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Category: Strategize!

  • Why Climate Defiance Is Doubling Down On Disruption

    On a brutally cold morning last December, shortly before I was arrested for the first time, a hundred of us gathered beside the National Mall in Washington, D.C. I came from campus in the dark with a couple of friends. As others congregated on the grass, we made awkward introductions. It was an eclectic bunch: teachers, tech workers, lawyers, tradespeople, students and full-time activists, some of whom I recognized from past demonstrations.

    When we reached a critical mass, Maxwell Downing, an organizer with Climate Defiance, split us up by risk level.

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  • A Guide For Federal Employees Under Siege

    Over the past few weeks, I’ve been inundated with messages from concerned federal employees. Many of you have reported disturbing developments involving Elon Musk and his inner circle—including private contractors from Musk’s companies allegedly accessing sensitive Office of Personnel Management (OPM) servers and locking federal employees out of their systems. These actions raise serious legal and ethical concerns, and we must confront them strategically.

    I understand your fear and frustration. You’re being targeted because authoritarian leaders know that professional public servants—those of you who uphold the rule of law—are the greatest obstacle to their agenda.

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  • Inflation Poses Unique Challenges For Worker Co-Ops

    Inflation is top of mind for many Canadian small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) these days. A recent survey of Canadian SMEs found 90 percent of them had been impacted by inflation, and another survey of 500 Canadian accountants revealed inflation as the most significant financial threat to Canadian SMEs. With the vast majority of Canadian worker co-ops being SMEs, it’s reasonable to assume that they’re also feeling these pressures. But delving deeper into the issue suggests that while worker co-ops face some of the same challenges as conventional businesses regarding inflation, how they respond is likely to be different.

    The post Inflation Poses Unique Challenges For Worker Co-Ops appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Putting Nature At The Center

    Life may be unique to Earth. Even if single-celled organisms can readily evolve in conditions that exist on millions or billions of other planets, we have no actual evidence that complex, multi-cellular life exists anywhere else in the vastness of space.

    Bacteria appeared on our planet roughly 3.7 billion years ago; by 2 billion years ago, the tree of life was branching into what would become a stunning web of creatures, huge and tiny. Plants, animals, and fungi proliferated, formed relationships, and produced ecosystems. The result was a planet full of life, and one whose atmosphere, temperature, chemical composition, and weather are all largely shaped by the side effects of the strategies that organisms use to thrive.

    The post Putting Nature At The Center appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • The Encampment Movement Leads The Way Under Trump

    On January 20, Donald Trump was sworn in for his second term as President of the United States. As the country reels from his inauguration and the sweeping executive orders of his first week in office, American progressives are left grappling with the implications of a new Trump Administration, and how our organizing projects might come under renewed assault by a hard right Republican trifecta that controls both houses of Congress and is well positioned to enact its legislative agenda.

    Many organizations are rightfully concerned about the repression and lawfare that Trump’s return to the White House threatens.

    The post The Encampment Movement Leads The Way Under Trump appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Betrayed By Green Capitalism, We Can Build A Livable Future

    In one way of measuring it, the mainstream framework to address the climate crisis has been a huge success. Promoting green energy, electric vehicles, conservation zones, carbon credits, carbon capture, and other new technologies has made billions of dollars for companies like Tesla, Google, NextEra Energy, British Petroleum, Saudi Aramco, Tongwei Solar, McKinsey & Company, and BlackRock. Governments have gained power through increased interventions in economic planning, and authoritarian regimes from China and India to Canada and the U.S. now have a new justification to carry out land theft against Indigenous and rural populations.

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  • Panama: Self-Determination And National Popular Unity

    The peoples have the right to decide their own collective destiny as established by the Bandung Conference in 1955 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights of 1966, which was not gratuitous but a product of the struggle of the peripheral countries for their decolonization. Amid this reality, the United States never gave up extending the Monroe Doctrine to the present day. Making the situation worse, imperial irredentism becomes explicit with President Donald Trump. The Panamanian people’s distrust of the political elite at this juncture is being reproduced in the collective imagination in a marked disinterest in Trump’s imperial irredentism.

