. HUMAN RIGHTS .

An article by Bernie Sanders in Common Dreams (reprinted  under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Make no mistakes about it, we are living in dangerous and unprecedented times as we combat Trump‘s oligarchy, authoritarianism, kleptocracy, and his horrific attacks against working families.

Demonstrators march through downtown protesting the agenda of the Trump Administration on September 30, 2025 in Chicago, Illinois. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

We have more income and wealth inequality than we’ve ever had; we have more corporate control of the media than we’ve ever had; we have more billionaire money buying elections than we’ve ever had.

We have a major housing and educational crisis, people are going to the grocery store and can’t afford the food their families need, and we have a health care system that is completely broken.

Meanwhile, we have a president who is a pathological liar, who has little regard for the rule of law, who is suing media outlets that criticize him, threatening to jail his political opponents and talking about the military invading U.S. cities as practice.

History has always taught us that real change never takes place from the top on down. It always occurs from the bottom on up. It occurs when ordinary people get sick and tired of oppression and injustice—and fight back.

And on Tuesday night, as you know, the government shut down because—for the first time in modern history—Donald Trump and the Republican Party are approaching a budget conversation that requires 60 votes with a take it or leave it approach.

I will not take it.

I will not allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party to take away health care from 15 million people by making the largest cut to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act in history.

I will not allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party to increase health insurance premiums by 75 percent, on average, for over 20 million Americans who get their health care through the Affordable Care Act.

I will not allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party to fund this by giving a $1 trillion tax break to people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and the other oligarchs in the top 1 percent.

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The struggle for human rights, is it gathering force in the USA?

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I will not allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party to undermine modern medicine and the health and well-being of our children by rejecting the scientific evidence regarding vaccines.

I will not allow Donald Trump and the Republican Party to allow this country to be moved toward authoritarianism by putting federal troops on city streets without a request from a governor or mayor.

I was asked ahead of the vote if I would just continue to vote NO over and over again until these issues are addressed, and you are damn right I will.

Donald Trump and my colleagues in the Republican Party may not stay up late at night worrying about people who can’t afford health care, the medicine they need to survive, groceries and an education for their children, but I do.

Republicans will not have my vote to fund the government unless they find a sense of morality and do the right thing on health care, income and wealth inequality, and stopping Donald Trump’s march toward authoritarianism.

I want the Republicans to go back to their districts and ask their constituents whether or not they believe it’s a good idea to take away health care from millions of Americans to give Bezos and Musk a tax break.

I suspect they will not like the answer they hear.

So no. Republicans will not have my vote to fund the government unless they find a sense of morality and do the right thing on health care, income and wealth inequality, and stopping Donald Trump’s march toward authoritarianism.

Until that happens it is important for all of us to stand up and make our voices heard.

Will it be easy? Of course not.

Is it possible? Only if everyone does their part.

Let me remind you, history has always taught us that real change never takes place from the top on down. It always occurs from the bottom on up. It occurs when ordinary people get sick and tired of oppression and injustice—and fight back. That is the history of the founding of our nation, the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement and more.

Sisters and brothers, we are living in dangerous times. Maybe more dangerous than any point in American history since the Civil War.

But this is a struggle that, for ourselves and future generations, we cannot lose.

Let us go forward together in solidarity

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. HUMAN RIGHTS .

An article by Jessica Corbett from Common Dreams (reprinted  under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

As President Donald Trump and his allies continue to target immigrants, journalists, and anyone else critical of the increasingly authoritarian administration, organizers are gearing up  for another round of “No Kings” rallies across the United States, which they expect will draw even more demonstrators than a similar day of action  in June.

Protestors march during a “No Kings” demonstration on June 14, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Jay L Clendenin/Getty Images)

“Sustained, broad-based, peaceful, pro-democracy grassroots movements win. Trump wanted a coronation on his birthday, and what he got instead was millions of people standing up to say NO KINGS,” Indivisible co-founder and co-executive director Ezra Levin said in a Tuesday statement. “No Kings Day on June 14 was an historic demonstration of people power, and it’s grown into a broad, diverse movement.”

