After Election Protection, Is A General Strike the Way to Beat a Trump Coup?

 

-by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman

Donald Trump has made it clear he will not peacefully relinquish power after the coming election, no matter what the outcome.

To get him out of the White House, it may take the ultimate non-violent action: a nationwide general strike.

Trump says he’ll brand any legitimate vote count that shows him losing to be “fraudulent” and proclaim himself emperor for life.

He’ll push to fill RBG’s Supreme Court seat before the election to give himself a solid majority there should he lose it in the popular vote.

Until it reaches that point, those opposing his permanent dictatorship face an apocalyptic trifecta, a three-part test of the human ability to save our democracy, and our place on this planet:

1- Protecting the Actual Election:

The daily battle for election protection has long since escalated to ceaseless hand-to-hand trench warfare against Trump’s infamous assault on the democratic process.

It’s highly unlikely Trump will command a legitimate majority of the American electorate. But if he subverts enough of the electoral process to win a majority of the votes cast and counted, or of the Electoral College, American democracy and the human ability to survive on this planet may be finished.

Mainstream polls generally show Biden ahead, even in the swing states that Hillary lost. In a legitimate election, those would give him an Electoral College majority.

But the New York Times has also published the only graph that really matters: if the polls are “as wrong as they were in 2016,” Trump wins 278-260.

That margin could come from Trump’s escalation of his 2016 attack on every conceivable aspect of the electoral process. It ranges from stripping the registration rolls, to destroying the US Postal Service to trashing paper ballots, to demanding (in Florida) ex-felons pay fees before they can vote, to every other Dirty Trick imaginable, from blowing up drop boxes, to terrorizing in-person voters, to hacking digital imaging machines, to torching election centers and whatever else Roger Stone and his Nixonian thugs can conjure.

As we report at grassrootsep.org and discuss every Monday at our 90-minute zoom calls, the grassroots work of fighting back for a free and fair election is a desperate 24/7 race for survival, with just five weeks to prevail.

But we are handicapped by the lack of response from the Democratic Party. In 2000, Greg Palast and Bev Harris reported on how the Bush GOP led by W’s CIA brother Jeb (then Governor of Florida) stripped more than 90,000 citizens of color from the Florida voter rolls and flipped the electronic vote count in key counties. Al Gore stopped Jesse Jackson from staging protest demonstrations, failed to sue for a comprehensive state-wide recount, failed to protect south Florida vote counters, stopped the Congressional Black Caucus from challenging the illegitimate Florida Electoral College delegation and much more (he also failed to carry his home state of Tennessee, which would have won him the election).

The Gore Democrats have since done nothing significant to rid us of the Electoral College (which seated Trump in 2016) instead spending the next two decades trashing Ralph Nader. In 2004 we reported from Columbus on a hundred (literally) different ways the Bush-Rove GOP stole the decisive Ohio vote count from John Kerry. We briefed his staff on the dire detail. In response, with 250,000 votes still uncounted, Kerry shafted us all by instantly conceding.

Since then we’ve been endlessly attacked by Democrat and “progressive” writers who could not be bothered to come to Columbus or dig past faux interviews with corrupt hacks.

In 2016, Green Party candidate Jill Stein slogged into decisive Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, unearthing a rat’s nest of manipulation and theft. Hillary ignored it all, joined Gore and Kerry in a quick concession, then attacked Stein in her ghastly memoir.

In 2018, absurdly rigged outcomes in Florida were sealed by another aborted vote count. With no serious objection from the Democrats, they seated a US Senator and a Governor now stripping the right to vote from more than a million ex-felons who may owe small fees. Those negated votes could easily put Trump back in the White House.

So too in Georgia, where Stacy Abrams was denied the governorship by a corrupt, vote-burning KKK Secretary of State who again could hand yet another decisive state—- with two US Senate races—- to the Trump Cult.

Now, in 2020 , we face the ultimate desperation. While the Democrats again ignore the massive untapped “youth vote” (millennials & GenZ) hard-working election protectionists must fight Trump’s Dirty Tricks. With early voting and vote by mail, the most critical juncture is poll workers decide whether to allow a ballot to be counted.

Trump says he’ll spend $20,000,000 to hire 50,000 “volunteers” to assault the polls. Many may strong-arm poll workers to trash countless ballots from suspected voters of color who omit a middle initial or a dotted i. Without fair-minded stalwarts to withstand that assault, the election could be decided simply by how many ballots Trump’s minions can trash before they’re counted.

