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Category: Strategize!

  • How Labor Can Fight Against Trump’s Mass Deportation Agenda

    This is a frightening time for immigrant workers. President-elect Donald Trump ran on the slogan “mass deportations now,” and has appointed a team of anti-immigrant hardliners. The leadership of the Democratic Party has lurched to the right on this issue, adopting Trump’s rhetoric about “securing the border,” and embracing core Republican policies.

    A bill that would target undocumented people for deportations if they are merely accused—not convicted—of nonviolent crimes like shoplifting passed in the House with bipartisan support. It’s moving forward in the Senate where only eight Democrats opposed its advance.

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  • Inside The Rise And Fall Of Hester Street

    Right where Manhattan’s Chinatown and Lower East Side start fading into each other, the below-grade garden-style storefront that Hester Street Collaborative called home for most of its existence was constantly awash in color.

    Post-its everywhere. Whiteboards, easel pad paper stuck up on walls, covered in handwritten notes. Giant print-outs summarizing community input for building redesigns or neighborhood rezonings. Artwork made onsite by students from the middle school across the street, who came for workshops or just to hang out.

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  • How Labor Can Fight Trump’s Mass Deportation Agenda

    This is a frightening time for immigrant workers. President-elect Donald Trump ran on the slogan “mass deportations now,” and has appointed a team of anti-immigrant hardliners. The leadership of the Democratic Party has lurched to the right on this issue, adopting Trump’s rhetoric about “securing the border,” and embracing core Republican policies.

    A bill that would target undocumented people for deportations if they are merely accused—not convicted—of nonviolent crimes like shoplifting passed in the House with bipartisan support. It’s moving forward in the Senate where only eight Democrats opposed its advance.

    The post How Labor Can Fight Trump’s Mass Deportation Agenda appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Washington’s Attempts To Bully China Will Only Backfire

    China is rapidly overtaking the United States in a number of areas that threaten to undermine America’s position in the world. Naturally, US leaders and their billionaire backers are concerned about this and have taken steps to remedy the situation. Regrettably, none of these steps include an honest appraisal of the western economic model that allows the ‘privileged few’ to skim-off too much of their company’s profits leaving insufficient capital to reinvest in productive activity, critical infrastructure or societal improvement. Chinese policymakers have taken a different approach to this issue and the results speak for themselves.

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  • Despised: The Poor white Trash Manifesto, Part IV

    The poor boy didn’t forget where he came; He never knew to begin with. Vast structures of violence and poverty have our mothers, sisters and daughters trapped in a vortex of abuse and low self-esteem. We are not junkies, winos or bums; We are fighters and survivors. Vance is all image, no heart. Vance is all Hollywood, no Middletown. Vance is venture capital, not steel. The GOP brass used Vance’s story as their own antidote to the pandemic of early deaths ravaging our families.  

    Quite naturally, the rich would prop up a fake. Black America has their uncle Toms and Latinos have their vendepatrias; We too have our booklickers and asskissers.

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

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  • How US Activists Are Infiltrating Israeli Events Selling Palestinian Land

    Outside of a synagogue in West Orange, New Jersey, a hundred people with PAL-Awda NY/NJ, a local Palestinian rights organization, gathered to protest an Israeli real estate event taking place there on Nov. 13. The protesters accused the realtors from My Israel Home, an Israeli real estate company based outside of Jerusalem, of marketing Palestinian land. They also said that the company was discriminating against event attendees by religion, effectively excluding everyone except especially religious Jews. According to PAL-Awda, the protesters were attacked by counter-protesters, including an organizer of the event, armed with pepper-spray and tactical flashlights wielded as bludgeons.

    The post How US Activists Are Infiltrating Israeli Events Selling Palestinian Land appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • No Popular Revolution Is Launched With Imperialism’s Backing

    After more than a decade of military occupation, imposition of civil war and deadly economic sanctions by U.S. imperialism and its regional allies, the legitimate government of Syria was finally brought to its knees and a rebranded group of terrorists occupied Damascus and implemented imperialism’s long-term plan for regime change in Syria; an act which could not have been possible without direct military assistance of the U.S. and Israel and support from Türkiye and the reactionary regimes of the region.

    The rapid collapse of the Syrian government has led many who do not have a proper understanding of imperialism’s objectives and the historical global trends — and who base their assessments and analyses only on momentary and transient events — to blame Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian government for the present defeat.

