Democracy Working Someday 🌻🌹

Quaker, Green, lapsed Wobbly & DSA member, retired immigrant rights organizer. ~ A grounded hope that is practiced every day ~ Mariame Kaba

[Democracy Working Someday 🌻🌹 @knowwhereIstand]

Accelerationism is my emotional support ideology.

[Kate Aronoff @KateAronoff]

This shit must hit so hard if you’re an accelerationist

[Democracy Working Someday 🌻🌹 @knowwhereIstand]

Excellent summary of a pointed and perhaps useful article! (Useful in educating liberals ... I never lose faith that this is possible)

[Aaron Regunberg @AaronRegunberg]

To understand the stakes of the progressive vs. centrist fight to control the Democratic Party, just compare Zohran's term so far with Spanberger's.

Zohran:
- Free childcare for 2-year-olds
- Banned junk fees
- Filled 100,000 potholes
- New bike and bus lanes across the city
- Wealth tax on luxury second homes
- Millions of dollars won for tenants and thousands of apartments repaired

Spanberger:
- Vetoed bill to let public workers unionize
- Vetoed bill allowing class-action lawsuits
- Vetoed bill to stop warrantless arrests by ICE
- Vetoed bill legalizing cannabis sales
- Vetoed bill to lower prescription drug prices

Trump was defeated in 2020, only to return in an even more dangerous form four years later. So we already know that it is not enough to beat MAGA once at the ballot box.

If Dems don't pair their next electoral victory with Mamdani's commitment to positively improving people’s lives, rather than Spanberger's model of selling out to corporations, we are going to be right back in the maws of fascism one election later. And this time, we might not be facing an authoritarian as incompetent and self-defeating as Trump has been.
https://t.co/TugdQiSj73

[Democracy Working Someday 🌻🌹 @knowwhereIstand]

Went to see #ILoveBoosters at the 90% dead Marley Station Mall in Glen Burnie MD, perfect metaphor for the dead husk of capitalism in which a better world is growing. Great flick as expected, kudos to @BootsRiley for the tireless promotion -- he organized me right out the house

[Democracy Working Someday 🌻🌹 @knowwhereIstand]

Skipping my usually ironclad commitment to yoga & going to see I Love Boosters tonight *even though I have to leave for the airport at 5 am tomorrow* because I'm so grateful that my timeline is half-filled with exultant celebration of this movie instead of the usual dire content

[Democracy Working Someday 🌻🌹 @knowwhereIstand]

Oh hey SO EXCITED to learn that Chris Rabb won in PA-03! Back in 2018 he came all the way out to Chambersburg to give a barnburner of an address to MILPA & the PA Forward coalition that (then as now) was championing #DriversLicenses4All -- here he is with me & my IRAGdA comrades

[Aníbal Garzón 🌎 @AnibalGarzon]

Obligaron a Correa a exiliarse, secuestraron a Maduro, encarcelaron a Lula, juzgaron a Férnandez, y ahora intentan detener a Morales. Es evidente que jugar bajo modelos políticos que dan libertad de movimiento al imperialismo y las oligarquías no hacen sostenible una Revolución

[Democracy Working Someday 🌻🌹 @knowwhereIstand]

Lol the "ban" on surveillance pricing that @iamwesmoore and that rude state Senator who dissed @ZephyrTeachout were bragging about is a TERRIBLE law as detailed here

[Zephyr Teachout @ZephyrTeachout]

See https://t.co/WodaEvJIkS

[Zephyr Teachout @ZephyrTeachout]

To be precise:

It is not a surveillance pricing ban because it allows surveillance pricing for “promotional offers” “temporary discounts,” and “lower prices" (but w/surveillance there's no reference price), automatic enrollment schemes, unsolicited marketing emails, subscriptions, and anything where a shopper "consented" (you know what consent means with terms of service!).

It is worse than nothing because prevents consumers from bringing lawsuits under ANY law, creating NEW immunity from MD's consumer protection law and therefore a total shield for businesses that use surveillance pricing for “promotional offers” “temporary discounts,” and “lower prices" (but w/surveillance there's no reference price), automatic enrollment schemes, unsolicited marketing emails, subscriptions, and anything where a shopper "consented" (you know what consent means with terms of service!).

WIth all those exemptions, the seller can just say they were giving you, who did not have a sick child at home, a "lower" price from the baseline price of the person who then pays their definition of baseline, the parent who does have a sick child at home-- or they could call the sales promotional, or temporary, etc etc.

