I read a post on the ICE agent subreddit today - it was this long bloviating post by a "retired 35 year ERO officer"... long on legal jargon & technical police talk... but my guy was utterly unable to Read The Room & he couldn't understand why he & his agency are hated hint - immigration violations are civil offenses, like renovating your house without a permit or understating your income on your tax return - yes they are illegal, but they are the illegal acts of regular people

one thing I don't get about a lot of internet Marxists

if you want to win regular blue collar workers to support communist ideas... why exactly do some of you insist on using graduate school jargon?

that's counterproductive

why not say what you mean in PLAIN ENGLISH? instead of talking about "the proletariat" - why not say "the working class"? instead of "bourgeoisie" why not say "capitalists" or "businesspeople'?

@Teamstersob - Sean O'Brien, the president of the @Teamsters has a new podcast @betterbadideas - Better Bad Ideas - a few thoughs

To start with the positives - the idea of a union president having a podcast is actually good.. in theory

in practice, this podcast??? first of all the title is terrible!

"Better Bad Ideas"?

Um brother LABOR NEEDS BETTER GOOD IDEAS - we've got plenty of bad ones, that's why we're in the fix we're in!

the Democratic Party & AFL-CIO's "pro immigration" argument is, basically "certain employers want to pay substandard wages & provide substandard working conditions, & we should help them do so by providing them with workers who are stuck with accepting that abuse" if you are a White American, African American or American born Latino & have a problem with this deeply anti working class argument YOU ARE A DIRTY EVIL RACIST!!!!!! and also stupid because those are JOBS AMERICANS WON'T DO!!!!

So, big changes in what was the Syrian Arab Republic - new flag - from the one on the left to the one on the right - also President Dr. Bashar al-Assad went from supreme dictator to yet another Syrian refugee - he's currently in Moscow

today is a good day to be Syrian
Dr al-Assad, the world's worst nepo baby, is no longer president of Syria - the man currently in charge is this guy, Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who went from being a literal al-Qaeda guy to being Syria's least racist ruler in the last 80 years

there is a strong debate among Jewish Americans - and Jews in other countries, including Israel - about the best way for that community to deal with Antisemitism - the very emotional debate about Gaza Strip is a recent incarnation of that debate there's strong views on the many sides of that debate - made all the more emotional by the Holocaust & the mass expulsions of millenia old Jewish comunities in Europe, Asia & Africa in the mid to late 20th century

Random Saturday night thoughts from an old radical working class activist all the energy the left puts into protesting on behalf of racist Palestinian Muslim Arab seperatist terrorists in Gaza Strip could be better put into fighting for bread and butter working class issues here in America

I'm at the intersection of Black Twitter & Labor Twitter & it's hilarious (days like this I'm really happy that I'm a communist)

all of the labor bigshots seem to have interrupted their golf games to run to the clubhouse, get out the laptop, praise Biden & endorse Harris they're like cardinals kissing the new pope's ring & the shamless grovelling is as amusing as it is pathetic - rolling over for the Democrats without demanding a thing in return (O'Brien being the lone exception)

of course, Democratic activists, union officials, Black leaders & the far left will spend the next 107 days browbeating us to vote for Harris & whoever they pick for her VP candidate - one reason for this will be the claim that Trump is a "fascist" this is not correct

"fascism" is irrelevant in modern America - it was a mid 20th century European phenomenon, in countries with a strong working class based far left where revolution was an immediate possilibilty

contrary to the master thesis of J D Vance's entire body of work, Appalachia isn't poor because of the personal traits of Appalachians - Appalachia is poor because of the mass layoffs that coal companies carried out after coal miners unionized in the 1930s the coal industry had a workforce of about 500,000 during the 1930s when the mines were unionized - that workforce peaked at 600,000 during WW II, then declined to 450,000 in late 40s - then miners won a series of pay & benefit increases in the strikes after WW II

lots of men on Tik Tok who are suddenly experts in Secret Service executive protection tactics - monday morning quarterbacking the agents who saved the former president this weekend & neutralized the sniper first principles - is President Trump still alive? now how bout the assassin?