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  • Members In Motion Changed The Game In Daimler Contract Campaign

    Inspired by the success of the Big 3 strike, United Auto Workers members at Daimler Truck North America ran a very different kind of contract campaign this year than we ever had before.

    The 7,300 members at DTNA’s four North Carolina plants and parts distribution centers in Atlanta and Memphis were very active, informed, and involved in the bargaining process. This is not how the union had done things in the past.

    Here’s what we did differently, and some ideas on how to keep members in the loop and in motion for an effective contract campaign.

    The post Members In Motion Changed The Game In Daimler Contract Campaign appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Liberal Media And Personalities: The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall

    On Dec 11, 2024, it was reported that the post-election audiences for the leading liberal media, MSNBC and CNN, continued to drop: 46% and 33%, respectively. Some of MSNBC’s biggest stars, including Rachel Maddow, have been asked to take pay cuts as revenues and profits come under pressure. The dozens of Kamala Harris’s supporters, among actors, pop music figures, and TV host personalities, continue to announce their departures from the Trumpian U.S. to another country. It seems like one is at an airport where we hear departure announcements every few minutes. But no one seems to be paying any attention or shedding tears.

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  • The Common Ground Between Labor And Climate Justice

    A fault line runs between labor and environmental movements, or so we’re told.

    Labor unions have been criticized for focusing on jobs without considering environmental consequences, with some unions supporting controversial projects like the Dakota Access Pipeline, and others opposing bans on fracking. Meanwhile, environmental groups are accused of being divorced from working-class realities, sometimes neglecting lost employment and wages related to the energy transition. The urgency of cutting emissions and phasing out fossil industries to mitigate climate change has brought the seemingly contentious relationship between labor and environment into sharp focus.

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  • Despised: The Poor White Trash Manifesto, Part III

    “Despised: A Poor white Trash Manifesto” is a cry for help. We are not living well. The American dream that appears on your netflix and Hollywood movies is a brittle myth. We are so busy surviving the capitalist nightmare, most of us have never even had the opportunity to learn about your struggles in Nigeria, Bolivia or Indonesia. The earth’s radius along the equator is almost 4,000 miles but the longest mile is between our two ears. When we are in our heads, we are in a bad neighborhood. We a shortsighted breed, but now at least you know the perplexing origins of our myopia.

    The post Despised: The Poor White Trash Manifesto, Part III appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Destruction Of Gaza’s Healthcare Is A Blueprint For Future Wars

    “Kamal Adwan Hospital is no more,” stated Dr. Mustafa Barghouti during a webinar organized by the People’s Health Movement (PHM) on December 28, 2024. As he spoke, reports of the latest Israeli attacks on the hospital were still emerging. These included the near-total destruction of its laboratory, storage, surgical units, and other critical facilities, alongside the arbitrary detention of its director, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya.

    The devastating outcome was all too predictable, given Israel’s systematic assaults on Gaza’s healthcare system during the ongoing genocide.

    The post Destruction Of Gaza’s Healthcare Is A Blueprint For Future Wars appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • How Congolese Climate Activists Stopped A ‘Carbon Bomb,’ For Now

    “I was very angry. I was astonished. Everything I saw was stolen,” said François Kamate, an environmental activist from the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC. He was describing how it felt to enter the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium for the first time.

    The museum was built in a rich suburb of Brussels to showcase the spoils after King Leopold II declared a vast swath of Central Africa, including the entire present day DRC, to be his own private kingdom. What resulted was one of the most vicious and exploitative episodes of European colonial history, and the funneling of 10,000,000 zoological specimens and 120,000 cultural objects into the museum’s collection.

    The post How Congolese Climate Activists Stopped A ‘Carbon Bomb,’ For Now appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • What’s Happening In Niger?

    “Homeland or death, we will win.” This sign stands in the Place de la Patrie, one of the cradles of the popular struggle against France in Niamey, the capital of Niger. Today, it serves as a meeting point where people gather, chat, and watch the movement on Boulevard Zarmaganda, home to the headquarters of the first popular committee supporting the Nigerien army.

    “It used to be called Place de la Francophonie. Today, it’s Place de la Patrie because this is the birthplace of the patriotic struggle for complete national sovereignty. A week after the coup d’état, we moved here.

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  • India’s Free Library Movement Counters Caste Discrimination

    Outside the Khirki branch of Delhi’s Community Library Project, a signboard details the day’s programs, including scheduled story times and art activities. Children bounce and buzz as they wait in line to check out their books. Patrons take advantage of clean public bathrooms, drinking water (in short supply in many of Delhi’s unplanned communities) and internet-connected laptops. This library feels more like my home Windsor Terrace branch of the Brooklyn Public Library than it does the Delhi Public Library a few kilometers away. The biggest difference?

