One of the central messages of Occupy Wall Street is conveyed by Alisa Messer, president, AFT Local 2121 (right), and Sheila Tully, California Faculty Association member at San Francisco State University.  Fred Glass photo

Click here for the CFT endorsement statement.
See photos from CFT activists participating in OWS around the state.

For several years the CFT has been championing progressive tax policies to address state revenue shortfalls. We have announced our intent to go to the state ballot box with a proposal to boost income tax rates on the rich in November 2012 to fund public education and services. We have been gaining traction with our membership, the public, and a growing list of coalition partners, who recognize that the growing gap between the very rich and the rest of us has been unbalancing our society.

But the attention paid to these issues was nothing like what is now happening in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement. After thirty years in which the public political narrative has been dominated by anti-tax, anti-government, anti-union messages, the game is changing.   For weeks it has been difficult to open a daily newspaper or turn on the ten o’clock news or go to your favorite news website without finding a story or seeing a picture about “the 1%” and the “99”.   For the first time in decades, income and wealth inequality is a major concern of the news media, of kitchen table conversations, and even politicians.

Modest credit
A modest amount of credit can be given to Barack Obama, for coming back around to a 2008 campaign theme he pushed briefly in late 2010 but then let lie dormant until a couple months ago: his call to boost tax rates on millionaires to fund public services.

But that wasn’t the game changer. Of far greater consequence was a message sent out by an obscure Canadian radical media-critique magazine, Adbusters, calling for people to show up on Wall Street and occupy it near the end of summer. Oddly enough, that’s what happened. Not an occupation of the magnitude of Tahrir Square, or in the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, earlier this year, although the lessons of both those events clearly played a role in setting up what quickly spread from New York to cities across the country.

Occupy Wall Street is thus far a rather limited example of direct action, if placed side by side with historical precedents like the wave of factory occupations in the United States in 1937 following the seizure by automobile workers of the GM Fisher Body Plant in Flint, Michigan—the event that led to unionization of the auto industry. But Occupy Wall Street has endured, with hundreds of people organizing themselves to sleep, eat, debate, demonstrate, and learn together outside in a quasi-public space, Zuccotti Park, in New York for six weeks as of this writing.

The numbers have swelled to thousands for demonstrations and to defend the square against a threatened eviction, much like the flexible size of CFT’s March for California’s Future last year as it snaked through the central valley from Bakersfield to Sacramento over 48 days. More impressively—and this is what is really different—Occupy Wall Street sparked similar occupations/demonstrations throughout the United States. More than one hundred fifty ongoing occupations sprang up and kept going.

In the process, they have changed what we talk about, frightened bankers, stockbrokers and hedge fund managers, and reinvigorated labor and community activists hungry for good news in a recession that should have created a progressive movement but hadn’t until now.

What do they want?
CFT endorsed Occupy Wall Street, as have many labor organizations. That’s because the occupiers, of varying opinions on some issues, are nonetheless clear that the economy and the government have not been working for you and me—the 99%—for some time now. They are clear that teachers and other public employees did not crash the economy with their salaries or work rules or pensions—Wall Street banks did, with their toxic financial derivatives and predatory loan practices. They are clear that as income and wealth has accumulated in the top 1% over the past few decades, and tax rates have been reduced on that same tiny slice of the population, our public schools, and transportation systems, and public health clinics, and public safety, have been pushed into steep decline.

The Occupy movement has projected those ideas into public discussion in a big way. As CFT president Joshua Pechthalt observed, “The women and men who are participating in Occupy Wall Street have given voice to the suffering and economic uncertainty felt by millions of Americans. Educators are proud to stand in solidarity with these principles and this important movement.”

Over the past few weeks CFT members have joined Occupy events in San Diego, Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Francisco. During the CFT Council of Classified Employees conference the October 15 weekend, a dozen members accompanied San Diego City College professor Jim Miller to Occupy San Diego. They presented the occupiers with a donation of several hundred dollars collected at the conference, and Miller read the CFT endorsement statement to an enthusiastic reception by the crowd.

Occupiers have reciprocated, coming out, for instance, to support San Francisco educators protesting an education “reform” conference headlined by Jeb Bush and Rupert Murdoch on October 13.

It remains to be seen where the Occupy movement will go. But even if it goes no farther than where it is, it will have made an historic contribution to raising consciousness about the real problems facing this country.

Occupy Wall Street