A 20 minute video that goes in depth into the topic of suburban office parks

The part where he talks about making offices suck less really blew my mind. A major issue with suburban office parks is that they are in the middle of nowhere. It is highly inconvenient to get something to eat, to go to the gym, etc... Some companies have reacted to this problem by bringing food and recreation into their office parks, but not all companies can afford to individually provide their own amenities. For them, it is better to cluster their offices into a common neighborhood where restaurants, gyms, and other things can cluster into: a business district.

The Empire Can No Longer Hide the Genocide of Palestine

On February 25, 2024, after over four months of ceaseless genocidal attacks on Palestine, a uniformed soldier self-immolated in front of the embassy of the zionist entity in Washington D.C., in the heart of the U.S. Empire. In protest of the U.S.-backed genocidal campaign against Palestinians, Aaron Bushnell livestreamed his sacrifice. He would  “no longer be complicit in genocide.”

In December 2023, another protestor self-immolated at the zionist entity’s consulate in Atlanta. News of this act was so successfully suppressed that even the name of the protester is not publicly known. Meanwhile, Aaron’s act spread quickly on Twitter. His name reached the number one trending topic on Twitter in the United States, with more than 1.03 million posts. We can attribute this to, as one Clarion article states, “the democratization of media through hand held television studios.” For weeks, all across the globe, images of his martyrdom have appeared at protests against the Palestinian genocide. Even a street in Palestine was named in his honor.

Aaron’s sacrifice is just one of many in a long list of acts that have been broadcast in this way since the heroic resistance attacks of October 7. The ability for anyone with a phone to both access and create media is making this round of zionist aggression unique, as far as western audiences are concerned. For the first time, people in the western world are seeing first hand the horror of the zionist aggression. The western media acts as a sieve for colonial violence. Now, the veil has been torn asunder. Western audiences can no longer pretend to be innocent bystanders, the role of the west has been made plain to all.

It began with the valiant acts of the Palestinian resistance fighters themselves on October 7. Their commandos used GoPro cameras to record their prison break and hostage capture. The videos spread quickly on social media, particularly through Telegram channels like Resistance News Network that share updates from various Palestinian resistance organizations. While footage from the frontlines has been available before, the social networks distributing the flurry of direct updates were made much more popular during the 2021 aggression on Sheikh Jarrah and Gaza. This is the first time that audiences in the western world, on a mass scale, were able to directly witness the actions of the resistance, uncensored and unaltered. 

As the record of atrocities becomes more complete, the imperial citizenry, those of us comfortable in the heart of U.S. Empire, are forced to grapple with the consequences of U.S. hegemony. Not only that, but the record remains to refute the lies that Empire inevitably spins. This cataloging proved immensely useful once zionist propaganda began to spin regarding the events of October 7. From accusing Hamas of committing massacres and rapes at the Nova music festival and in the kibbutzim, to showing sensational images of bombed out houses, a graveyard of cars, and charred babies, the zionist propaganda industry, also known as hasbara, spun many a tale around Palestinian capabilities. Video proof grassroots-televised across the globe showed that the Palestinian militants were equipped with rifles and rocket launchers; tools that are physically incapable of producing the carnage the zionist entity alleges. In fact, video from the zionist entity itself showed zionist Apache helicopters bombing indiscriminately at those fleeing from the music festival. This is the so-called “Hannibal Directive,” a standing order to zionist forces to prevent settlers from being taken hostage even if it means killing them. The deranged zionist political caste refuses to be pressured by their constituents, so they take every opportunity to remove sources of pressure: like hostages.

The impact of on the ground footage achieved new heights on November 2, 2023, when the Al Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, released a now-iconic video.  The video depicts a resistance fighter hiding in the bushes. They single-handedly run up to a Merkava tank, place an explosive under its missile defense system, and destroy it. We witness them sprint back to their hiding spot; their comrade hands them a rocket propelled grenade launcher. We are with them by video as they fire the rocket, demolishing the zionist war machine, and we crawl into a tunnel by their side, all through the magic of video. This video made the house style of Al Qassam videos recognizable across the internet. The brigade’s film techniques — using upside-down red triangles to pinpoint targets, zooming in on areas of focus, reversing the video at key moments and freezing the frame on the impact of explosions — clarifies the chaotic footage and captures the fighters’ bravery. These techniques allow anyone to appreciate the resistance fighters’ feats, without needing to understand military technology or military videography. In the following months, numerous videos would be released by Al Qassam and Suraya al Quds (the armed wing of Palestinian Islamic Jihad), broadcasting to the world the incredible operations conducted by these fearless commandos. “The colonized man liberates himself in and through violence,” said Frantz Fanon — now the world has a front row seat to these heroic acts of liberation. 

Another key media victory for the Palestinian resistance occurred between November 24 and November 30, 2023, during the temporary ceasefire and hostage exchange. The resistance released videos each day of the ceasefire showcasing the safe transfer of hostages. In most of these videos, the released hostages were friendly with their Palestinian captors. We saw greetings, well wishes, and even handshakes. Released hostages spoke of sharing meals, Palestinian women aiding the hostage women, and being shielded from zionist airstrikes by the Palestinian militants’ own bodies. These videos show the humanity of the Palestinian militants — in direct contradiction to the zionist lie of Palestinians as subhuman or hate-filled barbarians. As Fanon observed: “The ‘native’ is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values. He is, dare we say it, the enemy of values. In other words, absolute evil.” Meanwhile, Palestinian hostages released by the occupation consistently showed signs of having been physically and psychologically tortured. Many Palestinian prisoners have shared harrowing tales of the suffering they endured in zionist prisons. Just as Aimé Césaire warned us, it is imperialism that makes the barbarian of the occupier.

And what does the occupier do with this fantastic advance of technology? Zionist soldiers frequently and proudly publish video evidence of their cowardice and barbarism. Zionist clips demonstrate their inept soldiers unloading bullets into walls and furniture. We see the cowardly colonizers also attempted to steal Hamas’ upside down red triangle identifier, which has become a symbol of the resistance, by replacing the triangle with a star of David. What else do the zionist videos show us? Tanks searing a star of David over ruins in Gaza. The zionists’ published videos of a traveling D.J. performing concerts over Gazan ruins. To truly capture their inhumanity, they also put out videos showing their “soldiers” ransacking stores in Gaza and crushing food that is desperately needed by the Palestinians who have been denied humanitarian aid by the occupation. Aside from reveling in their carnage, the zionist occupying army (IOF) also released videos of their exploration of Al Shifa hospital, a site they claimed hosted a Hamas headquarters. The released videos provided no evidence for any of the claimed activity, despite the numerous human rights violations conducted to gain access to this hospital. In fact, the video has the air of a comedy skit — the zionist I Think You Should Leave —  rather than a serious attempt at journalism.

The hospital videos are not the only example of hasbara that feels too bizarre to be real. On November 14, 2023 the official Twitter account of the zionist entity shared a video, speaking about the struggle of Shaylee Atary, the wife of a zionist soldier who was killed by the resistance. Atary was seeking to retrieve her husband’s sperm so that she can still procreate with his genetic code. This post was the first exposure for many viewers around the world to the established zionist practice of sperm retrieval from the dead to ensure procreation and genetic purity. One would be forgiven for mistaking this for a practice originating from Nazi Germany. 

