Kaffe (cough-uh)

I’m a cup of coffee

New Afrikan

Read Walter Rodney!

Chunka Luta Library

  • 4 Posts
  • 57 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: March 23rd, 2022
  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.mltoWorld News@lemmygrad.ml•*Permanently Deleted*
    8·
    3 months ago

    Bandera was in Plast, then he later recruited from it in forming the OUN-B. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church funded Plast, and also the SS Galicia Division having string ties with the OUN-B. Plast in the Diaspora remains connected the the UGCC and former SS members set up the scouts over in the US, CA, and AUS. Here they taught revisionist history and celebrated Bandera and whitewashing their actions. After the union fell, Plast veterans went back to Ukraine and took over main industries and state positions. After the coup in 2014 the state made Plast almost mandatory as an assimilation tool.

    Proud past

    The Ukrainian scouting movement known as Plast was formed in 1911 in Lviv. Throughout more than 100 years of its activity, Plast has endured various challenges: from world wars, when Plast scouts showed their endurance under extreme circumstances, to a period of underground activity when Plast was outlawed by the Polish state in 1930.

    When the Soviet Union took control of Ukraine it banned the organization, but the Ukrainian diaspora revived Plast after World War II in different parts of the world: Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Argentina and others.

    Plast was to eventually renew its activity in Ukraine in 1989. This year marks the 30th anniversary of the restored movement in their homeland. Today Plast has 10,000 members in Ukraine and thousands in nearly 20 countries – which makes it the largest Ukrainian youth movement in the world.

    Among the famous Plast members were not only such historical figures as Stepan Bandera or Roman Shukhevych, recognized as heroes of the anti-Soviet nationalist uprising in Ukraine, but also economist and benefactor Bohdan Hawrylyshyn, former major archbishop of the Ukrainian Catholic Church Lubomyr Husar, and Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland.

    …

    Active position

    Although Plast calls itself “non-political,” it has also never shied away from supporting Ukraine’s fight for independence or helping in its struggle to counter the Kremlin’s attempts to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty. Many Plast members took leading roles in the protests that became the 2014 EuroMaidan Revolution, and when ex-President Viktor Yanukovych’s special police forces shot and killed more than 100 protestors, Plast members were among the dead and wounded.

    They also were among those joining the armed volunteer battalions in spring 2014 that fought against Russian-backed separatists. But for the diaspora, Plast often serves as a bridge between modern life and Ukrainian tradition and between their countries and Ukraine.

  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.mltoMemes@lemmygrad.ml•Move over Putin
    36·
    3 months ago

    Once again I have a Chunka Luta book recommendation: Indigenous Paleolithic by Paulette Steeves

    Archeology as a discipline in the West functions as a Colonial tool to deny the history of Indigenous peoples. The biggest example is the “Clovis First Theory” (debunked) that posits all Indigenous peoples of the Americas descend from migrations across the Bering Strait during the last glacial maxim. Archeologists who made their careers on this study have bullied and physically harmed opponents to their hypothesis. US settlers over and over have destroyed archeological sites intentionally (and many unintentional as well) and this has been used to deny how long people have been living in the western continents. (Another example is the “genetic testing” and other racism that posits European settlers are “more indigenous” than Arabic-speaking Palestinians).

    This is once again, a projection onto China what the Whites have been doing all over the world.

  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.mltoUS News@lemmygrad.ml•Nearly *half* of Amazon's warehouse workers are injured during Prime Day.
    18·
    3 months ago

    Relevant snippet from Palo Alto:

    Safiyo Mohamed immigrated from Somalia only three months before she started as a stower at an Amazon warehouse in Minnesota. After three days of training (only in English), she began emptying incoming boxes from the conveyor belt into boxes from which the pickers picked. The system had a strict quota: 2,600 items sorted for every 10-hour shift, or a consistent average of less than 14 seconds per object. To fit in any kind of break you had to go faster, so as a beginner, Safiyo tried to avoid taking any breaks. Still, after her first week, her manager told her she was too slow and made more mistakes than the acceptable number: one per shift, an inhuman error rate of .04 percent. What help she got concerning strategies for improvement came from the other Somali workers who filled the warehouse. (As in the Hoover-era gold mines, white English-speaking managers boss groups of nonwhite workers, whose ethnic composition depends on the location; in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, a high proportion of them are East African immigrants.) “After my shift, I couldn’t even cook for myself. I barely had the energy to take a shower and often went to bed with an empty stomach,” Mohamed recalled in an essay about her experience for Sahan Journal. “I had nightmares about getting fired, disrupting the little sleep I was getting. They treated me and every other warehouse worker like a machine, not a human.” Feeling like she had no other way to support her family, Safiyo lasted longer than most, 30 months. In Amazon’s numbers, she turns up as an unqualified success. That’s how it’s supposed to work; that’s how Amazon came to dominate retail and how Jeff Bezos became the world’s richest man.

    A detailed 2020 investigation found that Amazon’s warehouse workers have a serious-injury rate nearly twice the warehouse industry average. And the more robotized the distribution center, the higher the injury rate. “If you’ve got robots that are moving product faster and workers have to then lift or move those products faster, there’ll be increased injuries,” an Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspecting physician with experience in the company’s facilities told reporters. Racing to catch up with machines rigged to run hot hurts people. Efficiency causes injuries, which is another way of saying that, for Amazon, injuries are efficient. Amazon’s delivery must be very efficient, because drivers get injured even more—a lot more. And unlike warehouse workers, Amazon delivery drivers don’t technically work for Amazon, even if they’re wearing Amazon uniforms delivering Amazon packages in their Amazon vans following Amazon’s directions to Amazon customers.

