Picket for DC restaurant workers this week!!! #unions #democracy #workers #workingclass
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46 posts27 participants0 posts today
Sabia des de ben menut quina era la seua classe.
Napoli, Campania.
Minolta XD7 
Ilford XP2 400 asa.
I love Las Vegas's Fremont Street in the morning. Under it all, it's a working class town, just regular people trying to get by. Here fake Spider-man and Buzz Lightyear chat as they walk to work, another day standing in the heat, inside a painted circle on the ground, hustling tourist dollars to pose for pictures. It's a living.
It's easy to make fun, but I feel for these folks.
♲ @wurstaufbrot@pod.geraspora.de:
Today in Labor History April 14, 1935: The Black Sunday dust storm swept across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. This was one of the worst storms of the Dust Bowl. 4 years later, on this same date, John Steinbeck published his classic working-class novel, The Grapes of Wrath, about Dust Bowl refugees in California.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #dustbowl #GreatDepression #JohnSteinbeck #GrapesOfWrath #refugees #poverty #fiction #books #author #writer #Oklahoma #texas
kolektiva.social/@MikeDunnAuth…
Today in Labor History April 14, 1930: Over 100 Mexican and Filipino farm workers were arrested for union activities in Imperial Valley, CA. 8 were convicted of “criminal syndicalism.”
Today in Labor History April 14, 1935: The Black Sunday dust storm swept across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles. This was one of the worst storms of the Dust Bowl. 4 years later, on this same date, John Steinbeck published his classic working-class novel, The Grapes of Wrath, about Dust Bowl refugees in California.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #dustbowl #GreatDepression #JohnSteinbeck #GrapesOfWrath #refugees #poverty #fiction #books #author #writer #Oklahoma #texas @bookstadon
Today in Labor History April 14, 1919: Workers in Limerick, Ireland, initiated a General Strike against the British military occupation. They ran the city as a soviet for two weeks. Workers printed their own newspaper and issued their own currency, which local businesses accepted. They also regulated food supplies to keep prices low and prevent profiteering. Numerous other soviets were created during the Irish War of Independence.
Today in Labor History April 14, 1917: IWW sailors went on strike in Philadelphia and won a ten dollar per month raise. Ben Fletcher, an African-American IWW organizer, was instrumental in organizing the Philadelphia waterfront. Fletcher was born in Philly in 1890. He joined the Wobblies (IWW) in 1912, became secretary of the IWW District Council in 1913. He also co-founded the interracial Local 8 in 1913.
In 1913, Fletcher led 10,000 IWW Philly dockworkers on a strike. Within two weeks, they won a 10-hr day, overtime pay, & created one of the most successful antiracist, anticapitalist union locals in the U.S. At the time, roughly one-third of the dockers on the Philadelphia waterfront were black. Another 33% were Irish. And about 33% were Polish and Lithuanian. Prior to the IWW organizing drive, the employers routinely pitted black workers against white, and Polish against Irish. The IWW was one of the only unions of the era that organized workers into the same locals, regardless of race or ethnicity. And its main leader in Philadelphia was an African American, Ben Fletcher.
By 1916, thanks in large part to Fletcher’s organizing skill, all but two of Philadelphia’s docks were controlled by the IWW. And the union maintained control of the Philly waterfront for about a decade. At that time, roughly 10% of the IWW’s 1 million members were African American. Most had been rejected from other unions because of their skin color.
Fletcher also traveled up and down the east coast organizing dockers. However, he was nearly lynched in Norfolk, Virginia in 1917. And in 1918, the state arrested him, sentencing him to ten years for the crime of organizing workers during wartime. He served three years.
You can read my full biography of Ben Fletcher here: https://michaeldunnauthor.com/2021/05/13/ben-fletcher-and-the-iww-dockers/
Unions as a 21st Century Anti-Fascist Force
https://inthesetimes.com/article/unions-labor-trump-oligarchy-fascism
In These TimesUnions as a 21st Century Anti-Fascist ForceTrump and his MAGA movement are conspiring with oligarchs to turn the U.S. into a rightwing authoritarian state. The labor movement can play a key role in fighting back.
Continued thread
#BernieSanders had multiple opportunities to do call out the #Democrats, but refused to for being afraid of being a pariah in the political environment.
From the end of the day of the flowery rhetoric and policy positions #Sanders & #AOC are just hood ornaments to the #DemocraticParty and are loyal to the #Democrats than to the #workers.
When the call begins, they will stand behind #Washington than the #WorkingClass!
Fuck AI. And fuck the fat phobia inherent in this parody. But it does do a good job of poking fun at the likely consequences of Trump's policies for white working class MAGA supporters.
Today in Labor History April 13, 1894: The Great Northern rail strike began in Helena, Montana. It quickly spread to St. Paul. The strike was led Eugene V. Debs, president of the American Railway Union. Workers succeeded in shutting down most of the critical rail links. Consequently, the owners gave in to nearly all of the union’s demands. The successful strike led to thousands of rail workers joining the new union. Debs would go on to lead numerous other strikes, run for president of the U.S. several times, including from his prison cell, and to cofound the revolutionary union IWW, along with Mother Jones, Big Bill Haywood, Lucy Parsons, and others.
