Today, Occupy Oakland ups the ante in Occupy Wall Street tactics: It has called a general strike for the city of Oakland.
Nobody seriously expects that the general strike will turn into—well, a general strike. The kind of effort required to assure that establishments large and small either close their doors or allow their workers to wander off hasn’t really been attempted, as it was, successfully, across the Bay in 1934, when the San Francisco general strike did come pretty close to shutting the city down—the only time in American history when a general strike actually became general. (More on that below.)
In September, 2009 Atlantic Monthly named 
