Thanks for the link, Dan. You're absolutely right about the lack of ambiguity. For those without the time to view the entire press conference, here's a gem of a speech from a gentleman identified as Clarence Thomas - ILWU.

The reason why I and other workers will be standing in solidarity on Wednesday for the call for the general strike by the Occupy Oakland movement is because this is a movement about fighting corporate rule with worker power.

But we must be very clear about something. This is not about a crisis on Wall Street. This is capitalism run amok. Capitalism has failed us. It no longer can deliver the goods.

What does it say about a country who has billionaires, right here in the state of California, who are employers, but have their products produced in Asia, where they have people working for slave wages?

And the only way that's going to be turned around is when workers rise up.

The call for this general strike did not come from the AFL-CIO affiliated unions. It came from grass roots organizers. This could represent the dry run of what it will take to build for a general strike. Because the only time workers get any kind of concession in this country is when they organize and mobilize in their own name. 

And I'm going to conclude with this quote from a former slave, and abolitionist, and trade unionist, Frederick Douglas. "Power concedes to nothing, without a demand. It never has, and it never will."

Capitalism has failed us. That's clear enough.

The progress of civilization requires that more and more intelligence be devoted to social affairs, and this not the intelligence of the few, but that of the many.  We cannot safely leave politics to politicians, or political economy to college professors.  The people themselves must think, because the people alone can act.

Henry George quote, embraced by Emma Lazarus (from whose poem "The New Colossus" comes "Keep ancient lands your storied pomp...Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Cited in John Nichols' wonderful book The 'S' Word.  ​Nichols includes Lazarus' radical and egalitarian poem as part of the pantheon of American statements,..

along with Tom Paine's hope that this experiment might 'begin the world over again', Abraham Lincoln's promise that 'all men are created equal' and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s call to bend the arc of history toward the realization of that promise with a civil rights revolution sufficient that all Americans might declare themselves to be 'free at last'.

All of the words in the credo are radical...  

Virtually all of the political steps this country has taken to move towards fuller realization of this credo have come from the left, and notably from people who have (as destor writes in his current post) refused to accept that ours is the best of all possible worlds.  The dominant strand of today's Republicanism that favors even heightened plutocracy and oligarchy barely even pretends any more to believe in small "d" democracy.  Think Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth and his love of capitalism (his version of it) and, well, not so much when it comes to democracy.  Think the concerted right-wing voter suppression efforts.  Think corporate personhood and Citizens United.  Think Senator Durbin, one of the good guys who is honest enough to acknowledge where we've come to in our politics, commenting that the big banks run our U.S. Senate. 

Maybe it's now time and possible, finally, to reclaim the left's very American, if cyclical, role in making America better, truer to our best ideals. 

In order to do it again in our day.