Obama adviser, United Steelworkers international president Leo Gerard, urges ‘militancy’ in nationwide Occupy protests
November 4, 2011
by a12iggymom
a12iggymom.wordpress.com
Leo Gerard at an Obama campaign rally in 2008
NEW YORK – Three days before an Occupy Oakland protest turned violent, United Steelworkers international president Leo Gerard, an adviser to President Obama, called for “more militancy” in Occupy movements across the U.S.
Gerard serves on the board of a number of groups funded by billionaire George Soros, including organizations that reportedly helped to craft Obama’s “stimulus” and health-care laws.
In an interview with progressive radio host Ed Schultz on Monday, Gerard stated, “I think what we need is, we need more militancy.”
“I think we’ve got to start a resistance movement. If Wall Street occupation doesn’t get the message, I think we’ve got to start blocking bridges and doing that kind of stuff,” stated Gerard, according to a transcript provided by Newsbusters.org.
As WND was first to report, the tactic of blocking bridges, already used by Occupy Wall Street to hold up the Brooklyn Bridge last month, was institutionalized by Stephen Lerner, a controversial anti-capitalist SEIU organizer.
Lerner has visited the White House four times, while his former boss, Andy Stern, SEIU’s recently retired president, was the most frequent White House visitor in 2009, according to presidential visitors logs. Obama himself once trained SEIU in the 1990s.
Gerard has a history of direct-action protests. During the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle that turned violent, Gerard and United Steelworkers Vice President Tom Conway were caught on film dragging two large concrete planters into an intersection near the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in an attempt to help protesters block access to the WTO meetings.
A WND review of Gerard’s rhetoric during the past year finds scores of statements implying an Occupy onslaught against U.S. capitalism.
In February 2010, the People’s Weekly World, the official newspaper of the Communist Party USA, quoted Gerard and another United Steelworkers leader, Fred Redmond, as stating, “It’s time to stand up and be heard,” they said. “It’s time to mobilize online and in the streets. Together, let’s tweet, facebook and text. Let’s rally, vote and, where necessary, sit-in.”
In an August posting on the Firedoglake website, Gerard calling for an “uprising of hope and anger. There’s plenty of anger out there.”
He went on to quote Frances Fox Piven, writing that the radical professor “counsels in her book … that hope is crucial, that constructive change arises from the mix of hope and anger.”
Pivin, a member of the Progressives for Obama group, is co-author of the Cloward–Piven strategy, which calls for overloading the U.S. economy to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with a national system of “a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty.”
Gerard, meanwhile, was appointed in September 2010 to Obama’s Advisory Committee on Trade Policy and Negotiations.
He also serves as a vice president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest union.
Gerard further serves as co-chairman of the BlueGreen Alliance, whose partner is the Apollo Alliance. Gerard is also an Apollo board member.
The Apollo Alliance is run by a slew of radicals, including Obama’s former “green jobs” czar, Van Jones; Jeff Jones, who heads Apollo’s New York branch and is a former top leader of the Weather Underground terrorist organization; and Joel Rogers, a founder of the socialist New Party.
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