-by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman Donald Trump has made it clear he will not peacefully relinquish power after the coming election, no matter what the outcome. To get him out of the White House, it may take the ultimate non-violent action: a nationwide general strike. Trump says he’ll brand any legitimate vote count that shows him losing to be “fraudulent” and proclaim himself emperor for life. He’ll push to fill RBG’s Supreme Court seat before the election to give himself a solid majority there should he lose it in the popular vote. Until it reaches that point, those opposing his permanent dictatorship face an apocalyptic trifecta, a three-part test of the human ability to save our democracy, and our place on this planet: 1- Protecting the Actual Election: The daily battle for election protection has long since escalated to ceaseless hand-to-hand trench warfare against Trump’s infamous assault on the democratic process. It’s highly unlikely Trump will command a legitimate majority of the American electorate. But if he subverts enough of the electoral process to win a majority of the votes cast and counted, or of the Electoral College, American democracy and the human ability to survive on this planet may be finished. Mainstream polls generally show Biden ahead, even in the swing states that Hillary lost. In a legitimate election, those would give him an Electoral College majority. But the New York Times has also published the only graph that really matters: if the polls are “as wrong as they were in 2016,” Trump wins 278-260. That margin could come from Trump’s escalation of his 2016 attack on every conceivable aspect of the electoral process. It ranges from stripping the registration rolls, to destroying the US Postal Service to trashing paper ballots, to demanding (in Florida) ex-felons pay fees before they can vote, to every other Dirty Trick imaginable, from blowing up drop boxes, to terrorizing in-person voters, to hacking digital imaging machines, to torching election centers and whatever else Roger Stone and his Nixonian thugs can conjure. As we report at grassrootsep.org and discuss every Monday at our 90-minute zoom calls, the grassroots work of fighting back for a free and fair election is a desperate 24/7 race for survival, with just five weeks to prevail. But we are handicapped by the lack of response from the Democratic Party. In 2000, Greg Palast and Bev Harris reported on how the Bush GOP led by W’s CIA brother Jeb (then Governor of Florida) stripped more than 90,000 citizens of color from the Florida voter rolls and flipped the electronic vote count in key counties. Al Gore stopped Jesse Jackson from staging protest demonstrations, failed to sue for a comprehensive state-wide recount, failed to protect south Florida vote counters, stopped the Congressional Black Caucus from challenging the illegitimate Florida Electoral College delegation and much more (he also failed to carry his home state of Tennessee, which would have won him the election). The Gore Democrats have since done nothing significant to rid us of the Electoral College (which seated Trump in 2016) instead spending the next two decades trashing Ralph Nader. In 2004 we reported from Columbus on a hundred (literally) different ways the Bush-Rove GOP stole the decisive Ohio vote count from John Kerry. We briefed his staff on the dire detail. In response, with 250,000 votes still uncounted, Kerry shafted us all by instantly conceding. Since then we’ve been endlessly attacked by Democrat and “progressive” writers who could not be bothered to come to Columbus or dig past faux interviews with corrupt hacks. In 2016, Green Party candidate Jill Stein slogged into decisive Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, unearthing a rat’s nest of manipulation and theft. Hillary ignored it all, joined Gore and Kerry in a quick concession, then attacked Stein in her ghastly memoir. In 2018, absurdly rigged outcomes in Florida were sealed by another aborted vote count. With no serious objection from the Democrats, they seated a US Senator and a Governor now stripping the right to vote from more than a million ex-felons who may owe small fees. Those negated votes could easily put Trump back in the White House. So too in Georgia, where Stacy Abrams was denied the governorship by a corrupt, vote-burning KKK Secretary of State who again could hand yet another decisive state—- with two US Senate races—- to the Trump Cult. Now, in 2020 , we face the ultimate desperation. While the Democrats again ignore the massive untapped “youth vote” (millennials & GenZ) hard-working election protectionists must fight Trump’s Dirty Tricks. With early voting and vote by mail, the most critical juncture is poll workers decide whether to allow a ballot to be counted. Trump says he’ll spend $20,000,000 to hire 50,000 “volunteers” to assault the polls. Many may strong-arm poll workers to trash countless ballots from suspected voters of color who omit a middle initial or a dotted i. Without fair-minded stalwarts to withstand that assault, the election could be decided simply by how many ballots Trump’s minions can trash before they’re counted. Election protectionists must also guarantee that voters stripped from the rolls are reinstated, that vote-by-mail ballots actually go out, that drop boxes are deployed and then protected, that early voters get paper ballots and aren’t harassed by armed terrorists at the polls, that digital images aren’t hacked or pitched, that they’re counted quickly and accurately, and more. 2020 could well turn on poll workers, poll monitors and site protectionists. Most precincts require them to be local residents, but will allow them to be under 18, potentially marking a major generational transition in who conducts our elections. All who marched for George Floyd and police reform now must become poll workers. Those election boards are begging them to come in. The days are long, but the pay can be good, potentially marking a monumental generational transition from an historically elderly crew of poll workers to one spearheaded by a new generation. But once all the above is said and done, the future will likely depend on whether Biden and the Democrats will stand and fight against a stolen outcome. Or, beyond that, whether there’s a larger, more deeply committed “small-d” grassroots movement willing to fight for democracy and survival where the Democratic Party is not. 2- Protecting the Polls Against Trump Terror Assault As Greg Palast has shown, Trump has a “12th Amendment option” to throw the election. Assuming he’s about to lose the popular and Electoral College vote, Trump can simply resort to organized violence, official and otherwise. He can send military hit squads and fascist pouring into