On the zionist entity’s social media and on their personal channels, zionist soldiers have created a sick new subgenre of media: gloating photos of themselves as they pose with women’s lingerie ransacked from their victims’ abandoned homes in Gaza. One of the main propaganda talking points to emerge after October 7 was that Hamas militants went on a raping rampage, both in official media and in zionists taking to social media to share leering stories that compete for increasingly cruel detail. But the talking point is unraveling. As the writing of this article, the New York Times is investigating the ties to the IOF of one of the authors from their piece regarding these alleged rapes. Yet it is the zionists who extensively document their sexual crimes.

The media war is not only being conducted by combatants, but also by civilians. Endless videos have been released documenting Palestinian suffering. The world has witnessed horrific scenes from murdered babies in incubators and children starving to death. Countless parents have hugged the bodies of their slain children, and countless more have been left with no body to hold. In one video, the world looks on as a father carries the severed remains of his children in plastic bags. These painful videos continue to be released because a core aspect of zionism is erasing and denying the existence of the Palestinian people. Proof of Palestinian suffering is the most acute evidence that the Palestinian people endure. As Somdeep Sen stated in his study on Palestinian resistance, “The act of resistance is called a Palestinian act of resistance, and the injuries and deaths that follow become instances of Palestinian suffering. As a result, Palestine is recognizable in a way that compels one to declare, “Palestine exists,” despite the settler claiming otherwise.” So, we do not only see the bloodshed up close. We also see that the Palestinian people cannot even suffer and mourn in private, they know they must record their suffering so that the world knows they exist and will continue to exist. 

While Palestinians are focused on surviving and documenting their suffering for the world to see, the zionist settlers have spent this time showing the world their depravity. Since this phase of the conflict began, zionist settlers have produced numerous trends on TikTok where they dress as Palestinians and dance and sing about losing their homes, mocking the fate of the people they colonize. Since at least February 2024, zionist settlers have been protesting at Gaza’s crossings, blocking the path of trucks trying to enter Palestine with humanitarian aid. They proudly depict themselves doing this because, as settlers, they play a key role in colonization and in this genocide. A poll from January 2024 shows that 94.2% of zionist settlers believe the IOF is using an appropriate amount of force or too little force in regards to the genocide they are enacting. Screenshots of zionist Telegram chats depict settlers laughing at the suffering of Palestinians and urging for more brutality. The role of zionist settlers in this genocide cannot be overstated, despite the common western claim that these settlers are merely “civilians” or somehow innocent of the crimes of its government.

Supporters outside of Palestine also play their role on the media front. Hezbollah has been documenting their targeted strikes at zionist reconnaissance infrastructure, even attaching cameras to rockets so viewers can go on the journey themselves. Yemen has taken up an immense role in the conflict by threatening, and attacking, zionist-aligned ships in the Bab el Mandab Strait. On November 19, 2023 Yemen recorded their soldiers boarding the ship Galaxy Leader, commandeering it and diverting it back towards Yemen. The ship has since become a tourist destination for Yemenis, who can walk on its deck and take photos. In January, 2024 a young Yemeni man’s videos aboard the Galaxy Leader gained viral attention on TikTok for his handsome appearance and familiar selfie style. Viewers everywhere would soon hear the unfiltered perspective of this resistance supporter, Rashid Al Haddad, in podcast interviews translated into multiple languages.

While Palestinian supporters across the globe protest in solidarity, enraged and heartbroken by the ethnic cleansing they witness firsthand, zionists protest by putting red paint on their pants, trying to create an image of a raped woman, trying to shock onlookers with manufactured perversion in vain hope it can overcome the flood of footage that testifies against them. This genocide has been televised, to everyone, from all angles. There has been such an abundance of inhumanity proudly recorded by settlers and the IOF that South Africa could bring their case against the zionist entity to the International Court of Justice using social media videos as evidence. 

The sacrifice of Aaron Bushnell is just one recent event of this media war. The fall of the zionist entity is being televised for all to see, but the media war is even more damning for those in the western world. For more than 75 years they played ignorant, burying their heads in the sand. Now, the sand has washed away and their heads are bare and free — free to witness the slaughter done in their name. No longer can they turn away, as their eyes are forever opened to genocide. “Yes,” wrote Fanon, “everyone must be involved in the struggle for the sake of the common salvation. There are no clean hands, no innocent spectators. We are all in the process of dirtying our hands in the quagmire of our soil and the terrifying void of our minds. Any spectator is a coward or a traitor.” The people in the so-called “free world” have been condemned. History is condemning them, and offers only two paths: they must either rise and fight this genocide with every fiber of their being, or remain cowards and traitors to humanity. This is what makes Bushnell’s protest impactful to western audiences. He recognized his complicity and active participation in the genocide and decided that he would no longer be a coward and a traitor. The question now is: what will the millions who have witnessed his death do?

"No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens

In the hours following the release of CVE-2024-22252 for the project VMWare ESXi, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a vulnerability that allows someone with root access to a guest domain to execute arbitrary code as the VMX host process. This is due to the affected components being written in C, the only programming language where these vulnerabilities regularly happen. "This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there's nothing anyone can do to stop them," said programmer Lady Lurline Schuster, echoing statements expressed by hundreds of thousands of programmers who use the only language where 90% of the world's memory safety vulnerabilities have occurred in the last 50 years, and whose projects are 20 times more likely to have security vulnerabilities. "It's a shame, but what can we do? There really isn't anything we can do to prevent memory safety vulnerabilities from happening if the programmer doesn't want to write their code in a robust manner." At press time, users of the only programming language in the world where these vulnerabilities regularly happen once or twice per quarter for the last eight years were referring to themselves and their situation as "helpless."

Bike lanes are good for business, but store owners still hate them

Businesses hate bike lanes. Sure, they reduce pollution, slow the pace of climate change, cut traffic fatalities, and make cities healthier and more pleasant. But they also take away parking spaces, which makes it tougher for shoppers to load up their cars with piles of stuff. Freaked-out business owners have been fighting bike lanes coast to coast, in cities from San Diego to Cambridge, Massachusetts. They worry — not unreasonably — that anything that makes it harder for customers to get to their stops will eat into their already precarious margins. 

 “As someone whose family had a small business when I was growing up, I know how invested you get in it,” says Joseph Poirier, a senior researcher at the urban-planning consultancy Nelson Nygaard. “It’s your whole life. Anything you think could threaten that, even if the government and their consultants tell you it’s not going to be a problem, is very scary. It makes sense.”

It’s also wrong. Four decades’ worth of research proves it. I know this because I’ve read every study and report I could find that looked specifically at the economics of bike lanes since 1984 — 32 research articles, to be exact. The results show that making streets friendlier for bikes — and sidewalks friendlier for pedestrians — is actually good for business. The rise of “complete streets” and “road diets,” as urban planners call them, has been a huge boon to businesses in cities.

