“The Teamsters are launching strikes against seven Amazon warehouses Thursday, in the union’s biggest provocation yet against the nation’s second-largest private employer, threatening to delay some package delivery during the busy Christmas season. The strikes will take place at sites in New York City, Atlanta, San Francisco, Skokie, Ill., and Southern California. Roughly 9,000 Amazon workers around the country have joined the Teamsters, according to the union, but Amazon has refused to recognize their union and bargain with them. The Teamsters are hoping to force Amazon to the bargaining table to hammer out a union contract with this round of strikes, which they are threatening to expand. ‘If your package is delayed during the holidays, you can blame Amazon’s insatiable greed,’ Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said. … Amazon has said the union illegally coerced its workers to join, a key reason it cites for not recognizing the union’s representation of the workers.” (12/19/24)
“The shamelessness of the first family was writ large at the White House this week as the president’s final whirl of Christmas parties attracted social media ‘influencers’ whose biggest thrill was posting selfies with celebrity nepotist Hunter Biden. In the very week that he was due to be sentenced to jail for tax fraud, the first son merrily pressed the flesh and flashed his $70,000 pearly whites, secure in the knowledge that his father’s ‘full and unconditional’ pardon has got him off the hook for any and all crimes committed for the past 11 years. The outrage over Hunter’s pardon has been buried in an avalanche of other pardons Joe Biden has been doling out like candy to assorted scumbags. … It’s a fitting end to Biden’s benighted presidency.” (12/18/24)
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone
“New York prosecutors have charged Luigi Mangione with ‘murder as an act of terrorism’ in his alleged shooting of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson earlier this month. This news comes out at the same time as a Haaretz report titled ‘No Civilians. Everyone’s a Terrorist: IDF Soldiers Expose Arbitrary Killings and Rampant Lawlessness in Gaza’s Netzarim Corridor.’ The report contains testimony from Israeli troops that civilians are being murdered in Gaza and are then being retroactively designated as terrorists to justify heir execution. ‘We’re killing civilians there who are then counted as terrorists,’ a recently discharged officer told Haaretz. These two stories together say so much about the way the label ‘terrorist’ is used under the US-centralized power umbrella. The guy who shot the health insurance CEO is a terrorist, but the people systematically slaughtering civilians in Gaza are not terrorists.” (12/19/24)
“Post-election America finds itself in a panic. Voices from across a wide political spectrum warn that the country stands on the precipice of a potentially unprecedented and chaotic disregard for the laws, norms, and policies upon which its stability and security have traditionally relied. Some fear that the ‘new’ president, Donald Trump, is likely to declare a national emergency and invoke the Insurrection Act, unleashing the U.S. military for mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and for ‘retribution against’ the ‘enemy from within’ as well as ‘radical left lunatics’. As the New Republic‘s editor Michael Tomasky notes, writing about the nomination of Kash Patel for the post of director of the FBI, ‘We’re entering a world where the rule of law is turned inside out.’ ” (12/19/24)
“This fall, shortly after the election, the U.S. House passed a dangerous piece of legislation that many are calling the ‘nonprofit killer’ bill. The bill has an incongruous title: the ‘Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act’. Among other things, it would give the Treasury Department the authority to unilaterally accuse nonprofit organizations of supporting ‘terrorism’, and revoke their nonprofit status. Critics like the ACLU say it’s a blank check for presidents to shut down organizations that criticize them. When the bill was introduced in the spring, it was largely viewed as an effort to silence pro-Palestinian activism. At the time, dozens of House Democrats supported it alongside most Republicans. But after Donald Trump’s White House win, amid fears that the incoming president would use it as a tool to bludgeon his perceived enemies, it passed with significantly less Democratic support.” (12/19/24)
“Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2024 is ‘polarization’, which it defines as ‘division into two sharply distinct opposites’. (The word beat out ‘brain rot’, but one wonders if it did so among dictionary staff.) In reality, it’s been the word of the year since at least 2016, when President-elect Trump won the first time and the left went nuts. The lefty staff in dictionary land couldn’t handle being Trumped and started playing word games almost immediately after his victory. Even NPR noted in 2017 that, ‘The Merriam-Webster Dictionary Has Been Trolling Trump On Twitter For Months.’ The company’s word play is part of a larger leftist strategy to either make up new words or redefine existing terms to make them fit the liberal narrative.” (12/19/24)
“The Islamic regime in Iran has had a bad run lately. The collapse of its ally in Syria. The weakening of its proxy militias in Gaza and Lebanon. Embarrassing intelligence failures. Bombardments by Israel. Rarely has Tehran been more isolated. Yet on Tuesday, when supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed in a public address that ‘The resistance [to Israel and the West] is not over’, he also spoke of a vulnerability from within. ‘Everyone, especially women, should be vigilant about the enemy’s soft tactics and not be deceived by slogans and temptations,’ he said. By ‘advocating for women’s rights … they incite unrest in the country.’ The ayatollah’s warning comes amid a resurgence of the women’s rights movement that erupted two years ago when a young woman died while in police custody after being detained for not covering her hair properly.” (12/19/24)
“A Chinese national was arrested Thursday on charges of acting as an illegal agent for Beijing when serving as the campaign manager for an unnamed politician elected to a city council in Southern California two years ago. The arrest of Yaoning ‘Mike’ Sun, 64, came at a time of rising concerns that the Chinese government has cultivated a network of operatives to influence local elections in the U.S. to install politicians who are friendly to Beijing and can help promote Chinese interests. … Sun is accused of conspiring with Chen Jun, who was sentenced to 20 months last month for acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government. Chen, 71, also a Chinese national, pleaded guilty in July to using Chinese money to bribe federal agents to undermine the anti-Beijing spiritual group Falun Gong. The charge against Sun shows that Chen also conspired to interfere with local elections.” (12/19/24)
“When Northern Gaza was placed under a complete siege, the Biden Administration issued a warning that if conditions didn’t improve within 30 days, he would stop weapons shipments to Israel. At the time of the announcement, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians faced imminent starvation because the Israeli military was blocking trucks of humanitarian aid from entering Northern Gaza. As children and their parents either starved to death or suffocated under the rubble of their homes that were deliberately bombed – Biden told them to wait thirty days. When the thirty days were up, Israel correctly called Biden’s bluff. They knew he wasn’t going to stop sending weapons, and they were right. I began this hunger strike to demand that my government end the siege on Gaza. It’s clear to the entire world that Israel acts with full backing from the United States and both governments are responsible for the death and human suffering happening in Palestine.” (12/19/24)
“How many times have you heard someone say something along the lines of the problem with Congress being we need term limits? I hear it weekly, if not almost daily. It always makes me cringe a little and I try to be polite, or at least as polite as I can be, and respond that term limits won’t change anything because voters are the real problem. … Have you noticed how the fight over the continuing resolution (the one now or any of them ever) always contains new surprises and a ton of new spending? The name starts off with the word ‘continuing’, which implies it is simply an agreement to keep things as they are – continuing them for a while – but it always included new, horrible things that cost hundreds of million or billions of dollars.” (12/19/24)