Election protectionists must also guarantee that voters stripped from the rolls are reinstated, that vote-by-mail ballots actually go out, that drop boxes are deployed and then protected, that early voters get paper ballots and aren’t harassed by armed terrorists at the polls, that digital images aren’t hacked or pitched, that they’re counted quickly and accurately, and more.

2020 could well turn on poll workers, poll monitors and site protectionists.

Most precincts require them to be local residents, but will allow them to be under 18, potentially marking a major generational transition in who conducts our elections.

All who marched for George Floyd and police reform now must become poll workers. Those election boards are begging them to come in. The days are long, but the pay can be good, potentially marking a monumental generational transition from an historically elderly crew of poll workers to one spearheaded by a new generation.

But once all the above is said and done, the future will likely depend on whether Biden and the Democrats will stand and fight against a stolen outcome.

Or, beyond that, whether there’s a larger, more deeply committed “small-d” grassroots movement willing to fight for democracy and survival where the Democratic Party is not.

2- Protecting the Polls Against Trump Terror Assault

As Greg Palast has shown, Trump has a “12th Amendment option” to throw the election.

Assuming he’s about to lose the popular and Electoral College vote, Trump can simply resort to organized violence, official and otherwise. He can send military hit squads and fascist pouring into the key voting stations.

Non-violent activists must be there to confront them.

Trump hates vote by mail and early voting largely because (among other things) their diffuse nature makes it harder to terrorize the actual electorate in person at the polls. Trump’s Ku Klux Klan father was all about preventing people of color and other untermenschen from voting.

But the polling stations are still there, along with the ballots. Trump’s minions could make November 3 a new Kristallnacht, with armed troops and militias blowing up drop boxes, trashing stored ballots, destroying imaging machines, torching election centers and warehouses, trashing the legitimate vote count.

That would include assaulting poll workers, jamming the ballot approval process, sabotaging the timely reports needed to seat the Electoral College delegations set to choose the next president.

Should Trump succeed—- as so many US-sponsored mobsters have done in Third World countries—- he could (as per the 12th Amendment) throw the election into the US House of Representatives, or back to Republican-dominated state legislatures.

A reshaped Supreme Court, with a 6-3 fighting majority, could seal the coup.

3- The Ultimate Resistance: A General Strike

THEN what happens? Will the public resist? Does this nation have a non-violent core strong to stop such a coup d’etat?

The ability and willingness of an aroused, uncompromising, multi-racial public to shut the country down in the face of such a coup may be the only way to make an electorally defeated mobster give up power.

As Trump telegraphs his full Mussolini, much of the labor force in key industries must be ready to literally “shut it down” while occupying the means of production and distribution.

A national non-violent resistance must be ready to peacefully disrupt business as usual, and to sustain that silence until Trump leaves.

There’s plenty of history behind a new American general strike.

The first, of sorts, came in Virginia, 1685. An upstart landowner named Nathaniel Bacon wanted Governor William Berkeley to conquer more indigenous land. Bacon drew together an army of black and white indentured servants that overthrew Jamestown, burned it to the ground and forced Berkeley to flee.

Both Bacon and Berkeley soon died, as did the Rebellion. But southern landowners quickly separated the races by inventing chattel slavery, history’s harshest form of human servitude. Turning a class system into a caste regime, they put into the category of “subhuman” and gave whites a “gift” of superiority. No matter how badly exploited a white worker might be, they were still legally superior to blacks. This “invention” of slavery was the “original sin” of racial separation that divides us to this day.

Centuries later, the black scholar W.E.B. DuBois dubbed the never-ending mass defection of black slaves and poor whites from the plantation south a “general strike” and urged it as a highly effective tactic.

In 1835 a three-week general strike in Philadelphia won the working class some brotherly love in the form of higher pay and a shorter work day.

In 1877 railway workers birthed the modern labor movement with the Great Railway Strike. Coming in response to a 10% pay cut by the Pennsylvania Railroads greedy CEO Tom Scott, angry workers spontaneously shut the national system, burning many rail yards to the ground.

In 1894 the great Eugene V. Debs led his young American Railway Union again shut the national system in support of workers at the Pullman factory in southern Illinois. The strike was broken with federal troops who killed at least 35 workers, and soon turned Debs into a Socialist.

