Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Occupy Detroit's confused message

  Today the Occupy movement funded by the unions was supposed to march on the GE shareholders' meeting at the Renaissance Center in Detroit. The union promised to bus in 2 or 3000 marchers, funded by themselves, and launch the "99% Spring."
  Of course, Detroit has courted big spenders and big business because the city is dying. Indeed Quicken and Chrysler have both announced plans to work in Detroit.
  Yet here we are with the union bosses threatening those businesses with scenes like the ones they've been punishing the city with lately; the unions protested Gov. Scott Walker's appearance a week or so ago.
  Nolan Finley worried about this behavior in the Detroit News, openly wondering why businesses would want to relocate to Detroit when faced down by the bad behavior of union bosses, who are more interested in perpetuating their own success than any company's or shareholders':
But if massive numbers of raucous demonstrators disrupt the GE meeting, it will be a disaster for Detroit. 
Other business gatherings will avoid the city like the plague, hurting the convention business and killing jobs. 
More broadly, it will affirm that Detroit is still in the clutches of militant unions, hostile to business and a lousy place to plant money.
  Interestingly, though several buses showed up with union protesters (primarily SEIU), it looks like the brakes were put on regarding the size of the crowd.
  Imagine this.
  GE paid no taxes on many billion dollars of profits last year. Geoffrey Immelt, head of GE, is President Obama's top economic advisor.
  Payne at the DEtroit News also wonders what Bob King, president of the UAW, is thinking, in planning to protest the Democrat-happy GE:
The rally has horrified a Detroit Democratic establishment which fears a black eye to a near-bankrupt city already struggling to attract business. Though King’s antics have been telegraphed for weeks , a top Democratic source says that the party is frantically trying to discourage King’s 99 Percent Spring troops (which last week occupied Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s speech in Troy). Funny, though – the party raised nary a peep last fall when the Occupiers marched on Comerica Bank and DTE Energy, Detroit’s largest utility. The image of the UAW rampaging in front of Democrat-friendly corporations like GE and GM, apparently, hits too close to the bone. 
   So the unionists who showed up today, though fewer in number than originally planned, marched around the building and blocked the street so cars could not get through.
  Apparently the Democrat machine suddenly realized that these unionists were marching on Democrat leaning companies and it didn't poll well in the first place. Again, Detroit News:
Detroit — The United Auto Workers will join other labor unions and activist organizations on Wednesday in what is being billed as a major protest aimed at disrupting General Electric Co.'s annual shareholders meeting — part of a nationwide effort, called the "99 Percent Spring," to jump-start the Occupy Wall Street movement. [SNIP]

The union now seems to be dialing down its plans under pressure from political leaders who worry the demonstration could become a major embarrassment to a city and state struggling to attract business and investment, according to sources familiar with the situation.
  I wonder what it must be like to take orders like this, to become a union drone, to learn how to protest and argue with the police and to conform like some mindless zombie. And to have MSNBC try to find someone who actually drove their on their own in actual protest rather than arrive on a comfy union bus.
  Oh, wait, we have video of what that's like to be like that.
  Right here:

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