the key voting stations. Non-violent activists must be there to confront them. Trump hates vote by mail and early voting largely because (among other things) their diffuse nature makes it harder to terrorize the actual electorate in person at the polls. Trump’s Ku Klux Klan father was all about preventing people of color and other untermenschen from voting. But the polling stations are still there, along with the ballots. Trump’s minions could make November 3 a new Kristallnacht, with armed troops and militias blowing up drop boxes, trashing stored ballots, destroying imaging machines, torching election centers and warehouses, trashing the legitimate vote count. That would include assaulting poll workers, jamming the ballot approval process, sabotaging the timely reports needed to seat the Electoral College delegations set to choose the next president. Should Trump succeed—- as so many US-sponsored mobsters have done in Third World countries—- he could (as per the 12th Amendment) throw the election into the US House of Representatives, or back to Republican-dominated state legislatures. A reshaped Supreme Court, with a 6-3 fighting majority, could seal the coup. 3- The Ultimate Resistance: A General Strike THEN what happens? Will the public resist? Does this nation have a non-violent core strong to stop such a coup d’etat? The ability and willingness of an aroused, uncompromising, multi-racial public to shut the country down in the face of such a coup may be the only way to make an electorally defeated mobster give up power. As Trump telegraphs his full Mussolini, much of the labor force in key industries must be ready to literally “shut it down” while occupying the means of production and distribution. A national non-violent resistance must be ready to peacefully disrupt business as usual, and to sustain that silence until Trump leaves. There’s plenty of history behind a new American general strike. The first, of sorts, came in Virginia, 1685. An upstart landowner named Nathaniel Bacon wanted Governor William Berkeley to conquer more indigenous land. Bacon drew together an army of black and white indentured servants that overthrew Jamestown, burned it to the ground and forced Berkeley to flee. Both Bacon and Berkeley soon died, as did the Rebellion. But southern landowners quickly separated the races by inventing chattel slavery, history’s harshest form of human servitude. Turning a class system into a caste regime, they put into the category of “subhuman” and gave whites a “gift” of superiority. No matter how badly exploited a white worker might be, they were still legally superior to blacks. This “invention” of slavery was the “original sin” of racial separation that divides us to this day. Centuries later, the black scholar W.E.B. DuBois dubbed the never-ending mass defection of black slaves and poor whites from the plantation south a “general strike” and urged it as a highly effective tactic. In 1835 a three-week general strike in Philadelphia won the working class some brotherly love in the form of higher pay and a shorter work day. In 1877 railway workers birthed the modern labor movement with the Great Railway Strike. Coming in response to a 10% pay cut by the Pennsylvania Railroads greedy CEO Tom Scott, angry workers spontaneously shut the national system, burning many rail yards to the ground. In 1894 the great Eugene V. Debs led his young American Railway Union again shut the national system in support of workers at the Pullman factory in southern Illinois. The strike was broken with federal troops who killed at least 35 workers, and soon turned Debs into a Socialist. In 1919, some 65,000 workers shut Seattle. The generally conservative American Federation of Labor joined with the radical Industrial Workers of the World to handle essential services like garbage collection and medical care. In 1936-7, auto workers seized physical control of the General Motors production system in Flint. With 2,000 unionists on strike, the nascent United Auto Workers won a union contract soon duplicated in much of the rest of the industry. Strikes in Minneapolis, Toledo and throughout the US defined the decade. Amidst the 1946 post-war crash, with some two million Americans unemployed, general strikes erupted in Rochester, Pittsburgh and Oakland, California. Workers supporting female retail clerks held Oakland for about five days. In the wake of those strikes, a right-wing Congress passed the brutally anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act over Harry Truman’s veto. Democratic administrations have since failed to repeal that and other anti-worker laws, vastly weakening the American union movement. As in France, 1968, European and Asian general strikes have brought down governments. The Soviet grip on Eastern Europe was broken in 1989 by massive non-violent outpourings, as was the Soviet Union itself in 1991. Slobodan Milosovic’s fascist Serbia was also toppled largely by mass non-violent demonstrations. America’s movements for peace, civil rights and social justice ihave mobilized millions. The recent marches for George Floyd may collectively have been the largest in world history. They may have moved the American mind on racism and other critical issues. But we’ve yet to face toppling a fascist thug intent on becoming Dictator for Life. Mass marches alone cannot force Trump to step down. His joy at deploying troops and militia for mass killings is not in doubt. Countless millions could march for days with no tangible impact on Trump’s lethal mindset. There’s no precedent for an American non-violent movement shutting down the country or toppling a dictator. Woodrow Wilson did assume dictatorial power amidst World War I (which most Americans opposed) the infamous Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918 (which was mostly his fault) and his 1918-20 Red Scare (which he used to illegally crush the Socialist Party). Amidst it all, Wilson (an avowed White Supremacist) caught the flu and had a stroke, leaving his wife Edith to (badly) run the country for a year. Meanwhile some 675,000 Americans died in an entirely avoidable Pandemic, along another 100,000+ on the killing fields of Europe, and 70 more in a futile assault on the Russian Revolution. The strikes of 1919 impacted the nation, but not sufficiently to rid us of Wilson. Should Trump lose the election, he will proclaim it fraudulent and use force to keep power, and perhaps do even more damage than Woodrow. There would be no effective non-violent response other than shutting the country down. Let’s protect this election to make sure it doesn’t come to that. If it does, let’s be prepared for a general strike far bigger and more effective than all that have come before.
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