It's time for a General Strike!

The DNC and Kerry would denounce it, but so what? We've been leaving the leadership in their hands too long. Voting doesn't work anymore. It's nullified through media lies at best, outright fraud at worst. Let's shut the fucking country down and see how W and his corporate allies like them apples.

A few unions on board would help, but considering they represent less than 10% of the private sector workforce, we could do it without the spineless labor bureaucrats.

We pick a day and a few cities to rally in. We get enough people in certain worksites on board, then when the designated time comes, everybody walks off the job and to the rally.

Risky? Sure, but it's even riskier to allow the extreme right wing to continue its steady march towards a fascist state. Everybody's saying "whatever it takes" and all that jazz. Let's match rhetoric with action.

they got to know we aren't going ot bend over for them

organizational strategy if enough people think it's a good idea and are serious about organizing it. General strikes are illegal-- well, at least it's illegal for unions to engage in them under Taft-Hartley-- so from now on we will refer to it as "taking a day off work to rally against Bush" or something like that, and like I said we don't have to have official union sanction to do it, just the involvement of rank-and-file leaders.

http://www.generalstrike.us

I just registered the domain and am setting it up through my cnx.com site. We can put a site together and get word out through cyberspace, and hopefully the corporate media whores will pick up on it as an "oh, those crazy liberals" story.

advocating for. Under certain circumstances a general strike would be illegal, and it would be of little use advocating for anything illegal on a public website, as the Feds would shut down the website but fast.

But it's a good start. Why don't you set up a private forum there, and PM those of us who are interested the info plus usernames and passwords?

...and the domain should be active throughout the net in a few days.

In the meanwhile, I'm going to set up a mailing list through cnx.com for those who want to discuss this, potentially the greatest act of civil disobedience in the nation's history.

Anyone wanting to join in the discussion, please PM me your E-Mail address, and I'll send an opt-in message to you for the list. Thanks.

I agree. We are 1/2 of America we can do something about vote fraud by not going to work or buying anything until there's a real change.

I mean, what exactly would we be striking against? I don't think that it has much viability unless we get news of millions upon millions of disenfranchised voters. While I'm not saying that intimidation didn't go on, I don't think that it's anywhere near the current margin of 3.5 million votes.

The Republicans played this election brilliantly, as much as I hate to say it. They used the gay marriage issue to successfully mobilize their evangelical base in several key states (especially those with ballot initiatives to ban it), while simultaneously attacking Kerry relentlessly to raise doubts in the minds of a lot of middle-of-the-road voters. They realize that modern politics is a gutter war, while Democrats still seem to believe that we can win by playing nice. Just look at the contrast between the convention themes for proof of this.

Forget about a general strike for right now. Instead, continue to organize. Capitalize on the work that was pioneered by the Dean campaign. This is a marathon, not a sprint. If we truly want to win out in the long term, despite the dark skies on the horizon, we need to build the organizations that will propel us to victory on every level.

the right-wing's steady march to power out of the DNC's hands and out of the hands of union bureaucrats. They don't have the vision or guts of the right-wing zealots, and that's why we are losing. We need a big reorganization of the progressive movement from the bottom up, and we need a big, powerful, clearly visible action to kick-start it. Rallies and marches are a waste of time because the media largely ignores them and the only people affected by them are the rally participants themselves. We need a rally/march with some economic muscle behind it.

How do you think we got Social Security, minimum wage, and all that jazz? Because FDR was a nice guy? No, because of the biggest strike wave this country has ever seen forcing the politicians' hand. The objective conditions are different now (no Great Depression), so I don't think we'll see anything like the 30s, but we can do a one-day action to inspire further organization.

I'm well aware of how we got progressive reforms in this country through the end of WWII. But the thing to remember is that those movements succeeded because they got the majority of the mainstream behind them. They succeeded because politicians could no longer ignore them and remain in office.

Do you think that a general strike right now would have the majority of people behind it? Get real. It would be a futile and senseless act, without a unifying purpose, and would only serve to marginalize and actually hurt those taking part.

I'll say it once again. ORGANIZE. That's the key for both the short and long term.

It would require a lot of organization, but if we could pull it off it would inspire others to organize and take action.

I'm well aware of how we got progressive reforms in this country through the end of WWII. But the thing to remember is that those movements succeeded because they got the majority of the mainstream behind them. They succeeded because politicians could no longer ignore them and remain in office.

HOW? How did they get so many people behind them? Action. Organization and action go hand in hand. The first sit-down strike took place in Canton, Ohio, and it was almost completely spontaneous. Others in that area followed their example, and within a year the entire country was engulfed in sit-down strikes (many spontaneous)-- the labor unions like the UAW and URW didn't start using it as an organizing tactic until the practice had already been established through spontaneous grass-roots organizing/action.

