.J., center, spoke at May Day's labor rally. Here he's participating in an Occupy Tacoma demonstration last fall. (Photograph by Loren Bliss copyright 2011.)

 

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Occupy Tacoma survived the trials of a winter of discontent and dissolution to re-emerge as a small but fiercely determined affinity group – veteran activists who met for an early-afternoon barbecue in Tacoma's Wright Park on a chilled and rainy May Day, then proved their effectiveness by publicly joining hands with organized labor.

The immediate result was a day of informational picketing at St. Joseph Medical Center, Tacoma's increasingly anti-union, anti-working-class Catholic hospital. The pickets, never less than about 50 women, men and children, were mostly from Service Employees International Union Local 1199NW. They were reinforced by a few Jobs with Justice and Food Not Bombs people and maybe a dozen Occupiers from Tacoma, Puyallup and Kitsap County.

An oft-chanted slogan told the story: “What do we want? A FAIR CONTRACT. When do we want it? NOW!” Workers in SEIU 1199NW have been negotiating with the bosses at St. Joe's and its parent Franciscan Health System since last summer. Parallel negotiations were underway with MultiCare Health System, which includes Tacoma General, Allenmore and Mary Bridge hospitals.

Here's an SEIU after-action photograph of the pickets. (I'm bearded bespectacled geezer with the tan canvas field coat, broad-brimmed felt hat and upraised fist. Yes, crippled though I am, I walked the line for about an hour, cane in my right hand, placard – “Affordable Care for the Whole Community” in my left, chanting myself hoarse. )

Just before the photo session we had marched seven-tenths of a mile from the hospital for a union rally at Shiloh Baptist Church, where an hour of impassioned speechifying was followed by a dinner of southern fried chicken, salad (choice of potato or cole slaw) and freshly made dinner rolls. It was the most delicious fried chicken I've had in years; hence I was not surprised when one of the cafeteria-style servers told me all the food been cooked by the ladies of Shiloh's mostly African-American congregation.

By far the most memorable of the pre-dinner remarks were those by Fr. William J. Bichsel S.J., the 84-year-old internationally applauded radical Jesuit priest who has so often been imprisoned by the U.S. Government in retaliation for his pacifist activism.

Bix, as he is known to friends and colleagues, denounced the anti-worker greed of the Franciscan Health System executives as hypocritical defiance of the values of Francis of Assisi, the saint after which the system is named. Citing his own Catholic faith, Bix said the Franciscan executives' behavior causes him “deep embarrassment and sorrow.”

Though Franciscan and MultiCare hospitals are allegedly “non-profit,” SEIU sources say the two systems are in truth among the most profitable in the state of Washington. Franciscan recently amassed an operating profit of $147 million, while MultiCare made $95 million – this according to data released by the Washington State Department of Health.

 

Meanwhile the anti-worker stance of Franciscan management seems to be part of a larger trend of zero-tolerance anti-99 Percent policies at Catholic hospitals throughout the United States. This has led to speculation the pronouncements by Pope Benedict XVI demanding socioeconomic justice are merely eyewash to conceal intensified profiteering by the Vatican – a probability bolstered by the authoritarian nature of the church's organization, a dictatorial chain of command that stretches from papacy to parish and tolerates neither disobedience nor dissent.

Nor is this first time the church has proclaimed Beatitude-based charity doctrines to conceal its vicious exploitation of impoverished peoples – though that hypocritical practice was hitherto limited to the Third World. Its appearance in today's United States is therefore wrenchingly significant: it is undeniable proof the global Ruling Class now regards us – the 99 Percent – as it formerly regarded the peoples of Africa and Latin America: yet another colonial population from which to extract maximum profit by slavery then destroy by genocide.

Once again, welcome to the New Order of capitalist governance: absolute power and unlimited profit for the One Percent, total subjugation and premature death for all the rest of us.

When O when will we finally awaken?

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Perhaps at last the awakening is at hand. Perhaps the transformation of Occupy Tacoma is part of the process by which we seize the time. But how did maybe 150 men and women so stubbornly individualistic they could hardly agree on anything become a functional cadre of no more than one-tenth that number? How did OT evolve from ferociously opposing any sort of alliance with anyone – especially organized labor – to embracing a united-front policy of cooperation?

Since OT's publicly endorsed May Day allies were Food Not Bombs, Jobs with Justice, SEIU and (at least implicitly) the entire spectrum of unions including the newly rejuvenated Industrial Workers of the World, the question is relevant not just as a point of local history but – perhaps – as a teachable moment for Occupy groups elsewhere.

Deborah Petri, an OT activist since the beginning, says it was a matter of trial and error. “We learn from our mistakes,” she said. “We've become lot more easy going.”

