Occupy Detroit: The Obama Paradox
October 16, 2011 12:09 P.M.
By Henry Payne
Detroit, Grand Circus Park — Despite their grassroots pretensions, the Occupy Detroit protesters are very much a Democratic-party movement. Indeed, it is profoundly pro-Obama movement. Obama’s roots are as a community organizer, and the community-organized radicals of Occupy Detroit are his children. In Grand Circus Park on Friday, Rev. Jeremiah Wright would not have been out of place “God-damning America.”
So the most jarring irony of Friday’s anti-corporate rally was that Obama himself was just 40 miles away at a General Motors plant — the mother of all corporations — in Lake Orion, north of Detroit.
In fact, Obama was celebrating his bailout of GM and Chrysler — bailouts that the Occupy movement claims to loathe. But as the Obama-Occupy alliance proves, it is a false loathing. The Occupiers do not so much oppose bailouts as crave them for themselves.
All the demonstrators I spoke with were aware of Obama’s dance with the devil in Lake Orion — and they applauded him for it. After all, both events were heavily populated by UAW members. While Obama was flanked by UAW members at his 2:00 p.m. GM rally, the 6:00 p.m. Occupy Detroit crowd was flush with UAW members from organizations like Detroit Local 160 (the UAW is more than autos — it is also one of the state’s largest public-employee unions).
Instead of resenting Obama’s $50 billion for GM, they want federal bailouts for their own difficulties: To pay off home mortgages, student loans, health-care bills.
“Obama inherited a disaster, but he is doing what he can. GM does provide jobs,” said activist Keith Gunter of Peace Action of Michigan. “It’s a good thing Obama agreed to save them.”
A pro-Obama group of Albion College students was slightly more cynical — “Who else is there to vote for?” one lamented — and hoped that the president would do more to bail out their student-loan debt.
