I read in the San Francisco Chronicle today that not only Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) employees were likely going to strike on Monday, but that there were several other unions that were also talking about the possibility of a work stoppage.
What I find incredible (and I've written about this a few times) is that I can't, for the life of me, understand why all these unions fail to pick up the effing phone and call each other and organize a massive, long-term total shutdown of the whole Bay Area... I'm talking about BART, Parks, nurses, AC Transit, Teacher, Universities' employees, and many others.
I know somebody very involved in the local hierarchy of one of the big unions here in the Bay Area... I asked him a very simple question: How come you guys don't all coordinate and shut the whole fucking thing down? He said there seem to be some initial steps for communication between the unions.
For that matter, how come the several chapters of Occupy Wall Street here in the Bay Area, and the folks planning the Restore the Fourth protests on July 4th, don't all coordinate between themselves, and with the unions to do a massive "system" shutdown?
I find that a little strange, given the situation...
I'm about to go to bed. I'm going to do a little prayer/wishful thinking that when I get up in the morning I find out that there is some massive and coordinated action between all the unions in collaboration with activist groups.
Oh, maybe I'm going a little too fast here... I figure there may still be people reading this and thinking "Why does this guy is wishing for this type of massive disruption?"
The system is broken. Corruption is rampant. We need to call a time-out, or as we used to do when I was in the military, we need to go into a stand-down mode in order to fix the problem: Remove the control corporatist cartels and billionaires have over our entire system of government.
All the gridlock we see in Washington, and all the draconian (fascistic) laws and regulations being passed at a faster and faster rate to strip people of their constitutional and human, and workers' rights have their genesis in the fact that the the levers of power have been taken over by the corporatist ruling elite. We need to remove their deadly grip on our democracy.
Either way, let's see what happens Monday. If nothing changes, then we'll continue our march to the death of democracy by a thousand cuts, or electing to stay in the slowly boiling pot, like frogs.