Convict, Hotshot, or Municipal Firefighters: Which Side Are You On?
It is understandable and reasonable that many of you feel slighted by the overwhelming attention that convict crews are getting. As many of you have mentioned, it isn’t uncommon for news media to focus almost exclusively on these populations and it can feel like they are doing so intentionally despite the clear needs of non-convict crews – and I assure you, we hear you on the Left as much as we hear the convict crew even if you don’t have the informational streams to hear us talking back. But I implore you, please, look at this structure for what it is: worker manipulation and disempowerment.
The Looting of Los Angeles
There is a truth here that many are desperate to ignore: this is a class war. The rich who were able to mobilize private armies of fire fighters to protect their homes and businesses while everything their neighbors owned burned around them are turning around to point at Black and Brown young men minding their own business or seeking to save their own lives and loved ones. The politicians who were happy to allow private interests to subsume public resources as their own, who refused to stop the theft of our water, land, and opportunities in favor of those like the Wonderful Company (hope your pistachios taste like burning rubber) who have stolen some 90% of Californians’ water through underhanded manipulation of municipal levers and officials.
Mangione and Palestine: Two Faces of the Imperial Polyhedron
Luigi Mangione is an example of just what happens whenever the strictures of expansionism abroad translate to real deprivation at home, the continued over-investment of resources in external affairs allowing for a complete degradation of affairs here. The pressure has mounted across the country, building against the banking, housing, education, manufacturing, service, and healthcare industries with little to no release as US legislators focus almost exclusively on the maintenance of empire and the intentional distraction of their constituencies which this necessitates.
So You Want a Definition of Fascism
Slavery existed before we named the system; the idea of stolen labor a fundamental principle to the ideology of the capitalist, yet predating the invention of the definition by millennia. In fact, it was chattel slavery, the reduction of human beings to a class of livestock, which truly sowed the seeds for what Capitalism is today. Indeed, the East India Trading Company was established in 1600 and what, if not capitalist, was it if not the seizure of the means of production and distribution from the commoner for the benefit of the lords and financiers of Europe? What was the Slave Triangle if not the express theft of the means of production in its rawest form for the use of landed elites in both the Old World and New?