    The post Panama: Self-Determination And National Popular Unity appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Future Natures: On Seeing Commons Through Popular Genres

    In academic research about the commons, few scholars are as venturesome in their creative approaches than the scholars and researchers associated with the Centre for Future Natures, at the University of Sussex in England. Led by anthropologist and research fellow Amber Huff, Future Natures explores “ecologies of crisis, commons, and enclosures,” but its chief output isn’t monographs and books. It’s an exuberant array of creative works in popular genres like comic books, zines, social media, videos, and podcasts. 

    The post Future Natures: On Seeing Commons Through Popular Genres appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Future Natures: On Seeing Commons Through Popular Genres

    In academic research about the commons, few scholars are as venturesome in their creative approaches than the scholars and researchers associated with the Centre for Future Natures, at the University of Sussex in England. Led by anthropologist and research fellow Amber Huff, Future Natures explores “ecologies of crisis, commons, and enclosures,” but its chief output isn’t monographs and books. It’s an exuberant array of creative works in popular genres like comic books, zines, social media, videos, and podcasts. 

    The post Future Natures: On Seeing Commons Through Popular Genres appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • REI Workers Look To Shake Up Co-Op’s Board

    Since March 2022, over 600 workers have voted to unionize at 11 REI stores. The campaign is growing, with workers in Greensboro, NC, voting to become the eleventh union store just last week. Workers at these stores are affiliated with either the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) or the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU).

    To date, management recalcitrance has stymied workers’ efforts to win a first contract, so the REI Union is trying a new tactic: Running candidates for the board of the 24-million-member outdoor equipment retailer, the nation’s largest cooperative.

    The post REI Workers Look To Shake Up Co-Op’s Board appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • REI Workers Look To Shake Up Co-Op’s Board

    Since March 2022, over 600 workers have voted to unionize at 11 REI stores. The campaign is growing, with workers in Greensboro, NC, voting to become the eleventh union store just last week. Workers at these stores are affiliated with either the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) or the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU).

    To date, management recalcitrance has stymied workers’ efforts to win a first contract, so the REI Union is trying a new tactic: Running candidates for the board of the 24-million-member outdoor equipment retailer, the nation’s largest cooperative.

    The post REI Workers Look To Shake Up Co-Op’s Board appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Trump Attempts To Freeze Federal Spending

    Last night, at the behest of President Donald Trump, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued a sweeping freeze on the flow of congressionally approved federal funding.

    The decision has had a deeply harmful and chaotic effect already and is an unlawful overreach of executive power that ignores Congress’ constitutionally mandated control of federal spending and undermines the checks and balances that have, for hundreds of years, maintained democracy in the United States.

    Several states have already legally challenged the guidance.

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  • The Right Of Return Is Still The Issue

    The war waged against the Palestinian people is the longest and most sustained in recent history. For over a hundred years, since the Balfour Declaration, a war of death and destruction has been waged against the Palestinian people in Palestine and wherever they reside, raining death and destruction on them.

    The myth of Palestine as “a land without a people” in the 19th century has been converted into a Zionist plan of action to make it so; a ruined land with its people dead or expelled.

    Since the creation of the Zionist colonial project of establishing Israel on the ruins of Palestine in 1948, I witnessed, indeed endured in my lifetime, three historical stations worthy of contemplation.

    The post The Right Of Return Is Still The Issue appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Abolish Rent, Yes, For Real

    The largest tenant union in the country is responding quickly and passionately to the devastation of the Los Angeles fires. The LA Tenants Union is demanding not just enforcement of existing California protections against price gouging of rental homes, but a moratorium on evictions and a rent freeze, all while tenants are coming together with heroic levels of mutual aid.

    But these steps will only mitigate a perpetual struggle, as union co-founders Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis write in their new book “Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis.” “Why do tenants wake up every month and have to pay rent?” they ask.

    The post Abolish Rent, Yes, For Real appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Despised: The Poor white Trash Manifesto, Part VI

    Professor Chenshaw: if our ideological and class enemies so consistently elevate you, Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, what does that say about your work? Why do they pay you to examine every atomized niche of poverty in the United States but to ignore the biggest financial famine? You are fascinated by the pathologies but are too good to descend to talk to the pathologized. Every portrait you paint of poverty in America focuses on “black trans women” and other subsets to the detriment of us all. The only way black trans women can rise up is if we all rise up.

