Proposal for a New Antiwar and Regime-Removal Strategy
It is obvious that the antiwar movement needs to begin widescale direct actions to stop this war and provide a real and effective alternative to the Republican and Democratic collaboration. Some examples: dock worker strikes and refusing to ship armaments; student actions to force universities to divorce from war research, recruitment and corporate interlocks; soldiers, to resist the military sending them to war, and so forth.
It's equally evident that the antiwar movement does not have the capacity to do much of what's needed at this time. And so it turns one face towards the Democrats to save us. In doing so, even for the best of intentions (defined by our impotence, as a movement), we undermine our capacity to do anything else.
So let me propose a different strategy. Since the Democrats won't impeach, we form a People's Impeachment movement and assist community groups across the country in setting up their own impeachment tribunals EVERYWHERE. All the branches of the antiwar movement can agree to provide speakers, testifyers, prosecuting "attorneys" and so forth. The local communities can add to all of those, and also provide the judges and juries.
I mean this as a serious movement, and not simply as guerrilla theater. The local tribunals would issue subpoenas for whoever it seeks to testify, and the movement as a whole will try to serve them on those subpoenaed. We coordinate all this nationally through a People's Impeachment website similar to the fine work that BORDC (Bill of Rights Defense Committee) and NCRPA (National Coalition for Repeal of the USA Patriot Act) did around cities disavowing the USA Patriot Act.
And THEN each of the hundreds of tribunals deputizes the citizenry to actually, physically arrest those found guilty of propagating this war in their area.
Where possible, we try to hold these tribunals in state and municipal legislature buildings, and eventually inside the U.S. Capitol building itself -- NOT as civil disobedience (the point is NOT to be arrested, although that may become unavoidable, but it never is the point in our actions), but to reassert the will of the people over the institutions of this society, particularly over those institutions that are acting in our names and purporting to democratically serve the people.
Strategically, this begins to establish a "dual power" framework in which the Democrats are irrelevant. We create a new way to enable the truly democratic voice of the people to be heard, and implemented.
Mitchel Cohen Brooklyn Greens / Green Party