 I won’t walk you through every study, because most of them actually use survey data. Do you think bike lanes discourage shopping? How much do you spend when you ride your bike here? Surveys aren’t the most reliable way to look at this question. People lie, they misremember, they get stuff wrong. And anecdotal experience tends to loom too large. One angry customer who complains about not being able to find parking trumps the 10 who rode their bikes to your shop and didn’t say boo.

More confoundingly, survey after survey has shown that business owners overestimate how many of their customers drive to their stores, versus walking or biking. In a study of the effects of street improvements on a shopping corridor in Los Angeles published in 2012, more than half of the store owners on the bike-laned part of the boulevard thought most of their customers drove. The actual number was 15%.

So what we need is financial data. Revenue numbers. Sales taxes. Credit-card receipts. Employment figures. That’s the good stuff. And for methodological rigor, we want to case-match our study areas to similar neighborhoods that didn’t get bike lanes — and to numbers for the city overall, to establish a baseline.

That cuts the number of useful studies to just about half a dozen. Here, in brief, is what they tell us.

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In 2013, a researcher at the University of Washington named Kyle Rowe looked at two shopping districts in Seattle that got put on road diets. Rowe compared sales taxes in these “Neighborhood Business Districts” with those in similar districts in the city that didn’t get bike lanes. In one NBD, which replaced car lanes and three parking spots with two bike lanes, sales closely tracked those in the bike-less areas, both in peaks and troughs. Conclusion: Bike lanes did nothing to reduce business. And in the other NBD, which replaced 12 parking spaces with a bike lane, sales quadrupled.

Was the spike in business because more cyclists came to shop? Rowe, a careful researcher, declines to make that leap. “It would be logical to assume that more bicyclists were coming to the NBD because of the new facility,” he writes, “but no conclusion can be made to connect mode choice to economic performance.” Still, there’s no mistaking the data: Adding bike lanes certainly didn’t hurt sales — and may have boosted them dramatically.

A year later, the New York City Department of Transportation conducted the same kind of study on a larger scale, examining sales-tax data in seven retail-heavy neighborhoods. A few were plaza-type hubs; the others were more linear retail corridors. All had been through the kind of extensive changes to pedestrian access, mass transit, traffic calming, landscaping, and bike paths that New York was pushing at the time. The results were striking. Compared with the overall business climate in each borough, sales in the bike-friendly areas soared by 84 percentage points in Brooklyn, 9 percentage points in Manhattan, and 32 percentage points in the Bronx. “Better streets,” the report concludes, “provide benefits to businesses in all types of neighborhoods,” from “lower-income neighborhoods with ‘mom & pop’ retail” to “glitzier areas with sky-high rents.”

The next couple of studies got even more specific. In 2018, Joseph Poirier, the urban planner I quoted earlier, looked at sales data from three retail neighborhoods in San Francisco with newly installed bike lanes. Drawing on everything from industry coding conventions to map data, he was able to draw detailed distinctions among hundreds of businesses: what they sold (retail versus restaurants), where they were located (right next to a bike lane versus a few blocks away), and who their customers were (coffee shops serving locals, say, versus a furniture store serving the entire city).

The results were mixed. In two of the three districts, shops and restaurants serving locals did way better than places serving a wider area. In the other district, sales tanked relative to the number of people a shop employed, suggesting that bike lanes gave an advantage to smaller businesses. “The takeaway is that it’s probably a minimal effect on businesses when you put in a bike lane,” Poirer says. “That actually makes a lot of sense. If you think of a busy downtown district, there’s not that many parking spaces relative to the number of people who come to the business.” In this case, bike lanes didn’t seem to help businesses much. But overall, it didn’t hurt them.

In 2019 Poirer was on a team that did another study of San Francisco. They looked at businesses directly adjacent to two kinds of bike infrastructure — Class II, which creates dedicated bike lanes denoted by a paint stripe, and Class III, where signs instruct cars and bikes to share the street. (Either way, blocks with the new lanes lost an average of three parking spaces.) Once again, the results were mixed. On Class II lanes, bars and barber shops and banks enjoyed increases in sales, while furniture stores and gas stations were more likely to experience decreases. Older businesses tended to decline more than new ones. Overall, in the year after the bike infrastructure went in, businesses on Class II streets lost a median of $27,921 compared with $19,390 for those on Class III lanes. But similar shops that weren’t on a bike lane lost $25,296. When it came to bike lanes, there were lots and lots of winners. But there were some losers, too.

The most definitive study, to my eye, came in 2020. Jenny Liu and Wei Shi, researchers at Portland State University in Oregon produced a 260-page report looking at neighborhoods that got bike lanes and other street improvements in Portland, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Memphis. The team cross-referenced financial information like sales taxes with geographic data, so they could tell exactly where businesses were in relation to the street improvements. They ran three kinds of econometric analyses on each site. And they looked not only at revenue but also at the number of employees — per business and in total — in each study area. “I was really trying to be rigorous methodologically, to provide the kind of evidence that people can use to talk to their communities,” says Liu, the director of the Center for Urban Studies at Portland State.

Bike lanes don't hurt the shops next to them. They usually help bring in customers.

Like Poirier, Liu and Shi found that in many cases, only certain kinds of businesses benefited from the bike lanes and street improvements. Food and beverage did better; retail did worse. And just slapping a bike lane on a hectic thoroughfare didn’t do anyone any good. “On really large streets with high traffic volumes or speeds, even if you add a bike lane or pedestrian improvements, it still isn’t really inviting,” Liu says. “Just having street calming doesn’t always have positive results.”

But overall, Liu’s team found, retail areas benefited from better streets. Sometimes nothing changed, but more often the areas near bike lanes wound up with more employees and more revenue. That was true in Portland, at two sites in San Francisco, one site in Minneapolis (at the other, retail did better than food), and one site in Memphis (at the other, food did a bit better than retail). Across the country, again and again, the numbers told the same story: Either “business activity remained pretty much constant,” Liu says, or “certain types of businesses became much more prosperous.” 

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Back in the 1960s, when the advent of suburban flight and climate-controlled malls began to draw business away from America’s once thriving downtowns, cities tried to stanch the flow by banning cars on shopping streets. It was called, not exactly trippingly, “pedestrianization,” and it was a disaster. Pedestrian-only plazas couldn’t compete with the Golden Age of the Automobile, and many downtowns turned into boarded-up wastelands. That extinction event is still encoded in the genetic memories of today’s retailers and restaurateurs.

But things have changed. Nowadays, online retail is crushing brick-and-mortar worse than any half-assed pedestrian plaza ever could. What’s more, demand for new homes means lots of cities are putting them downtown, trading daytime workers for all-the-time residents close enough to ride a bike. COVID showed us it’s worth giving up parking spaces for outdoor restaurants. America’s cities are undergoing nothing short of a total rethink of what and whom downtowns are for.

You can pack way more bikes than cars into a small space — and that means way more shoppers.