In 1919, some 65,000 workers shut Seattle. The generally conservative American Federation of Labor joined with the radical Industrial Workers of the World to handle essential services like garbage collection and medical care.

In 1936-7, auto workers seized physical control of the General Motors production system in Flint. With 2,000 unionists on strike, the nascent United Auto Workers won a union contract soon duplicated in much of the rest of the industry. Strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo and throughout the US defined the decade.

Amidst the 1946 post-war crash, with some two million Americans unemployed, general strikes erupted in Rochester, Pittsburgh and Oakland, California. Workers supporting female retail clerks held Oakland for about five days.

In the wake of those strikes, a right-wing Congress passed the brutally anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act over Harry Truman’s veto. Democratic administrations have since failed to repeal that and other anti-worker laws, vastly weakening the American union movement.

As in France, 1968, European and Asian general strikes have brought down governments. The Soviet grip on Eastern Europe was broken in 1989 by massive non-violent outpourings, as was the Soviet Union itself in 1991. Slobodan Milosovic’s fascist Serbia was also toppled largely by mass non-violent demonstrations.

America’s movements for peace, civil rights and social justice ihave mobilized millions. The recent marches for George Floyd may collectively have been the largest in world history.

They may have moved the American mind on racism and other critical issues. But we’ve yet to face toppling a fascist thug intent on becoming Dictator for Life.

Mass marches alone cannot force Trump to step down. His joy at deploying troops and militia for mass killings is not in doubt. Countless millions could march for days with no tangible impact on Trump’s lethal mindset.

There’s no precedent for an American non-violent movement shutting down the country or toppling a dictator.

Woodrow Wilson did assume dictatorial power amidst World War I (which most Americans opposed) the infamous Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 (which was mostly his fault) and his 1918-20 Red Scare (which he used to illegally crush the Socialist Party).

Amidst it all, Wilson (an avowed White Supremacist) caught the flu and had a stroke, leaving his wife Edith to (badly) run the country for a year.

Meanwhile some 675,000 Americans died in an entirely avoidable Pandemic, along another 100,000+ on the killing fields of Europe, and 70 more in a futile assault on the Russian Revolution. The strikes of 1919 impacted the nation, but not sufficiently to rid us of Wilson.

Should Trump lose the election, he will proclaim it fraudulent and use force to keep power, and perhaps do even more damage than Woodrow.

There would be no effective non-violent response other than shutting the country down.

Let’s protect this election to make sure it doesn’t come to that.

If it does, let’s be prepared for a general strike far bigger and more effective than all that have come before.

You Know In Your Heart That the Day of Real Resistance Is Coming

You know in your hearts that only a #SixtiesStyleMovement will address this situation.

You know in your hearts that electeds are impotent or bought, and elections alone will never be enough.

You know in your hearts that the day of Real Resistance is coming.

How about now? https://t.co/eRo0V3Nnna

— Thomas Neuburger's errant politics (@Gaius_Publius) August 26, 2020

by Thomas Neuburger

A general strike counts as real resistance.
—Yours truly

The next horrific murders are upon us. In the bland reporting of the New York Times:

Arrest in Overnight Shooting During Unrest in Kenosha, Wis.

An Illinois resident was arrested in violence that occurred during a confrontation between demonstrators and a group of men armed with guns as protests continued over the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

KENOSHA, Wis. — An Illinois resident has been arrested in connection to a shooting that left two people dead and another person wounded during a chaotic night of demonstrations over the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis., officials said on Wednesday.

A court document from Lake County, Ill., shows that Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, was arrested in Antioch, Ill., on Wednesday morning after being charged with first degree intentional homicide in the fatal shooting that took place only hours earlier. (emphasis added)

The Times report portrays the event as "chaotic," and it's filled with details like this: "Tuesday evening was spent in a shifting, hourslong standoff between the police and protesters. Protesters assembled outside a newly erected metal barrier protecting the courthouse and threw water bottles, rocks and fireworks at the police."

As we'll see, the event was a lot less chaotic than it was reported to be. The order behind the chaos was cops appearing to work with the right-wing thugs to suppress the actual protesters.

Kyle Rittenhouse

This brings us to the shooter, Kyle Rittenhouse.

According to the Huffington Post report of the incident, "Police are investigating a group of men with guns who were lined up outside businesses a few blocks down the road from the courthouse, according to The New York Times. Ostensibly, the vigilantes were there to “protect” businesses from fires that had been set during previous nights of demonstrations. Though Rittenhouse’s connection to vigilante groups is unclear, he was quoted before the shooting saying that he considers himself a militiaman and was willing to use his rifle to “protect” people and property."

