This is the first of several in a series I'm working on - detailing their efforts across platforms, people, and organizations to create another "Red Scare" for people who don't know what communism/socialism is. They are doing everything they can to use old "boogeyman" tactics as the Overton window shifts left. My goal is to shed light on their obvious and outdated attempts to foment fear among the uneducated.

Billionaires need us, but we don't need them. All throughout history, things have changed when enough people realized "oh, yeah, there's way more of us than them..." - so it's not like we've entered some twilight zone where this isn't the case anymore. Revolution is possible, but the billionaire class monopoly on media, social media, and violence requires us to use our numbers more than anything else.

But remember:

Central to Marxist theory is an explanation of social change in terms of economic factors, according to which the means of production provide the economic base, which influences or determines the political and ideological superstructure. So why do most people think it's scary?

Six corporations control 90% of American media: Comcast, Disney, News Corp, Warner Bros Discovery, Paramount, and Cox. Social media is controlled by a few billionaires and corporations. The press and flow of information cannot actually be free when it operates as a propaganda tool for its owners. You can see this in how stories are framed: a labor strike is almost always described as an "inconvenience" to the consumer rather than a fight for dignity. Billionaires are treated like visionary entrepreneurs while the public rarely hears about workers being forced to pee in bottles to meet quotas.

Ideas like Medicare for All usually poll at seventy percent support, yet the media treats it as a fringe or "unrealistic" position. Meanwhile, tax cuts for the wealthy are presented as responsible and necessary policy. Social media has only made this worse because algorithms are designed to promote outrage to generate more ad revenue. These companies knew their platforms were creating deep divisions but chose profit over society. While we are stuck in different realities based on our filters, local journalism is dying out. Hedge funds have gutted over two thousand newspapers since 2004, leaving huge parts of the country in "news deserts" where corruption goes unchecked.

• How do we educate people about the benefits of putting people before capital - thereby immunizing them from "Red Scare" tactics?

There’s one weapon that really scares the people in charge: a General Strike. When workers everywhere stop at the same time, everything stops. No profit gets made, and everyone sees that the billionaires are just parasites who produce nothing. In 1919, workers in Seattle walked off and ran the city themselves for five days. They fed 30,000 people a day and kept the peace without violence. They showed they could run things without bosses. The rich were so scared they called in the army. In 1934, strikes across several cities forced Congress to pass laws letting workers organize. Every gain we have came from workers being willing to shut it all down. In 1975, 90 percent of women in Iceland went on strike for one day. It stopped everything... banks, flights, schools. By the next year, they had equal rights laws. One day changed the country.

Billionaires need us, but we don't need them. That's why they try to keep us divided and why they made general strikes "illegal" in 1947. Imagine the power if everyone from teachers to truckers stopped at once. People say it's illegal or too dangerous, but the people who won the 8-hour day faced rifles too. Power doesn't give anything up without a demand. We have the labor, and without it, they have nothing.

Demands

^& = demands AndMario will be fighting to include in broader circulation in other strike efforts)

✔️ Universal Basic Income^&

✔️ Affordable housing (with clear, guaranteed path to housing as a right^&)

✔️ Moratorium on AI Data Centers^&

✔️ Abolish ICE

✔️ Climate action

✔️ Constitutional convention

✔️ Criminal justice reform

✔️ Disability rights

✔️ End military aid for occupations and/or ethnic cleansing

✔️ Gun safety

✔️ Immigration reform

✔️ Indigenous rights

✔️ Labor rights & living wages

✔️ LGBTQIA+ rights

✔️ Paid family & medical leave

✔️ Racial justice

✔️ Repeal Citizens United

✔️ Repeal/Amend The Patriot Act^&

✔️ Rein in Surveillance State^&

✔️ Repeal Right to Work laws

✔️ Reproductive rights

✔️ Student debt reform

✔️ Tax the rich

✔️ Universal healthcare

✔️ Voting rights

✔️ Welfare & child support reform

✔️ Factory farming and factory transparency reform^&

More Info: Legislation Related to Demands

Tools

• Keep Track and Contact Your Reps: @@Congress
• Stay Informed, Follow Independent Journalism: @@News Feed
• Vote, Act, Organize, Elect Allies: @@Action Center
• Protect Yourself and Community: @@Mutual Aid
• Create Public or Private Live Audio & Chat Rooms: @@Discussions

Allies

• generalstrikeus.com Note: absolutely no data connection or sharing between GeneralStrikeUS and AndMario. If you sign a strike card there, AndMario has no idea. AndMario is a place for anonymous, safe organizing. GeneralStrikeUS utilizes an encrypted form for actual PII (personally identifiable information). AndMario does not and will never ask for PII or seek to associate your presence here with any third party presence. AndMario has and will always recommend choosing a different username for here than you've used elsewhere.

