With the threat of homelessness looming in many people’s minds
throughout March as the crisis moved from back page news story to global
pandemic, calls for a rent strike grew from viral memes into a real
world movement. Despite attacks in the corporate press, on April 1st,
the rent strike officially kicked off across the US and Canada, as
entire buildings and apartment complexes announced their refusal to pay
and support grew within the wider population for a rent freeze.
By the evening of April 1st, CNN was even running an entire segment on the strike,
showcasing the degree in which the campaign has exploded into the
popular imagination of millions of people. This in itself is a testament
to the hard work of grassroots organizers, the massive proliferation of
flyers, posters, graffiti messages, and the now iconic white sheets which have come to symbolize the rent strike, and the countless hours spent between neighbors in meetings and online discussions.
But perhaps the greatest power of the strike, is that it has encouraged and pushed so many people to actually organize and come together with other community members. By providing hotline numbers and organizing guides,
local tenant unions, autonomous groups, and community organizations
have worked to bring those unable to pay their rent into a much larger
struggle. This process has thus in turn created more organizers: it has increased the capacity of people to self-organize and fight back against forces so often seen as untouchable.
We should be clear that while the rent strike is clearly growing – this is a long term struggle. People will need to prepare themselves for the eviction fights and battles to come, provide mutual aid,
build support from surrounding neighbors, and link up with lawyers.
Moreover, we’ll have to keep organizing on the ground to bring more and
more people into the strike, who as time goes on, will be increasingly
unable to pay their rent as the crisis continues. We’ll also have to
counter the narratives pushed by the media and landlord class and
articulate our ideas in a clear way to other working-class and poor
people about why they should join the strike.
What follows is our roundup of rent strike activity. If we missed
something, you want to send in a larger report, or want to come on our
podcast to talk about the strike in your area – don’t hesitate to email
us at: info at itsgoingdown dot org.
literally do it, now, right now this exact second. yes you sitting there on your dashboard right now you get your phone out of your pocket or from your desk. get people from your work in a discord. get them in a group text. start talking about your grievances. start talking about the rumors of what the bosses won’t say. spread the information they won’t. get people riled up. contact your local relevant union and hook up. contact your local iww branch and get them on board. seek out the representatives of your district or your county and find the ones who support union activity. leverage them. use their connections. get the media on board. prepare to go to print on the conditions you’re suffering. cover your asses. do not let them retaliate. hit them again, and again, and again before they can recover from the previous hit. make them regret it. make them suffer for what they’ve done to us. stand tall and demand better. look them in the eye and tell them not one more. not one more death for the sake of profit.
this is not hyperbole. these people will kill you. you will go into work and be told that the quarter inch of plexi in front of the register (but never in front of where customers really stand) is going to protect you. that you’re fine. you’re low risk. you don’t need to stay home. it’s okay if there was a case in the store. it’s only one in ten. we need people to come in. you’ll be fine.
not one fucking more. draw a line in the sand here, now. you can do it. anyone can, and everyone has to. because no one is coming to save us. we are all we’ve got. protect each other, protect yourselves, and Fucking Organize.
The USPS is about to declare bankruptcy. It’s at the center of the longstanding plans for disaster recover and has been since the Cold War. It’s the only institution that could (for example) deliver covid meds to every home in America in one day.
The proximate cause of the post office’s bankruptcy is the pandemic, but that is merely the finishing blow. The USPS was murdered in 2006, when Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act.
The Act gave the USPS a mere 10 years to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years.” That is, to set aside cash to pay medical bills for future employees who hadn’t been born yet.
The Act gave the USPS a mere 10 years to “prefund its future health care benefit payments to retirees for the next 75 years.” That is, to set aside cash to pay medical bills for future employees who hadn’t been born yet.
The USPS’s murder is straight out of the neoliberal playbook: “1 Defund, 2 claim crisis, 3 call for privatizatization, 4 profit!”
As Lambert Strether points out, it was a bipartisan act of murder, cosponored by the “centrist” Democrat Henry Waxman.
Killing the USPS looms large in the Trump admin’s (nonmetaphorical, actual) privatization playbook, “Delivering Government Solutions in the 21st Century Reform Plan and Reorganization Recommendations”:
The proposals are for USPS to become a Wework clone or franchisee, but not to become a publicly owned bank - a common line of business for other nations’ postal services, natural based on the amounts of cash they handle.
The USPS is the nation’s second largest employer of veterans, with 630,000 employees. Trump is about to allow it to collapse so that UPS, Fedex and other private firms can skim off the most profitable parts of its business and leave rural Americans totally isolated.
The loss of the USPS would mean the loss of the last truly universal federal program in America and would unduly hammer the people whom Trump claims to love – veterans and rural voters.
