A general strike in the US? October 30, 2020
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
US unions have begun discussing the idea of a general strike if Donald Trump refuses to accept an election results showing a Joe Biden victory. Such a move would be unprecedented in the modern era. There has not been a general strike in the United States since 1946 – and that was restricted to Oakland, California.
Does it seem likely that Trump would really refuse to accept such an outcome? Or more significantly, would the apparatus around government allow that to occur?
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
Think it depends very much on the margin, if he is to lose. If it’s a landslide he’ll huff and puff but ultimately walk away. If it’s close they’ll be legal challenges and a Supreme Court that can’t be trusted and potential chaos.
In the end you’re actually relying a lot on the Republican Party to ensure a smooth transition, and you can’t trust them on anything.
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Looking at the state polls, Michigan and Wisconsin both seem to be well over the margin of error, and while Pennsylvania and Florida are narrower, both appear generally within the Biden camp. All in all, even a conservative estimate now would give the Democrats 320+ EC votes, so unlikely Trump would dispute that kind of margin.
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He seems set to try to litigate a win, ultimately with a referral to his stacked Supreme Court (three of the GOP appointees were on the legal team for Bush v. Gore, and Kavanaugh explicitly referred to ot as precedent in a judgement the other day).
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This outcome could genuinely cause something that you would have to describe as a rebellion in the country. I mean, it’s bad enough that Trump became President with less votes than the other candidate legally.
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The dialectic in action….
“Through one lens, the shock of the past few years has been a right wing getting ever less apologetic about its commitment to authoritarian, anti-democratic minority rule.
But through another lens, what has actually undergone a startling change has been America’s people, their thinking about the Republic, and, in some cases, their places and responsibilities within it. Some significant portion of the population has been roused to protest — or at least awareness — at a scale that has been seen rarely in our past and that has historically had the power to bring social and political change so eruptive and transformative that those in power will do anything to quell it….
the spirit of unrest bloomed explosively in the Trump years….
And then came 2020 — a deadly pandemic, lockdowns, hospitals way above capacity, illness and poverty heaped disproportionately on America’s most vulnerable. As millions found themselves shuttered inside, scared for themselves and their loved ones, glued to their phones, they got a vivid view of violent racism….
Even in the grip of fear and grief, with a full view of pandemic peril and the risk of punitive police response and rhetorical backlash, what made most sense to millions who saw those images and heard those stories was to take their fury to the streets….
In June 2020, police took more than 10,000 mostly peaceful protesters into custody across the United States….
We are wide awake now….
One of the transformative aspects of this period has been that, by participating in protest or activism, in challenging white patriarchal power structures rather than simply supporting and profiting from them, some of these women have gotten a glimmer of what it might be like not to be middle class and white….
something real has happened to the American consciousness in these past few years….
what so many have just woken up to: an entire system designed to resist uprooting….
And in this, the presidency of Donald Trump has been enormously useful. As a grotesque embodiment of an outrageously powerful tradition, he is a walking showcase of the ways in which so many oppressive interests — capitalism, misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia — are inextricably intertwined….
What — if anything — will we make of our latest, and perhaps last, chance at social revolution?….
If Democrats win, there is a blueprint, being vocally presented by activists, of what can be done to break the right’s stranglehold on power: passage of a Voting Rights Act; the overturning of Citizens United; statehood for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico; the end of the judicial filibuster; and court reform not simply on a federal level but at the State Supreme Court level. There are even more road maps: Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, free college and paid family leave and subsidized day care and a wealth tax and prison abolition. Some of these ideas may still be considered radical, but they nonetheless have entered the mainstream lexicon…..
And so perhaps the grimmest read of what has happened in these past four years paradoxically offers the greatest hope for an engaged populace going forward: that the results of this right-wing project may be so calamitous, so disastrous for so many millions — a 6-3 Court; corporations given free rein to drill us into destruction; rising seas and raging fires and rampaging plagues — that returning to unconsciousness is simply not going to be possible.”
https://www.thecut.com/2020/10/progressive-protest-movement-under-trump.html#_ga=2.43949990.2054549848.1604064388-1686288983.1604064388
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Thing is, I think, the establishment in the Republican Party won’t back Trump if he tries anything on. I think they’d welcome a Biden win. It would enable them to take their party back from Trump.
A fair few senior and grandee Republicans have publicly stated that they’ll be voting Biden.
Looks like the Democrats played a masterstroke in selecting Biden – he’s the candidate who, as the saying goes, can unite the country.
I’m writing now, like a lot of people, taking it for granted that Biden will win. I’ve been wrong about that sort of thing before!
