The modern building today:

I'm delighted to share my new article, published in @millennjournal.bsky.social! It examines how the Zapatistas used colonial memory while forging transnational alliances with European activists. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

The nuclear family's grip is fading, paving the way for new forms of kinship rooted in connection, choice, and community. Let's break free from outdated structures and reimagine our bonds. #FamilyAbolition #CommunityKinship

Peace - is always a potential - a possibility only the Corrupt and The Foolish stay blind to... www.newarab.com/analysis/wha... #Israel #Gaza #Palestine #Syria #Turkey #FreePalestine #FreeKurdistan #DefendRojava

Evaluation of the Political Situation of the last weeks from our Battalion. #rojava #SDF #Palestine #Armenia #Artsakh

Two years after his Join or Die graphic was published, Franklin placed a scalp bounty on Enemy Indians.

When the vigilante settlers known as the Paxton Boys marched on Philadelphia demanding genocide, Franklin met with them and then printed the proclamation of a new scalp bounty.

Franklin's Join or Die graphic was not about a rejection of monarchism because it predates the American Revolution by a decade and was about the colonies joining together to fight the French & Indian War.

“The press, as usual, in dealing with this incident, strives to belittle & cast ridicule upon Venezuela & the sympathetic nature of her sons in order to magnify & extol the merit that we ought to possess ourselves.” from the Tacoma anarchist journal, Why? historyiswhat.noblogs.org/post/2025/11...

Please contribute if you're able or share the original if you're not. Note that the most effective way to get help for people is to directly ask people you know

We develop, share & experiment w/ tactical interventions, strategic organizing practices & organizing tools to end all forms of criminalization, incarceration, surveillance & supervision. All of our resources are anchored in an abolitionist framework ➡️ www.communityjusticeexchange.org/en/resources

Chris Smalls, in San Diego told us that none of the U.S. unions supported Palestinian rights except for the Central Labor Council in our city. The AFL-CIO tried to quash the pro-Palestine resolution and sent a member to SD to try to talk them out of it. SHAME‼️ #FREEPALESTINE 🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸🇵🇸

📌 Reminder: Starbucks became a focus of global boycotts after it sued its workers' union, Starbucks Workers United, over a pro-Palestinian social media post in October 2023. Beyond the present union strike Starbucks still faces global protests bc of its pro Zionist stance.

Luella is a 1934 Chrysler Airflow Imperial possessed by the vengeful spirit of Luella Kreisky, a Austrian Worker's Front fighter tortured and killed and buried in the car in '34. Luella's strongly socialist, violently antifa, and her beloved driver Scott barely controls her rage. #StreetLevelHeroes

Bad employee-speech decision out of the 8th Circuit, holding that Home Depot could fire an employee who wrote BLM on their apron in the context of a workplace dispute about discrimination. (This is reversing a Biden-era NLRB decision) law.justia.com/cases/federa...

www.commondreams.org/news/starbuc... As its workers fight for a living wage and for the company to address hundreds of labor violation complaints, Starbucks Workers United says it’s prepared for the “biggest and longest” strike in the company’s history.

You can support Starbucks workers by not crossing the picket, and you can also contribute to the strike fund!

Never go to Starbucks? Cool. Going on strike is *hard*, and doing so requires bravery. Show your solidarity & support by donating to the strike fund! It'll keep the workers fed, housed & resourced while they're fighting.

If you want to help support the Starbucks union as they strike:

There it is Strike Fund - Starbucks Workers United share.google/pmINaeARKhjK...

Don't cross the picket line! #starbucks #unionstrike #strike

“County employee unions host Strike School” — The Vacaville Reporter #UnionNews #school #strike

There’s some amazing local coffee shops that pay their workers well and invest directly in our communities. Today is a really great day to support them!

Erik, if you have any other recs for reading on Marcos-Aquino era analysis of political economy or really any good English-language history of the Philippines, I would be very grateful for them.

Back tomorrow to discuss the National Women's Trade Union League, founded in Boston in 1903.

I drew from Annelise Orleck, We Are All Fast Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising against Poverty Wages to write this post.