Now you see it!?

[Zephyr Teachout @ZephyrTeachout]

Maryland did not ban surveillance pricing. it passed a bill it calls a “surveillance pricing bill” but it doesn’t stop companies from using personal data to give different people different prices. So it just doesn’t do what it says and actually will make it harder to use existing laws to stop the practice.

[Democracy Working Someday 🌻🌹 @knowwhereIstand]

@jwaldstreicher @ZephyrTeachout Mocking someone's name is a tiresomely childish way to engage with criticism. I look forward to reading @ZephyrTeachout's fuller response, but I think you & @iamwesmoore should both stop claiming that you've "banned" something if there are carveouts. That's not a ban!

[Democracy Working Someday 🌻🌹 @knowwhereIstand]

@FLPress I have a gentle suggestion, which is to put a large banner on the shop explaining that it isn't working and giving instructions to would-be customers on how to order by email.

[Democracy Working Someday 🌻🌹 @knowwhereIstand]

This is one of the sexiest videos I have ever seen. #TaxTheRich

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

Happy Tax Day, New York. We’re taxing the rich.

[Democracy Working Someday 🌻🌹 @knowwhereIstand]

Notably this exact clock radio in my personal experience worked flawlessly for a full quarter of a century.

[Michael Shindler @MichaelShindler]

There is no moral justification for creating anything more technologically advanced than this. This was the absolute peak, the limit. Everything beyond it is an abomination.

[Democracy Working Someday 🌻🌹 @knowwhereIstand]

I wrote in my reading log last year that it was "authoritative, revelatory, and remarkably lucid & flowing" and have been recommending it highly. Congrats @GregGrandin

[Democracy Working Someday 🌻🌹 @knowwhereIstand]

Incredibly good book. Offers a muscular & original examination of how South America's colonization and post-colonial arc shaped the U.S. while also directly influencing many of the precepts we think of as core to Western political philosophy and international law.

[penguinpress @penguinpress]

Congratulations to @GregGrandin for winning the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for his book, America, América! @PhiBetaKappa https://t.co/NqCCEvuNEz

[Politics Theory Other @poltheoryother]

"Great Satan" sounding like a fairly reasonable, merely descriptive formulation this afternoon.

[Democracy Working Someday 🌻🌹 @knowwhereIstand]

For some reason even though this exact thing happened to the crew of the container ship Dali after it broke Baltimore's Key Bridge, it did not occur to me to wonder about seafarers trapped on stranded ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Painful to read.

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

JUST IN: Three thousand ships are anchored in and around the Strait of Hormuz. Twenty thousand seafarers are aboard them. Fresh food ran out two weeks ago. Perishables are rotting in refrigerated holds whose generators are burning through the last reserves of diesel. Water is rationed. Mental health is deteriorating. No mass evacuation plan exists. No humanitarian corridor has been negotiated. No international body has the authority or the means to move twenty thousand people off three thousand ships through a five-nautical-mile channel controlled by the IRGC.

These are the people who move the global economy. Every barrel of oil that reaches a refinery was carried by a seafarer. Every container of goods that stocks a shelf was loaded by one. Every tonne of fertiliser that feeds a field was shipped by one. The war has trapped the invisible workforce that makes globalisation function, and the world has not noticed because the world never notices seafarers until the shelves are empty.

The ships themselves are worth tens of billions. The cargo aboard them is worth more. Crude oil, liquefied natural gas, urea, ammonia, consumer electronics, automotive parts, and 200 cryogenic containers of helium that are boiling off at a rate that no engineer can reverse. The stranded fleet is a floating warehouse of every molecule the global economy needs, and the molecules are degrading while the crews ration drinking water. The cargo is valued higher than the people guarding it, and neither can move.

The IRGC’s Larak corridor clearance system does not only control entry. It controls exit. A vessel that wants to leave the anchorage zone must obtain the same clearance code, submit the same documentation, and receive the same pilot escort as a vessel seeking to transit. The customs border works in both directions. These crews are not stranded by geography alone. They are stranded by bureaucracy, the same bureaucracy Iran wrapped in the language of sovereign maritime governance when the parliamentary committee approved the Hormuz Management Plan. The toll booth charges for passage through. It also charges for passage out.

