Late Stage Capitalism

The Prairieland case is Federal case prosecuting 19 people with terrorism after a noise demo at an ICE detention facility in Praireland, Texas in July 2025. Most have been convicted and are currently awaiting sentencing after being found guilty on multiple federal charges. Towards the end of the noise demo an Alvarado police officer was grazed in the neck with a bullet. The Prosecutors claim this was a coordinated ambush by an “antifa cell”. In reality its a drag-net prosecution against loosely acquainted people. If the corrupt verdict of this case is not over turned it will set a precedent that participating in black a bloc is terrorism and can land you decades in jail. We support the non-cooperating defendants not because they are victims of a miscarriage of justice, but because we support all who fight back against domination. Punks have historically played an important roll in spreading and sharpening anarchy across the world. This tape aims to continue that legacy. We affirm that I.C.E. Prisons & Police must be destroyed. People, plants and animals must be freed from the claws of colonial civilization. Against the state, Against capitalism, Solidarity with anarchist prisoners now & forever.

Money raised from this compilation will go towards the legal fees of the Prairieland Defendants

For more info check out:

Crimthinc's article “The road to Prairie Land”

prairielanddefendants.com

Anarchist Black Cross: www.abcf.net

[image description: a two-panel photo of a person dialling a number and then placing the phone to their ear. the contact is saved as ‘Ursula K. Le Guin’ /end ID]

context is this quote by her:

The Wretched of the Earth

Discourse On Colonialism

Making Space for Indigenous Feminism

Settlers: The Mythology Of The White Proletariat from Mayflower to Modern

Red Skin, White Masks : Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition

Borderlands/La Frontera

As We Have Always Done

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Books I couldn't find on the archive but still recommend you purchase or check out at the library:

Safety, ethics, and sustainability are all a part of urban gardening and foraging. I'm sorry that means you need to do homework before you can do anything, I know that sounds lame. But life is complicated.

Daily reminder: Leafy greens like kales uptake all those delicious heavy metals in urban soils like lead and cadmium.

Don’t eat sidewalk-crack kale.

Here's some cool references from the EPA on safe urban gardening:

REUSING POTENTIALLY CONTAMINATED LANDSCAPES: Growing Gardens in Urban Soils

Like, a cop in the United States can pull you over for any reason. Which is a nice way of saying no reason, because literally anything can be used after the fact as justification. A cop can say its cuz you looked at him, or didnt look at him, or it looked like you were holding something, or looked like you were driving too perfectly for it to be natural. It's insane.

There are apparently no circumstances where a cop can't just kill you. The line the courts have applied is "reasonably believed" you were a threat, but that's such a nebulous nothing limit that people get shot for reaching for their license, having their phone in their hand, you're running away with no weapon, not being able to follow conflicting commands, like anything. And cops are almost never charged, because every court is going to believe he could "reasonably believe" he was threatened. Fuck, if you give me enough time, I can make any situation seem juuuuust plausibly threatening enough to pass that bar. It's insane.

A cop can just rob you. Like tell you to give him your wallet, take all the cash out, and just walk away with it. Exactly like you would imagine getting robbed in an alley would go, except no one can help. And he doesn't even have to hide it, he just drops it in a box at the station and they put it in their bank account. It's legal. You can't prove it wasn't drug money. I can't prove any money wasn't at some point drug money. It's insane.

If a cop just walks in your front door and says "I'm here to kill you and your entire family" YOU ARE GOING TO PRISON IF YOU STOP HIM. There is no positive defense for assaulting a police officer in the United States, and doubly so if you kill him. You have effectively no defense against a homicidal cop, which happens same as any other job. Unless for some reason you have cameras all thru your house and clearly caught the audio of him saying that he's there just to kill you, you have zero chance of not going to prison, probably for life. And that's assuming you aren't killed "resisting arrest" while being taken into custody. It is a crime, in this country, for you to defend yourself under any circumstances if the person you're defending yourself from is a cop. That's insane.