    The post Despised: The Poor white Trash Manifesto, Part VI appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Fear Paralyzes: Courage And Fortitude Will Get Us Through Together

    Early in the morning, a few days ago, I received a phone call from Standing Rock. My brother said he had heard that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) was picking up people on the Pine Ridge Reservation. He also said that he heard the Proud Boys (a militant group that was involved in the White House raid in 2020 and now pardoned by the US President Trump) were driving their pickups all over Rapid City. Then I knew why he called so early. He was worried about me.

    I laughed and said “No, none of that is true. I’ll talk to my granddaughter who lives on the rez and she’ll tell me.

    The post Fear Paralyzes: Courage And Fortitude Will Get Us Through Together appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Labor Faces Artificial Intelligence And Outsourcing

    Two recent articles on AI / automation and outsourcing / immigration offer a glimpse of what faces labor unions and the working class as capital, emboldened by the election of Trump and his alliance with Big Tech, sets up to continue its push on automation, subcontracting, outsourcing, and the importing of foreign labor – despite Trump’s tacit claims to support “American jobs”. Organized labor, which, with the exception of the Teamsters, doubled down on its support for Biden and the Democrats in November and clinging to the lost strategy of labor-management cooperation, now appears more on the backfoot than ever to defend against the onslaught.

    The post Labor Faces Artificial Intelligence And Outsourcing appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Reclaiming Traditional Foods For A Degrowth Food Future

    Crusty Bread, creamy cheese, bubbly kimchi or refreshing tepache – all cultures have fermented foods and beverages with their own traditions, language, and cultural heritage surrounding them. Fermentation, in this sense, is a living food culture that taps into ancient skills and traditional knowledge. But this knowledge is under attack. As capitalism continues its onslaught on rural, indigenous, communal, and non-commodified ways of life, traditional food practices are slowly dying out in the contexts in which they originally emerged.

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  • What Could Workers Win In A New NAFTA?

    In his nine years in the auto industry, Ben Hinsey has seen a lot of misplaced blame. The threat of job cuts is always looming.

    In fact, Hinsey transferred into his current job at the Stellantis Jeep factory in Toledo, Ohio, when his previous one at the Chrysler Toledo Machining Plant evaporated in a 2017 wave of layoffs. He now installs instrument panels and serves as a float, moving from job to job to cover absences.

    Hundreds of thousands of auto jobs have disappeared from the U.S. since the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and its successor, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), often known as NAFTA 2.0.

    The post What Could Workers Win In A New NAFTA? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • The Coming Climate Uncertainty Conundrum

    This piece is about what we talk about when we talk about ‘climate change.’

    Mostly, whether in the campaigning world or the policy world, the tech world or the business world, the everyday world or the world of international summitry, we mainly talk about cutting carbon emissions. And if we talk about impacts, we talk about the impacts of global heating, plus the impacts of the growing chaos.

    But we don’t talk enough about climate impacts, our vulnerability to them, let alone how to prepare adequately for them, or to tackle them ‘upstream’ before they land or get worse.

    The post The Coming Climate Uncertainty Conundrum appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • The Promethean Aspirations Of The Darker Nations

    For decades now, there has been a clear understanding that the models of development proposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Washington Consensus – debt, austerity, structural adjustment – simply have not worked. The long history of adversity experienced by the former colonial countries remains intact. A glance at the numbers from the Maddison Project Database 2023 shows that global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) terms has risen by 689.9% between 1980 and 2022 (from $18.8 trillion to $148.5 trillion).

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  • Organizers Are Ready To Defeat Trump’s Mass Deportation Agenda

    Through racist, anti-migrant claims, falsehoods, and fearmongering, the Colorado suburb of Aurora has emerged as the right-wing’s potential staging ground for US President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda. Trump has pledged to launch the largest mass deportation operation in US history, expelling between 15 to 20 million migrants in an effort that will have ripple effects across working class communities and the entire US economy. The current US President has dubbed his mass deportation effort “Operation Aurora,” after a town that has become the epicenter of anti-migrant hysteria.

    The post Organizers Are Ready To Defeat Trump’s Mass Deportation Agenda appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Change The Conversation From Doomsday To Peace Day

    The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, with the advice of Albert Einstein and other scientists from the Manhattan Project who developed the atomic bomb, established a Doomsday Clock, in 1947 to illustrate the annihilating danger the earth has faced since the creation of the diabolical nuclear bomb. At that time, the clock was set at 7 minutes to midnight, their estimate of how much time we had left before nuclear war would wreak catastrophic devastation on our planet and all living things in existence.