Nationwide numbers of bike lanes are tough to come by. By one count, there are nearly 20,000 miles of bike-ready paths in the United States, but that includes rural routes and trails. Still, city after city is working to create European-style streets. Portland has over 430 miles of bike lanes, about the same as Chicago; New York City has more than 1,500; Los Angeles has added almost 1,000 miles since 2010. And every new mile of bike lane per square mile of city increases the number of cyclists by 1%. The training wheels are about to come off the “complete street” movement.

Now, advocates and policymakers should be honest about all this. Even if bike lanes boost revenues and employment overall, some individual businesses are going to win and some are going to lose. An older business selling heavier goods, or drawing from a wider watershed for its customer base, might well be in trouble. “Newer businesses who are thrilled with density and development around them are pivoting to a customer who’s younger, who’s arriving on a scooter or a bike,” says Larisa Ortiz, a managing director at the urban-planning consultancy Streetsense. “But this process of evolution toward bike lanes and mobility does not come without loss.”

One way I’d propose to help businesses adjust to the total remaking of the urban landscape is the most American solution of all: Just hand them some money. All you’d have to do is build funds into the budgets for street-improvement projects to compensate adjacent businesses for any sales they wind up losing. If your business takes a hit from all the bikes, you get a pay-out.

The most effective way to deal with opposition from local businesses is to just get the bike lanes built. Before-and-after surveys tend to show that in the long run, everyone winds up satisfied. “It’s a political question, and oftentimes it’s a very divided community when it comes to these types of projects,” Poirier says. “But once a street is changed, generally speaking, after six months or a year, nobody remembers what it used to look like. It’s the new normal.” All the data in the world may prove that bike lanes are good for business. But nothing beats experiencing them.

Revolution in Our Lifetime

The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make the apple fall.

It is possible to win and it is possible to win in our lifetime.^[1] This is a necessary starting point for any socialist revolution, anywhere, including in North America. Only when we begin with this proposition can we map a path to the seizure of state power. Any other starting point is defeatist. We are not here to equivocate, revise, or delay. We are here to bring about a total revolution in social relations.

It is shocking, then, to see professed revolutionaries in North America repudiate this principle. For example, when arguing for the support of international struggles, advocates will deftly expose the evils of imperialism and rightly insist upon solidarity in response, but what further direction do they give to those they win over? They direct us into elections, lobbying politicians, academic debate, and symbolic protest. In effect, the people with the closest proximity to the enemy are told they must act only as cheerleaders for resistance movements catching U.S. bombs abroad. Overthrowing our ruling class isn't on the agenda, despite the benefit to international struggles that would come if we could tie down even a fraction of the U.S.'s ability to project violence across the world. The failure to consider this possibility cuts off all thought of accumulating the forces needed to make a rupture within the United States. And because accumulating forces through developing deep ties to the masses is the most stable base from which to escalate confrontation, dismissing this path also dismisses effective and sustained tactical escalations, such as coordinated direct action or sabotage.

In other words, purveyors of this political line perceive international solidarity too narrowly. They separate our struggle from the global struggle for liberation, and they maintain or widen the divide between revolutionary classes and nations, between the core and the periphery. And yet, if we take the recurring advice of the most advanced decolonial movements and their leaders, it is that we should learn to fight alongside them and push to be as combative and militant as they are; that the further we are able to push in that direction as a movement, the greater our contribution to their struggles against U.S. imperialism. In the words of Adolfo Gilly from his Introduction to Fanon's A Dying Colonialism,

"Instead of pitying us and being horrified by the atrocities of imperialism, better fight against it in your own country as we do in ours... That is the best way to help us and put an end to the atrocities."

Some dismiss this advice based on a conscious belief that revolution in the United States is not possible. For others, impossibility remains an uninterrogated assumption. But this is the tricky thing about scientific socialism and the political mode: whether or not a revolution is truly possible cannot be known in advance. It is a thesis, an axiomatic starting point. The actual possibility can only be resolved in the experiment and synthesis, in political practice. This starting point is as much required for proving the revolution as it is for proving its impossibility. It is the starting point towards either building the mass movement and party necessary to win, or, even in losing a revolution in the imperial core, having concretely supported the international struggle. 

Organizing for international solidarity is far from the only place where this tendency to side-step the question of revolution appears. This tendency is rife within all manner of issue-specific organizing and self-described activism in the U.S. In the sphere of nonprofit organizing, where promising revolutionary rhetoric sometimes appears, systematic thinking about how to realize a revolutionary seizure of power and any consideration of how their own programmatic work may or may not relate to that is completely off the agenda. Mention it aloud and you will find yourself either the subject of patronizing smiles or hushed into silence as though the very thought is forbidden. 

The overriding directive from leadership in these spaces is that any possible revolution is, at best, so far into the future that speaking about it is a distraction from the work of harm mitigation and legal reform. Push too hard on the matter and force them to address it publicly and they will misrepresent what it means to take the question of revolution seriously, dismissing the discussion as an ultra-left call to immediately move into armed struggle, as if there aren't obvious steps to be taken between a reformist starting point and the ultimate destination of a seizure of power. So, on the one hand, they will give lip service to revolution, name-dropping and quoting revolutionaries from past struggles, but, at the same time, they will energetically marginalize and silence anyone who would call on them to live up to those quotes because it disrupts their foundation funded programming and pulls the horizon of revolution too close for comfort. 

This orientation to revolution as something perpetually on the horizon is unfortunately very common, even among those forces who are explicit about their belief that a revolution is possible. Such organizations have developed programs around accumulating forces to win a revolution, when the time is right, but their methods and practices make clear that they don't really believe in achieving victory any time soon, certainly not in our lifetime. 

To the extent that there is a strategic orientation around accumulating forces, it is typically framed around two often overlapping projects: contesting elections and party building. For example, the hegemonic program within the DSA of electing minority legislative delegations and losing presidential elections presumes the only path forward is to gain a foothold within the government itself and, from there, mitigate the harms of capitalism. You can even see some adherents of this path dismissing other trends on the basis that their electoral faction is serious about governance, as if a handful of legislators who can't consistently coordinate around policy and messaging in a body with over 500 members has anything to do with governing. But they promise that at some point in the distant future, they will accumulate a majority position in government, albeit working alongside the oppressor and at the ultimate pleasure of a relatively unmolested ruling class

that's

"democracy," after all. The possibility of actually winning the world we want is so thoroughly dismissed by these social democratic tendencies that it is simply not discussed, or perhaps it's the case that the vision of the world they want is so stunted that it's not all that different from what we already have.

But what of party building as a revolutionary project? The most basic understanding of political history makes clear that to seize state power we must have a revolutionary party. The question then is whether any of the party building projects in the U.S. take the possibility of victory seriously. They do not.

Consider the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), for which party building is not only their end goal, but evidently the limit of their entire program. Methodologically, PSL's party building centers around the accumulation of members, a process built out of a constant churning of almost exclusively petit-bourgeois recruits.^[2] Similar to the DSA, it is presumed that, at some point, enough will be accumulated that the organization will be able to play power politics with the ruling class.