    For most of its existence, Amazon got its packages to customers’ doors just as everyone else does, contracting with the U.S. Postal Service or the big private shippers UPS and DHL for the dreaded “last mile” delivery. But as part of Operation Dragon Boat, the company planned to bring shipping inside the Amazon tent, or at least next to it. Driving trucks around is dangerous—for drivers, for the other people on the road, and for the legally liable employers. Trucks kill people, especially when you drive fast. Amazon drivers, unsurprisingly, have to drive fast if they want to keep their jobs, and their trucks do kill people. But when it comes time to hold someone responsible, Amazon is nowhere to be found. Patricia Callahan’s 2019 investigation for ProPublica and the New York Times couldn’t establish exactly how many deaths Amazon drivers were responsible for because they are all contractors, hired through the Delivery Service Partner program.

    Amazon has absurd injury rates while they get a lot of great press for their “automation”, but what such “automation” is actually doing is setting a dangerous pace for the human bodies. With such high turnover and higher than local average wages, Amazon is able to pace workers at inhuman speeds, to their body’s breaking point, because each individual worker is an expiring commodity to them.

  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.mltoUS News@lemmygrad.ml•Majority of Middle-Class Americans Say They Struggle Financially
    4·
    4 months ago

    No it’s not. Wages in the Imperialist countries are buffed by super-exploitation of the global South.

    The amount of resources Americans use means that they are condensing into a “middle class” above the 3rd world nations workers and below the Imperial Bourgeoisie.

    Spending most if not all of your paycheck does not mean you aren’t “middle class” (petty bourg or labor aristocrat). You were never meant to be able to accumulate wealth, the bourgs want you to consume it and for them to get it in their balance sheets at the end of the day because you bought goods and services from their property. If you are accumulating significant wealth that can’t be wiped out due to crises (ex: getting very ill, medical costs), you are certainly not exploited. If you are consuming more labor than you put out, but break even on paper, you’re still not exploited (Imperialist wages).

    This is why Economism (and accompanying social democracy) is dead end politics that is incapable of handling national contradictions that Imperialism feeds on.

    As well, the top 80% of income brackets have been getting increased wealth and income, since the end of WW2.

  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.mltoLeftist Infighting: A community dedicated to allowing leftists to vent their frustrations@lemmygrad.ml•Roderic Day talking about {Hexbear}
    30·
    6 months ago

    And this ain’t the first time, Roderick’s a bit terminally online, arguing against other based progressive like JT (Second Thought) and Michael Hudson…

    Why shouldn’t he? Hudson’s following reproduces Industrial Capitalist apologia in the same way that fed Social Chauvinism in Europe prior to WW1 (and during the height of Imperialism’s African carve). I can see the consequences of Hudson in the patsoc space. Second Thought’s video on MMT was uncritical and like Hudson reproduces petty booj cope about “the economy” and reform.

    Hudson and ST are Marxist educators, they should be criticized so that their performance at that role can improve. If we are giving these people a living as revolutionary educators, shouldn’t they be held to the highest standards?

    The western left has a deep cultural lack of seriousness (I wonder why that is?). Memes and jokes are fine but bigotry and anti-intellectualism shouldn’t be passed off as jokes to avoid criticism.

  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.mltoWorld News@lemmygrad.ml•The Jewish Federation of North America (JFNA), one of the largest Jewish pro-Israel groups in the U.S., is behind the fast-tracking of the TikTok divestment bill in the U.S. Congress.
    2·
    7 months ago

    The market of ideas is not the battleground of Imperialism. The US struggle against the PRC over Bytedance is the US Bourg trying to enforce the International Rule that large corporations outside of the US are not allowed to exist outside of the public exchange. Americans need to be able to buy it up, whenever they want. This is also how the US exerts national domination over the Bourgeoisie of other nations. They can only invest in certain things on the continent, like real estate (which there are talks of banning Chinese nationals from owning land), and tech companies (inclusive of entertainment infrastructure), to keep the bubbles in both growing. They store their wealth in the US, under restrictions, so the US can remain liquid and clip coupons.

    This is similarly why some European big whigs are calling for liberalization of pensions so they can be spent on militarism, which as we know from books like Palo Alto, the STEM sector in the Imperialist nations and militarism are two sides of the same process. Imperialism is Scientific Capitalism. 401k funds are also workers giving their wages straight to International Capitalism without going through the government.

  • Kaffe@lemmygrad.mltoWorld News@lemmygrad.ml•The Jewish Federation of North America (JFNA), one of the largest Jewish pro-Israel groups in the U.S., is behind the fast-tracking of the TikTok divestment bill in the U.S. Congress.
    14·
    7 months ago

    Sure, but this is an excuse and a diversion. So are the anti-Comm and Sinophobic excuses. The reason why TikTok is facing an attempted force buyout is because the US-led Bourgeoisie wants to bring Bytedance into the stock market for the biggest IPO in history.

    Something that the CPC blocked from happening in 2021:

    US based firms like Blackrock have huge stakes in private Bytedance, they want to force an IPO so they can make dozens of billions at least. The American employees who own significant private stock also stand to benefit from a force takeover of Bytedance. The Tech Industrialists in California are in a win-win if the state is to be weaponized as well, TikTok goes public and they buy pieces of it up or TikTok is banned and their software cartel holds firm.

    Remember which banks collapsed last year? The ones that deal with startup-to-IPO schemes? TikTok is the dream company for the IPO industry that is US Tech and California banking.