yes, when Commies do it it's "national liberation"

It is my opinion that none of this matters. The game has been fixed and there is little that a general strike is going to do to change that. The only thing that would truly affect change is if people change the way they live their individual lives. Think globally act locally. This election is a sham. Hilary is the lesser of two evils. Barrack doesn't stand a chance unless he is some sort of sleeper for the international banking cabals. He who holds the money holds the power. The election is a cleverly crafted piece of public relations if ever there was one.

The vietnam war was protested by youth and the left for a very long time before the moderate and parts of the right wing, the buisiness leadership, etc... turned against the war.

we need to make the ending of the war about nothing else but the ending of the war, period, using language which doesn't make a distinction between right or left. I say this as someone who is personally more left leaning than most people, someone who'd eventually like to see humanity use technology to create a socialist state of leisure with robotic manufacturing and staffing for all goods and services being labor or at the very least used to create full employment but with people only working a few days a week to enjoy what they have now for working a 60hr week.

One has to consider a reasonable "heirarchy of needs" for humanity roughly parallel to Maslow's heirarchy of needs for the individual. I'd love to see some major changes, a movement for labor to push back and make some gains, power more evenly distributed as well as wealth and income... but I consider stopping people from killing one another the most important priority.

Anyway, stop and think about it strategically. We are in a recession, or perhaps since our fed chairman used the word and his job is to lie and minimize how bad things actually are we are probably in a depression. If we focus on bringing a young generation home to hit the labor market who feel used, manipulated, pissed off, traumatized, and are experianced in tactics of urban warfare into a job market where they'll be treated as being just as dispensible by their employers as they have been by their military leaders... won't it actually bring labor even faster to a boiling point with the priveledged?

The buisiness leaders don't negotiate with peaceful liberals wanting laws for labor reform unless they are terrified of more violent and radical groups asking for the whole kit and kabootle. If the returning veterens of this war who have learned very well from the militias in Iraq how easy and effective it is to wage guerilla warfare, conduct assasinations, etc. and are treated like human garbage by their employers or not hired at all if they have too much "baggage" from the war... then they'll naturally be the seed for revolution.

For having been once "america's son" lied to, cynical, angry, never before the war open to any leftist talk seriously... if they end up here psychologically tramatized, hopeless, under-employed, in debt, exploited... they'll be more ready to listen to left rhetoric and probably feel they have little to lose (and little to fear anymore, for their minds are conditioned to a state of perpetual hypervigilance anyway where it would make no difference to their level of stress if they are fighting in revolution or not). They'd understand military tactics they've used and would be able to anticipate what our military would do. Some might still be in the military units but be sympathetic with the veterens they'd be called to fight against and distrustful of their own leadersthip, it could perhaps divide the military against itself enough to make a revolution perhaps a relatively bloodless coup to just eliminate the leadership and corperate heads from companys like Haliburton.

But before you can take advantage of that situation, they can't be out in Iraq, they have to be home here looking for work or dealing with the reality working people have to deal with, and getting no sympathy from the people they were told that they were fighting for. Ultimately it will end up very much like the Sabbath song "Iron Man".

With people like that unleashed on the authorities, the very dogs they trained like disposible attack pets turned on their masters, that opportunity would be created... perhaps... for a more peaceful person to come in and demand labor reform saying "well if you don't like dealing with me, you could deal with them"

There was a good reason why the generation which was seasoned to WWII's horrors was utterly placated with a larger share of the country's wealth and made into a huge and comfortable middle class. If they had returned home and didn't have that, they would have started shooting here. It remains to be seen if the powers that be today aren't so blind and greedy, and obsessed on keeping power over people that they might anticipate this problem with the current troops return.

Think about what Tim McVeigh went through in the first gulf war, how he went from war hero to forgotten underpaid nobody who felt totally abandoned by the leadership he was once unquestionably loyal to. That was the second largest instance of domestic terrorism, and he hadn't seen half the shit that some of these young people in our current war have seen over and over in extended duty. When they come home I will not be surprised if there aren't 1000 feeling just like Tim Mc Veigh, mad as hell, and familiar with improvised road side bombs, how to plant, make, and unmake one.

Just let's get them back here, and see what these veterens do, you won't even need to incite or encourage them before the bloodbath starts of it's own accord in response to our aristocracy's arrogance to these working class ex high school football players and town heros that they made into killing machines working for minimum wage if at all. The phones of peaceful lefties wanting labor reform will be ringing off the hook from the priveledged asking us to think of how to placate them.

>But the timing isn't a surprise since the ILWU is a politically radical group

Sentences like this can only happen when the center has moved so far Right that usging companies to pay benefits to workers is considered 'extreme'. It's a center where the neocon think tanks are reputable sources no matter that they've been wrong-literally, as in factually--about every single thing they've uttered in eight soul-grinding years of ceaseless bloodthirsty moral nihilism, war profiteering and very active disinformation.

And those last three elements CAN be proved ad infinitum. Of course, in NuCentristVille, 'proof' and 'facts' are extremist things.

<If it's just the radical left that's seen as being mostly against the war, then they've already lost.>

You mean to say "The right has been winning the argument about the war by painting all anti-war groups as radical leftists" - if you care about the truth, that is.

Of course "winning" is a rather odd term in this case as the anti-war groups have been proven to have been right about pretty much everything and the war-boosters utterly wrong.