Message from The World Can’t Wait – Drive Out the Bush Regime! Steering Committee on our Next Steps:

We call on
people everywhere to: recognize the State of the Union for what it is–a
State of Emergency; to mobilize in downtowns and town squares, as well as
in  neighborhoods all across the country, on the night of Bush’s State
of the Union speech and, at the very moment he speaks to the nation,  we
will “Bring the Noise! Drown out Bush’s Lies! Drive out the Bush Regime”,
politically drowning out Bush.



Then, the weekend right after Bush State
of the Union speech, people will come from all across the country to Washington
DC in order to deliver the people’s verdict and the people’s demand right
there at the seat of power, and before the whole world: “Bush, Step Down. And
take your program with you.”  Join with us and make these protests
massive enough, broad and determined enough, to make  stopping this
regime, driving it out, the huge social movement and political question it must
urgently become.

——

As a key part of our rapid preparation, right now,
for this big leap we must take in the next two months,  local WCW
committees and organizers–new and “veteran”–should again read our movement’s
founding “Call” and to read and discuss the opening speech given by Debra Sweet
at our recent organizers’ conference. All this helped us decide on the
extraordinary political steps we need to take now. Here are some points that can
help focus on some central issues in that speech:



***Taking stock of our
real begining on Nov 2, which was the birth of a new thing–a movement utterly
determined to drive out a sitting President! Now we have to take what we
learned,  what we accomplished,  to a whole other level, so
that our beginning on November 2 does not go down as an interesting footnote in
the history books, but as the day history began to

change. It’s our
responsibiliity–the world can’t wait.



***Why is our founding “Call” so
important?  It provides the basis for uniting and guiding a movement
to drive the Bush regime from power–and take its program with it. As a key part
of that, it vividly paints a picture of why we MUST drive this regime from
power–the stakes, and what will happen if we do not. We need to have a much
broader movement–around this Call.  One of the main reasons that some
people have not yet thrown in to this movement is that they have not seen the
Call, or we have not yet deepened, with real substance, peoples’ grasp of what
is in that Call–starting with its opening description of the situation, and our
responsibility when faced with it.



**Will this regime go down to defeat
if things just take their course?  Wishful thinking. There are no
“self-controlling” forces “up there.”  The Bush regime is facing real
troubles–but,faced with this, they remain relentless in pursuing their very
dangerous and extreme course. “There is not going to be some magical ‘pendulum
swing.’ People  who steal elections and believe they’re on a
‘mission from God’ will not go without a fight.”



***We have to recognize
that the only thing that can save us is our own independent political activity.
Now, the political cohesion of our Movement is not voting vs. not voting; the
Call doesn’t tell people not to vote.  And it would be very wrong to
make that the dividing line.  Anybody who says that this movement
is against voting perhaps has not read the Call.  The point is that we
cannot rely on the Democratic Party – that “This whole idea of putting our hopes
and energies into leadership who tell us to seek common ground with fascists and
religious fanatics is proving every day to be a disaster, and actually serves to
demobilize people.” As the Democrats fell in line and voted, nearly unanimously
in November, not to withdraw now from Iraq, they reminded us again that relying
on them, and on 2006 elections, is a disastrous–and  utterly
unrealistic–course. With the State of the Union, we will begin to seriously
enter the 2006 election season. It is up to us–and urgently, through
powerful mass actions around the State of the Union–to provide people the way
to get on a different road.



**In sum, nothing less will do now than
something extraordinary. What is required is boldly and massively putting the
demand that “Bush step down and take his program with him” at the center of the
political stage at the time of the State of the Union. THAT, nothing less, is
the criteria we must use to evaluate the merits of different possible courses of
action now for our movement. It is by applying that standard that we at the
conference arrived at the need for the BIG LEAP– represented in the bold plans
for the two mass political mobilizations around the State of the Union,
demanding Bush step down. The future we get really is up to
us.



***Finally, we have to do some things immediately so that The World
Can’t Wait can be “on the map” very quickly now:


–ads featuring our Call in
major papers, like the NY Times;

–massive fundraising (now and still more later) to make these plans
feasible;