Important strategic considerations are completely neglected; for instance, how to develop deep and durable roots among the masses, or how to protect party networks from repression. Further confusion is created by intervening in electoral politics solely for the purpose of gaining even more members. The PSL's allergic reaction in the Palestine mobilizations to anything tactically beyond marching in circles is similarly self-defeating.

The failure to escalate the Palestine protests, indeed the active deescalation coming from PSL, is illuminating, as both a massive strategic blunder and a betrayal of this moment. PSL has significant access to the networks that have been mobilized and a robust communications infrastructure, such that it could lead hundreds or thousands of people to block a port, or a military base, or to occupy weapons manufacturers. They also have the logistical capacity, proved by their contribution to the massive November 4th protests, to maintain those blockades and occupation for days or weeks, or at least until they were forcibly dispersed by the police. If they stepped forward other organizations would contribute as well.^[3] So, why don't they? 

At this point, they can't blame the unwillingness of a movement whose members are being driven to martyrdom for lack of an avenue to end the most brutal genocide humanity has ever witnessed. The answer, it seems, is that they are not interested in confronting the ruling class, even when the people are demanding it. Rather, they are interested in riding this wave of mass protest while recruiting as many new members as possible, and then pushing them into the PSL's presidential campaign, which has as its only practical purpose the recruitment of yet more members. But then what? At what point is party building complete enough that you can use the organization to actually fight? And is the size of the party the only determinant of when it's time to fight? What if fighting back is the greatest recruitment tool you could ever hope for?

This is where the magnitude of PSL's strategic blunder can be seen. There is no surer or faster way to build a party than by winning over the millions of people currently activated by the heroic resistance in Palestine. The most obvious path in this direction would be to lead the masses where they want to go, which is into direct, forceful confrontation with the people and institutions prosecuting this genocide. Actively avoiding and deflecting the pressure for more militant action fully demonstrates that, despite their stated program, PSL is not building a party that can contest for power.

If PSL were to instead facilitate the increasing militancy of the movement, it would expose itself to strong state repression, and its leaders would face very serious personal risks. Yet, this is an organization that lionizes the experiences of communist revolutions and national liberation struggles throughout history

struggles in which

key leaders took risks that landed them in prison, exile, or worse, and they still won. Pointedly, these are the kinds of risks that the leadership of the Palestinian Resistance have been making for decades. Why not us? What greater honor than to face repression for unleashing the combativeness of the masses to stop a genocide and support the Palestinian's national liberation struggle? 

The great shame of the PSL is that there is no other formation with the avowed intention of making a revolution, the broad network of members and relationships with adjacent organizations, the media apparatus to point the masses at strategic targets, and the logistical capacity to sustain such protests. As it stands, the most confrontational our movement can get is to engage in episodic and symbolic protests, perhaps shut down a bridge, a tunnel, or a highway for a few hours. At the more militant end, the best we can do is for small groups to engage in civil disobedience or direct actions that harass the enemy. These are the limits that PSL and others are actively defending at the national and local level. Unless something gives, they will keep calling toothless "Shut It Down" protests with their partners until the movement demobilizes, but not before many thousands more Palestinians have died, and not before they've pulled thousands of people into their campaign to not elect Claudia and Karina. 

Imagine having the capacity and opportunity to unleash the masses and move with them in fighting the ruling class, even with the foreseeable result of being beaten back by the agents of state violence, and not taking it. Now, imagine refusing that opportunity at a moment when millions of people are positioned for mobilization and feeling the kind of emotional intensity that would drive a person like Aaron Bushnell to self-immolate. It's frankly outrageous. And it's not just a lost opportunity for the PSL, but for all of us. 

What we see here is that the PSL's specific methodology of accumulating membership is self-evidently not going to build a party with durable roots amongst the masses, or even a broad level of respect. They are determined to not grasp the once in a generation opportunity to gain the broad respect that would create a basis for quickly sinking roots among the masses. Deep support among the masses being the only basis for defending a party against a fascist crackdown, their inability and lack of interest in developing that support means they will not be able to weather the kind of repression we will see with a second Trump presidency. Worse, their list of members is completely transparent to the forces of state repression, as they generally have people sign up with an internet form.^[4] So, not only do they not have a basis for defending themselves, they have inadvertently created a door-knocking list for a fascist roundup. You wouldn't do this if you believed that a revolution, win or lose, was possible within the next 10-20 years. It is quite clear that, although PSL has a program that presumes winning is possible, they have no serious expectation of ever accomplishing it in our lifetime. Once again, actually winning a revolution is perpetually on the horizon.^[5]

Moving past false party building projects, if we start from the position that overthrowing the ruling class and seizing state power for a socialist project is possible in our lifetime, and we take the development of this potential seriously, some important realizations arise. Chief among these realizations is that organized force is necessary to overthrow the ruling class of the United States. If that's the case, a revolutionary movement must build the infrastructure, both ideological and material, needed to project that force and to survive the reaction. To put it in simple terms, on the ideological side we need broad exposure to our ideas and political program and we need a strong partisanship to that program among significant sections of the classes that would form a revolutionary coalition. Within that network, now bound together ideologically, we will find the material elements of the infrastructure of resistance. The preeminent material element is the movement partisan or party cadre who form the nodes in this network, tying individuals and communities together in struggle, spreading propaganda, and securing resources to protect and support the movement. The end goal is an above-ground network that distributes information and resources, with an underground (the capacity for self defense, hiding and being hidden) embedded within it. You'll know you're there when the masses are willing to harbor revolutionaries from state violence, even at great personal cost.

So, where do we begin? We have the starting point: that a revolution is possible in our lifetime. We have a bare-bones idea of what's required to accomplish that. Beyond that is a gaping chasm of unknowns. The most critical question being who are the people that are the base of a revolutionary movement in the United States? Almost unanimously, the answer would be the working class. But that obscures almost as much as it illuminates. What working class? Where? What about elements of the proletariat and semi-proletariat forced into the labor reserve? What about any remaining vestiges of peasantry, or immigrants with peasant backgrounds? What role can the petit bourgeoisie play, or even class traitors among the big bourgeoisie? And how do national and other identities running through these classes and subclasses crystallize into identifiable revolutionary subjects? When communists are faced with these questions, the most basic questions of our craft, we don't wave them away and rely on stale doctrine, dusty traditions, and hoary assumptions. We investigate.

We understand based on historical experience that winning will require organized political violence with mass support, so we understand that building that mass support is a prerequisite to victory. Our immediate question is both with whom to build that mass support and how exactly to do it. In essence, we need to identify who the revolutionary masses are, who their enemies are, and who forms the vacillating middle forces between them. This has to be a specific and concrete analysis of actual class dynamics in situ. The "method" handed down through the communist movement in the United States of simply presuming a class structure based on schematics derived from doctrine developed over 100 years ago must be abandoned. That's not to say the schematic is unsound, but it is not politically actionable. It doesn't tell you concretely with whom to organize or how.

