the “most pro-labor president in history” says christmas shopping is more important than sick leave for rail workers so he’s forcing a deal thru that workers have rejected and forbidding them from striking
Management didn’t take workers seriously because they knew if it came to it the gerontocracy would side with them like they always do. Workers were asking for bare minimum reasonable demands like 15 days off a year, and the Biden deal gives them just 1. What an absolute fucking clown, if they strike (which they definitely should at this point as one of the last viable unions) there’s gonna end up being a massive supply chain crisis. Fuck luxury goods taking a little longer to arrive we’re talking food riots, trucking can’t even come close to making up the difference if it came to it. As one of the last unions with real stopping power in the country (cop unions don’t count, acab) I really hope they stretch their legs and make the oligarchs sweat.
Over the weekend, the paper of record’s editorial board described a “chilling preview of what the future might look like if violence from the right begets violence from the left.”
The event that precipitated those fears at the New York Times offices
in Manhattan? A would-be showdown that never was at a Roanoke, Texas,
restaurant’s family-friendly drag brunch. An armed far-right group,
including Proud Boys and self-identifying “Christian fascists,” turned
up to harass brunch-goers — a sadly commonplace form of fascistic intimidation that’s hardly news.
Instead, what concerned the Times about this event was that the armed
fascists were met and obstructed by armed antifascists, who had been asked by members of the local community to provide security for the brunch.
In the end, no one was hurt in this alleged portent of political
violence and the restaurant owner’s son, a performer at the drag brunch,
thanked the antifascists of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club for
“keeping us safe.”
Just a week had passed since the Club Q
massacre, which left five attendees of an LGBTQ club dead, when the
Times decided to draw an equivalence between the fascists who threaten
LGBTQ-friendly spaces with guns and the antifascists with guns who
volunteer to defend those spaces — a new low in bothsidesism.
For as long as marginalized and minority communities have been
threatened and imperiled by armed white supremacists and fascists — a
violence foundational to this country — they have been condemned for
taking up arms in self-defense.
It is a profound mischaracterization of the history and principles of
armed community defense to suggest that armed antifascists and
anti-racists are engaged in escalatory political violence that is worthy
of the same condemnation as the fascists they confront.