And Rittenhouse was very pro-cop. "A now-deleted Facebook page that appears to belong to Rittenhouse featured almost exclusively pro-police imagery and photos of the suspect carrying guns. At some point, he changed his profile image to a “Blue Lives Matter” sign and held a fundraiser for a police nonprofit called “Humanizing The Badge." 

Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha (source)

"We're going to push them down by you, 'cause you can deal with them, and then we're going to leave"

What's missing from these reports, both of which whitewash police actions, are details like these:

Cell phone video shows Kenosha Wisconsin police officers in an military vehicle telling armed White militia members they "appreciate them being there" and giving them bottled water; while in the background cops can be heard ordering protestors to disperse. pic.twitter.com/73SsfCUYWj

— Rebecca Kavanagh (@DrRJKavanagh) August 26, 2020

and these (click through to the video to hear, "cops told us, we're going to push them down by you, 'cause you can deal with them"):

Here, a militia member says cops told them they would "push" the protestors towards them because they knew they could handle them. pic.twitter.com/S6lzmJfOJe

— Rebecca Kavanagh (@DrRJKavanagh) August 26, 2020

and these:

Heard with my own ears on the scanner in Kenosha last night: "I can't tell if those are protestors or our guys" - says a cop as a group of 100 or so people was moving from one area to another. He was referring to the armed vigilantes "our guys" of course. #DefundThePolice

— The Bern Report (@TheBernReport) August 26, 2020

Even Rashida Tlaib understands what happened:

Look at him roaming freely while protestors are met with military war like equipment and tear gas. https://t.co/Va7wkf9X8l

— Rashida Tlaib (@RashidaTlaib) August 26, 2020

There are more reports like these, which, of course, will either go viral, or go unreported by the media most people read and listen to.

Systemic Change by Non-Systemic Means

It's more than obvious by now that cops are siding with right-wing thugs, using them even, against whoever stands with the protesters. When will this end?

It will never end by ordinary, electoral means...

...until those elections are backed by the kind of organized, 1960s-style movement... 

Mario Savio, leader of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, speaks to assembled students on December 7, 1964. (AP Photo / Robert W. Klein)

...that adds the critical mass of the people, chaotic and unruly, to the orderly exercise of power by elected officials who, frankly, with cops, also want the real left to lose.

The nation may not be to that point yet, but it's not far away. That's why big-media outlets like the New York Times want to paint these protests, all of them, as either "chaotic" or left-wing-violent only, and why they hide the state violence that incites and encourages those violent responses. A real left-wing movement — a 1960s-style revolt, a real rising of the people — is the stuff of nightmares for editors at the Times, and many of its readers as well.

Yet ... what will make a change that makes real change? Electing more Democrats? If they're the right ones, yes, that's needed but not enough.

Will the eighteenth protest after the thirtieth police murder of the hundredth or two-hundredth victim, black, brown or poor, of state-enforced austerity and racism — will that finally make a difference?

We've seen this movie. Trayvon Martin was murdered in 2012. How are things different today? What has America done since that sad day to make lives better and safer for the victims of our police — and the victims of the economic system that creates police victims?

I'll say it again:

You know in your hearts that the day of Real Resistance is coming.

How about now? 

A strike counts as resistance; AOC understands that. A general strike counts as real resistance. Will it take a general strike to make real change? If so, when should that start?
  

What Will the Real American Resistance Look Like — Chaotic Rebellion or Organized General Strikes?

Click to enlarge. Suitable for framing.

by Thomas Neuburger

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.
—Jay Gould, 1886

It's normally a bad idea to denigrate the other side's supporters in a fight, especially in a political fight like the one we're currently engaged in, and especially when the game being played is the oligarch's version of Eric Berne's "Let's You and Him Fight" — the one where the rich get the poor to kill each other, while they steal both of them blind.

So don't consider this piece to be about the other side's supporters, whichever side the "other side" is to you, so much as it is an indictment of us all, and a call for all of us to change our ways.

The Real Surrender Monkeys

The indictment comes from Juan Cole, writing at Informed Comment. Two notes before we begin. First, I'm going to quote at some length, so forgive me; his point is stronger that way.