In terms of how to undertake this investigation, what methods to use, and how to train ourselves to do it well, I can only point to examples and suggest potential models, while also sharing a sense of what we should not do. First, a thorough class analysis that creates a basis for actual political engagement with class elements of an incipient revolutionary movement is not something that can be found hiding in a library. What can be found in books are instances of similar investigations, usually partial and outside of our current context, which can suggest methods of investigation. Additionally, "book" research is a source of broader information about the social formations in North America and how they link to the periphery, which can help identify promising targets for further investigation. However, the main element of the investigation is actually talking to people face to face. In other words, this is the type of investigation which would require methods that look more like journalism or ethnography than parsing through reams of economic statistics. 

An example of this method and its output would be Mao Zedong's Report on an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan. Another example can be found in the practice of Amilcar Cabral and the PAIGC, which is described in Basil Davidson's The Liberation of Guiné: Aspect of an African Revolution. Investigations that model a more formal structure would be W.E.B. Du Bois' The Philadelphia Negro, which used systematic survey methods. The methods of Mao and Cabral are processes for developing actionable political analysis and, at the same time, they are themselves elegant political interventions. In addition to training ourselves in methods of communist political practice, the process of speaking with people directly about their class existence, their hardships, grievances, and systems of support, is one of introducing our movement to them. If done right, this introduction begins the process of winning them to the revolutionary movement, and winning them to this movement is the essence of building the infrastructure of resistance, including a revolutionary party.

Do not misunderstand: this investigation doesn't happen while setting aside current struggles for a later time. It must be done at the same time that other struggles are advancing, and it must be done from within these struggles. Critically, this is not a prescription for stepping away from the movement for Palestinian liberation. Rather, that struggle must be escalated strategically and tactically. On the strategic side, our slogans need to move from demanding a ceasefire, to demanding total liberation for the Palestinian people, and they must connect the realization of that demand with a goal of overthrowing the U.S. ruling class that is the driving force behind israel and its genocide of the Palestinian people. On the tactical side, small groups engaged in civil disobedience need to escalate to direct action. Those doing direct action should consider escalating to sabotage. At the mass scale, those organizing marches of hundreds or thousands need to be pointing those mobilizations at more strategic targets, and working towards more sustained interruptions of operations at these targets. And, across the board, leadership sitting at the gateways to this movement need to stop deescalation, while explicitly endorsing escalation in both word and deed. 

In the last five months, the struggle for Palestinian liberation has radicalized millions of people in North America and has shifted the political center of gravity. This shift has contributed to a whole train of prior fractures in the global system of capitalism-imperialism presided over by the United States and its imperial bloc. Where the temporary shutdown of capitalism in response to the COVID pandemic shot cracks through the system, in the United States this was followed by the George Floyd Rebellion, further weakening the structure. At the same time, an objective increase in the conflict between capital and labor ensued, including the attempted recuperation of capital's position prior to the pandemic, most painfully through the unleashing of price inflation across the necessities of life. Internationally, the Global South has embarked on an inexorable process of asserting its sovereignty, decisively marking the zenith of U.S. hegemony. As these fractures have developed, a wave of fascist political advances has washed over the collective West. And overarching all of these stresses have been catastrophic changes to the global climate system, the very cradle of life on the planet. This was our reality on October 6, 2023, and it was in this context that the Palestinian Resistance broke through, shattering the system of global domination that is the source of ruling class power in North America. It may not look as if the system has fundamentally come apart, but that is only because the broken pieces are falling in slow motion and have yet to land. All of these conditions have decisively pulled the horizon of revolution into our lifetime. 

So, let us begin...

---

^1^ This intervention is intended to be non-antagonistic and to engage politically conscious people in thinking through these questions. To paraphrase Mao Zedong, my intention is to struggle against incorrect views for the sake of building unity and getting the work of revolution done properly. If the language is sharp or totalizing and without caveat, this is due to the need for clarity in political interventions, as compared to the obscurity of academic and scholastic interventions. An unequivocal position in favor of one end of the contradiction is necessary to point out a course correction. It is not a full dismissal of the validity of the other side of the contradiction or the complexity of our reality. 

^2^ This method of "building the party" is replicated in almost every communist/socialist party in the United States.

^3^ It should be noted that it is not only the PSL that is failing in their responsibility to help the masses identify impactful targets and facilitate actions against them. Every major organization involved in the broader movement for Palestine in the U.S. has either failed to identify strategic bottle-necks in the war machine, or has interfered against the use of appropriate protest tactics for disrupting them in a sustained way. 

^4^ It is a fact, established through Edward Snowden's leaks, that the NSA literally makes a copy of all electronic communications in the United States, with years of traffic stored in databases to be "google" searched by a whole bevy of federal law enforcement agencies. The absolute minimum in security for a communist organization in this context is to keep your membership sign ups off the internet.

^5^ It is theoretically possible for the PSL to shift away from their opportunistic program and practice, and I hope they do, but we can't wait around for it.

Apple terminates Epic Games developer account calling it a 'threat' to the iOS ecosystem

The Apple-Epic saga has taken a new turn today as the Fortnite game developer, Epic Games, shared that Apple has terminated its developer account. This is a reversal from the earlier approval of Epic's account last month, which Epic said would allow it to bring back Fortnite to iOS devices in the EU by way of the region's new law, the Digital Markets Act (DMA). But Epic now says Apple's lawyers have sent it a letter saying it's terminating its Epic Games Sweden AB account

a move Epic calls a

"serious violation of the DMA" and an indication that Apple has no intention of "allowing true competition on iOS devices."

"In terminating Epic's developer account, Apple is taking out one of the largest potential competitors to the Apple App Store. They are undermining our ability to be a viable competitor and they are showing other developers what happens when you try to compete with Apple or are critical of their unfair practices," writes Epic on its company blog, where it has also published copies of its correspondence with Apple.

The game developer alleges that one of the reasons Apple provided to support its decision was Epic's criticism of Apple's proposed DMA rules, including this post on X (formerly Twitter) by Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney. Of course, Epic has been a thorn in Apple's side, having taken it to court over antitrust concerns and lobbying for regulations in multiple markets to crack down on Apple's power and influence over the app economy. As a result, Apple would rather be done with Epic, it seems. According to Epic, Apple reportedly told the company that it's "a threat to their ecosystem."

However, Epic said that it has publicly shared its intentions and then again assured Apple in writing that it would agree with all the terms of its developer agreements after requesting one of the DMA consultations that Apple is offering its App Store developers. (The request was initially denied). It was after agreeing to abide by its rules that Apple's lawyers sent a letter terminating its Epic Games Sweden AB account.

Epic claims the tech giant is retaliating against it for speaking out, as a letter penned by Apple exec Phil Schiller indicates.

"In the past, Epic has entered into agreements with Apple and then broken them," Schiller reminds the game maker in the letter dated February 23, 2024. "You also testified that Epic deliberately violated Apple's rules, to make a point and for financial gain. More recently, you have described our DMA compliance as 'hot garbage,' a 'horror show,' and a 'devious new instance of Malicious Compliance.' And you have complained about what you called 'Junk Fees' and 'Apple taxes."

