Tag: history

ICE OUT: Minnesota Protests Reach Critical Mass!

They probably didn’t teach you this in school, but in 1934 Minneapolis Teamster coal drivers went on strike over falling wages and other workers and farmers joined them on the picket lines. The company owners responded with the usual collection of armed thugs known as the “Citizens Alliance” and Minneapolis Police. As the strike grew, on July 20th these thugs attacked the strikers in the warehouse district, killing two and wounding sixty seven. The good citizens of Minnesota were so upset that the funeral precession was at least ten kilometers long, simple math tells us that given the 10 meter or so width of Minneapolis streets, at least 50,000 came out to protest that cold blooded murder and demand justice.

Two months ago ICE invaded Minnesota in retaliation for our simply welcoming our immigrant neighbors. Piling on the stupidity, they responded to massive non violent protests by murdering mother of three Renee Good, then denied her medical care while helping the murderer escape. The protests grew, and ICE thugs only became more violent, wounding innocent bystanders and kidnapping 5 year old and even 2 year old children.

As the 1934 Teamsters strike grew and became a general strike the thugs and their business owner bosses became even more repressive, occupying strike headquarters and imprisoning strikers at the state fairgrounds. But the strike fed on repression, and the company owners finally surrendered and signed union contracts, making Minnesota a union stronghold. Today’s ICE OUT march and rally filled 20,000 seat Target Center with thousands more outside, even conservative media estimated the crowd at 50,000. That’s enough bodies to lay siege on ICE, chase them outa Minnesota, and keep our immigrants safe and fed in the meantime. ICE and Trump will retaliate, but just like 1934 we will win.

May they Rest In Power: Teamsters Henry Ness and John Belor, Philandro Castile, George Floyd, and Renee Good

Sassy Democrat Reporting For Duty, Ma’am!

Over the last couple decades I’ve created and mostly abandoned damn near a dozen blogs, most due to lack of interest on my part or readers. The winner has long been GearheadGrrrl.com, focusing on just about anything with wheels and an engine and occasionally horses. But lately the traffic on this political blog sassy.democrat has taken off, so I’ve upgraded it and will be cranking out the content to meet the GOP’s desire to refight the Civil War.

In August 1862 my great great grandfather volunteered for the Union Army and not quite a year later he was dead. Like most of his unit, he died not in combat but from disease, having seen but a few days of combat between long periods of encampments and marching between encampments. This incompetence of Union leadership was fortunately eclipsed by the greater incompetence of Confederate leadership, starting with the stupidity of starting the Civil War in the first place. Never mind that while the Norths competent trades people could accurately bore cylinders for guns or steam engines while even the best rifle would within hours rust to uselessness in the South’s humidity, while the slave labor the South exploited would within a few decades be obsoleted by advancing farm technology. We lost about a tenth of our adult men in that war, fortunately immigrants and freed slaves took their place and continued our nations growth.

So a century and a half later the neo fascists DBA Republican Party have publicly promised to deport a hundred million or so Americans whose skin isn’t as blanco as theirs. Even dumber than the Confederates who went to war to avoid actually having to pay workers, the Republicans are formenting another Civil War to keep immigrants out who came here to work while we have a structural shortage of workers for the next couple decades at least. Compounding that mistake they’ve overfunded ICE, a part of “Homeland Security” we wouldn’t need if the Border Patrol was effective, by billions so they can overpay the nation’s blanco clinically obese incels to play “army” with live ammo between internet porn watching and other grossities. Once past probation we’re stuck with ’em, trillions of dollars of national debt on top of the Republican’s Iraq War that will be collecting pay for no useful work and pensions for pretty much the rest of this century. And like the Confederates, they’ve lost before the first innocent citizen was shot by them- ICE is struggling to deport a thousand a day, and every day over 5000 hispanic and nonwhite babies are born in America.

So again, history teaches us strategies for the current crisis- The Republicans want a useless war and let’s not give it to them. Let their guns and stuck in the snow SUVs rust and chartered planes sit empty while we hide and supply our immigrant neighbors and bankrupt any greedy vendor making a quick billion or so bucks on ICE’s wasteful spending. More on tactics coming in future posts…