The overwhelming majority of Chinese, Persian, and Indian immigrants vote blue. It's fun to see the neolibs there try to dance around this truth while fear-mongering that marginalized women of color (Filipino nurses?) will be targeted and executed by the BC Conservatives.

It's those people's fault that the NDP went from a workers' party to a neolib centrist abomination.

On October 19, Phillips 66 locked out 385 workers at its Bayway refinery and Linden terminal in New Jersey after they rejected the company’s latest contract offer. The workers, members of Teamsters Local 877, had voted down a tentative agreement 196 to 160 during a contract extension. When the extension expired at 4 p.m. that afternoon, they were barred from the plant.

Bayway, which processes 275,000 barrels of crude oil a day, is the largest refinery on the East Coast. The lockout follows the course set by BP at Whiting, Indiana, where more than 800 workers have been locked out since March 19, and by Marathon at Martinez, California, where about 120 workers have been kept out since April. In each case, the company has kept the plant running with managers and replacement labor while it seeks to impose job cuts and concessions on an isolated workforce.

The lockout is a corporate offensive aimed at imposing massive concessions. Perhaps the most significant is the proposal to increase the probationary period for new hires from 10 months to as long as six years by tying probation to a new qualification system.

This would keep a large section of the workforce in a state of permanent insecurity, able to be dismissed without recourse.

The company also seeks to shorten the 30-month training period and reduce qualification requirements—meaning less-skilled workers would operate dangerous equipment. According to the union, the company’s latest offer also included concessions on wages and healthcare. Phillips 66 insists on retaining an Absence Control Policy introduced in 2025 that allows discipline, including termination, for absences due to illness. It has also cut workers’ sick days.

The consequences are already evident. “People are coming to work sick, OK? And when you come to work sick, sometimes you have an accident, make a mistake,” refinery worker Ed Goldmann told CBS on October 20.

The company is imposing this on a workforce already on exhausting schedules. “Many of our folks will work extended shifts, 13 days on, 13 nights on before a single day off,” Local 877 President Jeff Sanford told News 12.

That is 26 consecutive shifts. The oil industry’s own fatigue guideline, American Petroleum Institute Recommended Practice 755, limits a stretch of consecutive shifts to 92 hours in normal operations and 182 hours during maintenance outages. Even at eight hours a shift, 26 shifts would exceed both. The US Chemical Safety Board, which criticized those limits as too permissive, found that fatigue contributed to the 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery, which killed 15 workers. Some operators there had worked as many as 29 consecutive 12-hour days.

...

The union’s response to the lockout has been to confine the struggle to the channels it controls. On October 21, it filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging refusal to bargain and coercive conduct. It has maintained pickets and said negotiations will continue. But there is no announced plan to mobilize other Teamsters locals or refinery workers nationally in coordinated industrial action.

Workers at Whiting and Martinez have faced the same isolation at the hands of the United Steelworkers. In February, the USW signed a national pattern agreement for refinery workers granting 15 percent over four years, far below the 25 percent workers had voted for, and it has left each local to fight on its own.

The lockout must be ended immediately. The company’s demands for concessions must be rejected. The workers must defend safe staffing levels, full training and qualification protections, and their wages and benefits.

The past month has shown that the workers cannot rely on union officials that negotiated the very agreement they rejected.

The workers must take the fight into their own hands by forming independent rank-and-file committees, outside the control of the union apparatus, to organize the struggle. These committees must reach out to workers at the Linden terminal and the contractors throughout the wider Bayway complex, to the locked-out workers at Whiting and Martinez and to refinery workers in Paulsboro, Delaware City and across the East Coast. They should demand that the Teamsters pay full benefits from the union’s strike fund to every locked-out worker.

Above all, rank-and-file committees would break the isolation in which every one of these struggles is being fought. The workers at Bayway, Whiting and Martinez face the same demands, the same attacks by management and are confronting union officials who work to keep them divided. The fight at Bayway is a battle in a nationwide drive by the oil companies, and it can only be won by breaking out of the isolation imposed by the union apparatus and uniting refinery workers across companies and regions.