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  • A Reality Check On Our ‘Energy Transition’

    The much-vaunted “energy transition” that promised a great leap forward from fossil fuels to renewables along with a cornucopia of technologies is now struggling with history and complexity. A few facts tell the story.

    Despite all the talk of “decarbonization,” global coal production reached a record high in 2023. The dirtiest of fuels accounts for 26 per cent of the world’s total energy consumption. And despite all the promises of a green revolution, oil, gas and coal still account for 82 per cent of the global energy mix.

    Meanwhile greenhouse gas emissions galloped to a new high in 2023. The concentration of carbon dioxide gases in the atmosphere has increased 11.4 per cent in just 20 years.

    The post A Reality Check On Our ‘Energy Transition’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • How Labor Can Fight Trump’s Authoritarianism

    Given the critical impacts that the victories of Trump and his broader right-populist Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement will have on the social and political terrain of the country, this installment looks at imperatives for labor in the coming years. It integrates lessons from UTLA and the broader educator union movement, which fought necessary defensive battles during Trump’s first term and, critically, also went on offense to make significant breakthroughs in red, blue, and purple states.

    MAGA’s attacks will be much more vicious in the coming years. Yet we fought and won battles in Trump’s first term — and can do so again.

    The post How Labor Can Fight Trump’s Authoritarianism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Despised: The Poor White Trash Manifesto, Part II

    Perched up in their Ivy League offices and downtown skyscrapers, the tenured professors and well-paid journalists have written a great deal about us. When have we got a day off from work and our survival routines to analyze their foreign attitudes and habits? Today, we get to have our say. It is our lived experience in the trenches versus your pontificating. You are not us and we are not you. Do you really think you would last a round with us in the real world? The petit bourgeois white has found their place at the capitalist trough; the poor white, desperate for breathing room, searches for an opening. 

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  • Seven Lessons From South Africa’s Genocide Convention Case

    On December 29, 2023, South Africa invoked the Genocide Convention against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

    To some people, this came out of the blue.

    Some are aware there was a concerted effort to that end through the fall of 2023 which involved myself and others.

    Few are aware that the story goes back further.

    And tragically few are aware that there are clear steps that can be taken now to give it force which the US government has insidiously undermined.

    In 2000, Prof. Francis Boyle published the piece “Palestine Should Sue Israel for Genocide before the International Court of Justice.”

    Boyle reiterated such calls periodically, particularly when Israel would decimate Gaza.

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  • Higher Education Must Champion Democracy, Not Surrender To Fascism

    For decades, neoliberalism has systematically attacked the welfare state, undermined public institutions and weakened the foundations of collective well-being. Shrouded in the alluring language of liberty, it transforms market principles into a dominant creed, insisting that every facet of life conform to the imperatives of profit and economic efficiency.

    But in reality, neoliberalism consolidates wealth in the hands of a financial elite, celebrates ruthless individualism, promotes staggering levels of inequality, perpetuates systemic injustices like racism and militarism, and commodifies everything, leaving nothing sacred or untouchable.

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  • How The LA Tenants Union Fights Displacement With Community

    The first LA Tenants Union meeting was a ​“renter’s rights workshop.” Soon, we realized, all three parts of that framework had to go.

    “Renter,” because we had to broaden our understanding of the populations who live in antagonism to rent, including people who live outside. ​“Workshop,” because we couldn’t just offer resources to individual tenants and send them on their way. ​“Rights,” because what few tenants had weren’t easy to use and didn’t stop landlords from acting otherwise. And the right we want to win, the human right to housing, will take another kind of housing system, another kind of state, and another kind of world.

    The post How The LA Tenants Union Fights Displacement With Community appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • How Union Democracy Builds Labor’s Strike Power

    Scott Houldieson had some questions. He had worked at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant, United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 551, since 1989, but in the late 2000s the company was in a financial hole following the Great Recession, and the leaders of the UAW told him and his fellow coworkers that they were going to have to give up some of the benefits that had long made auto work a good blue-collar job.

    Houldieson understood that times were hard; he’d seen the quarterly reports showing gigantic losses for the company, even if it wasn’t facing bankruptcy like its competitors, but something still didn’t compute.

