Occupy Zelig

One of the best things about Occupy? You get to meet a lot of great people.

Here is ReFund California’s Jono Shaffer, legendary organizer, speaking at the January 1, 2012 Occupy the Rose Parade kick-off teach-in event. The guy to his (camera) right is my good friend blogger/agitator Marty Berg who moderated the event.

Jono tells the story of bringing it to the banks with a direct action that put foreclosed home owner Rose Gudiel on the Bel Air doorstep of OneWest CEO Steve Mnuchin.

And Rose wasn’t the only one he helped:

By 1995, Justice for Janitors, part of a nationwide effort led by the Service Employees International Union, had lifted wages for 7,000 L.A. County cleaners, many of them illegal immigrants, and won them paid vacation time and family health insurance. The janitors’ three-week strike in 2000 — the year the movie came out — pushed hourly pay to about $12 in downtown L.A.

The movie was Ken Loach’s “Bread and Roses”, in which an intrepid organizer, based on Shaffer, is portrayed by Adrien Brody.

In this clip, what he has to say about bringing it to the captains of finance makes sense: forget the puppets, go for the master, as he did back in 1995:

Shaffer figured the contractors would respond only to pressure from building owners, and that they would cave only when picketers made tenants — lawyers, brokers, doctors, studio executives — uncomfortable about how little the people who emptied their waste baskets earned.

So the 1% needs to know how bad it looks.

Learn something new everyday and look who I’m learning from…

Star struck as the next Angeleno, the discovery that the guy Marty introduced me to is a labor legend made this Occupy Zelig wonder who he’d meet next.

Spencer Mills, the legendary Oakland streamer, that’s who.  There he was sitting two pews up from me in the same church!