Why Voting Won't Save Us, And Why It's Time For A Women's Strike

Thelma Glass, a founding member of the Women's Political Council of Montgomery, Alabama

What to do with so much egregious government to respond to? In Maine we have a legislature in session that is attacking Medicare, Medicaid, public education funding passed by referendum, water quality via changes in mining regulations, Native sovereignty, and our status as a refugee asylum state -- just to name a few.

So I'm receving hundreds of messages a week similar to this one, from a former colleague, on facebook:

shared a link.
15 hrs
How about a rotating ongoing vigil at Poliquin's office with a sign: Poliquin's voted for Mainers to die.
I'd take a shift every week.

The link shared was news of the passage of draconian austerity in the form of the "American Health Care Act" published in the Washington Post. (The Post is a corporate government stenographer I'm no longer willing to read or share because it has been so destructive of truth; but most baby boomers cling to loyalties they developed when young. Here's an alternative by RoseAnn De Moro in Common Dreams, "Did the Marquis De Sade Write This Health Care Bill?")

Older white progressives have a hard time recognizing that the Democratic Party is not their friend.

This delusion extends to believing that an "independent" senator toeing the pro-Israel line and espousing socialist notions while voting with corporations would have saved the party.

Source: Amino.com

Millenials, on the other hand, have been kicked in the teeth by corporate government since the day they were born. As they stagger through life carrying the burden of their student loans, many can't afford a dentist. A dip into their social media threads finds them responding to the newest wave of healthcare austerity by calling for guillotines and other forms of violent rebellion.

I don't believe in the effectiveness of violent tactics, especially when the people are so thoroughly outgunned by the "security" forces of the state, whether police or military (this line is blurring rapidly).

Also, I'm a boomer heavily influenced by Rosa Parks and Jo Ann Robinson, women who believed that giving up the moral high ground i.e. abandoning nonviolent tactics like the Montgomery bus boycott would be a strategic mistake.

Another view in wide circulation among the woke on U.S. healthcare woes:

Phil Rockstroh sums it up: 

"If Obama and the Democrats had submitted and fought for a single payer plan rather than the byzantine, designed-to-fail (by the rightwing Heritage Foundation) Big Insurance/Big Pharma/Big Medicine Trojan horse ACA, there would not be the extent of discontent that has allowed the act to be challenged and its existence threatened. 

The popular outcry would have made the attempt to dismantle it politically prohibitive. 

Therefore, we are witnessing yet another example of how the lesser-of-two-evils canard in the end serves no one but the capitalist plundering class.In short, liberals and sham progressives, it is more propitious, result-wise, to be engaged in an honest fight, rather than to feign one, as High Dollar owned and controlled Democratic Party elites did in regard to Obamacare. 

Yes, the Republicans are soul-dead practitioners of shit-wizardry. But the fact does not provide cover for Obama’s and the liberal class’ own collaboration in the craven art."

This is countered by people calling for our "Representative" Bruce Poliquin to be held accountable at the next election and who will no doubt call on us to elect a Democrat to fix everything.

Poliquin is a man who wears $500 shoes to a town hall in central Maine, whose entire resume reflects his service to Wall St., and who will literally hide in the bathroom to avoid questions about how he intends to vote. All his office voicemail boxes are full, and all constituents get is a busy signal when trying multiple times a day to get through. On the rare occasion that they do get through they are told that "the congressman is still deciding." If they rally at an event he's willing to attend, he quickly cancels his appearance citing yet another family emergency. 

My impression is that Poliquin has watched and studied the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off very, very carefully.

I do not believe that working through the proper channels to request meetings or elect better represenatives are anything more than elaborate wastes of time at this point in the trajectory of history.

We have full on corporate government with the mass incarceration that goes with along with regimes abandoning non-coercive ways of earning support (like providing healthcare, housing, or public transportation) in favor of 100% coercion.

I also do not believe that most baby boomers will understand this. That's ok, we are the past not the future. We are old and in the way for the most part. 

Begging for scraps from the corporate table is also a waste of time.

Women's Political Council organizer Jo Ann Robinson's mug shot from the Montgomery County archives

Now is the time for Parks and Robinson-style strategy: start withholding support from the corporate beast.

If every woman who could get away with it would call in sick for two days in a row, the system would wobble. Then, others would join in. Einstein estimated that if 2% of the population stops upholding a system, that's enough to bring it down.

Baby boomers, many still working because they can't afford to retire, could play a key role here. Most of us could get away with not working for two key days (like the Monday and Tuesday of a new quarter or fiscal year?). Working class women who can't afford to lose wages should be subsidized by those who can. Caregivers for the dependent obviously would go on working. No one is going to stop feeding their 3 year old or bedridden mother to make a political point. That's ok if the 2% work together.

After 48 hours, the white males who run this country would be forced to notice their lack of meals, travel itineraries and business as usual. Phones would ring unanswered. Important emails would pile up in inboxes, or not get sent in the first place. Many in the ruling class would be scrambling to get enough calories -- or maybe they would just drink their calories until their liquor supplies ran out? 

The Montgomery bus boycott was a movement largely of women (and the making of Martin Luther King, Jr. as a national leader -- draw your own conclusions). The black female domestic workers who joined the boycott initially wanted to make a point about how valuable they were as a customer base for the bus line that discriminated against them.