Schiller suggests that Epic's "colorful criticism" combined with its past actions "strongly suggests that Epic Sweden does not intend to follow the rules." He adds that another intentional breach could "threaten the integrity of the iOS platform, as well as the security and privacy of users."

"...in plain, unqualified terms, please tell us why we should trust Epic at this time," he concludes.

It noted, too, that its company has contractual relationships with Apple going back to 2010 for Epic's Games, Unreal Engine, and other creator tools and Apple itself has been a public supporter of Epic's Unreal Engine.

In response to Epic's news, Apple shared the following statement:

Epic's egregious breach of its contractual obligations to Apple led courts to determine that Apple has the right to terminate 'any or all of Epic Games' wholly owned subsidiaries, affiliates, and/or other entities under Epic Games' control at any time and at Apple's sole discretion.' In light of Epic's past and ongoing behavior, Apple chose to exercise that right.

The company also told us its right to terminate Epic's account is based on the September 2021 judgment which resulted from Epic's litigation against Apple. This judgment stated that "Apple has the contractual right to terminate its DPLA with any or all of Epic Games' wholly owned subsidiaries, affiliates, and/or other entities under Epic Games' control at any time and at Apple's sole discretion."

Apple noted, too, that Epic Games Sweden entered into the Apple Developer Progam License Agreement via a click-through agreement, which had not involved any executive review by Apple at that time.

imagine buying apple devices lmao, what a profoundly anti-user company.

The Democrats Have Nothing Left To Offer You

Renewed student loan payments. Increased drilling and oil extraction. Removal of all COVID protections. Strike-breaking. Increased border security and intensified detention and deportation of children and families at the southern border. Failure to codify gay marriage. Failure to codify the right to abortion. Failure to codify protection for trans people. Genocide. The Democratic Party comes to you with open hands and presents you these policy planks.

War. Pollution. Famine. Death.

The Biden-Harris campaign website doesn't have a single policy on it. Go and look. It urges you to donate, and nothing more. "Why should we tell you what our policies are?" they ask, their dead eyes mocking. "You know what our policies are: we're not Trump."

The political horizons of the Democratic Party have narrowed down to a single point. Once the party of "progressive" labor and struggles for racial recognition, the Democrats have jettisoned the last of their betrayed allies and have adopted a blank and stony face. They refuse to make the case for their administration, because they are no longer capable of doing so. As their policies and inaction increasingly alienate and repulse the masses, the only people still arguing on behalf of the Democratic Party are the so-called socialist parties of the United States Empire: the Democratic Socialists of America and CPUSA.

Why is this the case? Surely, there must have been a time when the Democratic Party had something to offer someone other than their ruling-class donors?

There was.

To understand what's become of the Democrats, and why they have increasingly tacked toward war abroad and law and order at home, you have to understand the history of the 20th century from the point of view of the ruling class. Of course, we're told one story

the one

that we all learn in high school history

but the truth is quite

something else.

The story we learn is one about Roosevelt and the New Deal, the incredible progressive dream of equality and freedom for all. We're told that basically only racists opposed the New Deal programs, that FDR brought about an era of prosperity never-before-seen by the United States, and that he "saved" the country from the Great Depression. This isn't just the story told by the Democrats, it's also the one told by the so-called Communists of the U.S. The problem is, none of it is true.

The New Deal With the Devil

To understand the limits of the Democratic Party, we need to begin with the historical composition of the so-called Democratic coalition and how the party realigned at the beginning of the 1930s. Labor unrest had rocked the young settler-republic: in 1877, workers established the brief but influential St. Louis Commune during the 1877 General Strike; nine years later,  in 1886, the Haymarket Affair shook the country. In 1894, the Pullman Strike affected the railroads country-wide. The Coal Wars saw brutal repression of strikers by government troops and Pinkerton agents. In 1919, what came to be called the Red Summer reached  near revolutionary fervor in the major cities, spurred primarily by class consciousness in the Black Belt and returning Black soldiers amidst the shadow of World War I. Acts of white supremacist terror and lynchings, meant to maintain the status quo, were confronted with fierce resistance from Black communities. Hundreds died. Nascent Black liberation movements, such as the African Blood Brotherhood were born from the ashes. This was followed by the 1921 Tulsa Massacre in Greenwood as white supremacist capitalism asserted itself over the wealthiest Black neighborhood in America by razing it and killing between 75 and 300 people.

In the face of this labor agitation came the Great Depression. The threat of the final and total overthrow of the capitalist order loomed large as the world capitalist economy melted down and threw twelve million people out of work. The capitalists scrambled to craft a policy reply to the crisis. It finally came in the form of European style social democracy. Thus was born the New Deal. In the words of conservative think-tank the Hoover Institute, the revolution never came because the "man in the White House co-opted the left."

But the New Deal didn't end the Great Depression. For white workers (and European workers aspiring to whiteness), it mitigated the worst harms of the economic collapse that we call the Great Depression, but it was only the outbreak of World War II that stopped the bleeding. Communists in the CPUSA went from accurately assessing FDR as a kind of fascist at the beginning of the '30s to openly embracing him by the end of the decade. In the process, they abandoned the revolutionary struggle and contented themselves with economic gains for the working class. The New Deal became the basis of an unsteady alliance between the officers of organized labor

the AFL and other unions, primarily

and the old

Democratic party machine.

Government control of the centralized war production industry supercharged the U.S. economy and helped propel the settler-republic into the position of world hegemon. The U.S. stayed out of World War II as long as it could, letting the older empires slug out the fight, hoping that the USSR would be debilitated by their conflict with fascism. As a result, the ruined capitalist world was dominated in the post-war period by the U.S. Control over the complicated machinery of empire meant the U.S. imperial managers could funnel profits back into the domestic U.S. market

and keep funding the social democratic

project FDR had promised.

"The traditional colonialist powers represented by Britain, France, Holland and Belgium labored heavily under the War burdens, while Germany, Italy and Japan labored heavily under the burdens of defeat, a situation that enabled U.S. capital to extend and penetrate into all these countries through the reconstruction process," wrote the Marxist-Leninist People's Front for the Liberation of Palestine in its 1968 analysis of the world-imperialist bloc.

Breakdown

President Carter repudiated the deal between the Democrats and organized labor as the U.S. economy stalled and stagnated in the 1970s. This tack to the right was fully realized by Bill Clinton and the "Third Way" Democrats of the 1990s. The Clintonite period is where we get the term neoliberalism. Like neoconservativism, neoliberalism was a rejection of the traditional left-wing policies the Democrats embraced between 1932 and 1970.

It's easy to call policies neoliberal, but what does it mean? In content, neoliberalism is the shifting of state-sponsored programs into private hands so they can make a profit. The U.S. Empire never developed a strong welfare state like Europe

despite Lyndon Johnson's attempts

to do so, the security state and the military industrial complex demanded too much money and attention. Instead, it was always somewhat neoliberal, relying on private corporations to recognize their interests in forestalling revolutionary consciousness. These corporations invested in pensions, healthcare, programs, etc. for their employees... until Carter signaled the Democrats' willingness to turn on their one-time partners, the officers and bureaucrats of the labor unions.

