DOWNTOWN — With their city caught in the country’s largest immigration enforcement operation, as many as 250,000 Chicagoans flooded Downtown on Saturday to condemn Donald Trump’s administration as part of the second nationwide No Kings protest.
“We will never surrender!” Illinois governor JB Pritzker said. “Throughout history we have learned that tyranny doesn’t arrive with dramatic proclamations. We learned that it comes wrapped in ‘law and order’ … The reality here in Chicago is this: Black and Brown people are being targeted for the color of their skin. Children are being zip-tied and separated from their families … These people are not abstractions. They pay taxes on their businesses. They work hard — these people are the fabric of our society.”
“They want a rematch of the Civil War,” Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson said to the crowd. “But we are here to stand firm, to stand committed — that we will not bend. We will not cower. The attempt to divide and conquer this nation will not prevail, because when the people are united, justice always prevails.”
Johnson closed out his remarks by calling for a general strike.
For the mayor of one of the largest cities in the US to be calling for a general strike is massive.
This is about as close as I’ve ever seen to a call for actual revolution. Most people have no idea just how serious a General Strike is.
I don’t think our country would ever pull it off entirely, but if even a fraction of our labor force stopped producing, it would shut down not just our country, but the world would grind to a halt. We are far more fragile from a supply-chain/labor level than we’ve ever been.
This is why they want us separated, this is why they FIERCELY oppose any form of unity and why they fund bad-actors on both sides of every political and social issues to make us all hate each other. This is why we have so much contention. Because if we ever all woke up and looked around and realized we all want the same things, we could all decide together to hit the big “reset” button and our government would be irrelevant. Corporations would lose their stranglehold overnight. Empires would crumble.
It would be bad, many people would be hurt, but it wouldn’t be as bad as an armed revolution, and it would address that burning question that most lefties get angry about when I ask: “Let’s say it works, let’s say we have our glorious revolution and topple the king. What do you do about the tens of millions of people who didn’t want it and will view you as an insurrectionist?”
A general strike is founded on cooperation and unity against power. If we can keep this narrative alive, even just the threat of it will make every powerful institution pause and rethink their next moves.
Hell, a general strike in just one industry would have devastating effects. What if airlines went on strike for a day? Telecom? A national nurses strike? Waste management? Maybe we rotate, one industry per day.
Yes! After all, how do the jack-booted thugs beat up people who aren’t even there?
Yeah, holy shit. This isn’t some hippy caricature at a park, but mayor of arguably the 4th largest city in North America. That’s nuts, but I’m glad to see it. Wild times…
You don’t have to have a revolution where some whole new government takes over from scratch–a new political party could be enough if enough support. I think most people want to keep the Constitution but with fixes to safeguard the freedoms it was supposed to guarantee, but turned out to be optional.
We can demand new elections and amendments to the constitution (probably via a Constitutional Convention), and until that can happen, legislation to prevent the executive branch from ever being able to take this much power again.
Reforms to demand would need to start with the most crucial, including things like those listed here. Especially stripping power from the oligarchs! by massively taxing them, overturning Citizens United, and allowing only publicly funded elections. Shoring up the checks and balances to fix the vulnerabilities we’ve learned the hard way. Expanding the Supreme Court to a fairly large number would also be important so our very rights don’t depend on something like one person not dying. Etc, etc. Ah well, I can dream, right?