Can we talk about the cesspool that is lemmy.world and beehaw.org? lemmy.ml and lemmy.ee seem downright tame in comparison.

What happened over there? It's like all the worst parts of Reddit, but concentrated.

Biden’s Picket Line Visit Doesn’t Mean He Is On Our Side

Hell yeah, Scheerpost is joining my dunking on Jacobin here!

Yesterday, Joe Biden became the first sitting president to visit a picket line of striking workers. It is historic. A few hours later, Jacobin published an article entitled “The Militancy of the UAW Strike Forced Joe Biden to Take a Side and Walk the Picket Line,” by Nick French. Jacobin is right that Biden’s visit to the picket line results from the UAW strike’s strength. But Jacobin is dead wrong in its assessment that Biden is “on the side of the working class.”

Instead, Biden’s visit is a product of the capitalist crisis in which both Trump and Biden are vying for influence over the working class in a tight presidential race. In doing so, they are representing the interests of the ruling class. In fact, Biden broke the railway strike and has provided massive handouts to the auto industry to build nonunion, low-wage electric-vehicle (EV) plants. Now, that isn’t a guy who is on the side of workers.

We have to understand that both parties are making overtures to workers because the establishment is in crisis and because workers are showing their strength. This just highlights how important it is that class struggle remain politically independent of both parties. We have to build an independent working-class organization that charts a different path from that of Trump, Biden, and the entire ruling class.

...

Of course, it is historic for a sitting president to stand with striking workers. That is undeniable. But the lesson that Jacobin wants you and millions of ordinary people to take from this is the wrong one. Biden is not “on the side” of the workers any more than the kente cloth–wearing Democrats were on the side of Black Lives Matter.

Instead, Biden’s visit to the picket line is part of a project of aligning the working class with the Democratic Party in order to win the 2024 election, especially in the face of an erratic Donald Trump, who won a big-enough sector of the industrial working class to help carry him to victory in 2016. And it’s part of a project of projecting support for the working class in order to quell struggles and create national stability under the hegemony of the Democratic Party in order to continue its strategic competition with China. Biden and the establishment are terrified that this strike could unify the ranks of the working class — as there is bipartisan support for the strike — and reinvigorate a labor movement that has been growing stronger since the Red State revolt of 2018.

This is not “on the side of the working class.”

Poor little Ukraine isn't getting as much war money eith the shutdown deal. What has the world come to

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/ftc-sues-amazon-illegally-maintaining-monopoly-power

FTC and 17 US states suing Amazon for enshitification.

Feinstein has passed away. Is there any representation for the 90+ left in Congress?

Brazilian Senate approves bill cutting Indigenous land rights, defying Supreme Court

Brasilia, Sept 27 (EFE).- The Brazilian Senate on Wednesday approved a bill that restricts the right to land of Indigenous Peoples, contradicting a ruling by the Supreme Court on Thursday that granted them a constitutional right to lands occupied “historically”, “traditionally” and “permanently.”

Indigenous people march on Bogota to demand justice for killings; Indigenous ‘Minga’ collective demands action to stem a rising wave of violence in their communities across Colombia.

In the end, Feinstein's legacy isn't about her policies or the lives she touched. It's about how magnificently she epitomized stagnation.

Updates on my Marxist reading journey: I'm waiting for my books to come in the mail and I read a bit of Engels yesterday for the first time and OH MY GOD he is so much easier to read than Marx. I only read an introduction to the creation of the middle class in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and I felt like it was a contemporary writer the whole time.

Also I finished Wage Labor and Capital and now I'm seeing that, if value increases for one thing, it comes from the decrease in value of something else in everything. Like things only improve at the expense of another. Is that dialectics? Lol. Anyway I'm obsessed with reading now more than I have been in a long time, perhaps because I feel challenged. Let's see how long it lasts; I have a LONG ass reading list so I feel like I have to read as fast as possible before my brain randomly decides that it doesn't care anymore.

Biden’s Middle East deal is a disaster, from Hoffman at the Cato Institute (shudder), writing in Responsible Statecraft (news site of the Quincy Institute). Some weird cope in here about Russia and China but it is an indicator of what the ghouls are fighting about in the upper echelons of the United States.

The Biden administration is currently considering going where no other president has gone before: offering a formal security guarantee to Saudi Arabia and helping the kingdom develop a civilian nuclear program in return for Riyadh normalizing relations with Israel.

President Biden and his team argue that the United States has a national security interest in brokering such a deal, even if that means massive and unprecedented concessions to Riyadh.

Biden and his team are wrong. Entering into a mutual security agreement with Saudi Arabia would represent a catastrophic miscalculation. A security guarantee for Saudi Arabia would entrap Washington as Riyadh’s protector despite a fundamental disconnect between the interests and values of the United States and the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia seeks increased security commitments in return for formally normalizing relations with Israel, a country with which it is already strategically aligned. This is part of a deliberate strategy by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) to exploit growing fears in Washington that the United States is losing influence in the Middle East relative to other actors such as Russia or China.

As the Wall Street Journal reported, “in private, Saudi officials said, the crown prince has said he expects that by playing major powers against each other, Saudi Arabia can eventually pressure Washington to concede to its demands for better access to U.S. weapons and nuclear technology.”

And yet, though Russia and China have expanded their respective footprints in the Middle East, neither Moscow nor Beijing can fill an American void in the Middle East, nor do they desire to. States within the region are aware of the limitations facing Russia and China. Saudi Arabia and other U.S. regional partners have cultivated Washington’s anxiety about losing its position relative to Russia or China and are pressing for major policy concessions, resulting in a type of “reverse leverage.”

...

This is precisely the lens through which Riyadh views its possible entry into the Abraham Accords: as a way to pressure the United States into granting the kingdom sweeping concessions and guaranteeing Washington remains its ultimate protector over the long term. Washington’s ongoing support for actors like Saudi Arabia has resulted in a vicious cycle: by committing itself to propping up the underlying sources of regional instability, the United States repeatedly finds itself having to confront challenges that are largely the product of its own presence, policies, and partners in the Middle East. Making things even more obscene, Washington may be deepening its commitment to these illiberal states at a time when it has become clear that the region hardly matters to U.S. national security.

If Trump loses in 2024, he's going to run again in 2028 and it will be the peak of grotesque Trump comedy. He will be 82 by that years election day

aight my beautiful news mega do yall have a link to the study finding little evidence there was any russian interference in our elections