    The post How Union Democracy Builds Labor’s Strike Power appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Despised: The Poor white Trash Manifesto, Part I

    There is a material reality behind this human schism and this mutual hatred, that of the privileged white versus that of the downtrodden white. It dates back centuries and hemispheres. Whoever is not a billionaire and groups us together, erasing our class differences, does so at their own peril, and our peril as well. 

    To group all whites together is the priority of the ruling class. We poor whites have different resentments, spiritualities and worldviews from those of our class oppressors, though we often don’t recognize it, much less know how to express it. Leftist identity politics conflate us with the foreign reality of another social class. Whose agenda does this serve? 

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  • Syria’s Fall And Anti-Imperialist Lessons

    The fast-paced unfolding of events that took place in Syria shook everyone, including the regime change and color revolution enthusiasts who hoped to destroy Syria only to deliver it on a golden plate to the Zionist entity to annex massive swaths of lands. The forceful overthrow of the government in Syria represents a colossal defeat to the Pan-Arabists in the region and those who center the Palestinian national liberation cause. This is not a rhetorical exaggeration; the demise of Syria will have direct consequences on the Axis of Resistance — given that the land bridge (Iran-Iraq-Syria-Lebanon) has been undermined — and the interconnected struggle against imperialist zionism.

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  • Generation U Raises Its Head With A Roar

    In the middle of the holiday rush and massive profits for big business, Starbucks workers have just joined Amazon workers and gone on strike against one of the largest corporations in the country. Hundreds of workers are rising up against these union-busting companies who refuse to negotiate contracts that would guarantee real wage increases, job protections, and other much-need improvements to working conditions. Amazon and Starbucks workers, who have been at the forefront of a new wave of labor organizing amongst precarious sectors of workers in recent years, have had enough.

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  • New Report Shows A Surge In European SLAPP Suits

    Lawsuits to silence those speaking out and fighting in the interest of the public are increasingly being used as a form of private censorship, according to a new report published last week by the Coalition Against SLAPPS in Europe, or CASE.

    Developed in collaboration with the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation, the report shows that SLAPPs continue to rise in Europe and identifies a total of 1,049 cases between 2010-2023. The lawsuits cover a broad range of topics, and environmental issues made up the second-most-targeted subject of all the SLAPP suits reported, behind corruption.

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  • Can Britain Re-Nationalize Water Services?

    Social justice organizations in Britain are urging judges to reject a bailout request from Thames Water, one of the country’s largest water providers, serving some 16 million people in the greater London area. Campaigners argue that approving the bailout of the private utility provider would allow Thames Water to continue its mismanagement while forcing consumers to shoulder the burden—raising annual water bills by £250 (USD 317) per user.

    “This is daylight robbery. There are two people who can stop it, the judge in court today and Steve Reed, the environment secretary.

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  • Capitalists Should Be Removed From All Our Systems

    Imagine that your household was regularly broken into by a sadist who systemically beat-up everyone in your home. He’d start by punching folks in the stomach. Then he’d smack people on the both sides of their heads. Then he’d kick your legs out from underneath you and pound you all on your backs and necks before kicking you all in the jaw and punching your noses.

    In forming a response to this outrageous oppression would you tell this monster that the next time he breaks into your home with his fists balled he’s going to have to forgo one of the shots he takes at people – say, the head smacks.

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  • Is Public, Quality Healthcare Possible In The United States?

    People in the US pay billions towards the health insurance industry, yet many in the healthcare field believe that this industry does little to ensure quality care to patients. While US healthcare spending is by far the highest of any country in the world, the country has the lowest life expectancy among other nations with a similar GDP.

    In recent weeks, the rage against the for-profit healthcare industry in the United States has intensified. The reality faced by many in the US, of avoiding seeking medical care in an emergency for fear of costs, or having health insurance claims repeatedly denied despite paying thousands to private insurers, has become too much to bear.

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  • The Lessons L.A.’s Anti-Olympics Organizers Are Taking From Paris

    On Nov. 3, a group of young people armed with banners began to prepare a protest. It was just two days before the U.S. election, but these activists weren’t at the White House or Trump Tower. Instead, they made their way to the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

    As evening fell, the activists beamed a powerful laser onto the iron grills of the tower. “Olympics Legacy: 20,000 Evictions,” the message read.

    This action was the grand finale of The Other Side of the Medal, a coalition of Parisian activists shedding light – in this case, literally – on how the Olympic Games can harm host cities through temporary displacement of rough sleepers, heavy policing of low-income communities, greenwashing and other side effects.

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