Second, despite its headline, the point is not about resistance to Trump alone, but far more general than that. Is America's broken state the fault of Republicans, or do the corrupted leaders of both parties have a hand in what we suffer?

Here's Cole:

How did Americans become such Wimps? Silence as Trump kills tens of Thousands, Destroys Social Security and Post Office, Plots Election Fraud

Nicole Winfield and Lisa Marie Pane at the Associated Press write at the unbelief with which Europeans are staring at the United States, as we head for 300,000 dead from the coronavirus and our economy shrank 33% on an annualized basis last quarter, and we just appear to be all right with that.

Not only are we perfectly willing to toss grandma in an early grave on Trump’s say-so, but we are supine as he openly engineers the destruction of social security and medicare, and of the post office, on behalf of himself and the billionaire class he represents. That is after we sat by while he completely gutted all environmental regulations that got in the way of corporations making money off poisoning us. I don’t think the neutering of the EPA has even been reported on daytime cable news, though the prime time magazine shows on MSNBC have at least brought it up.

Americans imagine themselves rugged individualists. A cartoonist did a satire on us showing brawny guys, shirts off, with the logo “Rugged individualism works best when we obey.”

In fact, Americans are masochistic sheeple who let the rich and powerful walk all over them and thank them for the privilege. ...

The rich figured out in the 1980s that Americans are all form over substance, and if you put up for president a Hollywood actor like Ronald Reagan who used to play cowboys, they would swoon over him. In 1984 when Reagan ran against Walter Mondale, I saw a middle aged white Detroit auto worker interviewed who said he woudn’t vote for Mondale because he was a “panty-waist.” Reagan took away their right to strike and took away government services by running up the deficit and cutting taxes on the rich simultaneously, then claiming the government couldn’t provide the services the people had paid for because it is broke.

Reagan raised the retirement age from 65 to 67. Why? Most young people don’t realize that their health will decline in their late 60s and they often won’t actually get any golden years.

What did Americans do in response? They just bent over and took it.

Actually, it is the French who are much more like Americans imagine themselves to be. President Emmanuel Macron last December tried to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64. I can’t understand why. France has persistently high unemployment as it is.

In response, all hell broke loose. Some 30 unions went on strike, and they supported each other. Trains were interrupted. Trucking was interrupted. Life was interrupted. A million people came out into the streets. But one poll had 61% of the French approving of the strikes. They went on for months, and were very inconvenient. ...

Macron backed down on raising the retirement age.

In the 2000s, Americans ridiculed the French as "surrender monkeys" for not joining the "Coalition of the Willing (to Commit War Crimes in Iraq)."

That was particularly rich coming from a nation that, in 2000, had just witnessed its presidency stolen by a blatantly partisan Supreme Court — and lifted not a single finger to stop it. The French (and Germans, and Italians) would have been in the streets had that happened to them, burning cars and reputations until the wrong was redressed.

The 2000 election was a constitutional coup — two of them if you count the one attempted by George Bush's brother Jeb in Florida, whose own coup attempt was made moot by the U.S. Supreme Court's. Yet for almost every American, it happened on television only, a game show to be watched between dessert and the late-night comics.

Cole writes about how the French are not only willing to "throw a first class fit when the servants of the rich in government come after their lifestyles," but also how all of the unions and most of the working class had each other's backs during these actions.

For contrast, in the U.S. the United Food and Commercial Workers union recently filed a lone-wolf lawsuit against the Dept. of Agriculture for allowing poultry manufacturers to speed up production lines, and no other union joined with them. In France, according to Cole, "it wouldn’t have been one union filing a lawsuit. ... It would have been a massive set of mutually reinforcing strikes."

A massive set of mutually reinforcing strikes. Surrender monkeys indeed.

Civil War or Civil Chaos?

Now for the call to change our ways: At the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century, Americans face a crossroads. For everyone who isn't either independently wealthy (like most of the donors who make up the real Republican base), or comfortably tucked into the professional managerial class (whose interests the Democratic Party seems most to serve), daily life is a both horror show now and collapsing fast to something even worse.

If there were ever a time to rise up, it's today. And rise up Americans will, I'm sure of it. With Covid deaths high (1,000 a day as I write this), incomes insecure for all but work-at-home professionals, and evictions just one or two missed paychecks away, even for the pre-Covid comfortable — with all this at the door, why would they not?

The question isn't will they rise up, but how will they revolt?