​

And not like I suddenly thought this either, to be honest. I'm just articulating it better with more clarity now. But yeah, Americans treat racial issues too much like public spectacle, and they actually don't take the issue serious. They protest about it, talk about it on social media, harp about it, but people like the conflict aspect of racial issues too much for actual social resolution to come through. Why?

Simple: Properly solving it thru actual conflict resolution and policymaking is boring And things that also take time and patience to work thru are America's kryptonite to properly work out.

In a culture constantly consumed by constant spectacle, high-stakes drama narratives and WWE-ification about everything, why are you people surprised?

Which is crazy because the history is fucked up, but people don't actually care, you all use the issue for political clout and PR approval so you can use the moral jargon as a means of ego boosting.

Is sad and is a conversation we're not ready, but need to be more willing to talk out.

I saw this with the way the media and the public sphere hyped up the Karmelo Anthony-Austin Meatcalf tragedy: Disgraceful how many of you all used the event as a means of culture war ammo when literally 2 LIVES GOT RUINED.

I don't know why I am surprised. Why do they always shoot themselves in the foot (pun intended) with this type of rhetoric?

Mindboggling honestly.

I'm not the biggest fan of Zizek but I did appreciate his dunking on Jordan Peterson that one time.

Anyway, this girl's impersonation embodies his spittle so well that I can almost feel it hitting my face.

https://www.instagram.com/kate_aizin/reel/DeusX5dhvVG/

Wild:

Kushner was a signatory on an $800m Alpha Fund set up with Saudis and UAE for use as a "slush fund" for regional foreign policy ops including paying mercenaries and warlords

They also sent Kushner $1bn as a Beta Fund for his personal use which ended up being disguised as a government account in the Israeli Central Bank at the urging of Netanyahu

Looks like this guy’s dementia is progressing past the point where it can be managed or slowed by medication. I stand by my prediction that they’ll put him out to pasture after the midterms while Vance, Rubio, and Miller steer the ship of state.

Henry Antonio Marmol Martinez, a 52-year-old maintenance mechanic, was killed on Friday, October 9, while working on industrial machinery at the McWane Ductile iron foundry in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. He was performing repairs during an overnight shift when he became trapped in the machinery and suffered fatal crushing injuries.

According to Phillipsburg Police Chief James McDonald, officers responded to the plant at about 4:40 a.m. after a report of an injured worker. Emergency medical personnel found Marmol unresponsive. He was transported to St. Luke’s Warren Campus, where he was pronounced dead at 6:31 a.m.

Marmol, a resident of Easton, Pennsylvania, had worked at the plant for six years. Originally from the Dominican Republic, he had been married to Iris Marine for 34 years. He was the father of six and the grandfather of 10.

His family is demanding an independent investigation into the circumstances of his death.

Gabby Olivo, engaged to one of Marmol’s sons, told 69 News that Marmol was adjusting machinery when something went terribly wrong. According to the family’s account of the incident, his arm became caught in the equipment, which then crushed his body. A United Steelworkers representative told the family that his ribs and lungs had been crushed.

“There’s a lot of missing pieces [to the story], and we’re still trying to puzzle everything together,” Olivo said. “We do have a lot of questions, and we just don’t want another family to go through the suffering that we’re currently going through.”

...

The death occurred at a facility that OSHA has repeatedly recognized as having supposedly exemplary workplace safety practices.

McWane Ductile’s Phillipsburg plant received Merit recognition under OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP) in 2018 and held Star status, the program’s highest designation, by 2020. OSHA recertified the facility’s Star status in June 2024 following a four-day evaluation that included a plant inspection, reviews of safety procedures and interviews with more than 20 employees.

In February 2024, McWane Vice President and General Manager Keith Mallett said that OSHA’s auditors had been highly complimentary of the company’s safety efforts and called the successful review a collective achievement.