It’s no wonder then that so many of the Filipino working class have turned back to strongmen such as Rodrigo Duterte to channel their frustrations. Thanks to American support of neoliberal institutions, democracy has been no better for them than dictatorship.

There is still a union movement today in the garment factories of the Philippines, but it also faces the continued global race to the bottom, with companies constantly threatening to move to Bangladesh if the wages go too high.

The others were named Cirilo Almario, Jose Bacera, Ricardo Dicon, Gilbert Galicia, Oscar Legaspi, Filomeno Maligaya, Gene Paris, Freddie Sumagaysay, and Edger Sumido. They were all either in hiding or out of the country by 2021.

There were of course other people involved and some of them still remained very powerful. One of them, an officer named Red Kapunan, was the nation’s ambassador to Germany in 2021. So he was untouchable.

Fernando Casanova, Dennis Jabatan, and Desiderio Perez, all military officers, were found guilty of two counts of murder and received prison terms of up to 40 years, in addition to paying about $2.1 million in restitution to the families.

Finally, in 2021, the Filipino legal system went after some of the people directly responsible for the assassinations.

And this time, it was clear that the Global North financial institutions and the governments behind them were obviously responsible for this.

The KMU kept organizing after Odalia’s murder and launched another strike in 1990, but wages have basically stagnated in that country’s industrial zones since then. Five years after their peaceful revolution that got rid of Marcos, the lives of workers were just as terrible as they were before.

Aquino implemented neoliberal restructuring, destroying what existed for a social safety net and expanding free trade zones that encouraged more western companies to use the nation’s cheap labor to move jobs from nations such as the U.S., or by this time South Korea and Taiwan, to the Philippines.

So then the International Monetary Fund and World Bank and the United States came calling for those debts.

In terms of labor though, while Aquino most certainly was not the monster Marcos was, she was hardly some great leader for the working class. But some of this was the times. The finances of the Philippines were a mess thanks to all the debt Marcos had run up to keep his power.

But Marcos sure didn’t care. It became quickly known that RAM was not only involved in this, but that they saw it as a precursor to launch a coup against Aquino. She acted immediately and took action against the RAM leaders. Their coup didn’t work. But good luck getting justice here.

On November 13, 1986, the military went after Olalia. Along with his driver Leonor Alay-ay, Olalia was shot and killed. First, Olalia was stabbed a bunch of times. There were 12 men directly involved. They didn’t hide it. People knew who they were.

In short, this was not too different than how the military acted in Chile to get rid of Salvador Allende and install Augusto Pinochet in power in 1973.

The military was furious. A fascist movement developed in the upper ranks called Rebolusyonaryong Alyansang Makabansa (RAM) to plot a coup, eliminate the leftists, and reinstate Marcos or someone like him.

In the aftermath, Marcos went hard after the KMU, with American support of course. Olalia was an attorney by training who did a ton of work for the Filipino working class. But in February 1986, Marcos was finally forced from power and the reformer Corazon Aquino took over the presidency.

By 1982, 26,000 garment workers in the Bataan Export Processing Zone launched a huge strike and despite the military going in there and raising hell, they actually won the strike. The main demands were for higher wages and an end to sexual harassment, always endemic in the textile industry.

This was a communist led movement that would soon have 400,000 members and criticized the AFL-CIO for being hacks of Marcos, which was true given how the federation under George Meany and Layne Kirkland were more concerned with killing communists abroad than in organizing workers anywhere.

By 1980, grassroots anger at these bought and sold unions and the Marcos administration was rising. This was personified in the May First Movement, or KMU in Tagalog.

In 1974, the Filipino Congress had offered a very limited place for unions in the government as a way to undermine the influence of communists. But they were only tolerated if they did not challenge Marcos and informed for the government on radicals. So these were not effective unions at all.

For him, anyone who threatened his control over the nation was a communist, whether other elites such as the Aquino family or labor organizers. He ordered about 3,000 executions over the 21 years of his awful regime.

. But this is where the Marcos regime came in. Marcos would order these organizers beaten, jailed, tortured, even killed. Marcos was pretty good at this. He was a mass murderer.

The Philippines had a fairly active union movement and from nearly the moment that the factories opened, union organizers attempted to bring the workers together to fight for their rights.