Luke Shaffer

[Roy Drones Jr @chiweethedog]

no healthcare. no vibrant middle class. crumbling infrastructure. grifters in every office. so all we have are tools and symbols of violence to flaunt that are antiquated useless to win wars but only useful to bomb poor third world countries. happy 250th

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

Lebanon. There is absolutely no justification for this whatsoever.

[Ramy Abdu| رامي عبده @RamAbdu]

“They killed my mother — and before that, my brother. I urge everyone: do not go to the American aid distribution points soaked in blood. This bag only contains 2 empty flour sacks — nothing else — & yet they shot & killed my mother as she tried to get us something to eat today.”

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

Absolutely hilarious for the FT to argue the West is losing to China because "liberal market democracies operate with greater accountability to voters."

Hilarious and, of course, absurdly wrong. China is winning precisely because it's obsessively focused on delivering for its people: infrastructure, improving living standards, reducing poverty, etc.

"Liberal market democracies" are losing precisely because they forgot who democracies are supposed to be accountable to.

Src: https://t.co/tQjkt6OSg4

[COMBATE |🇵🇷 @upholdreality]

A transnational Jewish-Italian mob network centered on Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante ran Cuba as a privatized extraction arm of US empire: gambling, laundering, narcotics, prostitution, political bribery.

What the US could not openly run on its own border, the syndicate ran for it in Havana.

Batista was on a $ 1.28-million-a-month retainer, delivered every Monday at noon. His development bank bankrolled half of every new mob casino.

And this was not just gambling. Havana was a key node in the postwar heroin pipeline: Turkish opium, Marseille labs, Havana transshipment, New York distribution.

By the late 1960s, that French Connection network supplied most of America’s heroin.

Then Castro won.

In January 1959 the casinos were smashed, the bosses fled or were detained, and Batista escaped with a fortune estimated around $300 million.

The national lottery, once a graft channel, was converted into a housing fund.

But the mob did not disappear. It was redeployed.

Lansky’s lieutenant Doc Stacher later said Lansky offered to finance Castro’s assassination as early as 1959. By September 1960, the CIA was running the operation directly.

The Agency hired Johnny Rosselli, Sam Giancana, and Santo Trafficante. The opening offer was $150,000. The weapon: poison pills from the CIA’s Technical Services Division.

The 1975 Church Committee found concrete evidence of at least eight CIA plots against Castro between 1960 and 1965.

The same Havana-Miami underworld that lost Cuba in 1959 became useful again as the deniable violence arm of US policy.

Of the three mob figures the CIA hired, Giancana was murdered before he could testify to Congress. Rosselli was murdered after he did. Trafficante survived.

The continuity is structural, not anecdotal: Tampa, Havana, Miami. Casinos became exile paramilitaries. Exile paramilitaries became lobby infrastructure.

Jorge Mas Canosa, a Bay of Pigs veteran and CIA-radio figure, founded the Cuban American National Foundation in 1981 at the suggestion of Reagan's advisors. It was modeled on AIPAC and built to harden Cuba policy permanently.

The lobby's most famous operative was Luis Posada Carriles: CIA-trained, Bay of Pigs veteran, Iran-Contra contractor under Oliver North, perpetrator of the 1976 mid-air bombing of Cubana Flight 455 (73 dead) and the 1997 Havana hotel bombings. By 1998, he had publicly named Mas Canosa as his financier. He died free in Miami in 2018.

They did not just lobby. They wrote the laws.

1992: Cuban Democracy Act.
1996: Helms-Burton.
2019: Trump activates Title III, letting US claimants sue foreign firms using confiscated Cuban property.

Today the legal afterlife of Batista’s Cuba runs through federal court: hotel chains, expropriation claims, embargo law, and Miami political power.

Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State, is a product of that machine.

When he says “freedom in Cuba,” hear the history underneath it:

the old casino mobster class wants its island back

[Ryan Grim @ryangrim]

So the feds are dropping charges against the Israeli citizen caught in Las Vegas with an illegal biolab, after he was caught in LA with an illegal biolab https://t.co/4KAU8mbNNB

[Daniel Mayakovski @DaniMayakovski]

"Invadimos pueblos árabes desarmados, casi ninguno luchó porque no tenían armas, los expulsamos, los disparamos y las mujeres y niños huyeron a Gaza. Les disparamos y les matamos, hicimos cosas terribles por el sionismo"

Amnon Neumann, sionista que participó en la Nakba de 1948, relata cómo entraban a los pueblos palestinos desarmados, los mataban a todos y los que sobrevivían huían a Gaza.

Sus medios nunca te contarán el origen de Gaza, literalmente es un campo de concentración lleno de palestinos sobrevivientes del genocidio sionista de 1948, palestinos a los que le mataron a toda su familia, les destruyeron sus casas y fueron expulsados de su tierra sin nada... pero ellos son los malos según la prensa mamadora del sionismo.

[Luke Shaffer @_lukeshaffer]

@Vinncent Thanks for the reminder, just picked up a paperback on bookshop

[Luke Shaffer @_lukeshaffer]

@DiscussingFilm Better use that @scharpling @bestshow4life script, or I’m not seeing it!

[Alan MacLeod @AlanRMacLeod]

What stage of capitalism is this?

[Sana Saeed @SanaSaeed]

I love that he didn’t let it go, that he kept going deep into the (violent) contradiction

[Will 🦥 Menaker @willmenaker]

If you think this is "funny" or "cool" you are an antisocial nihilist. You are the problem. Did the elephants not consider using the legal system to hold bad actors to account instead of just murdering this guy?

