General Strike? Who’s Really Turning Back the Clock?
When activists talk about general strikes, cynics scoff “That’s taking us back a hundred years!” But let’s be real: it’s the GOP that’s dragging us backward, trying to undo a century of public protections born of public experience and struggle.
Look at the floods in Texas Hill Country. Entire communities were washed away and children drowned not just because of nature and rainfall and water rise, but because of years of disinvestment in public infrastructure and the intentional gutting of the very idea of government as an expression of public caring — for one another — in an interdependent society.
Republicans today are hacking away at the New Deal’s legacy; slashing relief programs, deregulating industries, even trying to privatize weather forecasting. Because why should working people get life-saving alerts for free, when someone could profit instead?
It wasn’t always this way. Ironically, one hundred years ago, small towns in the Texas Hill country pioneered local relief laws and protections when neighbors were in trouble, paving roads and providing support that would inspire national action decades later. As Robert Caro chronicles in his biography of Lyndon Johnson, these efforts weren’t about charity — they were about democracy in action, about recognizing that the well-being of the community demands collective responsibility.
Today, the wealthy build homes up high and ignore the pleas for flood warning systems down below.
So talk to your grandparents and great-grandparents. We’ve learned this lesson before. If we have to, we’ll learn it again. But when people demand collective action today, don’t call it nostalgia. Call it survival. Because the real backward agenda is coming from the top — and the floods are coming for all of us.
You can watch my interview with AFA-CWA Union Leader Sara Nelson on Laura Flanders & Friends on YouTube and PBS stations or listen to my uncut conversations with any of my guests, by subscribing to our free podcast. All the information is at www.lauraflanders.org.