Hundreds of thousands of federal employees have been furloughed since the shutdown began on October 1, while others deemed essential – including some military personnel – have been required to turn up to work without receiving a paycheck.
“We kind of feel like we’re like a bargaining chip to an extent,” a long-serving US Air Force employee told AFP. “We’re not getting paid because people in D.C. who are getting paid can’t get on the same page.”
I mean, if there was ever a perfect moment to do a General Strike, it would be right fucking now.
Starting demand?
Simple.
No one works untill furloughed Federal employees are explicitly guaranteed their back pay.
Who the fuck has the balls to be vocally, visibly, intentionally against those optics?
Iterate from there.
Secondary demand?
No work, none, of any kind, untill the government passes a working budget.
Just that, that simple.
The idea here is to be broadly appealling.
Federal employees are explicitly guaranteed their back pay.
Part of the problem behind the scenes is that the Democrats do not really trust guarantees passed into law anyone, as Trump has been utilizing the recision process to simply not pay money that Congress has explicitly appropriated into law.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/24
Trump said that they will not though, and it doesn’t matter what the law is when it comes to things Trump wants done.
Yeah, I forgot to explicitly mention this is my other comment, but… they’ve / Trump’s just been withholding funds when he feels like it, redirecting them… almost everything DOGE did was mind-numbingly illegal, Elon should be in jail for multiple lifetimes if we… were pretending on the book laws were still being enforced.
I mean, yes… but ICE is constantly violating the law 100s, 1000s, 10000s of times a day.
Thats not part of the problem.
It is the entire problem.
Miller just said, outloud, on a live CNN broadcast, that the President has ‘plenary’ powers.
What that means is totally absolute, ie, he is a god-king-dictator.
The entire problem is that the Republicans have just quite literally gone with ‘rules for thee but not for me’, ie, they are fascists, formal law doesn’t matter to them as anything more than a means to an end, and they will use any other means to their ends that they can.
“The law” doesn’t exist / doesn’t matter when you have this many fascists and enablers just willy nilly deciding which ones they will or wont follow, which new interpretations they just fucking make up.
You have to actually, physically, remove them from government, and we are already beyond the point where there is no way to do that without force.
What, you think the mideterms are going to happen, not be as rigged as a Russian election?
Maybe, maybe something like this could happen:
Dems try to bring an article 25 remove the President from Office because he is literally demented type of thing, and then that coincides with just literally a military coup (call it a counter coup though, better optics) to just enforce that, literally, with guns.
Anything other than something like that doesn’t actually stop anything, it just delays the inevitable, maybe.
A General Strike is just a way for average people to maybe express their extreme displeasure with what is going on, and you can maybe say oh we did the military counter coup because the strikers were correct, something like that.
We are in revolutionary times, theres no such thing as a universally agreed upon framework to follow, there are only actions that produce/enable outcomes.
The logistics of a general strike are not that simple.
I am talking about simplicity of a rhetorical front, a ‘policy position’.
Keep that simple, and it makes the “sell” much easier.
You are of course correct that the actual logistics of organizing and conducting, sustaining a General Strike are much more complex… but I am trying to make them simpler via a broadly agreeable set of demands, that can be propogated and articulated easily and simply.
Yeah but without the funds and organization we can’t effectively strike, and we don’t have the funds or organization right now. That’s why the chatter about major strikes put a date 3 years down the road. Start saving and organizing now.
The uh, No Kings / 50-50-1 movement has successfully been organizing regular, coordinated, mass public demonstrations for months now, probably the largest in US History, but ok, I guess they don’t exist.
We don’t have 3 years.
We have less than 0.
I didn’t say anything about demonstrations. Demonstrations and general strikes are not the same thing. Organizing a protest is pretty easy, just tell people when and where to show up. Organizing a strike is substantially more complex, substantially more coordination and resources are required.
The US is a very large country with too many people who have no problem with this so organizing a nationwide general strike here would be extremely difficult.