Taking advantage of the power displayed by the public employee unions in Wisconsin, socialist union leaders are planning a campaign to destroy capitalism by creating financial chaos. They consider capitalism to be in such a fragile and weakened condition, that a massive campaign aimed at creating financial chaos will bring the whole financial system crashing down.
Thus, they are organizing a coalition of unions, community groups, lawmakers and students to become a battering ram against the capitalist system. They want a half-million home owners to stop paying their mortgages and a million students to stop paying off their student loans. They believe that such mass repudiation of loans would make the banking system insolvent and the country ungovernable.
All of this has been revealed in a recording of a union leader explaining the plans to associates, posted on a Blog entitled The Blaze. Here are some quotes made by Steve Lerner, a former operative of SEIU, Service Employees International Union, the architect of the Justice for Janitors campaign. SEIU’S head, Andrew Stern, has been a frequent visitor at the Obama White House. Lerner says:
It seems to me that we’re in a moment where we need to figure out in a much more, through direct action, much more concrete way how we really are trying to disrupt and create uncertainty for capital, for how corporations operate. And it may sound like that’s a crazy thing that in a moment of weakness we could deal with it, but the thing about a boom and bust economy, it is actually incredibly fragile, because it’s not based on real way, well, it’s based on gambling and all of that. And so there are actually extraordinary things that we could do right now that would start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.
And for example … a quarter of all people who own a home are under water. Right? Their home is under water, they’re paying more for it than it’s worth. Ten percent of those people are now in strategic default, meaning they’re refusing to pay but they’re staying in their homes. That’s totally spontaneous. Right? They figured out it takes a year to kick me out of my home because the mort, the foreclosure’s backed up. I’m going to say I won’t pay. It’s just what business does, it’s a good, a good business decision. If you could double that number, you would make banks, put banks on the edge of insolvency again.
And so the question would be, what would happen if we organized homeowners in mass to do a mortgage strike. Just say if we get half a million people to agree … we won’t pay our mortgages, it would literally cause a new financial crisis.
There are four things we can do that could really upset Wall Street. One is if city and state and other government entities demanded to renegotiate their debt because they’re paying too much interest. And you might say, well why would the banks ever do it? Because they, the cities and counties could say we won’t do this and this in the future with you if you don’t renegotiate the debt now. Meaning, about a third of bank profits generate from dealing with cities and states.
So we could leverage the power we have of government to say we won’t do business with you, JP Morgan Chase, anymore unless you do two things: you reduce the price of our interest, since your interest rate is down; and second, you rewrite the mortgages for everybody in the community so they can stay in their homes. We, we could make them do that.
The second thing is there’s a whole question in New York now about austerity and student’s rates and the question of the debt structure. What would happen if students said we’re not going to pay? It’s a trillion dollars. Think about …sweeping that debt, a trillion dollars from students debt?
There’s a third thing that we could think about, what about if public employee unions, instead of them being on the defensive, put on the collective bargaining table when they negotiate they said we demand as a condition of negotiation that the government renegotiate, we want, we believe in good financial management. It’s crazy that you’re paying too much interest to your buddy the bankers. It’s a strike issue for us. We will strike unless you force the banks to relieve the debt of the city.
I’m not going to go through all the detail except to say there’s extraordinary things we could do and if you add on top of that, if we really thought about moving to the kind of disruption in Madison, but moving that to Wall Street and moving that to other cities around the country where we basically said you stole $17 trillion, you’ve impoverished us and we’re going to make it impossible for you to operate.
Labor can’t lead it, but we can be a critical part of it. We do have money, we have millions of members who are furious, but I don’t think this kind of movement can happen unless actually the community groups and other activists take the lead. … And if … we really believe that we’re in a transformative stage and what’s happening in capitalism, and we need to confront this in a serious way and develop a real ability to put a boot in the wheel, then I think we have to think not about labor community alliances. We have to think about how together we’re building something that really has the capacity to disrupt how the system operates.
A reader commenting on the above wrote: “The enemy within has control of all the major levers of power, and now are poised to finish off the nation and remake it into their own nightmare image made reality.”
If the socialists can create massive economic chaos and dislocation, this might give Obama the pretext to impose emergency martial law so that he could call off the election in 2012 and remain in power as dictator.
But there is no question that such a scenario would lead to a civil war in the United States. Not many people in their right minds think it can happen here. But if we also have runaway inflation, who knows how the American people may react.
The left is salivating over the prospects of a violent revolution. But as Alinsky complained about the left, violent revolution will never work in America. Therefore, he created the stealth strategy that got socialist Obama into the White House. And if Obama can prevent an election from taking place in 2012, he will be able to use all of the levers of power in his hand to advance the cause of socialism.
And when out of the chaos the American people cry for law and order, Obama will be able to impose a new socialist order by redistributing the wealth, that is confiscating the wealth of the rich and giving it to the militant poor, the enforcers of the revolution.
It all sounds like fantasy. But it has happened in other countries, and we ought not to think that it can’t happen here, since through perfectly legal and peaceful means, our politicians have brought us more than halfway there.