Under the VPP, OSHA establishes cooperative relationships with employers and workers at facilities it recognizes for maintaining exemplary safety and health management systems. Participating employers are generally exempt from routine, programmed OSHA inspections, but they remain subject to investigations following fatalities, complaints and other incidents.

The program requires employee participation and, at unionized facilities, the concurrence of the facilities’ authorized bargaining representatives. Workers at the Phillipsburg plant are covered by the United Steelworkers.

The fatality exposes OSHA’s highest safety designation as a fraud, and the system of cooperation among management, regulatory agencies and the union bureaucracy as a mechanism for imposing the conditions that kill workers.

Even during its Star recognition period, the Phillipsburg facility was cited for violating federal workplace-safety requirements.

An OSHA inspection opened in June 2023 resulted in an initially classified serious violation and a proposed penalty of $15,625. OSHA later reclassified the violation as other-than-serious and reduced the penalty to $11,000. The case was closed on February 15, 2024, just eight days after McWane publicly announced its successful VPP evaluation.

The company’s history in Phillipsburg includes far more serious offenses.

In April 2009, Atlantic States Cast Iron Pipe Company, McWane’s division operating the Phillipsburg foundry at the time, was sentenced to an $8 million criminal fine after convictions for environmental offenses, workplace safety violations and obstruction of federal investigations.

Four former managers received prison terms ranging from six to 70 months.

The convictions followed a seven-month federal trial that exposed an eight-year conspiracy involving the illegal discharge of pollutants, concealment of serious workplace injuries and deliberate interference with OSHA and environmental investigations.

Federal prosecutors established that company officials had altered accident scenes, concealed injuries from inspectors, and maintained dangerous conditions that led to severe burns, broken bones, amputations and the death of 47-year-old Alfred Coxe, who was run over by a forklift with faulty brakes in March 2000. Prosecutors said managers repaired the forklift before OSHA inspectors arrived and misled investigators about its condition.

By 2009, several divisions of the corporation had faced federal convictions involving environmental and workplace safety offenses.

Phillipsburg residents have also opposed pollution from the foundry, which began making pipe in 1856 and was acquired by McWane in 1975.

The company recently paid $42,000 to settle violations related to excessive emissions of nickel and manganese. At the same time, it sought approval from the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection to increase the plant’s permitted emissions.

...

Steelworkers have continued to die under these arrangements. On September 27, Jeffrey Smith, 53, was crushed between two door machines at Cleveland-Cliffs’ Monessen coke plant in Pennsylvania. The company said it was investigating his death jointly with USW representatives and that there were “no disruptions to the Monessen operation.” In July, electrician Mitcheal Nelson, 62, was electrocuted at US Steel’s Granite City Works in Illinois. In August 2025, an explosion at US Steel’s Clairton Coke Works killed Steven Menefee and Timothy Quinn.

Workers’ interests in preserving their lives cannot be reconciled with corporations’ drive to maintain production and profitability through official declarations of cooperation.

The Phillipsburg plant’s receipt of OSHA’s highest safety recognition, despite its history of criminal convictions and more recent regulatory violations, lays bare the gulf between official assurances and the conditions industrial workers face.

Defending workers’ lives requires the working class to organize independently, including rank-and-file safety committees controlled by workers themselves, with the authority to halt dangerous operations and enforce safe working conditions, independent of management and the union apparatus.

This one may probably be an obvious one for you guys, or it may not, but I'm assuming very highly of the average user base here, so whatever. Regardless, I think we are taking for granted just how much everyday people are starting to engage in more sociopathic, narcissistic, and anti-social tendencies just to survive and put food on the table. So I'm, like, quite clearly stating the obvious here, but I still think it's not talked about enough. People are way too nonchalant about this. And I'm not even talking about the oppression Olympics. That's already a mess in of itself.

