SEIU's Communist Behavior

The recent story concerning the SEIU's May 16th protest at Bank of America's senior executive Greg Baer's home displays a potentially disturbing trend as union organizers bussed in its members, totaling approximately 500 people, who surrounded Baer's home and invaded his private property. Besides these actions, the demonstration outside Baer's home coincided while one of his children was home by himself while Baer was away at another son's baseball game. The chants and bullhorn speeches outside the home caused the frightened boy to lock himself in the bathroom until his father returned home. For further information and details of the group's behavior, Fortune magazine has an Op-Ed article by journalist and Baer's neighbor, Nina Easton, who witnessed the event.

This tactic adopted by the SEIU is not surprising when one knows the background of the organization's Marxist philosophies as described by its recently retired President, Andy Stern. A man who has become famous not only because of his leadership role in the SEIU organization, but more so because of his status as the person who most visited the Obama White House at least through July of 2009. Even during his campaign, then Democratic Presidential hopeful, Barack Obama, stated that SEIU's "agenda has been my agenda," and that he "talked to Andy Stern" before voting on health care in the Senate. He also spoke to SEIU representatives concerning immigration and other issues in the U.S. Senate at the time.

The French philosopher Voltaire is attributed with the quote "history does not repeat itself, [humanity] does." Well it seems perhaps that this sentiment is true in the case of the SEIU; or perhaps it is just very familiar with its Marxist past. In The Black Book of Communism, a text written by several different authors describing the history of Communism in the 20^th century, Pascal Fontaine describes the same tactic being used by Fidel Castro's "Committees for Defense of the Revolution" or CDRs. These CDRs were "small neighborhood committees" whose leadership was responsible for "surveillance of 'counterrevolutionary' activities."

Fontaine describes the function of these CDRs as such:

The CDRs are responsible for organizing actos de repudio (acts of repudiation) designed to marginalize and break the resistance of opponents...and their families. A crowd gathered in front of the opponent's house to throw stones and attack the inhabitants. Castroists slogans and insults are written on the walls. The police intervene only when they decide that the "mass revolutionary action" is becoming physically dangerous for the victims.... Actos de repudio destroy the links between neighbors and damage the fabric of society to bolster the omnipotence of the socialist state.

This tactic was used repeatedly within Castro's Communist Cuba into the 1990s.

While the SEIU and its defenders would likely point to the differences in the levels of violence between their protest and the CDRs of Cuban Communists; an important point to note is that this is the first reported incident of this type by the SEIU, and they were willing to violate the property rights of a citizen (another attribute of Marx's Communist Manifesto), and it is likely that the level of violence will only increase with each display of this action. While fear of police reprisal or loss of public support may have limited the protesters behavior to simply passive law breaking in performing trespassing upon Mr. Baer's property; ultimately they hope to eliminate those aspects of society against them so that they can then perform the more violent acts, as demonstrated in St. Louis last summer, which are not only described in Cuba, but have been attributed to other Communist nations, past and present: the extermination of the bourgeois or middle class of society to be replaced by the "proletariat." For as Andy Stern stated concerning Marx's closing line in the Communist Manifesto, "WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!.. It's just not a slogan anymore. It's a way we're going to have to do our work."

http://money.cnn.com/2010/05/19/news/companies/SEIU_Bank_of_America_protest.fortune/index.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzG0xpkjWrA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ1NJaCtIkM&feature=related

http://biggovernment.com/mikeflynn/2009/11/06/obamas-shock-troops-seiu-and-political-intimidation-in-st-louis/

Courtois, Stephane, Nicolas Werth, et.al. trs, Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.