Will Americans rebel in an organized, focused way — like colonial Americans, for example, rose against British taxes, with planned resistance and coordinated action?

Or will the next rebellion devolve to the kind of battle that Jay Gould contemplated more than a century ago, a civil war where half of the suffering class attacks the other half, a chaotic free-for-all that allows the muscular security state to bootstomp in and "restore order" — all while our modern Jay Goulds (Jamie Dimon, Jeff Bezos, our hedge fund kings and queens, our CEOs of Google, Disney and Comcast), sail blindly off to their private-jet cocktail sunset, feeding on caviar and broken hearts?

Will Americans rise up effectively, with targets in mind — Medicare for All, Student Debt Forgiveness, Free Public Colleges and Universities, an actual End to Police Violence and Murder — and fight the misery descended upon them all?

Or will they rise up chaotically, their legitimate protests hijacked by Boogaloo Boys and FBI provocateurs, a faux-revolt where fascists battle anti-fascists, the former aided by violent, racist police, until the nation, getting nowhere, yearns for the security of a rapid but "managed" decline over the insecurity of a state-funded free fall to despair?

The time to decide all this is now, before the real first spark, the one that starts the American Arab Spring, is lit. If a General Strike seems frightening, consider the alternative, a five-way civil war with armed cops permanently stationed in the streets and skirmishes everywhere.

The French learned their lesson in 1789 and the century that followed their world-historical revolt, though it took them six generations to get things right.

"America, rise, or you will surely fall" is a lesson this generation has yet to learn. The task is not only to rise from five decades of sleep, but in rising, to act in a way that dispels the nightmare, and doesn't deepen it.
   

Hollow Words “Make Me Do It” Can Be Filled Like A Piñata By Pre-Election Threat Of Post-Inauguration General Strike

We'll help you get it done, Joe-- come join our one big union

Exactly six months from today: Inauguration Day, 2021. Consider what the impact would be, over the six months until inauguration day (on January 20, 2021), and the subsequent "100 days," "10 days" and "1 day," if hundreds of organizations, supported by millions of people, starting next month (in August), publicly threatening and preparing for a general strike to start 72 hours after the inauguration, with these organizations agreeing, far in advance of the inauguration, to call off their general strike if the newly inaugurated President, within those 72 hours, signs executive orders tailored to jump-start a short list of major overdue federal actions.

There is a need to prevent a strong Presidential election victory margin for the anti-Trump presidential ticket, from being opportunistically interpreted as a "blank check" for the unrepentant Biden/Democratic Establishment (not to mention their new comrades, in the emerging Democratic-branded uni-party, among the Romneys, Bushes, Bloombergs, Kasichs, etc.). There is an urgent need to pre-empt the reversion to federal austerity, which is otherwise baked in, as the Friedmanite elite reaction to the recent bailout binge. There is an equally urgent need to pre-empt normalization of the Pandemic-catalyzed Panopticon ("just for Pandemics-- of course") jointly run by the intelligence community and their new BFF high-tech oligopolists-cum-monopolists.

Obvious is the need to encourage the Pentagon leadership (and their future employers in the "war for profit" industries), to decide that their recent position ("don’t send our troops to intervene in and deepen a domestic American civil war-- especially one destructive of risk race relations within the military") is prudent to stick with, even if the intervention policy is floated not impulsively and and divisively by Trump but instead under color of unifying rhetoric through customer elite consensus-building channels.

Perhaps all of this will reassure-- and secure more votes against Trump from-- supporters of Bernie and local Green (and even Libertarian) candidates, policies and principles, and from the many non-voters who long ago became convinced that "my vote doesn’t matter because Presidents will do whatever their biggest donors tell them to do." The above proposal can enhance rhetorical framing, coalition building and activist mobilization, largely by:

• Acknowledging the fact, known to many and suspected by more, that legislative sabotage by lobbyists (and plausible "I tried" excuses for presidents and other elected officials abandoning their campaign promises) is the single output that our present system is best-designed to ensure-- especially in the short time period before substantive debate is drowned out by the rallying cry "compromise all to win suburban seats in midterms!"
• Softening the otherwise sharp wedge being driven by Biden’s platform and position "task forces," and other backroom negotiations for endorsements, to deepen divides and acrimony between:



(a) sceptics, and


(b) those Progressives who see no path forward other than engaging in these processes, despite the long track record of money-drenched backrooms being weaponized to neutralize and discredit Progressive leaders.