“While Trump escalates his attack with occupations of American cities and secret police forces terrorizing American communities, normal everyday people across this country are showing up every single day with courage and defiance. On October 18, we’re going to show up in the largest peaceful protest in modern American history,” he added. “Millions will come together in more cities than ever to say collectively: No kings ever in America.”

Indivisible is planning next month’s peaceful protests alongside groups including the ACLU, American Federation of Teachers, Common Defense, 50501, Human Rights Campaign, League of Conservation Voters, MoveOn, National Nurses United, Public Citizen, Service Employees International Union, and United We Dream.

Organizers announced  the second Not Kings mobilization earlier this month. As a federal government shutdown loomed on Tuesday, they said that over 2,110 protests are now planned across all 50 states—more than those that drew over 5 million people to the streets in June.

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“We the People of the United States of America reject the Trump regime’s repeated assaults on our freedoms,” said 50501 national press coordinator Hunter Dunn. “This administration has invaded our cities, dismantled our social services, and tossed hard-working Americans into concentration camps. He has sacrificed our Constitution on the altar of fascism. On October 18th, the American people will gather together to practice two time-honored American traditions: nonviolent protest and anti-fascism.”

Trump has deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles, California, and Washington, DC, and this week is moving to do the same in Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, Illinois—where US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are already carrying out the deadly  “Operation Midway Blitz” as part of Trump’s national push for mass deportations. The administration is also specifically targeting pro-Palestinian foreign students, which a federal judge on Tuesday rebuked  with what one reporter called “the most scathing legal rebuke of the Trump era.”

Also on Tuesday, during an unusual gathering of US military leadership in Virginia, Trump declared that the country is “under invasion from within” and generals should use American cities as “training grounds,” while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth pledged to overhaul the inspector general process: “No more frivolous complaints, no more anonymous complaints, no more repeat complaints, no more smearing reputations, no more endless waiting, no more legal limbo, no more sidetracking careers, no more walking on eggshells!”

Meanwhile, Jacob Thomas, a military veteran and communications director for Common Defense, said that “as veterans and patriots who swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution and the freedoms that it enshrines, we are appalled at the lengths President Trump and his billionaire buddies have gone to to strip our neighbors and communities of the rights, dignity, and freedoms owed to everyone residing in this country.”

“We must all do our part to fight back against his authoritarianism and military occupation of cities,” he continued. “We cannot allow a wannabe dictator to destroy our democracy, gut veteran healthcare, keep people from accessing the ballot box, and tank our economy. We must all join together in solidarity to fight back and secure our freedoms. Two hundred and fifty years ago, Americans stood up to a tyrant king, generations later our great-grandparents defeated fascism abroad. Now it is up to us to defeat fascism at home.”

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. HUMAN RIGHTS .

An article by Jeremy Brecher from Waging Nonviolence

Something is in the air: A perception that American democracy and livable conditions for working people may only be saved by the kind of large-scale nonviolent direct action variously called “general strikes,” “political strikes,” or, as I will refer to all of them, “social strikes.”

Calls for mass disruptive action are coming from unlikely places, like Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, an organization normally associated with legal action through the courts. When Romero was asked in a recent interview what would happen if the Trump administration systematically defied court orders, he replied, “Then we’ve got to take to the streets in a different way. We’ve got to shut down this country.”

Similarly senior Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern said, “We can’t just sit back and let our democracy just fall apart. What we need to think about are things like maybe a national strike across this country.”

Some in organized labor are also entering the fray. Sara Nelson, head of the Association of Flight Attendants, recently said that American workers — no matter what they do or what sector they are in — now have “very few options but to join together to organize for a general strike.” (She led the organizing for a national general strike that successfully deterred Trump’s attempt to shut down the government in his first term.)