Look, I've organized unions, and a big mistake people often make is not knowing when to stop the organizational groundwork and just take action. Because, guess what? In the majority of union campaigns, most people will not get involved until a small group of people get organized and start demonstrating leadership through action. Why shouldn't the same principle apply when trying to organize an entire country? We'll never get anywhere without taking risks. Everyone wants to win the safe way. Well, sorry, but it doesn't work that way.

... I agree, this could hurt me and my family more than help

From my inbox (and a follow-up email follows):

To: Urgent Response Network
From: No Stolen Elections! Campaign

Dear Friends,

It is here: Election Day 2004. Now is the time to make sure everyone gets to the polls and casts their vote. But we also know that there also have already been major voting rights problems, and that’s why tens of thousands have already signed the No Stolen Elections! pledge. If there is significant election fraud, we are committed to be out on the streets protesting as long as necessary to ensure that every vote is counted.

Many national groups and leaders such as Julian Bond, Jesse Jackson and Dolores Huerta have become part of this Urgent Response Network. Late on election night, November 2nd, we will put out the word through the www.nov3.us website, text messages and massive emailing about whether or not we will activate the network. Please read this second action alert, and get ready.

* * *


NO STOLEN ELECTIONS! www.Nov3.US
Second Action Notice:

1. WATCH for the Word - In the case of significant election fraud, the Urgent Response Network will be be activated via email, phone, text-messaging, and the web. To receive notice as to whether the network has been activated, you can check the www.Nov3.US website, you can check your email (if you've provided it to us), and you can receive text message updates (see below). The Network will help provide up-to-date information and identify important demands, messages, and action sites!

2. NEW Text Messaging Service - Please sign up to receive the word via your cell phone. We are no longer using textmob as our main service. You can either sign up for our very own text messaging service at http://voip.radicaldesigns.org/subscribe.php?organization_ID=9, or you can sign up by simply calling in to 917-779-0015 from your cell phone.

3. PREPARE Your Local Response - Go to the website and click on "Directory of Local Actions," and see if someone in your community has already organized a rally, public meeting, or other event for November 3rd, and beyond. If so, please contact them and help them out. If not, take steps NOW to organize an event, and please post the details on the website. Click on "What You Can Do" for tips and suggestions for your local organizing, and for a PDF poster you can download for local use. Please share any press releases you send out with out media team: media@nov3.us - please also send us any local media coverage of your No Stolene Elections! organizing.

4. CONTRIBUTE - Go to the website and click on "Contribute!" to make a contribution to the No Stolen Elections! campaign. For the timebeing, the costs of coordinating this campaign are limited to field support, web, communications costs. But we expect that if Urgent Response Network is mobilized, costs will increase significantly. We need to be prepared. Please contribute today.

5. SPREAD the word - Go to the website and click on "Spread the Word." Use the form that is there to send out a letter to everyone you know asking them to join you in signing the pledge. On that same "Spread the Word" page there is also a banner at the bottom. Click on that to see an array of banners and buttons you can add to your website as links to the No Stolen Elections! campaign.


6. READ & FORWARD the following No Stolen Elections! article:

Florida’s Palm Beach County Bracing for the Electoral Storm


By Medea Benjamin and Deborah James
November 1, 2004
(West Palm Beach, Florida) Odile Dumas’ daughter Monique, a student at Howard University in Washington D.C., was so anxious to vote that back in September she requested an absentee ballot from Palm Beach County in Florida. On Friday, just five days before the election, when her ballot still hadn’t arrived, she called her mother Odile in a panic. Odile immediately went to the Supervisor of Elections office to get her daughter’s ballot and Federal Express it to her. But the lines were too long and she had to get to work. So she returned on Saturday and took her place on line. “My black ancestors were jailed and killed for trying to vote,” said Odile. “The least I can do is stand in line so that my daughter can vote.” Odile’s patience turned to exasperation, however, when the 8-hour wait meant that she had missed the deadline for Federal Express and the wait was all for naught. “My daughter has just lost her right to vote,” said Odile. “Is this the democracy we fought for?”

Odile was not alone in her frustration. Also on line was Shelly Marcus, trying to get an absentee ballot that her son Joshua, a student at Emory College, had requested on September 11. “My son is 18 and this was his first opportunity to vote for president. I’m ashamed that once again, Palm Beach can’t get it right.” Gregory Berman, who waited on line for 8 hours and 40 minutes to get an absentee ballot for his 90-year-old father in a nursing home, was furious. “No one in America should have to wait 8 hours to vote, and certainly not to get an absentee ballot that the county was supposed to send out long ago. What you are witnessing here in Palm Beach County is democracy in crisis­again.”