• Offering all Progressives, whether they now feel wedged one way, the other way, or chopped in half, new outlets (for their organizing and proselytizing energies) that are:



(a) more productive than engaging with Biden’s task forces and backroom negotiations,


(b) vastly more productive than debating whether it is strategic and/or virtuous for Progressives to self-censor on Biden’s long career of (and his biggest donors’ embrace and reinforcement of) grossly anti-Progressive bugs and features, and


(c) infinitely more productive than arguing about whether Trump’s electoral college prospects have any chance not only to overcome the Pandemic’s decimation and traumatization of senior communities and other prior Trump supporters in Florida and other swing states, but also to overcome a (vote lawsuit-deciding) Supreme Court that has ever-more reasons to perceive Trump as a threat to the very domestic system and global primacy from which the Court derives its power and prestige.

"I Can't Breath" by Nancy Ohanian

How to go about all this? Start with a website and a peoples' plebiscite to determine the list and text of the executive orders which should be:

• collected on a website
• ranked in importance by means of votes solicited from all U.S. residents (limited to one vote per Social Security number and probably per ISP address)
• specifying (also by the above voting process) the minimum number, of highest-ranked orders, that most participants regard as sufficient to avert (or defer) the general strike.

Ready for action? Start just listening to some music... maybe dancing? Meditating? It's our country; no one else is going to save it for us.

Bernie Sanders, Organized Labor & the Use of Force

Striking mill workers facing off with National Guardsmen in Greenville, S.C., in 1934. (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

by Thomas Neuburger

     Power concedes nothing without a demand. 
     —Frederick Douglass

One of the things I worry about in the coming election is not just whether a progressive will be elected, but whether enough of a progressive will be elected. I've written about that previously — see "Thoughts on Warren and Sanders: How Much Change Is Needed in 2021?" — but there's a lot more to say on the subject.

One example of Sanders' more aggressive-progressive approach to both policy and process was recently captured in, interestingly, the New York Times, and by, also interestingly, former Hillary Clinton supporter Jamelle Bouie. (For an example of Bouie's 2016 Clintonism, see "Bernie Sanders' Scorched Earth Run Against Hillary Clinton Is a Mistake").

And yet Bouie is onto something — that the fight against a radically entrenched, radically anti-worker establishment must be engaged with force, not negotiation or the use of insider leverage alone.

That argument makes itself. To quote the great Frederick Douglass, "Power concedes nothing without a demand." And more often than not, that demand must be backed by enough force to make the demand impossible to ignore. It must be accompanied by an "offer that can't be refused."

From Bouie's article on Sanders' needed radicalism, here's his retelling of the turbulent, violently repressed yet successful labor strikes of the 1930s. Consider the force these labor actions represent, and consider if anything less would have worked. Also consider how far labor leaders are today from anything like these approaches.

First, Bouie discusses Sanders' radical labor proposals (emphasis mine):

The Necessary Radicalism of Bernie Sanders

His plan to enhance workplace democracy puts the strike back where it belongs: at the center of political power.

... [T]he most important parts of Sanders’s plan have to do with striking and other powerful levers. He would give federal employees the right to strike and ban the permanent replacement of any striking workers. He would also end the prohibition on secondary boycotts, which keeps workers from pressuring “neutral” employers — like suppliers and other service providers — in the course of an action against their “primary” employer. This prohibition closes an important avenue for collaboration among workers. Lifting the restriction would open new paths for collective action.

This push to enhance workers’ freedom to strike is more consequential than it might look at first glance. Conflict was the engine of labor reform in the 1930s. And mass strikes and picketing, in particular, pushed the federal government to act.

In the post-war era, labor has been successively hobbled by these restriction, each encoded into law. Then Bowie tells the story of the mass strikes of the mid-1930s that forced passage of the Roosevelt-era pro-labor laws in the first place.

It's an amazing, inspiring, impossible-to-believe-in-today's-environment tale:

In 1934, the historian Irving Bernstein writes in “The Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941,” “there were 1856 work stoppages involving 1,470,000 workers, by far the highest count in both categories in many years.” In that year, nearly five years into the Great Depression, “labor’s mood was despair compounded with hope.”

The despair was self-explanatory. The hope came from the growing conviction that workers had to act of their own accord — to, Bernstein wrote, “take matters into their own hands and demonstrate their collective power to recalcitrant employers through the strike.” And strike they did.

