I'm saying it right the fuck now.
Healthcare staff need to go on strike, consequences be damned. Imagine how fucking fast Washington would have to act if several state hospitals suddenly had to shut down because of major staff strikes. They would have to IMMEDIATELY stop what they were doing and address the crisis. They would have to buckle down.
The alternative would be a worst case scenario that would be dangerous even for Washington, and it would especially piss off or scare the Administrators of these for-profit hospitals.
Strikes are extremely effective. The pro-corporate side of America doesn't want people to realize that, but they are. Corporations are scared to death of people using their right to protest unlivable conditions that endangered people's lives because it pressures the politicians to do something. Elections go on and on. Even regardless of elections, we know some would be shamed or shaken up outside in the public space.
I think it's never been more important that the healthcare staff send this message NOW before there is no one left to care for the sick. They deserve better.
https://reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/k9nizs/the_worst_disaster_in_us_history_is_about_to/
Portland, after months of angry protests, figured it out. People came out to fight off the cops at the red house, they put out a call, and enough people came together to beat Ted Wheeler.
But it took months of those protests to build people up to this point, and Portland already had a lot of the pieces thanks to the fucking nazis invading constantly over the past several years.
Ted Wheeler is still in power. The city is still under military occupation. It was good to see Portland fight back, but it was not a win.
He lost and he's pissed off about it. https://twitter.com/MacSmiff/status/1338644069933715456
Preventing an eviction is good. This doesn't seem much different than the protestors who chained themselves to city court houses to prevent evictions.
Fighting off cops and declaring your intent to keep doing it is different.
I don't think that would have happened befor ethe protests. Portland is facing 45k evictions, things like this are gonna keep happening.
I'm not saaying it's revolution I'm just saying I agree with the idea that the people are way ahead of the left. So far ahead.
It is the same situation. The protestors "fought back" the police when they showed up and tried to remove the protestors. You just agree with the aesthetics of the Portland protest more.
In actuality, the police could just massacre the people in both situations and continue normal operations. They have significantly more tools available to them. We are not even at the "fire-bombing anarchists in major city centers" part yet.
They decided that a day of eviction court processes or single eviction, respectively, was not worth further use of force.
Again, the events in Portland are good. But we need to be honest about where we are at right now. Your comment makes it sound like Portland is anarchist-controlled territory.
I agree with your edit. My only additional comment is that the Left is leading these operations. But our political discourse does not seriously reckon with the conditions we are in, though.
What does this mean?
I don't understand how people are deciding which of these events are spontaneous self-organized responses and which are "organized by the Left." Are those one and the same?
It means that the people carrying out these actions are Leftists.
That should be blatantly obvious from symbols & language they have been using, both in media correspondence & on signs surrounding the barricade.
There's no centralized Left-wing project in the country, so these are functionally the same thing.
Gotcha. I hear a lot of complaining in some leftist circles about any action that wasn't "organized" enough for their tastes being "anarchist lifestylism" or "commie larping" so I'm curious where people on here land.
Personally, I feel we're still in the early days of cultivating anti-capitalist sentiment and I'll take any kind of liberatory action I can get. As we have more successes like the one at the Red House we inspire more people to recognize both where they stand in relation to capital and the power they can wield with their neighbors and comrades.
The Red House project is good. They are clearly fighting for peoples' immediate material needs, and they are demonstrating to the neighborhood whose side they are on.
This is much better than, say, CHOP - which I would call "anarchist lifestyleism" and "commie larping."