Between Carter and Clinton, the Republican Party became the main vehicle for ruling-class action. Having repudiated the old progressive deal, the Democrats no longer had anything to offer the ruling class in terms of mass mobilization. Carter and Clinton, the bookends to Democratic control, were both indistinguishable from Republicans in their economic policy; Clinton, in fact, ran to the right of former CIA director H.W. Bush in 1992 on almost every economic issue.

The Obama Administration, despite its pretensions to restoring the voided social contract of the 1950s and 1960s, increased the party's commitment to neoliberalism and the degradation of unions. A financial catastrophe comparable to the stock market crash of 1929 put the Obama White House in a position quite similar to that of the FDR White House. However, since 1929, there had been major developments in the state's repressive machinery. No one was afraid of labor unrest or a looming revolution; the Occupy movement was easily disarmed and countered. What was the answer of the 21st century Democratic Party to the New Deal? FDR provided relief to the working class. Obama provided relief to the owning class.

To prevent total economic meltdown, the federal government infused the economy with new money; it "bailed out" banks. Not one of the criminal bankers responsible for the crisis was ever held accountable. The banking system itself was put on life support as federal regulators eased restrictions on lending that have remained in this "foot on the gas" position until this very day. Interest rates were cut, reserve requirements were overturned, and the U.S. (and thus the global) economy was puffed up on "aid" while still remaining fundamentally unsound.

Bidenomics and the Working Class

The economy is unsound because the rate of profit is in decline. Despite its sharp recovery after the life-support system installed by the Obama regime, it once again began to tumble and continues to fall to this day. This is the law of capitalism: the concentration of capital leads to declining rates of profit worldwide.

In the chart above, we can see the sharp spike in the rate of profit when the U.S. destruction of the Soviet Union brought markets back into the capitalist world, but even with this shot in the arm, the rate of profit continues to fall over time.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the rate of profit was appreciably higher than it is today.  The rate of profit began to decline in the middle 1960s. It was at this time that the social-democratic program of the Democrats gave way to Carter in the early 1970s, and the breakup of union power with the failed Chrysler strike and culminating in the PATCO strike of the air traffic controllers. PATCO

the Professional Air

Traffic Controllers Organization

was a trade union operating from

1968 until it was decertified in 1981. Just like the railroad workers that Biden forced back to work, PATCO demanded a shorter work-week to increase safety. Carter instructed the Federal Aviation Agency not to give in to the demand to provoke a strike he knew was in the offing. Reagan took up Carter's torch and, even though he had supported PATCO vocally during his election campaign, he followed the ruling-class line shared by Democrats and Republicans: the PATCO strike was declared illegal and the union was decertified.

The fact is that, as of Biden's assumption of power, the progressive potential of the Democratic Party has been completely exhausted. The chair of the party is Jaime Harrison, a "former" lobbyist for the Podesta Group where he represented Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Berkshire Hathaway, numerous pharmaceutical corporations, and Walmart. The main funding arm of the Democratic Party is run by the board member of a CIA cut-out, the National Democratic Institute, which often works with the infamous National Endowment for Democracy to instigate regime change in socialist or nationalist countries in order to make them palatable to American business interests.

This leads us to the Bidenomics of today: massive debt relief and loan programs for private businesses while the working class see only the steep climb of inflation. Prices have climbed 20% since the 2020 implementation of Biden's relief plan for the rich. Wages have risen, but only roughly 10% in that time. That means every dollar in 2024 can buy what 80 cents could buy in 2020

a devaluation that is now almost

the equivalent of having robbed every working person in the United States of a quarter of their income. Getting paid an additional 10 cents on the dollar doesn't make that much better.

There is no appetite among the Democratic Party's ruling class supporters to budgeon any economic issue. We have seen Biden break rail strikes even when the rail workers repeatedly warned that the health and safety of the entire country was on the line. His administration is only interested in offering relief to one class: the ruling class. Since 2020, the concentration of wealth in the hands of billionaires has increased 70%. This is under Biden's watch.

What about social issues? These, too, have been surrendered by the Democrats. The Biden regime has failed to codify abortion at the federal level, failed to protect trans rights, which are under assault in the right-reactionary stronghold states of the South, failed to even try to hold the police accountable for violence doled out on oppressed communities (he's worked hard to increase police funding and presence in the wake of George Floyd's death), failed to stop the creeping entrenchment of crisis-fascism amongst the Republicans, and failed to step down from an aggressive, hawkish foreign policy that sees all countries and all realms of the earth as the prerogative of the U.S. Empire's intervention.

There Is Nothing Left

The last of the progressive elements in the Democratic Party were sacrificed to the profit drive long ago. Social democrats are merely chum in the water for fascist retrenchment. Today, they serve as seductive sheepdogs, struggling to lead the working people away from the realization that the entire system is corrupt.

The bargain is a raw one!

For too long, we have been induced to trade our economic freedom in exchange for economic security. Now, even the lure of security has been taken away. All that remains is the threatened cudgel of Trump. For this, it is clear, the Democrats love him. Oh, not the rank and file, not the Democratic voter, for whom Trump is the expression of every foul and carnal urge, but for the Democratic politician there could be no more effective whip to mobilize those disaffected portions of their former electorate.

"We have nothing to offer you. Don't look for us to offer you anything other than this: we aren't Trump."

That's not enough, Mr. Biden. We must not stand by and allow the Democrats to bully us into another unholy bargain. We must stand up against them.

keywords: pony, shrug

transcript/text essay version: https://joyce-stick.tumblr.com/post/743810615561404416/hi-everyone-so-the-coffin-of-andy-and-leyley-is

This is partially a repost of my comment in the news megathread but not really.

OpenAI just announced Sora, a tool for creating video from text, and the results are really fucking good (especially compared to state-of-the-art AI video generation tools), and this has me thinking about job security again.

Generative AI is already displacing workers.

A study surveying 300 leaders across the entertainment industry reports that three-fourths of respondents indicated that AI tools supported the elimination, reduction or consolidation of jobs at their companies. Over the next three years, it estimates that nearly 204,000 positions will be adversely affected.

The Concept Art Assn. and the Animation Guild commissioned the report, which was conducted from Nov. 17 to Dec. 22 by consulting firm CVL Economics, amid concerns from members over the impact of AI on their work. Among the issues is that concept artists are increasingly being asked to “clean up” AI-generated works by studios, lowering their billed hours and the pool of available jobs, says Nicole Hendrix, founder of the advocacy group.

“We’re seeing a lot of role consolidation and reduction,” Hendrix says. “A lot of people are out of work right now.”

According to the report, nearly 77 percent of respondents use AI image generators enabling, for example, individuals to upload landscape photos to virtual productions screens or speed up rotoscoping in postproduction. They have applications in 3D modeling, storyboarding, animation and concept art, among other things.

Generative AI displacing workers isn't some future hypothetical, it's something that's already happening right now, and as someone working in a field which is vulnerable to automation by AI tools, I'm really worried that OpenAI (or some other company) is going to create a new tool that just completely puts me out of a job.

Is anyone else worried for their job? Is there anything that can be done?