Demonstrators shout slogans and hold placards during a protest at the Amazon fulfillment center in Shakopee, Minnesota, on December 14, 2018. – A group of Amazon workers in Minnesota who are Somali refugees resettled in the Midwestern US state demanded better working conditions during a protest outside one of the retailer’s warehouses. Dozens braved frigid temperatures to demonstrate outside of the Amazon warehouse in the Minneapolis suburb of Shakopee — home to a sizable Somali immigrant population from which Amazon has heavily recruited. (Photo by Kerem Yucel / AFP) (Photo credit should read KEREM YUCEL/AFP/Getty Images)

The serfs in Minnesota who work long hours for low pay are on strike. You wouldn’t cross a picket line, would you?

Anyway, read the story, it’s an eye-opener. Workers there have grueling schedules, like having to race through the warehouse to pick an item every 8 seconds, or to pack 230 items an hour. It’s demanding and unreal, and Amazon uses the threat of firing and replacing people as a whip to keep them in line.

This isn’t the first time Amazon has faced accusations about improper working conditions. A 2015 New York Times exposé described Amazon as a “bruising workplace.” Multiple reports claimed that Amazon warehouse jobs are grueling and extremely taxing, both physically and mentally, due to ever-increasing demands. Journalist James Bloodworth wrote that there were workers who peed in bottles to avoid taking bathroom breaks. A Verge report revealed that “hundreds” of workers in a Baltimore facility were fired for not meeting productivity levels. Amazon, for its part, has denied many of these reports, insisting it is a “fair and responsible” employer.

Yet, thousands of workers in Europe have gone on strike in the past to protest increased work hours, the reduction of bonuses and an unhealthy work environment. That hasn’t really happened much in the US — Amazon workers in Europe are unionized, while US workers are not — but the workers in Shakopee could help change things.

Also interesting is that Minnesota became a hotbed of resistance to Fuhrer Bezos because they recruited workers heavily from our Somali population…and they organized to fight for the right to prayer breaks. I may not be sympathetic to the idea of prayer, but I am entirely sympathetic for workers’ right to have a little time free to do as they will during the day. Anything less is inhumane.

But it all boils down to one thing: UNIONIZE.

Truth be told, a single warehouse going on strike will likely not affect Amazon’s bottom line very much, even if it does happen on Prime Day. But it’s a sign of a much larger shift in how Amazon workers across the country are attempting to organize for a better workplace. Some workers in the Staten Island warehouse are trying to unionize, for example, as are Whole Foods employees. As Amazon introduces more automation and attempts to retrain its staff, the need to negotiate better working conditions might be more important now than ever.

Jeff Bezos would not have a hundred billion dollars if he hadn’t ripped it from the backs of labor. Imagine a country with strong unions — we wouldn’t have so many billionaires, and we’d be productive without treating human beings as automatons.

The most damning thing about antifa is that we have photographic evidence of them mixing up lots of milkshakes — it’s so pathetic that the fascists had to make up a lie about them adding quick-set cement to them, just to make it seem like maybe they were a little bit dangerous.

Contrast that with the fascists. A police raid on a fascist group in Italy found this:

The article says it’s an air-to-air missile. I don’t think the arms race has gone so far that they have an air force yet, but maybe they just want to peel the warhead out of its shell for 500 pounds of explodey evilness.

There was also this fine collection of armaments.

I guess they’ve seen too many Avengers movies, and need a fascist shield to counter Captain America. The guns are going to be an effective response to getting milkshakes thrown on them, for sure.

I approve this use of the scientific method to debunk the Portland police. They fed this stupid rumor that antifa was mixing quick-setting cement into milkshakes to do more harm to the fascists they were protesting. There was no evidence of such behavior, but it quickly became a right-wing talking point.

So Willamette Week tested the assertion. They made vegan milkshakes, then stirred in cement. It can be done! Unfortunately for the accusers and the credibility of the Portland police, it can’t be done surreptitiously.

Neither the Portland Police Bureau nor any witness has been able to produce credible evidence that a single cement milkshake was thrown June 29. But a concrete milkshake is distinctive, as we learned. It’s gritty, clumpy and a dark color. If such concoctions weren’t seen June 29, that is almost certainly because there weren’t any.

Cement milkshakes also won’t set, confirming what I heard from many people that sugar interferes with the process.

Do you have an empty prison in your neighborhood? ICE will fill it up for you, no matter how dilapidated and horrid it might be.

When members of Congress reached a bipartisan deal to end the government shutdown in February, they gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement a simple instruction: Stop detaining so many people. Instead, ICE pushed its detention population to an all-time high of 54,000 people, up from about 34,000 on an average day in 2016 and well above the 40,520 target Congress set for ICE.

Now, just after Congress rejected another request for more detention money, ICE is continuing to spend money it hasn’t been given. Mother Jones has learned that ICE has started using three new for-profit immigration detention centers in the Deep South in recent weeks. One of them has seen the death of three inmates following poor medical treatment and a violent riot in 2012 that left a guard dead.

That one is the Adams County correctional facility in Mississippi, which was so awful and poorly run that the Justice Department shut it down…but nothing can be too bad for housing immigrants and immigrant children.

Don’t overlook the key phrase there: for-profit detention centers. The Adams County facility is run by CoreCivic, the largest such organization in the country, and which was founded by — hold on to your hats — a group of Republican politicians and lobbyists. These vermin need to make money somehow, so they’re happy to get government contracts to abuse people.

CoreCivic also owns the Prairie Correctional Center, a currently empty 1600 bed facility just down the road from me, in Appleton, MN. You can bet they’re drooling at the thought of turning it into a money mill once again for ICE.

You know, for-profit prisons of any kind are an abomination. They all ought to be closed. And the laws ought to change so they stop throwing hordes of people into any prison at all — one sign that we might be a nascent fascist nation is that we’ve got the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world.

Read these old pre-WWII newspaper articles, in which a very nice American Quaker is arguing (to a conference of rabbis, no less) that if Jews throughout the world try to instill into the minds of Hitler and his supporters recognition of the ideals for which the race stands, and if Jews appeal to the German sense of justice and the German national conscience, I am sure the problem will be solved more effectively and earlier than otherwise.

It’s weird. The guy also repudiates the notion of boycotts, because that’s economic violence. Buy from fascists, because capitalism is a hell of a drug. There’s even an article from another person arguing that Hitler’s supporters aren’t racist, they’re just economically anxious.

We’ve been through all of this in the 1930s. Unthinking pacifism didn’t work then, it’s not going to work now.