Meanwhile, online, there are even more ad hoc efforts demonstrating the tactic’s appeal right now. For instance, more than 300,000 people have signed cards pledging to participate in a general strike.

Calling for general strikes is a staple of the radical toolkit. (I’ve made questionable efforts to call two or three myself over the past half-century.) But why has the idea of such mass actions suddenly appeared on the lips of such a wide range of people? There are three principal reasons:

1. The wide range of people being harmed by the MAGA juggernaut gives credibility to actions based on wide public participation.

2. The demolition of key institutions of democracy, constitutionalism and the rule of law is threatening to leave few alternatives to popular uprising.

3. The fecklessness of the leadership of the Democratic Party, as sublimely illustrated by Sen. Chuck Schumer’s passage in March of the devastating MAGA budget, has led to despair about resistance within the institutions of government.

These inescapable realities are forcing people to think in unaccustomed ways.

I use the term “social strikes” to describe mass actions people take to exercise power by withdrawing cooperation from and disrupting the operation of society. The goal of a social strike is to affect not just the immediate employer, but a political regime or social structure. Such forms of mass direct action provide a possible alternative when institutional means of action prove ineffective. In all their varied forms they are based on Gandhi’s fundamental perception that “even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled.”

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What are social strikes?

Social strike is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of activities that use the withdrawal of cooperation and mass disruption to affect governments and social structures. While the U.S. has a tradition of social and labor movements using mass action and local general strikes, it does not have a tradition of using people power for the defense of democracy. However, in other countries where democratic institutions have been so weakened or eliminated that they provide no alternative to tyranny, such methods have been used effectively.

Tyrannical regimes from Serbia to the Philippines to Brazil and many other places have been brought down by nonviolent revolts that made society ungovernable. More recent examples include the “popular impeachment” of the governor of Puerto Rico in 2019 after the leaking of scurrilous discussions in a chat group by top government leaders and the massive uprisings that removed the president of Korea as he instigated a coup last December. In March 2025 alone there were general strikes in Belgium, Argentina, Serbia and Korea — all directed against government austerity policies or, in the case of Korea, unconstitutional seizure of government power.

Various kinds of social strikes have occurred in U.S. history. The U.S. has seen at least half-a-dozen phases of intense class conflict like those Rosa Luxemburg called “periods of mass strike.” These often involved popular action that went far beyond, though usually included, the withdrawal of labor power that conventionally define a strike. Mass strikes have included general strikes, mass picketing, occupation of workplaces and government buildings, nonviolent direct action, shutdowns of commerce, blocking of traffic and other disruption of everyday activities. Mass strikes have often been met with severe repression and at times involved violent conflict with company guards, police, state militias and the U.S. Army.

The U.S. has also seen a handful of actions that fit the classical definition of a “general strike” as a coordinated work stoppage by trade unions in many different sectors.

The closest the U.S. has come to a national general strike was in 1886, when a strike for the eight-hour day became a general strike in Chicago and some other locations. Since then there have been a handful of general strikes in individual cities, for example the Seattle general strike in 1919 and the general strikes in Oakland and Stamford, Connecticut in 1946. They have all been sympathetic strikes to support particular groups of workers in struggles with their employers.

Such union-called general strikes, however, have been a rarity in U.S. labor history. American unions are bound by laws specifically designed to prevent them from taking part in strikes about issues outside their own workplace, such as sympathy strikes and political strikes. In most cases their contracts include “no-strike” language that bans them from striking during the contract. Unions that violate these prohibitions are subject to crushing fines and loss of bargaining rights. Their leaders can be — and have been — packed off to jail.

Historically, American unions have often opposed their members’ participation in strikes that union officials have not authorized because they wished to exercise a monopoly of authority over their members’ collective action. In labor movement jargon, such unauthorized actions were condemned as “dual unionism.” U.S. unions have often disciplined and sometimes supported the firing and blacklisting of workers who struck without official authorization. As a result, unions have often deterred their members from participating in mass strike actions even when the rank and file wanted to.

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