sounds like THEY DID THEIR JOBS

but not according to the armchair "experts" - btw these men seem especially mad at the women agents - I wonder why?

there's lots of fear talk going around about "Agenda 2025" - what it's REALLY about is an attempt to change the way the Federal government appoints managers, to make more of them political appointees let's make this simple - there are several different categories of federal employees - 1.3 million active duty military personnel, 525,000 postal workers, 193,000 Wage Grade civilian blue collar federal workers and....

so the @labornotes conference just finished up today - as usual, the socialists who organized this confab of labor activists, left wing students & aspiring union bosses made sure that nobody actually talked about socialism or working class political issues supposedly this is because all of us workers are so right wing that it would offend us to talk about anything but pure and simple trade unionism - actually it's to curry favor with the union bosses who fund Labor Notes

one question I have after 4 decades of activism is... what exactly is the point of the modern American style protest? I've been to plenty of them - at times in my life I was a weekly attendee at these rallies - but... what do they really accomplish? this is especially true of the civil disobedience/disrupt traffic/vandalize property/scrap in the streets with the police variety of protest - what does that actually DO in terms of achieving the goals of the protesters?

I've spent most of my adult life involved in labor activism, in industries that I actually work in, in unions that I actually belong to - a poltics driven by the working class' need for a better life & power over our society & a say in our destiny so, when I see labor unions getting involved in foreign policy issues in faraway countries where most of their members have no religious, ethnic or racial ties to... I have to ask myself WHY?

at a time of falling wages, extortionately high prices for groceries, skyrocketing rents, millions unable to pay for prescription drugs & 94% of workers not having a union you'd think that @demsocialists and @nycdsa would focus on those things especially since it happens in a context where this country has two parties that compete to represent the top 20% of income earners & the bottom 80% have no voice in politics or government

but... that's not @demsocialists or @nycdsa priority

so the Democrats have already started with the "Vote Biden or TRUMP IS GOING TO FASCISM" nonsense

it's emotional blackmail & totally non factual

it also reflects a fundamental problem - the bottom 80% of Americans are unrepresented by the political process & have no stake for the top 20% - the capitalists, the professional managerial class, small business owners & rich farmers - who gets elected is vitally important - above all, there's lots of patronage jobs, government contracts & federal funding at stake!

Israel expelled 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948

Only 30,000 of those actual refugees are still alive today

however, the UN gave them "hereditary refugee" status - that is, they can pass on their "refugee" status & benefits to their kids - that is unique to Palestinian Arabs every other refugee in the world is only a refugee if they personally fled a country - the goal is to resettle them & once they're naturalized there, they are not a refugee anymore & their descendants are not refugees

the job of labor unions is to unite all the workers in a trade or industry to fight for higher pay, shorter hours, better benefits & better working conditions - outside politics can be & often is a distraction from that it is not the job of a labor union to have hot takes on controversial political issues - I think this generation of Ivy League educated unelected union staff people just don't understand that reality

I grew up in the far left - my dad was a socialist, my mom was a communist, I went to my first protest when I was in middle school in the early 1980s, so I was basically raised far left & spent most of my life there... but not anymore

what made me change? part of it was becoming a union dissident in the late 1990s - I had to learn to think for myself (cause the left tend to be slavishly uncritical of union leaders, no matter how corrupt, incompetent or pro corporate they might be) & I had to blaze my own trail politically

I always wondered why leftists see multiracial nations of immigrants (the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel) as "colonialist", & the immigrants & their descendants as "settlers" - then I figured out why - the modern left are National Socialists they believe in racial purity, that certain races have a transhistorical "right" to certain pieces of land, even if they have never lived there & others presently do - it's a common trend in leftist thought