In Toledo, Ohio, for example, workers demanding union recognition organized a strike against Electric Auto-Lite, an automobile parts manufacturer, and its related firms. When Auto-Lite and its partners hired strikebreakers and kept their factories open, the union worked with the American Workers Party, a small, radical political party that organized jobless workers to keep them from breaking strikes.

Together, unionists and labor radicals led mass pickets against Auto-Lite. Thousands of workers, employed and unemployed, surrounded the plant. Fighting broke out when a strikebreaker attacked a striker. The police and company guards attacked, and a battle ensued. The National Guard arrived and the fighting continued. In their attempt to break the siege and evacuate the strikebreakers, troops killed two strikers and injured more than a dozen others. After a week of violence, Auto-Lite agreed to close the factory. The next month, after additional mass protests and the threat of a general strike, the company backed down, recognizing the union and agreeing to rehire the strikers.

Mass pickets appeared elsewhere in the country. Late that summer, the United Textile Workers of America called a national strike, demanding union recognition and a shorter workweek. Hundreds of thousands of workers formed pickets at mills as far north as Maine and as far south as Alabama. “This strike now in progress,” Joseph Shaplen reported in The New York Times, “is obviously a mass movement.”

The strike was most active in North and South Carolina, where strikers closed hundreds of plants. “Moving with the speed and force of a mechanized army,” Shaplen wrote in a Sept. 4, 1934, report, “thousands of pickets in trucks and automobiles scurried the countryside in the Carolinas, visiting mill towns and villages and compelling the closing of the plants.” He continued: “The growing mass character of the picketing operations is rapidly assuming the appearance of military efficiency and precision and is something entirely new in the history of American labor struggles.”

Of course, the reaction to the Auto-Lite strike from those in power was violence:

Mill owners and management responded with private militiamen and armed strikebreakers, all backed by state and local authorities. A police officer killed a picketer in Augusta, Ga. In one South Carolina mill town, sheriff’s deputies fired on picketers, killing seven. In Rhode Island, armed state troopers — equipped with machine guns — drove a crowd of 600 strikers from a mill that refused to close. And during a confrontation in Burlington, N.C., soldiers bayoneted several picketers.

Bayonets, machine guns, the arsenal of the State in defense of ... I have to say it ... capital and its owners. This is what labor, working people, always face when they resist the wishes of wealth.

Finally, the Roosevelt administration capitulated to the strikers: "The strike ended when the Board of Inquiry for the Cotton Textile Industry, established by President Franklin Roosevelt at the start of the strike, issued its report, which recommended a federal study of work conditions and pay." The unions' leaders declared a victory and ended the strike — to the great and bitter disappointment of the striking workers, I might add, since even under Roosevelt workers didn't trust government to ultimately side with them when the final report was issued.

There were many other strikes in 1934; it was a turbulent year:

The year saw many other monumental strikes. After the San Francisco police killed four workers in a confrontation with striking longshoremen and their allies, local unions announced a general strike. More than 150,000 workers left their jobs, paralyzing the city. And in Minneapolis, tens of thousands of workers walked off the job in solidarity with a Teamsters strike in the city.

It was this widespread labor struggle — as well as an overwhelming victory for New Deal Democrats in the 1934 midterms — that created new space for political action in 1935. Senator Robert Wagner of New York introduced a labor bill that would give workers “the right to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing.” Facing re-election and eager to shore up support from labor, Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act that summer.

That's how the National Labor Relations Act got passed — not because labor asked, or negotiated, or leveraged deals with insiders, cleverly and carefully trading one thing for another. The law was passed because FDR had two choices — do what Hoover had done and call out the army (thus risking his support in the 1936 election), or give in to labor's demands because those demands were backed by a force — constant and national strikes — that no one could ignore.

Sanders' radical plan, which is curiously and academically called his "theory of change," is plainly and simply the massive use of force — the wielding of his multi-million-person mailing list to mobilize anti-establishment resistance and demand that his policies be passed.

These days, given how entrenched insiders are in their force-defended world, I don't trust anything but outside force to dethrone them. Let us negotiate with them after we've given them no other choice, not before. For example, consider what a nationwide general strike would do today to the balance of power in the U.S.

Any course of action — any "theory of change" — that doesn't depend primarily on force is doomed, I fear, to fail. And if it does fail, I also fear for the fragile, pre-revolutionary nation it attempted to save.