But if he does, the rest of the world will have to readjust to start dealing again with the good ole USA that we’ve known and ‘loved’ for so long.
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Thing is, I think, the establishment in the Republican Party won’t back Trump if he tries anything on
Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Trump. There’s a clear progression there towards ‘trying stuff on’, as the GOP increasingly become unable to win a majority of US votes and every new low just digs them further into that hole. Obama should have prosecuted the lot of them.
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Is Bush not reputed to be anti Trump?
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“Most pollsters show Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden with a sturdy and stable lead over President Trump at a time when tens of millions of people have already voted and there is almost no time to change the course of the race.
But a handful of contrarian pollsters believe Trump’s support is underrepresented and that election analysts could be headed for another embarrassing miss on Election Day…..
FiveThirtyEight’s model gives Trump about an 11 percent chance of winning — roughly equal to pulling an inside straight in poker — after giving him about a 30 percent chance on Election Day in 2016.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/523426-positive-trump-polls-spark-polling-circle-debate
“Filmmaker Michael Moore on Thursday said to be wary of polls indicating that President Trump is trailing in the presidential race behind Democratic nominee Joe Biden, warning that the Trump vote is being undercounted.”
https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/523398-michael-moore-says-dont-believe-polls-trump-vote-always-being-undercounted
In any case Trump will still be president for about 10 weeks after next Tuesday,- a lame duck enraged crackpot. To get him out of the WH the U.S. Marshall’s may need a straitjacket.
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Didn’t the infamous “secret Trump voter” play a large part in his 2016 victory?
Biden seems to have a lead in the “Battleground States” though:
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-53657174
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Maybe, maybe not. We’ll know more late Tues early Wed. The final count might take several days. But results from Florida, Texas, Arizona, Georgia. N.Carolina, Wisconsin, where the results are expected fairly early, should give an indication of how its going.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/29/2020-polls-trump-biden-prediction-accurate-2016-433619
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But results from Florida, Texas, Arizona, Georgia. N.Carolina, Wisconsin, where the results are expected fairly early, should give an indication of how its going.
Republicans have already apparently succeeded in getting the votes of an entire county in Texas thrown out. If this is how the Trumpers intend to ‘win’, then we’re surely set for the start of succession talk by the east and west coasts, who of course actually bankroll the madness in between.
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Didn’t the infamous “secret Trump voter” play a large part in his 2016 victory?
Trump lost the 2016 popular vote by a few million, it needs to be pointed out. He squeaked out wins in a couple of key states, no doubt (as with Brexit) helped by granular targetting of voters on Facebook with personal data which was unethically collected by private entities. That, and a late assist from James Comey of the FBI.
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Unlikely really. They will try, but have heard pundits over there point to Florida, who’ll count their votes previously gathered before the election day votes. So a result will come from there quickly enough. If Biden wins there, likely he’ll win other Southern and Rust Belt seats too.
Republicans got the 2017 tax cut and now the S Court 6-3 majority. And apparently plenty of appointees in positions below S Court levels. Any Biden administration will not try to push the envelope on healthcare, Covid-19 payments or even immigration policy. Any agitation regarding any kind of economic redistribution won’t be coming from within Democrats, Biden in the past always made a big thing of his bi-partisanship. The Lincoln Project typifies that.
Republicans if they lose wd take out their animus on cultural divide issues such as Roe vs Wade, welfare funding etc. That’s where the Supreme Court comes in. Trump’s used up now, time for them to seek a younger version to fire up disaffected whites and to marginally expand that voter share to include Hispanics perhaps. It doesn’t seem to be in either party’s interest to have a Bernie figure appear with a bit of materialist analysis but who knows, maybe there cd be a right wing equivalent
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AOC will definitely attempt a run, but seems too radical for Middle America.
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‘Republicans have already apparently succeeded in getting the votes of an entire county in Texas thrown out’
-EWI
Not yet
“A legal cloud hanging over nearly 127,000 votes already cast in Harris County was at least temporarily lifted Sunday when the Texas Supreme Court rejected a request by several conservative Republican activists and candidates to preemptively throw out early balloting from drive-thru polling sites in the state’s most populous, and largely Democratic, county.
The all-Republican court denied the request without an order or opinion, as justices did last month in a similar lawsuit brought by some of the same plaintiffs
The Republican plaintiffs, however, are pursuing a similar lawsuit in federal court, hoping to get the votes thrown out by arguing that drive-thru voting violates the U.S. constitution. A hearing in that case is set for Monday morning in a Houston-based federal district court, one day before Election Day.”
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/11/01/texas.drive-thru-votes-harris-county
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