Video on Occupy Oakland November 2 General Strike now available... West Coast Occupy calls for December 12 shut down of all West Coast ports in support of truckers, longshore workers
A video of the Occupy Oakland general strike is now available and the call for a strike to shut down all West Coast ports on December 12 is now available. The URL is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGqncu3wlEI. The six-minute video explains how the Occupy Oakland movement's November 2 general strike shut down the Port of Oakland, the fifth largest port in the USA, when longshoremen honored the Occupy picket line as workers arrived for the second shift that day. Now the Oakland movement is calling for a shut down of all West Coast ports on December 12 in solidarity with striking longshore workers in Longview Washington, who have been fighting against a scab corporation back by Goldman Sachs.
Many histories of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU), which organized port workers on the West Coast of the USA under the leadership of some of the most militant union leaders in American history, are available. The ILSU also organized agricultural workers in Hawaii, for a time making Hawaii one of the most progressive states in the USA politically after fierce battles against the military, oligarchs and plutocrats who had ruled the island from colonial days by ethnic divide and conquer methods. The confrontations along the ports of the West Coast and in Hawaii bring clearly the ninety-nine percent values against the power of the one percent.
Chicago attorney George Munoz (above) was one of the most loyal and ambitious servants of Chicago's one percent during the 1980s (as President of the Chicago Board of Education and one of the architects of the School Finance Authority) and during the 1990s (when he negotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA for the Clinton administration). Munoz's attempts at forcing austerity on the Chicago Teachers Union during the 1980s resulted in the major strikes that took place between 1983 and 1985, while he was also serving as an attorney for Continental Illinois National Bank. For Chicago school workers, there is a local connection. The NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) that has turned many truckers back into the slaves they were before the Teamsters Union and others liberated the work. When I worked as a Teamster in Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1960s, the drivers reminded us that before the unions, "the horse was more valuable to the boss than the man, and the truck was always more important than the person driving it..." One of the sayings of the drivers who remembered the old old days was "You're the boss, I'm the horse..."
Former Chicago Board of Education President George Munoz, who forced the strikes of the mid-1980s on the Chicago Teachers Union while he served as a lawyer for Continental Illinois National Bank (which later disgraced itself in bankruptcy, but not before it had helped engineer the Chicago School Financial Crisis of 1979 - 1981 and for the Chicago School Finance Authority on CPS) negotiated NAFTA as a member of the Clinton Administration. Along with Munoz, Chicago's Bill Daley was one of the prime movers of "globalization" against Chicago's working people. Daley is now White House Chief of Staff, while his precedessor, Rahm Emanuel, is the chief union buster as Mayor of Chicago.