Welcome to Palm Beach County, home in 2000 of the infamous butterfly ballots, “Jews for Buchanan”, and hanging chads. The infamous Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore was voted out of office in this past August ­ but unfortunately her term doesn’t end until January. That gives her an opportunity to muck up one more election as her parting salvo. And before election day has even arrived, it looks like she’s succeeding.

In both Palm Beach County and neighboring Broward County, run by a Democratic Supervisor, there have been a record number of requests for absentee ballots­mostly from the elderly, disabled, voters living outside the county, and people who don’t trust the new paperless voting machines. Both counties have been flooded by complaints from people who never received their ballots. In Broward, when the media reported that 58,000 absentee ballots seemed to have “disappeared,” Supervisor Brenda Snipes opened up an emergency center to field calls, brought in volunteers to call all 21,000 out-of-town voters, and overnighted thousands of ballots with prepaid overnight return envelopes. Here in Palm Beach County, Theresa LePore’s constituents had no comparable support.

Ms. LePore also put obstacles in the way of people wanting to vote early. One of the solutions to the calamity of the 2000 election was to institute early voting, an option for voters to go to the polls up to two weeks in advance. It is estimated that one-third of Florida’s voters will take advantage of this new option. Yet after 10 days of voting, out of 744,000 registered voters in Palm Beach County, less than 30,000 had been able to vote early­ one of the lowest turnouts in the state. One reason is that Theresa LePore offered her constituents only eight locations for early voting in the entire county, making the waiting time in Palm Beach County longer than anywhere else in the state. “These long lines are ridiculous,” said Omar Khan, whose father, a diabetic who was fasting for Ramadan, was forced to abandon his attempt to vote after hours of standing in the hot sun. “Either it is tremendous incompetence or deliberate voter suppression. In either case, the supervisor is not doing her job.” Liz Grisaru, a volunteer lawyer with Kerry’s Voting Rights Protection Team, said that they had tried to negotiate with Theresa LePore for more early voting locations, more voting machines, more poll workers, and longer hours, but all of their efforts were rebuffed. “The Supervisor has failed miserably in her duty to the public by not responding to the large volume of voters,” said Ms. Grisaru.

Another example of Ms. LePore’s attempts to put up obstacles relates to newly registered voters. Secretary of State Glenda Hood, herself an old family friend of the Bushes who is proving to be as partisan as her predecessor Katherine Harris, directed county officials to nullify applications if the applicants didn’t check a box saying they were citizens, despite the fact that elsewhere on the application they have signed an oath of citizenship. While Broward and Miami-Dade counties are ignoring this bureaucratic requirement that disenfranchises new voters, in Palm Beach, Ms. LePore is following the directive.

And don't forget the issue of direct disenfranchisement of former felons - a practice which dates back to the times of slavery. This year's list in Florida, prepared by a private consulting firm that donates heavily to the Republican Party, disproportionately included African Americans (who vote Democrat nine to one) yet only 61 Hispanic names (who vote heavily Republican in Florida). The list was dropped after a lawsuit forced the list into the light of day, yet the ACLU estimates that 600,000 people in Florida, predominantly African Americans, are denied their voting rights because of their criminal history,

Another explosive issue is the paperless electronic voting machines that will be used by about half the voters in Florida. Ms. LePore spent $14 million in federal funds provided by the Help America Vote Act on this supposed solution to the problems of the butterfly ballots and hanging chads of the 2000 elections. But to be audited in the case of a close election or contested voting, electronic voting machines must yield a paper trail. Yet Glenda Hood and Ms. LePore fought to make it illegal to do a paper recount. Since the introduction of paperless electronic voting in March of 2002, Palm Beach County has witnessed one election in which the front-runner ­ who entered the election with a 17-point lead over his nearest opponent ­ finished an upset third. In the following two elections, the number of people who came to vote - but whose votes were not registered ­ greatly exceeded the margin of victory. These inexplicable anomalies sufficiently outraged local Democratic Congressman Robert Wexler that he unsuccessfully filed suit against Ms. LePore and the State of Florida to force the adoption of a paper trail.

So while hundreds of thousands of citizens in Florida are being prevented from voting due to problems with absentee ballots, obstacles in early voting, excessive technicalities barring registration, and felon disenfranchisement, even those who actually make it to the polls have little guarantee that their votes will be counted correctly by the voting machines. If the strategy of the democratic forces is an unprecedented voter mobilization, the strategy of the Republicans in Florida is clearly voter suppression and possibly even outright theft.

