STEPHEN LERNER

• Former SEIU board member
• Seeks to foment revolution that will derail the "failed free market corporatist ideology"
• Aims to “bring down the stock market” and “interfere” with wealthy people's “ability to be rich”

See also: Cloward-Piven Strategy Occupy Wall Street

Service Employees International Union



Formerly the director of the Service Employees International Union's property services division, Stephen Lerner is a longtime left-wing organizer. In 1996 Lerner lamented that labor unions, whose influence he deemed indispensable to the maintenance of “a just, democratic society," were "losing membership, influence, self-confidence, and strategic direction." Asserting that workers' “economic and political strength comes from collective organization [and] not individual wealth,” Lerner voiced his unwavering commitment to “rebuilding unions and transforming them into the leaders of a new movement for economic and social justice” that would address the needs of “the ever increasing numbers of people forced into poverty” by capitalism's inequities.

In 2007 Lerner gained notoriety as an organizer with Justice for Janitors, a civil-disobedience campaign that saw protesters in Houston take such aggressive measures as storming and occupying an executive conference room, chaining themselves to the front door of a prominent building, and bringing traffic to a halt by handcuffing themselves to trash cans in the middle of a busy intersection.

As the U.S. economy headed toward crisis in the summer of 2008, Lerner sensed an opportunity for launching a transformative left-wing revolution, as he noted in the socialist journal Monthly Review: “The meltdown of the economy, the resulting disenchantment with failed free market corporatist ideology, growing inequality, global warming/environmental degradation, and the war in Iraq are creating conditions that are ripe for organizing and ... movement building.... [I]t feels like we are on the edge of a moment of historic change.”

In November 2010 Lerner stopped working for SEIU amid rumors that he had been fired by the union's recently elected president, Mary Kay Henry, in a dispute over whether SEIU would “spend millions of dollars on a multi-city campaign to organize low-paid workers and attack the banks as Lerner wanted, or [pursue] more traditional organizing targets...” But according to SEIU official (and ACORN founder) Wade Rathke, Lerner remained on the union's international executive board and had merely been “placed on paid leave ... to think through his contribution to the union.”

Seeking to punish Wall Street firms for allegedly having stolen “$17 trillion” from the American middle class, Lerner helped organize a so-called “anti-banking jihad” which Wade Rathke had heralded in a March 2011 call for “days of rage in ten cities around JP Morgan Chase.”

At a “Left Forum” held at New York's Pace University on March 19, 2011, Lerner speculated that if he and his comrades could organize “half a million” homeowners to stage a mass “mortgage strike”—i.e., refuse to pay their mortgages—they could “put banks at the edge of insolvency again” and “literally cause a new financial crisis.” In a similar vein, Lerner urged college graduates to initiate “a debt strike” vis à vis their student loans. Such tactics were variations of the Cloward-Piven Strategy, which seeks to collapse the capitalist system by means of orchestrated crises, or, as Lerner puts it, “destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.”

Lerner further explained that “we are in a transformative stage of what's happening in capitalism … building something that really has the capacity to disrupt how the system operates.” Outlining his strategy to “bring down the stock market” and “interfere” with wealthy people's “ability to be rich,” he paraphrased a tactic which had been spelled out by the famed community organizer Saul Alinsky: “We have to politically isolate them, economically isolate them, and disrupt them,” said Lerner. Explaining that "a bunch of us around the country" had "decided" that JP Morgan Chase "would be a really good company to hate," Lerner added: “We are going to roll out over the next couple of months what will hopefully be an exciting campaign about JP Morgan Chase that is really about challenge [sic] the power of Wall Street.”

Specifically, Lerner envisioned “a week” of “civil disobedience” and “direct action” to be carried out “all over the city” of New York in early May of 2011. He and his forces would “roll into the JP Morgan shareholder meeting” and then initiate “a ten-state mobilization” that would similarly target “bank shareholder meetings around the country.” By waging such “brave and heroic battles challenging the power of the giant corporations,” Lerner hoped “to inspire a much bigger movement about redistributing wealth and power” in the United States.

On September 10, 2011, Lerner revealed his connection to the soon-to-be-launched Occupy Wall Street movement when he foretold that major protests would be staged “in Seattle, in L.A., in San Francisco, in Chicago, in New York, in Boston.” “We've got some stuff in Boston and New York that's going to really be spectacular,” he emphasized. “This is about building and creating power,” Lerner added. “We're not going to convince the other side that we're right through intellectual argument. We need to create power, and in a way we need to talk about how we create a crisis for the super rich.”

Between early 2009 and late 2011, Lerner visited the Obama White House four times: once for a large group's private tour, once for a Hanukkah celebration, and twice for private meetings with high-level executive offices.