    Over the years, the hands of the clock have been reset, forward and backward, as scientists and policy makers estimated how immediate the nuclear danger loomed.

    The post Change The Conversation From Doomsday To Peace Day appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Trump Says Schools, Churches, Hospitals Aren’t Off-Limits To Immigration Police

    For years, undocumented immigrants have held onto the knowledge that — while no place is ever completely safe — places like schools, hospitals and houses of worship have been much less likely to face raids from either Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

    That changed on January 21, when Donald Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a statement announcing that the administration has rescinded guidelines that previously deterred immigration police from conducting raids in locations considered “sensitive” or “protected.”

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  • How The Jewish National Fund Abets US-Sanctioned Settlers

    For more than a century, the Jewish National Fund (JNF) has raised money in the United States and around the world to acquire land for Jewish-only settlements in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. In recent years, more than $1 million of that money has flowed towards people and projects that have since been sanctioned by the United States government for their violence against Palestinians, according to Israeli financial documents reviewed by Mondoweiss.

    A registered 501(c)(3) in the United States with 40 offices around the world and its international headquarters based in Jerusalem, the Jewish National Fund owns approximately 15 percent of the land in historic Palestine.

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  • Trump’s Presidency And The Prospects For Peace In 2025

    A lot of people are angry about the inauguration falling on MLK Day this year, but I actually believe the convergence of dates is auspicious because it gives me the opportunity to bring the issues that Dr. King raised in his speech Beyond Vietnam–Time To Break The Silence to this forum.

    In this speech, Dr. King raised the issue of the triple evils plaguing this country and the world: racism, poverty, militarism. What Dr. King was alluding to what we in the Black Alliance for Peace recognize is imperialism, which is why BAP was founded on April 4, 2017, to commemorate this pivotal address, and as a means to pick up the mantle of Dr. King and raise the consciousness of the masses in this country to the issue of imperialism that he spoke of.

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  • Strengthen Solidarity With Palestine!

    Resistance in Palestine and West Asia has mobilized an important movement in the U.S. and other NATO countries for over 15 months to demand the genocide in Gaza stop. A ceasefire has finally been achieved. This movement must ask itself the following question: What do we do now to contribute to liberation for Palestine?

    Despite the avalanche of pro-imperialist propaganda from the Israeli and Western corporate media, hundreds of millions of people around the world have been propelled into action to oppose the horrible, genocidal war against Gaza.

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  • Running In Circles On Racial Justice

    We keep running in circles when it comes to addressing racial justice in the US. This means that with every advance we almost come back to the same place and must fight the battles all over again. It doesn’t mean that progress has not been made, but the progress retrogresses due to the immediate backlash that charges any advance to rectify past racial injustices as an affront to white people. At best there is an ebb and flow when it comes to rectifying the racial harms and damages of the past.

    Race history and the many initiatives to rectify past wrongs are more of a circle than a linear line.

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  • Can A Labor-Backed Candidate Inspire More Working-Class Independents?

    While running for U.S. Senate in Nebraska, working class candidate Dan Osborn characterized the Senate as “a country club of millionaires that work for billionaires.”

    In November, he almost crashed their party.

    Osborn, a 49-year old former local union president who helped lead a multi-state strike against Kellogg’s cereal company, was recruited by railroad workers to challenge two-term incumbent Senator Deb Fischer, a Republican. Rail is a major industry in Nebraska, and Fischer had voted to break the 2022 national railroad strike. She also opposed the Railway Safety Act.

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  • Despised: The Poor white Trash Manifesto, Part V

    The petit-bourgeois whites are a non-thinking tail to the kite of the dominant wing of capitalism. Appearance is everything; dialectics is a cross to the liberal vampire. 

    It is not uncommon that they recruit, artificially elevate and reward “diverse” members of the oppressed class who do their bidding. There are such examples which Fox News unabashedly refers to as “diversity hires.” On our side of the class barricades, we should be careful of those possessing the appearance of militancy but not critically grasping the essence of Marxism. Independent thinkers are a problem for the PMC.

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