What we’ve seen in Florida so far demonstrates a clear lesson. The efforts of tens of thousands of volunteers to get folks registered and out to vote are paying off handsomely with massively increased voter participation. The efforts of monitors documenting irregularities like the Fair Election International (www.fairelection.us) delegation of Global Exchange (www.globalexchange.org) and groups like Election Protection (www.electionprotection.org) to help voters resolve problems, are indispensable. Yet the specter of a stolen election looms large, and Floridians are bracing themselves.

“I’m worried,” said Janis Botsko, a local Democratic activist who has been working non-stop to register voters, call voters and knock on their doors. “I think there are going to be a lot of shenanigans. After all, we have the grand combination of Jeb Bush, Glenda Hood and Theresa LePore. But we also have a plan to counter their shenanigans, and that is to overwhelm them with huge numbers of voters. There will be such a groundswell that they won’t be able to get away with it.”

And if that doesn’t work, these angry voters will not sit by quietly. Many have already signed the No Stolen Elections Pledge (see www.nov3.us) and are setting up their emergency protest sites at federal buildings and elections offices, just in case. “Here in Florida we’ve learned to prepare for hurricanes,” said West Palm activist Brian Hefner. “And if that’s what happens on November 2, this time we’ll be ready.”

Medea Benjamin and Deborah James are in Florida observing the election with CodePink (www.codepinkalert.org). They are also part of the No Stolen Election campaign (www.nov3.us).

* * *
NO STOLEN ELECTIONS! www.Nov3.US

"This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." ~ Frederick Douglass, 1857

Also from my inbox:

To: Urgent Response Network
From: No Stolen Elections!

* * * STAND BY! BE VIGILANT! * * *

Dear All,

It is now 12 Midnight Eastern time on the night of
Nov.2. At this point in time the election results are
still very much in doubt. Although it is clear that
there has been widespread voter intimidation, fraud or
suppression, it is not yet clear whether these have
affected the outcome of the election. We will be
sending another assessment at about 9 A.M. eastern
time on Nov. 3.

Here is a bit more detail as to our assessment of what
we know so far.

The main issues of voter suppression seem to have
occurred prior to election day itself. Most notable
were the attempt to illegally purge the voter rolls by
the Republican Secretary of State in Florida and the
Ohio Republican Secretary of State's attempt to
disqualify all voters registrations not written on
80-pound paper. There has also been a tremendous
amount of false information spread about voting and
registration, especially in communities of color.

There is still great controversy around the
35,000-plus voter registration challenges launched by
the Republicans in both Wisconsin and Ohio, states
where the candidates are presently running neck in
neck, and the 60,000-plus missing absentee ballots in
Florida. The processes surrounding provisional ballots
still remain unclear.

The Republicans largely, but not totally, stepped back
from their threats to launch massive voter challenges
at the polls on election day. There was certainly an
impressive voter turnout. Still there were thousands
of reported incidents affecting the vote, including
very long lines and shortages of ballots and
translators. Additionally, there have been reports of
first-time and student voter purging due to dubious ID
requirements, and a whole collection of reports about
electronic glitches.

A looming issue is vote spoilage caused by computer
error. Some say this disqualifies more than a million
votes and that many of these might be African American
and Latino voters. This was documented in Florida in
Election 2000, but no good numbers are out on this as
of yet.

We want to reiterate our main conclusions at this
time: There was widespread voter intimidation,
possibly fraud, and suppression. But we do not yet
know whether these acts have affected the outcome of
the election. If you have actions planned we suggest
you go forward, discuss what has happened and denounce
the voter suppression. We will be meeting again at 8AM
on Nov. 3 to reassess the situation.

Whatever the outcome of the election we have much work
to do. Stay strong and united, and let's go forward
together. For a full list of actions planned, see
www.nov3.us and www.unitedforpeace.org.


NO STOLEN ELECTIONS!
www.Nov3.US

Democrats and progressives have been launching huge protests, marches and rallies for the last four years and where has it gotten us? We need to combine such public displays with economic action if they are to have any effect.

....demonstrate....show the world that we are not "standing by"....we must do something to do nothing or to wait is a bad idea.....we must show our great displeasure over the voting system in this country

don't exist. The only thing We The People can do is take to the streets and cause a revolution. But, bush owns the guns. If he can crush any country in the world, he can heartlessly kill all of us and there's no one in the world to protect us.

We have the power to shut this economy down. To shut it off almost completely. If only we could organize it. It's been the dream of my IWW pals for many years.

I'm game. Let's go!

Illegal war, the PATRIOT act, the destruction of environmental protections- the very air we breathe?
why support fascism?

maybe I shouldn't be saying this here, but what about a tax revolt?

Many people have been tax protesters for decades. Google it.