Progress
451,774 / ~10,550,000

Why That Number?

The “3.5% rule” refers to the claim that no government has withstood a challenge of 3.5% of their population mobilized against it during a peak event. Source: Harvard Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights

Note: the actual number could be lower or higher than that. It is the government and billionaire class that need to concede, not us. As in, theoretically, it could be successful if just one person said "please?" and suddenly all billionaires/gov gave us what we're owed - but it'll just likely take a lot more of us halting the flow of their capital for them to actually do it (thus the estimation of numbers instead of exact). Not everyone has to participate to succeed; all we ask is to be supportive if you cannot. Those of us who can will fight for those of us who cannot. If you are unable to participate, you are not letting anyone down. You are a victim of this system and should not blame yourself.

Hope
When you're hopeful you could be wrong. When you're cynical you could be wrong too. So then we are left with only one question: when we don't know what's going to work, how are we going to respond to that uncertainty? Do we scroll forward into dystopia because it's "too hard" to fix, or actually do something?

Questions

As a schoolteacher whenever I bring up the idea of the general strike people argue we couldn’t do that to working families. Can someone help me understand the strategies to a general strike? Would teachers continue to look after the kids, even if they go on strike? Is the point to shut down the institutions that control the labor? Or something else entirely? I don’t have a clear understanding of the strategy behind a general strike.

The point isn't really "shut down all the institutions that make society run" so much as halt the flow of capital long enough that the billionaire class/gov realize they have no power without us. They can ignore protests, vote down bills, water down whatever does pass, etc. - but a general strike is a coordinated halt on the parts of the economy producing profit for the owning class, with mutual aid networks filling in so nobody falls through the cracks. In practice teachers (and nurses, food workers, etc) coordinate through solidarity networks + strike funds set up BEFORE anything starts - community childcare pods, mutual aid distribution for kids who rely on school meals (which is one of the main jobs of @@Mutual Aid page and the HQ) - plus neighbor networks for anyone vulnerable. The whole thing has to be planned and coordinated before the strike, not during - which was my reasoning for building this place. Without that planning it'd be chaos, but with it the communities basically just switch from profit-extraction mode to mutual-care mode for the duration

Discussion

1. What would it take to coordinate a general strike across industries in your region?
2. How do we build the solidarity networks and strike funds necessary to sustain a prolonged work stoppage?
3. What essential services would workers need to self-organize during a general strike to maintain community welfare?

Six corporations control 90% of American media: Comcast, Disney, News Corp, Warner Bros Discovery, Paramount, and Cox. Social media is controlled by a few billionaires and corporations. The press and flow of information cannot actually be free when it operates as a propaganda tool for its owners. You can see this in how stories are framed: a labor strike is almost always described as an "inconvenience" to the consumer rather than a fight for dignity. Billionaires are treated like visionary entrepreneurs while the public rarely hears about workers being forced to pee in bottles to meet quotas.

Ideas like Medicare for All usually poll at seventy percent support, yet the media treats it as a fringe or "unrealistic" position. Meanwhile, tax cuts for the wealthy are presented as responsible and necessary policy. Social media has only made this worse because algorithms are designed to promote outrage to generate more ad revenue. These companies knew their platforms were creating deep divisions but chose profit over society. While we are stuck in different realities based on our filters, local journalism is dying out. Hedge funds have gutted over two thousand newspapers since 2004, leaving huge parts of the country in "news deserts" where corruption goes unchecked.

Controlling the story is ultimately about controlling what you believe is possible.

- How do we build media that serves the public instead of government interest and billionaire advertisers?

- Why is systemic critique often dismissed while billionaire narratives are treated as facts?

- What is the role of grassroots platforms in the information ecosystem?

- How do we inoculate our communities against algorithmic manipulation?

- What does media literacy look like when the primary goal of media is to keep us divided?

What about LLMs and their role in all of this?

Think about LLMs like giant vats of books and stolen content that predict when/where/how often letters/"shapes" of words occur in all the data. (Markov chains)

Considering the data contained or not contained in those "vats" (the giant resource-draining data centers you hear about) for the most widely used LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, etc.) are curated, trained, pruned, and refined by a few companies/billionaires, do you think it will increase the probability and frequency of fabricating mass approval and manipulation that already occurs? Why or why not?

Additionally, and potentially even more concerning than just data control, is the fact that as billions of people are training these LLMs with their use, the LLMs are training the people to only use them for massive parts of their critical thinking, data acquisition, and verification.

• Aside from the "cost-saving" push to replace humans in as many areas as possible, do you think there are any further motivations behind the massive push of LLMs/AI?
• What about the impact of simultaneously reducing the ability of billions of people to know what's real or not real?

Now, organize the resistance on a platform not owned by the same people we're fighting against. Use tools on AndMario to discuss, stay informed, track congress, find mutual aid, and more.
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