At some point in your life in South Minneapolis you may finding yourself in one of our many cafes and diners run by and catering to upper middle class progressive white people. You may be tempted, there, to order something Mexican off of the menu, such as the tacos or burrito or huevos rancheros.

Don’t.

Whatever spice-deprived abomination on an uncooked flour tortilla you’re about to receive is not worth the 150% markup over getting the actual dish from a Latino restaurant.

Go to Lake Street instead.

New libretto

Tax Cut Spend

This unelected trillionaire
And all his boys claim laissez faire
While whipping out the chainsaw of the state
Like Mario they smash and grab
I Prefer Luigi, but these scabs
Need money to deport the ones they hate
First they dig their razors in
Let you bleed, then circle in
They’ll eat you once they slash you to the bone
These corporate goons ain’t anarchists
And us who are fucking pissed
They’re buying up this last frontier that they don’t own

Chorus:
You tax the food, tax the clothes
Tax what comes and tax what goes
Every buck I work to make, you take your share
You cut the parks, you cut the schools
Cut on the poor, just to be cruel
But for borders, cops, and wars there’s cash to spare

They want to privatize the mail, just gut it ‘til it fails,
Then sell it to their friends at Amazon,
They wanna privatize the schools to raise soldiers, drones, and fools
And starve SNAB/EBT until it’s gone
Already planned a spending spree, killing social security
Turned the park service into their whipping boy
Now I’ve heard the nurses say they’ll privatize the old VA
So guardsman, think on that if you’re deployed.

Chorus

What they’re cutting with their knives, we paid for with our lives
A concession to our class from the elites
They were not given, they were won, on the picket ‘gainst the gun
When our great grandfathers fought them in the streets
In the mills and in the mines, bought in blood and held the line
When you pick a fight with power, better win it
Now they want to claw them back, another corporate attack
Bet get used to class war, son, you’re living in it.

Chorus

I thought it was frustrating, but rewarding, struggling alongside the newly radicalized folks of 2020, who often had ambitions in excess of their means, a great sense of self-confidence born from the successes of the first week of that uprising, a sort of hodgepodge radicalism, and a sense of security culture that often put the emphasis on completely the wrong thing.

It is so much more frustrating to work with people who are involved in the 50501 movement. Not only are many of these folks completely inexperienced at any sort of protest, but many of them come to the struggle with the attitude that finally, the reasonable liberal centrists are coming out and will show the radicals how to "properly" protest. As if being completely respectable, nondisruptive, and ignorable is a genius strategy that the radicals just never considered.

The essence of Irish revolutionary music is an international group of immigrants in a textile factory unfolding a earthquake of a strike with the IWW in which Andy Irvine specifically dedicates bars to praising organizers and condemning the Irish-American bishop who sided with the bosses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rYPCLfIetM

From a ruling class perspective, one of the most valuable things you can have is an active civil society, competitive "market of ideas", and active but nonviolent fairly nondisruptive protest movements.

That's the ideal governing position for a competent group of rulers exercising power. It allows them to identify points of social tension and resolve them-- through repression or concession.

This was the strategy of the American state from the 1950s through the 1980s or so. Protests were no longer machine gunned like strikes were back in the day, but they were brutalized with tear gas and dogs and fire hoses, until public pressure built so much that people had to cave. Violence was still there, but was more underground- the assassination of Black Panthers dressed up as a shootout, the shooting of Kent State protestors shrouded in the chaos of combat (rifles against chants). Concessions were made, at the same time, through struggle. The ruling class had a strategy of both repression and concession.

There is a whole layer of soft power being stripped away now, making social conflict bare.

Hey check this oud player out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGUQyh-JdOI