You don't have civil rights if a cop says so. You have the right to have a gun, right? A lot of states have open carry. A cop can shoot you if he sees you have a gun. Doesn't matter if you have a license and everything. So you effectively don't have the right to bear arms if a cop can shoot you for exercising it. You have the right to protest. Unless a cop tells you to stop. He doesn't need a real reason to tell you to stop. And if you don't stop, you can be arrested or shot. So you don't really have the right to protest, do you? A cop cant just search your car or house, right? Unless he claims he heard something, or smelled something, neither of which can be proven. So a cop can search whatever he wants, as long as he pretends there was a "reason". So you dont have protection from unreasonable search and seizure, do you? These are no longer rights- they're things the cops allow.. for now. But legally, those rights have already been found to not actually be rights, because any random cop can decide to take that right from you, for any reason. It's insane.

yeah i mean i live in a country where if a trans woman is convicted of a crime she'll be sent to a men's prison and forcibly detransitioned, and also they recently made it a crime to get off with someone without telling them you're trans first - there is a trans woman in prison in the UK right now who gave a man a blowjob, he later claimed he didn't know she was trans, and now she's in jail for sexual assault

Don't get me wrong, that's an extraordinary claim with extraordinarily poor evidence, but it's also one of the more sensible claims Gavin Menzies made in that book. Other assertions include:

The treasure voyage which reached the Americas also visited every continent except Europe and circumnavigated the globe, in three years

They returned to China by way of the Arctic Sea, visiting the North Pole along the way

China left colonies everywhere the treasure voyages went, only for those colonies to vanish when the Hongxi Emperor stopped the famous treasure fleets.

And then there's the sequel, 1434, which asserts that a Chinese treasure voyage "ignited" the Renaissance right after China famously stopped its treasure voyages and somewhere between 30-120 years after the Renaissance started. And that Zheng He's massive treasure ships got to Italy by way of a Nile/Red Sea canal which, in our world, wasn't used for ships since the 8th century or so and was mostly used for irrigation.

Menzies also says that Croatians used Chinese maps to sail to modern-day Virginia, specifically Roanoke. It's not clear whether he thinks these people became the Croatan tribe in the ~150 years between his cited date and the end of the Roanoke colony or if Menzies just doesn't know the simple and well-documented explanation for the Roanoke colony's fate. This isn't actually related to China igniting the Renaissance, but Menzies threw it in.

Source

"A small group of activists assembled before dawn on a recent day in a South L.A. parking lot preparing to patrol the neighborhood. The gathering was not unlike what you see when police congregate in a parking lot preparing for a raid.

Only this time, the target was federal immigration agents.

The activists were from the Community Self Defense Coalition, which fights for immigrant rights. They were armed with two-way radios, bullhorns, and were trained to spot undercover vehicles from U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the Department of Homeland Security.

The coalition formed in the wake of the second election of President Donald Trump and includes groups from across Los Angeles. They say their aim is to find ICE agents, alert the community to their presence using bullhorns, and drive them out of neighborhoods.

“They’re on our land. This is our territory,” said Ron Gochez of Unión del Barrio, which is part of the coalition. “Whatever they do here, they have to know they are going to meet an organized resistance.

“There is nowhere, there is no alleyway, no little corner of our city anywhere where an ICE raid can happen where we won’t know about it almost immediately,” he said.

An ICE spokesperson confirmed in a statement that agents have aborted at least one enforcement action “due to safety concerns brought on by protesters/bystanders.” The spokesperson declined to give his name “due to a heightened security risk to ICE employees.” ...

Tracking ICE

Last week, a high school history teacher, an ethnic studies instructor and a youth program leader were among the activists in South L.A. Nine people in three cars rolled into the darkened streets looking for ICE agents.

“We drive the streets of our neighborhood looking for anything suspicious,” said Gochez, a 43-year-old father and high school history teacher. "We start early in the morning because we know this is when ICE starts their operations.”

Gochez is a member of Unión del Barrio, one of the members of the coalition.

Unión del Barrio started the patrols in 2020 during a Biden Administration crackdown on unauthorized immigrants. The organization restarted the patrols over the past few weeks in response to the second Trump Administration.

On Wednesday, Gochez’s two-way radio crackled with the sound of a colleague checking in from another car on patrol.

“Copy. We are on Jefferson and Trinity. All clear,” she announced.

They looked for ICE vehicles – typically with heavily tinted windows, usually on an American made sedan or SUV, almost always with a cage in the back seat for detainees. Sometimes, the cars are parked sideways on a street in front of their target or grouped together in a grocery store parking lot.

Gochez said he and the other activists try to catch ICE agents in those lots as they gather before a raid.

“We try to catch them at that stage — that way we’re able to affect their plan and at the same time, we start alerting the community.”

When they find federal agents, they go into publicity mode.

“We go live on social media,” Gochez said. “We use our megaphone to alert the immediate community that ICE is present.”

In a recent Facebook Live post, Gochez can be seen speaking into a bullhorn across the street from where ICE agents appear to be conducting a raid.

