keith bb

building trades & climate troublemaking @labornotes :
keith at labornotes dot org :
first book out summer 2027 @versobooks

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

proud as hell to share: i'm joining @labornotes as first ever Labor-Climate Organizer🌞

troublemakers in construction, manufacturing, energy, transit – hit me up with your stories of fighting the boss, esp. to lead a green transition your way. we'll help you fight ✊

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

i spent the summer of 2007 washing pans in a pizza joint and thinking thru the prison notebook pages i’d read the night before, so nothing seems as lazy as paid shills who can’t bother to read or accept gramsci’s strategy starts from class war

[Bhaskar Sunkara @sunraysunray]

"Politics is downstream from culture" has nothing to do with Gramsci and everything to do a right-winger who read the Wikipedia entry for "hegemony" in 2007.

[Lisa Xu 🌹 @l_l_xu]

THIS is now the craziest story I've ever written for Labor Notes. UFCW Local 8 staff reps are stalking a dissident candidate for office, chasing him across California, in the union's first ever competitive local elections. I wonder what they have to lose? https://t.co/XNQ6pXUuoc

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

randy villegas + unions won a working class landslide, in california's heart of oil + big ag power.

key: a surge of construction unions on solar & rail. some took a rare left turn. stay tuned for my @VersoBooks dive on this upheaval, a map for union + climate hope far and wide

[Zachary Donnini @ZacharyDonnini]

One notable result from last night: CA-22 actually shifted *more blue* as votes came in. Incumbent David Valadao appears on track to lose this Trump+2, heavily Hispanic and agriculture-based Central Valley district by 36 points to Randy Villegas. Just an unreal shift.

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

on my way to Cleveland for first convention of Carpenters Rank and File Together: the new national caucus to transform one of the least democratic building trades to a 400k+ member-led union & fight bosses for worker solidarity. to me, one of the most hopeful developments in yrs

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

plenty of work remains to build bottom up transformation across my old union – follow + help @UAWMemberAction for that – but four years after being a dept steward and west coast soldier for Shawn I think our vision for a union that fights corporate bosses has come amazingly far

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

if you needed good election results this week: Shawn Fain is on track to win UAW president reelection by a landslide (w/ ~40% counted from diverse regions)

here's to more daring strikes, record contracts, new union drives, anti-corporate & anti-genocide political courage

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

track the vote count here https://t.co/b07BZqRtb3

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

been asking neighbors to put up Yes on 3 + 40 signs from DSA. enjoying the enthusiasm from no kings unitarians, hospital workers, gardener retirees on my block for taxing these tech villains. winning the first US wealth tax would be a massive working class breakthrough

[Gabriel Zucman @gabriel_zucman]

California’s 250 billionaires know they have little chance of winning a referendum in which 20 million voters are asked to approve a tax of 5% on billionaires’ wealth to fund health care and education.

So, what do they do? Sergey Brin (Google co-founder), @patrickc (Stripe co-founder), @peterthiel , @ericschmidt and others have devised an extraordinary array of schemes to manipulate the vote.

[Daniel Aldana Cohen @aldatweets]

Lula probably should have tried a constitutional convention in the late 2000s at the peak of his popularity. The political system is ungovernable and that mainly benefits the fascists. One more haunting parallel between Brazil and the US.

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

have to add that if I have hope in any working class to turn a corner it's still Brazil, a wild depth of socialists and land occupations, their vast creative courage. as chico buarque sang in the military censors' faces, a roda viva, we will turn the wheel of history again

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

in six months in brazil to learn from its movements, b/t 2010-22, at corner sambas and debates I heard the same story. constraints from US-led capital have been awful. but the atrophy of the PT, one of the most vibrant mass parties in world history, was also a brutal own goal

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

no left govt, especially in the global south, will not face capital's wrath. the lesson of Brazil, an echo of Ralph Miliband on postwar Europe, is that a left govt can only survive and advance if it keeps growing fighting working class orgs, to force a new balance of power

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

exemplary reporting by my coworker on the biggest factory union win in years -- at an anti-union company at the heart of the solar and data center booms

[Labor Notes @labornotes]

1,400 solar manufacturing workers at a Corning plant in Michigan have joined the Steelworkers after an intense anti-union campaign by the company https://t.co/CzSRvbYZn0

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

@CihanTugal @VersoBooks have a feeling that dialogue w your new book will help re: how strategies in mine scale up globally... stoked to read it

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

my book and cover were just announced with @VersoBooks ! out july 2027, a story on how we reverse the long tailspin of unions and climate politics at once

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

@prouns_ @VersoBooks gonna need your help to plan a bonkers launch party, skate ramps, hands on power tools etc

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

@aldatweets @VersoBooks relying on a few load-bearing quotes from DAC & co in intro

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

@land_planarian @VersoBooks hope to be as proud of it as you and your woodwork

[keith bb @TRAILSANDWAYS]

@TherynDArnold look fwd to your take on it! yr work on battery plants & state theory looks much needed