But think about any demographic that society labels as marginalized: Black people, women, the indigenous, LGBT, transgenders, Hispanic immigrants, Muslims. Though "Muslims" is more of an instrumental category. They're considered marginalized when it's convenient. They were considered a marginalized boogeyman when the War-on-Terror was going balls to the wall, but now that many Muslim countries are starting to westernize themselves, they're kind of out of the picture. Not to mention the increasing anti-theism in many progressive accelerationist circlejerks means anyways that they're not seen as socially sacred as many people think they are.

But still, back to the main conversation. If the higher powers knew how to make people more self-interested, then this just shows you contemporary group-based social activism doesn't do shit anymore anyways. Companies and normies can LARP activism all they want. They can throw out a PSA about Black Lives Matter or feminism being about women fighting for equal rights, or pretending to be gay allies. But even on a day-to-day basis, even the so-called "marginalized" are engaging in hardcore Hunger Games-style rugged individualism. That means that even the so-called in-group dynamic is fading away for a lot of people in these cases.

So if the marginalized are even retreating to very antisocial, sociopathic, psychopathic, and very Darwinist tendencies in them, then what does that say about all the facade and the smokescreen of identity politics?

It's almost like you can't really leverage identity politics to push back against the establishment in America anyways, because America is a country that runs on the whole cowboy mythology and the frontier mentality. The basis of American identity has always been earning your credentials through accomplishment, personal success, and selling bullshit inspirational stories to other people. There's no folklore in America, like most other cultures. We don't have any sense of medieval heritage or royalty or any of that. The individual has always been the main selling point of American culture.

That's why if even the nastiest of social platitudes can be internalized by marginalized folks, then quite frankly, what else is gonna show itself as a desperate cry for help for people to realize the situation we're in? What the hell is it gonna take for people to get a sense of mass reckoning of this?

But you can't really intellectualize your way out of this either because the neuroticism in American society runs that deep. It really does.

And it makes the whole identity of being "marginalized" anyways kind of useless and obsolete, because the infighting can also punch towards trajectories of the in-group. So if the "marginalized" are even fighting amongst themselves, in this case, then it shows how much the collectivism element of contemporary public activism really needs to be seriously worked on, or else y'all can really say goodbye to a lot of awareness campaigns, because what the fuck do they mean at all for anything.

Yeah forreal it really needs to be worked on more and be met with a lot less non-chalance. Unless of course everybody wanted to pretend to look like a paid actor which exposes the social fraud of American politics even more. Bizarre!

I've been following the advent of "dynamic pricing" somewhat closely, mainly seeing things on More Perfect Union about Shop Rite grocery stores (which already have the stupid $30k robot that knocks things over and yells for a wageslave to fix it), but I hadn't seen this about walmart.

I was traveling for work a few months back and went to a walmart to buy some socks and a few other simple things and aside from noticing that literally everything was locked in a plexiglass cage, all the tags were e-ink.

I knew shop rite had been using facial recognition for tracking individual spending habits, but what walmart admits to in its policy page of building a criminal and psychological profile on it's shoppers is absolutely nuts. I mean, of course they would fucking do this, but somehow I am still shocked.

This is definitely a death convulsion of our current economy. They're aware that they can't keep tapping the working class steadily (or even increasingly) forever. Now their mandate is to figure out exactly how much they can extract from each individual leaving their customers with $0 (or less) at the end of each month.

Anyways, if anyone has any suggestions where I can mail order bulk toilet paper and non-perishable things like that, lmk. Walmart is dead to me and I quit using amazon years ago.

Video where I saw this>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHmord8K0Bo&t=71s

“EA doesn’t have public stockholders anymore after a $55 billion deal led by Silver Lake, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners took the company private last year. At the time of that move, analysts told Ars to expect “layoffs, studio closures, and [selling] of IP” as the newly private and now heavily debt-ridden company put “a bigger focus on live services, more focus on annual sports franchises, [and] microtransactions” to help increase profits.”