[Paweł Wargan @pawelwargan]

Shrouded in a serpentine-green light and dressed as a dollar-store Nazi, Javier Milei addresses a Zionist university about ‘Satanic Marxism’. You could not make it up. The Fascist International is real and its every member is a sickly spawn of US imperialism.

[THE KID MERO 🇩🇴 @THEKIDMERO]

LET ME BE ABUNDANTLY CLEAR. FUCK ZIONISM ENTIRELY, FUCK NETANYAHU, FUCK THAT WHOLE SHIT. FAV THIS PIN THIS SHIT, TAPE IT UNDER YA FUCKIN EYELIDS NIGGA. IM A BORN N RAISED NEWYORKER I COULDA ENDED UP WITH A BUDDHIST BITCH FAM IDGAF ABOUT YA RELIGION ESPECIALLY IF YOU DONT EVEN PRACTICE THE SHIT. ISRAEL AINT SHIT. PUT THIS TWEET IN THE FUCKIN SAFE POCKET OF YA BRAIN CHAMP SO U DONT QUESTION WHERE I STAND.

[Paweł Wargan @pawelwargan]

Hitler aimed to do to the east what the US had done to the ‘wild west’: Exterminate its people and seize their land for settlement. 27 million Soviet citizens were killed in this crusade — some in the very same camps in which the Germans massacred Jews. The war of extermination against ‘Bolshevism’ was repeatedly and explicitly named as the principal driver of German imperial foreign policy under Hitler. The denial of this genocide and the Red Army’s singular role in defeating Nazism has been a central instrument of historical revisionism in the hands of the West for over half a century. It has allowed imperialism to wash its hands of its colonial crimes, while preserving its core white supremacist foundation.

[Rap Game Edward Bernays @edward_bernayz]

People are criticizing this without understanding that the backbone of our global economy is billionaire oligarchs & oil sheiks trafficking influencers to Dubai to perform the most depraved sex acts in exchange for some IGs on a yacht & at Saltbae’s restaurant

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Amazon just got caught running a secret price manipulation operation with Levi's, Home Depot, Walmart, and many more.

Every time you "comparison shopped" online, you were looking at prices that were already rigged.

Here's what happened:

Amazon would monitor prices on Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot, and Chewy in real time. The second a competitor listed a product cheaper than Amazon, they'd contact the brand directly and tell them to "fix it."

And the exact emails are now PUBLIC.

Amazon sent Levi's links to two Walmart listings with the subject line "styles of concern." They basically said the prices on Walmart are too low and we have a problem.

The next day, Levi's responded: "I talked to Walmart and they have partnered with us to take Easy Khaki Classic fit back up to ladder SPP price, $29.99 immediately."

Levi's literally called Walmart and told them to raise the price. Because Amazon told Levi's to make the call.

Walmart complied. Then Amazon matched the HIGHER price.

Both retailers ended up charging more. The customer paid extra. Nobody competed.

Same playbook with Hanes:

Amazon sent them links showing Target and Walmart prices were lower. Hanes confirmed they "reached out to Target and Walmart to have the prices increased."

Target increased the prices. Walmart increased the prices. Amazon kept their margins.

But it gets even worse...

Amazon told Allergan (the company that makes eye drops) that their product was "suppressed" on Amazon because it was cheaper on another site.

Allergan responded: "Walmart got their price back up to $16.99." Amazon then unsuppressed the listing.

They did this with pet treats on Chewy. Furniture on Home Depot. Products across dozens of categories spanning YEARS.

The mechanism is simple but terrifying:

If you're a brand and you sell cheaper on Walmart than on Amazon, Amazon suppresses your product, removes you from the Buy Box, buries you in search results, and effectively makes you invisible to 300 million customers.

Brands can't afford that. So they call Walmart and Target and say "raise your prices or we'll lose our Amazon listings."

Walmart and Target comply because they need the brand's products.

Amazon captures 40 cents of every dollar spent online in America. That gives them the leverage to set prices across THE ENTIRE internet. Not just their own platform.

So turns out, you were never comparison shopping.

You were looking at a coordinated price floor set by Amazon through backroom phone calls between brands and their competitors.

"Amazon is working to make your life more unaffordable."

3 separate antitrust trials are now scheduled for 2027. The FTC has its own case. 18 states plus the DOJ are piling on.

This is literally happening during the WORST affordability crisis in a generation. Groceries up 25% since 2020. Housing unaffordable. Wages flat.

And the largest ecommerce company on Earth has been secretly coordinating with brands to make sure you can't find a cheaper price ANYWHERE.

"Competition" in retail is just a fantasy.

[Sean Padraig McCarthy @SeanMcCarthyCom]

Talk to anybody who has ever been in politics. Voting against your party on anything no matter how irrelevant is a death sentence for your career. Leadership will make your life hell. That is unless you get permission from leadership first. Democrats think you’re stupid

[Don’t Boo…Revolt! @BreeNewsome]

We normalize mass shootings at people’s places of employment but a warehouse of toilet paper being burned sends shockwaves. Very unwell society.

[aída chávez @aidachavez]

Brief recap: Dem leadership delayed a war powers vote until after the war started, then pushed the next potential vote to mid-April.

Schumer literally led a pressure campaign pushing Trump to bomb Iran last summer