The World Can't Wait (WCW) is a group in the United States dedicated to mobilizing mass resistance to what it describes as crimes committed by the US government.[1]
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World Can't Wait was formed in January 2005. Its headquarters is in New York City. WCW attempted during the Bush years to create a mass popular movement strong enough to force George W. Bush and Richard Cheney from office in disgrace. According to its original (2005) mission statement, by organizing people living in the United States, WCW seeks "to create a political situation where the Bush administration's program is repudiated, where Bush himself is driven from office, and where the whole direction he has been taking U.S. society is reversed."[2]
WCW levied many accusations against the Bush regime, including: the Iraq war, prisoner abuse, torture of military detainees, the abrogation of their rights to habeas corpus, ubiquitous domestic wire-tapping and surveillance activities ordered personally by the President, the administration's response to Hurricane Katrina, and the administration's support for anti-abortion legislation which they state has a basis in the goals of the Christian Right.
Founders of WCW included members or supporters of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Greens, anarchists, and people of various other political backgrounds.[3] Organising in high schools, college campuses and on the Internet, by October 2006, the group gathered 24,000 supporters, including actor Sean Penn, writers Studs Terkel and Eve Ensler, Democratic state assemblyman Mark Leno and anti-war protester Cindy Sheehan, and was able to organise protests in 150 cities across the United States, Canada and Switzerland.[4] According to WCW national coordinator Debra Sweet, "In the beginning, we were what you might call the voice-of-conscience usual suspects. Since then, we've been opening our umbrella wider." [4]
World Can't Wait stated during the 2008 presidential race that Obama would not be the redemptive figure that so many believed. Its National Director Debra Sweet said on November 7, 2008,
“Obama, the ’anti-war’ candidate, wants to leave 50 to 80,000 troops in Iraq, and move more combat brigades to Afghanistan. … People expected Obama, who taught Constitutional law, to protect their rights, but Obama went out of his way to make an unpopular vote to bolster the ‘war on terror’ and set the basis for expanded political repression. He voted for an amended USA PATRIOT Act that had more draconian curbs on political protest than the 2001 version.
“How can we feel Obama is ‘for the people’ when he put all his backing behind the bailout of Wall Street banks, but tells the people only to have faith in their leaders? When he supports the notoriously racist death penalty, and blames Black people themselves for the huge prison population? When he finds ‘common ground’ with the most rabid Christian fundamentalist plans to do away with abortion and gay marriage? The ban on gay marriage passed in California, benefiting from Obama's expressed opposition to gay marriage.
“This is not the time to ‘wait and see’ what Obama will do after January 20, or after 6 months or a year...or never, because if he does what's in the peoples' interests he won't be re-elected? He's telling us what he will do, and the worst thing would be to get passive in the face of more crimes being done in our name.”[5]
In 2009 the WCW adopted a new mission statement that incorporated the major elements of its original statement and ended with: “This direction cannot and will not be reversed by leaders who tell us to seek common ground with fascists, religious fanatics, and empire. It can only be possible by the people building a community of resistance - an independent mass movement of people - acting in the interests of humanity to stop, and demand prosecution, of these crimes.”[6]
In the fall of 2010 WCW took out an ad entitled "Crimes Are Crimes No Matter Who Does Them," stating that the Obama administration "either continued Bush policies or went even further than Bush". The ad appeared in the New York Review of Books, The Nation and the New York Times. [7].