The Mongtomery bus boycott was only planned to last for a day.

But the power of withdrawing so much support from a bad system was intoxicating. It snowballed quickly so that the cautious joined the first adopters. Community groups helped organize people to share resources so they could still get to work. 



Pregnant teenager Claudette Colvin's wildcat strike against bus segregation provided the spark that motivated the Women's Political Council WPC) of Montgomery to support Rosa Parks in a planned arrest followed by a boycott. Which strategy adopted by the WPC resulted in more change: voter registration, or the boycott?

May 1 this year saw strikes in many U.S. locations, with a theme of the power of immigrant labor predominating. That's a good sign.

What will be the spark for a general strike by women? My prediction: when the corporate controlled Supreme Court removes access to legal, safe abortion.

The ACHA is already well on its way to making abortion unaffordable. Even white baby boomers will strike against that.

Reports From Inside Israel's Gulag On Hunger Strike And Reprisals #DignityStrike #PalHunger

Supporters participating in the Salt Water Challenge post videos of themselves drinking the only thing prisoners
planned to consume during their hunger strike prior to Israeli prison officials confiscating their salt.

I am sharing this news from my inbox received today from Addameer, which in Arabic means "conscience." Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association published their reports on attempting to visit prisoners who have been on hunger strike since April 17.

I would like to dedicate this post to Eric Axelman, a young Jewish friend in Maine currently raising funds for post production on his important documentary 70 Years Across the Sea: American Jews and 21st Century Zionism. To support this effort to educate English speaking folks on the ongoing brutal occupation of Palestine, click here.

Today, 25 April 2107, Addameer’s attorneys visited Nafha, Hadarim and Asqlan prisons, where they were not able to visit hunger-striking prisoners and detainees due to Israeli Prison Service (IPS) refusal. However, they managed to visit prisoners who were not on hunger strike that informed the attorneys of the hunger strike's recent developments.

During a visit to the Hadarim prison, prisoner Thabet al-Mardawi explained to Addameer’s attorney Mona Naddaf, that the IPS started transferring prisoners from one section to another on the second day of the strike, 18 April 2017. He added, that Marwan Barghouthi and Karim Younis were placed in isolation in Al-Jalama prison, and Anas Jaradat and Mahmoud Abu Sorour were placed in isolation in Ela prison. He added that about 36 prisoners were transferred to Ramle prison, and the rest of the prisoners were placed in different prisons across occupied Palestine.

Additionally, sick prisoners were transferred to the cells of Section 5 in Hadarim, which is a civilian detention room located in the civil section of the prison. The prisoners live in a completely isolated situation, where there is no television, no electrical devices and were only given sleeping mats.

Prisoner Thabet explained that the IPS isolated 102 hunger-striking prisoners before placing them in different prisons. Special unit forces stormed and raided the hunger-striking sections confiscating personal belongings. All of the prisoners have been stripped of their possessions; only one blanket has been kept for each prisoner and one set of clothing in addition to the “Shabas clothing” or prison uniform. Prison administration also seized salt in the first days of the strike, and strikers have had to drink water from the tap as the administration does not provide them with drinking water.

The prison administration has also imposed several punitive sanctions on the hunger-striking prisoners. The most important of these is the denial of family visits, as well as the denial of recreation, denial of access to the “canteen” (prison store).

In Nafha prison, Addameer’s attorney Samer Samaan visited prisoners Ayman Odeh and Raed al-Saadi, who told him during the visit that the number of hunger striking prisoners in Nafha is 250 from all political factions. The IPS also started isolating hunger strikers from their fellow prisoners, raided their sections and banned them from having attorney visits.

In Ashkelon prison, Farah Beyadsi visited prisoner Sharif Hamid, who is not on hunger strike. He informed her that the IPS transferred all the prisoners who are not on hunger strike to Section 12 of the prison. And transferred hunger striking prisoners to  Section 3 and placed them in isolation. 42 prisoners in Ashkelon prison are on hunger strike.

“In Ashkelon there are 5 rooms, each room has about ten prisoners, the prisoners are forbidden from communicating with anyone, and they are denied family visits and access to the prison canteen. They are not allowed to see their attorneys as well,” Hamid added. The prison administration in Ashkelon also stripped hunger striking prisoners of their possessions, and strikers have had to drink water from the tap as the administration does not provide them with drinking water. They also prohibited them from participating in group prayers on Friday.

Addameer Prisoner Support urges supporters of justice around the world to take action to support the Palestinian prisoners whose bodies and lives are on the line for freedom and dignity.

Addameer urges all people to organize events in solidarity with the struggle of hunger-striking prisoners and detainees. Addameer further calls upon the international community to demand that the Israeli government to respect the will of hunger strikers who use their bodies as a legitimate means of protest, which has been recognized by the World Medical Association (WMA) Declaration of Malta on Hunger Strikes as “often a form of protest by people who lack other ways of making their demands known.” 

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Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association

P. O. Box: 17338, Jerusalem

3 Edward Said Street
Sebat Bldg.
1st Floor, Suite 2
Ramallah, Palestine

Tel: +972 (0)2 296 0446 / 297 0136
Fax: +972 (0)2 296 0447

Email: info@addameer.ps
Website: www.addameer.org
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