this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2024
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General strike in the US seems like less of an impossibility year by year
Just restating some of the greatest hits:
Universal healthcare
Universal education through university level or trade school
At least a month pto annually
Parental leave for births
Guaranteed sick leave
32hr new full time threshold before overtime
Only public, equal funds for elections, no PACs/dark money/donations, no lobbyist bribes
Any elected official over a certain level cannot engage in trading of individual stocks or own businesses, dump it all in an index fund or hand off management to someone else they cannot contact without a mediator and recording, immediate expulsion & no longer able to hold office when found in violation
No billionaires/oligarchs, anyone with earnings and assets over a billion should be taxed at 100% and assets redistributed
Edit: May 1st 2028 looks like a good target thanks to the UAW https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/general-strike-2028-unions-labor-movement/
Remember when the railroad threatened to strike and nacy pelosi said they would throw them in jail if they didn't go to work.....fucking unreal.
A few take aways:
They need us so fucking bad
They will do anything to maintain control
No one at that level is fighting for you
Solidarity will be hard to achieve because those threats will be too much for people on the ropes in their day to day life to endure.
There's a great WTYP on this, detailing how the inability/refusal to strike has resulted in an exodus/early retirement of train engineers sufficient to knee-cap the industry already. Increased incidence of train derailments, higher rates of rail jams and mechanical failures, and generally slower delivery times are all the result of the decline in experienced and knowledgeable industry workers.
None of this matters to the train management, which has reaped an enormous windfall in profits at the steady marginal decline in network efficiency. Monopoly means you either pay the cartel for degraded service or you ship using a more expensive method.
Its important to recognize modern capitalist control as a form of hostage taking. "Pay us the ransom or your critical infrastructure get its", even as we're receiving fingers and earlobes in the mail with every passing year.
Solidarity is about liberating these critical components of infrastructure and operating them for the benefit of the public. The goal isn't to shut down these institutions, but to run them without profiteers leeching the excess revenue. That's why some of the most effective popular economic protests don't involve suspending services, but operating them while refusing to collect fees for service.
This is so fuckin true.
BINGO if we have the power to protest effectively then we can actually make them hurt. Right now I feel like we don't have that power at all. Just citing my example of the railroads, they stepped in quick and made sure the goods kept moving.
Absolutely.
This is interesting to me I always understood keeping services running for the sake of not harming innocent citizens But I didn't really think it was effective. I could see a public transport rail system doing that and it working, but how do workers in other industries prevent the corporation they work for from taking in the revenue
Keep doing what you're doing without operating the cash register, whether that's serving meals or fixing cars or whatever.
For some stuff this won't work (entertainment, for instance, needs a full work stoppage to compel capital concessions). But if you're working to rule at a point of critical infrastructure, the only thing that really needs to stop is the financial side of the business.
Nothing about replacing First-past-the-post voting?
Campaign finance reform under 7 would allow further reforms to follow, without those regulatory capture and bribery are legal and prevent any other electoral reforms benefiting the working class.
It's questionable if that's enough, though. FPTP means we'll vote for people who maybe took small bribes, and it'll become a slippery slope to a fully for-sale goverment again.
Why not beta test a general strike on Jan 6, 2025?
Because then they'll think it's about Harris, when she would've just delayed it.
Sad, but likely true. Especially sad given how fast the Harris team just rolled over and shut up.
General strike in the US sounds more like a civil war
I'd recommend a longer full time week. If the full time week is too short, many people well rely on overtime for their salary. This completely destroys the benefits of some of your other points, since you can't do overtime during vacations, parental leave, sick leave, etc. Overtime should not be the norm if you want a good social/financial security.
Edit: part time job should of course always be possible if your revenue allows you to work shorter weeks
@ #9; Whoa there. 100% is unreasonable. Still there's room to start at a hard 90% at about 250 million and then incrementally scale until the tax is say, about 95-97% by about a billion.
Unfortunately you cannot tax anyone 100%; that would ultimately be unfair and demotivating and only motivate corruption to avoid the tax
It's progressive. You're still allowed to have a billion. That's just a cap. Anything past that goes to the public.
Makes perfect sense. It's like having $999,999,999.99 in a management game.
It doesn't go above that, but if you buy a ton of assets and set them down, it'll probably climb right back up there to the limit again at some point.
You still have a billion bucks to do whatever with.
Although yeah, businesses routinely buy things for billions (like acquiring Minecraft? Hah) So they'd find some clever way of putting it all in some kind of "company trust" or something, so they don't have it as an individual.
But I'm no lawyer. I still think having it on the books would be better than not, if it went to healthcare and education instead of funneling into the defense industry, that is...
That's fine, as long as there's legal stipulations as to how that money can be spent, similar to campaign finance laws. That kind of money should go back into the company to the benefit of both the workers (via continued employment and fair compensation) and the consumers that support the company (via the quality of the company's product). It should not go to any individual executive to pocket and walk away with.
Why? Why do you feel the need to hold on to this "aspiration"?
You will never become a billionaire, stop defending your exploiters.
that's the motherfucking point, bootlicker.