Can the Bernie Sanders supporters multitask and hit the 1 percent on many fronts at once? Like wage inequality and single payer healthcare, labor rights, climate change and school debt. Let’s take the criminal interests being charged on student debt.
There are 5 million student debt holders. What if they took the skills and knowledge they have and used it in the Sanders’ campaign to build a list of student debt holders, and then using this list to demand the right to bargain with the Department of Education and the banks to reduce or eliminate this debt, or they could just refuse to pay any more on the debts.
There are groups out there trying to achieve the same thing, but it doesn’t appear their tactics are working. So maybe it’s time these institutions felt the Bern. Those fighting against student debt could look at what the group leading the FightFor$15 has done and follow their lead or look to how 2,000 doctors have come together to fight for single-payer healthcare under Sanders. The FF$15 is making head way in increasing the minimum wage, though some states and cities are slow walking the increase, which is typical of corporate-minded politicians to do, but they can be voted out of office as a form of retribution.
We have reached the point in our lives where we are echoing the sentiments from a character, Howard Beall, in the 1975 movie, Network, when the television anchor, Beall, tells his viewing audience, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.”
There are a lot of young people today, and older ones, whose inclination is not to ask whom should I join, but what should my friends and I do. These people want more out of life than watching other people live out their lives on reality television.
This fight for debt relief can be an open source project and have individual activists do what they think is needed The leaders and activists of people for Bernie Sanders have no trouble obviously with electoral activities, but aren’t that keen on traditional organizational forms. The young of today now just want to know what can I and my friends do now and they are proving what they can do and there is lots of work to be done using their skills and energy.
This is the time to get things done while the momentum is here and they energy is strong while the opponents and activists from the other side are in disarray. We are moving forward while they are still trying to figure out how to handle a reality television personality as their presidential candidate and spending all their money bashing Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This all makes for the perfect time to strike.
There are three phases of a general strike and unions must plan for one. Those three phases are: 1. general strike in an industry 2. general strike in a community 3. general national strike We need to move away from being on the defensive and move toward a good offensive. The American Federal of Labor (AFL) could not have held a general strike if it wanted to because they had thousands of different contracts that expired at different times of the year. This was done deliberately so that there is no consolidation of power for a general strike. Also, nowadays, there is no law agency that will support labor, except the National Labor Relations Board (NLBR), which has been under attack and in decline for years. This leaves the burden of change up to unions, and unless unions work together, little will change. We essentially have a combination of job trusts, which are not as strong as contracts, and the courts can break easily because the NLBR will be further weakened and essentially elim...
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