In other words OT – or rather what remains of it – has learned to practice the tolerance it originally claimed but too often did not exhibit; the patience it originally rejected but now has embraced; and the serve-the-99=Percent determination that, from the very beginning, has always been the defining trait of its most committed activists.

Nor does this betoken any loss of the avowedly democratic OT dynamic. “We're still debating whether to endorse groups (as in making formal alliances) or to endorse (only) actions,” said Petrie.

But will OT's older, wiser more mature persona suffice to ensure its endurance – and, more importantly, its influence?

Naomi Wolf poses the question for Occupy in general and does so as succinctly as I've seen it stated anywhere:

“Is May Day's Occupy turnout a chimera – a groundless gesture to be hedged in by rapidly escalating new surveillance technologies and punitive new laws? Or is it a new beginning – a base, finally, to be built into a massive electoral lobby, built out of 'the people's coalitions', with sound messaging, reporter follow-up, and clear legal and political strategies?”

Meanwhile Wiebke Hollersen describes Occupy from the perspective of the European Ruling Class:

“It is a popular front of the indignant, a confusing and mutually contradictory throng of millions of people with varying demands, united only in their rage.”

Only time will tell whether Occupy's rage will evolve into ideology and organization, two of the four requirements for successful revolution. (The other requirements are mastery of technology and the support of a major foreign power.)

But it appears OT is already attempting to grow beyond the more self-destructive expressions of rage. It seems to have consciously abandoned the self-righteous arrogance that fueled much of its dissolution over the winter. Good riddance – not the least because this was exactly the sort of snobbery by which the Anti-Vietnam War Movement irreparably shattered New Deal solidarity, inflicting blue-collar/white-collar class antagonisms that persist to this day.

Indeed OT seems to be repositioning itself to resume what I have always believed is Occupy's most promising function: providing the 99 Percent a vehicle for the articulation of grievances – our first step toward formulating ideological solidarity and effective strategies and tactics of resistance.

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I began writing this piece yesterday, Friday 4 May, the 42nd anniversary of the Kent State Massacre, the event so many of us in New York City and the Northeast in general assumed was the beginning of a second American Revolution.

We were wrong, of course – not just abysmally mistaken but utterly deluded. And perhaps our most important post-delusional realization is the need to proceed with extreme caution in assuming any local conditions anywhere in this nation are a microcosm of the whole.

Hence, though I was initially thinking of writing about class struggle in Tacoma as exemplary of class struggle elsewhere in the U.S., reading the reports from other locales – always a good idea before laying out such a generalization – convinced me Tacoma is instead unique, probably a rule unto itself.

But to see Tacoma's uniqueness it is necessary to contrast May Day here with May Day elsewhere in the land the One Percent ever more obviously regards as its One Big Plantation, the United Estates.

In other, larger cities the government is employing new, much more brutal tactics against Occupiers – methods that seek to induce maximum terror (and provoke violent retaliation) by including obviously organized campaigns of sexual assault against women. As I noted via the linked item's comment thread, these are precisely the tactics utilized by the U.S.-supported fascist regimes in the Third World and elsewhere.

But here in Tacoma the authorities have apparently rejected all such brutality in favor of peaceful co-existence, not just with Occupy but with every other nonviolent expression of 99 Percent anger and resistance.

I can only guess why and how the Tacoma Police have seemingly resisted takeover by the Department of Homeland Security and have thus far blessedly avoided being turned into the One Percent goon squads the cops in Oakland, New York City and Seattle have so notoriously become.

But three factors seem relevant. Tacoma is not just a seaport city but one that has managed to retain some of its industry, which means organized labor is still relatively powerful here. It is a Working Class city – a city of the 99 Percent – and its municipal government sometimes yet displays what the Right invariably denounces as an “unAmerican” consciousness of those roots. It is also a city in which the citizens give the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution the same regard they give the First Amendment.

In any case, as was notable during the Occupy events here last fall and winter, so it was on May Day: the police, though present, were respectfully unobtrusive, and the few cops who were obvious were invariably friendly or at least neutral. There was none of that Cossacks-guarding-the-Winter-Palace malevolence the police now routinely display in Oakland, New York City and Seattle.

Indeed for the first time ever, I who so often have so desperately missed life in Manhattan – the good life from which I was permanently exiled by gentrification 25 years ago – now thank whatever benevolent deities might exist I am here instead of there: here in what I can no longer deny has become Home, said with all the pride that befits such meaning.

And now let us raise a toast to the heroism of Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller: may we never forget it is their blood too that colors the Red Banner we in the 99 Percent must soon raise as our own.

LB/5 May 2012

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