Today in Labor History April 13, 1873: The Colfax massacre, occurred in Colfax, Louisiana. A mob of former Confederate soldiers and current KKK members murdered 60-153 black militiamen after they surrendered. The militiamen were guarding the parish courthouse in the wake of the contested 1872 election for governor. Southern elections during Reconstruction were regularly marred by violence and fraud. It was the worst act of racist violence during Reconstruction.
Today in Labor History April 13, 1975: Phalangists in Lebanon killed 26 members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. This marked the start of the 15-year Lebanese Civil War. 120,000 people died in the war and nearly one million people fled the country. One of the worst atrocities of the war was the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Lebanese Phalangists, allied with the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), slaughtered 3,500 Lebanese and Palestinian civilians in a refugee camp. IDF soldiers facilitated the slaughter by blocking exits and preventing civilians from escaping. In 1983, the Kahan Commission found then-Israeli Defense Minister, Ariel Sharon, personally responsible for the massacre. He resigned and then became Prime Minister.
Today in Labor History April 13, 1953: CIA Director Allen Dulles launched the MKUltra mind control program. The program ran from 1953 to 1973. It involved giving human subjects LSD and other drugs, often without their knowledge. Then, researchers would try to “weaken” their minds and force confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture. Over 7,000 U.S. war veterans were unwitting test subjects, as well as many Canadian and U.S. civilians. The program was a continuation of Nazi mind-control experiments, which utilized mescaline against Jews and Soviet prisoners, hoping it could be exploited as a “truth” serum. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor of the CIA, recruited many of these Nazi torturers in the wake of World War II to exploit their knowledge and research. MKUltra was headed by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, who later devised plans to kill Fidel Castro with an exploding cigar, and saturating his shoes with radioactive thallium to make his beard fall out. He also tried to assassinate Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of Congo, with poison. Several well-known liberals and radicals knowingly participated in MKUltra and its OSS predecessors, either as test subjects (e.g., Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Hunter), or as researchers (e.g., anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson). Others who have been alleged to have been victims or volunteers include Sirhan Sirhan, Ted Kaczyinski, Charles Manson, and Whitey Bulger.
For a really fascinating look at Margaret Mead's and Gregory Bateson’s exploration with hallucinogens and their connection to MKUltra, check out the recent book, Tripping on Utopia, by Benjamin Breen. And for a truly amazing documentary on the 1961 CIA-supported coup in Congo, check out the 2024 documentary, “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.” But the film is really about so much more than the coup. It covers Cold War machinations, propaganda, and covert operations in the early 1960s; the superpowers’ jockeying for control of puppet regimes and spheres of influence in the global south; the Pan-African movement; racism in the U.S., the Civil Rights movement, and the repression against it; and, of course, jazz music, including tons of interviews and live footage of Lumumba, Ghanian president and revolutionary Kwame Nkrumah, activist and writer Andree Madeleine Blouin, Malcolm X, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miriam Makeba, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, surrealist artist Rene Magritte.
#workingclass #LaborHistory #cia #mindcontrol #torture #lsd #mkultra #castro #nazis #oss #allenginsberg #lumumba #malcolmx #coltrane #jazz #imperialism #kenkesey #margaretmead #charlesmanson #mescaline #castro #soviet #coldwar #books #nonfiction #ussr #communism #film #documentary @bookstadon
Dictator wannabe #Conman Trump’s proposal to freeze federal workers’ pay while giving billionaires massive tax breaks is an all-out attack on working Americans. We won’t stand by while the rich get richer and public servants get screwed. #Resist #StandUp #WorkingClass www.govexec.com/pay-benefits...
Trump likely to propose pay fr...
Bluesky SocialBluesky
#Pessach #ClassStruggle #Pharao #Aristocracy #Jewish #WorkingClass
I know there are shortened versions, and I believe I've seen an atheist one, but I'm wondering:
Is there actually a Marxist Haggadah?
Maybe we should make one? Anyway, Happy Pessach everyone. Chag sameach. Please enjoy your time.
Today in Labor History April 12, 1963: Mexican journalist and human rights activist, Lydia Cacho, was born on this day. She has reported extensively on violence and sexual abuse against women in Mexico. In 2006, she reported on the hundreds of female homicides in Ciudad Juárez. That same year, a tape emerged of a conversation between businessman Kamel Nacif Borge and the governor of Puebla, in which they conspired to have her beaten and raped for her reporting.
Today in Labor History April 12, 1935: 150,000 college students protested across the U.S. in the first nationwide student strike against war. Between 1936 and 1939, the movement mobilized at least 500,000 college students (almost 50% of all American college students at the time) in annual one-hour strikes against war.