No centralised evacuation exists because evacuation at this scale would require IRGC approval, and requesting approval would legitimise the system the United States refuses to recognise. So the crews wait. The International Transport Workers Federation issues statements. P&I clubs cover individual medical evacuations by helicopter. Flag states, predominantly Panama, Liberia, and the Marshall Islands, register ships but do not operate navies. The system that made global shipping cheap by divorcing flag from nationality has left twenty thousand people without a government willing to retrieve them.

The seafarers are from the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Indonesia. Countries whose workers crew the world’s merchant fleet because the monthly pay of $1,500 to $3,000 exceeds anything available at home. They signed contracts to deliver cargo across oceans. They did not sign contracts to become indefinite residents of a war zone, rationing water on a ship whose cargo of ammonia could feed a million people if it could reach a port that is 40 nautical miles and one IRGC clearance code away.

The helium boils off. The fertiliser waits. The crude oil sits. And the people who carry it all drink less water today than yesterday.

The supply chain has a human body at the very bottom of it. The body is thirsty.

https://t.co/dAOBBMsgDS

[Academic Freedom/FreeSpeech/FuckGenocide/War/ICE @SChenHayes]

@FLPress My dear friend Jenny Isaacs has just published a book!

[Democracy Working Someday 🌻🌹 @knowwhereIstand]

Galanthus nivalis (Common Snowdrop)

This was the 3rd poem I had published in 2025. Unlike the first two (ancient & middle-aged respectively), it was an almost-new poem, written in June 2024 after the January death of my aunt Debby.

https://t.co/XDINVBNz2L

[Finishing Line Press @FLPress]

FLP CHAPBOOK OF THE DAY: The Argument of Time by Jenny Isaacs
On SALE:    https://t.co/kehjI3JqAY

In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale Time is boldly and experimentally personified as the play’s chorus/narrator, subverting the Aristotelian “classic unities” of time, place, and action.  These poems, written over the course of twenty years, take up and investigate “the argument of Time,” examining experience in the probing light of memory and drawing on physics, linguistics, and biology to illuminate the mysteries of consciousness, desire and loss. #poetry #time #memory #consciousness #phenomenology

Jenny Isaacs graduated at a precociously young age from Johns Hopkins University with a degree in writing poetry, then wrote “around the edges” of her life for 40 years while raising three daughters to adulthood.  Now retired, she lives with her husband four doors down from her own parents, on the shores of a creek near the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.  The Argument of Time, her first collection, was awarded publication as a semi-finalist in Finishing Line Press’ Open Chapbook competition.

PRAISE FOR The Argument of Time by Jenny Isaacs

In The Argument of Time, Jenny Isaacs peels back the cultural veneer of love and loss, of presence and absence to reveal the mutability of longing: the yearning to be subsumed, the yearning to be separate from.  Infused with the fresh vision and invention of quick-silver shifts of perspective and time, the language of the poems draws on concepts of physics to create “a new and common tongue” through which desire is made palpable as density, mass, atmosphere, friction, weight.  A memorable debut!
–J. C. Todd, author of Beyond Repair
*
There are two kinds of poetry: the one is filled with images like air and water, the other with the properties of air and water. The poetry of Jenny Isaacs is illustrative of the latter. The poems in The Argument of Time demand deep probing, not just deep thought, but felt thought. “Movement is always difficult,” she warns, and movement is precisely what she offers in these poems: “Here is the evolution of fish:/ they teach themselves to speak by listening.” So, dear reader, move into these poems and be moved. Listen to their speech. Feel their thought, and you will end by “finding the way/ we were meant to come.”
–George Drew, author of More Distant than Olympus
*
Jenny Isaacs‘ The Argument of Time traverses space and time, offering us the perspective and breathing room we so desperately need. From the Arctic Circle to Malaysia, from Paris to the moon, Isaacs’ poems capture our longing and loss: “this human physics, / these wakings and stretchings / our mornings.”  And they deliver to us such subtle wisdom, as in these final couplets, also from “The Bending Moment”:  “Every beginning’s a bridge: not on the way there / but there, built to stay / against the bending moment.”  You’ll want to keep this gem of a book by your side.
–Ethel Rackin, author of In Time

Please share/please repost  #flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt  #poetry #chapbook #read #poems

[Democracy Working Someday 🌻🌹 @knowwhereIstand]

This poem was my second published in 2025! Not as ancient as "Subjacency" (more middle-aged) but during its lengthy incubation it had similarly received a new title & epigraph AND been rewritten backwards:

https://t.co/oJ8d2poeZ1

I love the artwork selected to accompany it