“Everybody in this community, if you can hear me please do not come outside if you are undocumented,” he says on the video. “We have terrorists in our community.”

He implores people who are documented to come outside and support the protest.

Enforcing law vs defending community

Later, L.A. police officers confronted Gochez.

“We’re not interfering,” he told them.

“Yes you are,” responded an LAPD officer, who forced Gochez and the other protestors down the street.

The participation of city police officers appeared to violate L.A.’s sanctuary cities law, which prohibits police from cooperating or assisting ICE agents...

ICE backs off

As part of the coalition, Unión del Barrio has trained people from more than 50 other organizations to engage in similar patrols, including The National Lawyers Guild, Jewish Voice for Peace and The Peoples Struggle San Fernando Valley, according to Gochez.

It's unclear how many conduct regular patrols like Unión del Barrio does.

Gochez estimates his and other groups have intercepted ICE on about a dozen occasions. He said in some cases, ICE has backed off of a raid because of Unión del Barrio’s presence.

Cardona said ICE agents called off the raid when they were called out at the Target. “That one day, we knew we prevented several people from being detained and deported, their lives being uprooted.” ...

Union del Barrio urges people to use a text thread or to have some sort of a phone tree to alert each other about the presence of ICE in their neighborhoods. The group also has a hotline people can call if they spot ICE.

“We get calls from Uber drivers. We get calls from street vendors. We get calls from business owners and just everyday normal people who support the work that we do,” said Gochez, who refers to ICE detentions and arrests as the “kidnappings.”

“It is a kidnapping – no different from when they kidnapped Native Americans during the Indian Removal Act,” Gochez declared.

He said many of the calls to the coalition are false alarms, involving local agencies, like LAPD or the county Sheriff’s Department, conducting their own undercover operations. But the coalition is focused on the actions of federal immigration agents.

A new tactic

Experts said the tactic of patrolling for ICE is relatively new.

Mirian Martinez-Aranda, an associate professor of sociology at U.C. Irvine, said it lets members of immigrant communities know they are not alone.

“It's a new form in which immigrant communities and their supporters are finding a way to protect each other and to stand up for what's unfair and cruel,” Martinez-Aranda told LAist.

And here is a video explaining what’s going on in more detail than I provided.

With everything else going on in the world, it can be hard to keep up with stuff going on at home, but ICE is still out here terrorizing innocent people. We must keep our eyes on them, and keep fighting.

It's when the USA pushed through legislation that allowed them to terminate tribes from existing.

Not too long ago, the United States’ explicit policy regarding Native Americans was termination. The goal was to marginalize and eradicate Native people and cultures. As a first step, the government stole Native land and resources, murdered Native families and herded the survivors onto bounded reservations offering little chance of survival. The next step was instituting a legal policy during the 1940s, 50s and 60s stripping Native nations of any remaining rights. True to form, this officially coined “Termination Era” witnessed the government terminating over 100 tribes through legislative mandate.

[...]

The termination era continues, although now with a more subtle economic bent. Instead of physically taking land or paying cash for dead Indians, the current approach is more refined and politically palatable. Choking down on revenue streams and economic progress is just as effective as wholesale killing. Economic blight furthers the dependency and bleakness that ultimately leads to extinction. Occasionally, non-Natives get a fleeting glimpse of this in action—Diane Sawyer recently took TV viewers on a shocking tour of the deplorable conditions facing the Oglala Lakota Sioux on the Pine Ridge reservation. The general public expressed concern, albeit for a moment. Surprise and compassion flowed through the Facebook and Twitter worlds, but emotions were quickly squashed by apathy.

Facially, the resolution seemed to be well-intended, for it appeared that Congress wished to liberate tribes from federal control. However, this policy became another means of controlling and erasing Native Americans' rights.

What is being called a “K-shaped economy” is not a temporary distortion or the result of recent shocks, but the normal outcome of monopoly capitalism.

The image suggests two trajectories diverging from a common point—one arm rising, the other falling. The term has gained traction in economic coverage because it names the visible split between those who own and those who work, but it does not explain the system that produces that divide.

In the third quarter of 2025, the economy grew at an annual rate of 4.3%. Corporate profits rose by $166 billion. Unemployment climbed to 4.6%. Real disposable income for households did not grow at all. These figures do not contradict one another. GDP growth records the expansion of value for capital, not improvements in living conditions. Taken together, the numbers describe an economy organized so that accumulation at the top proceeds even as conditions deteriorate for most working people.

The “K” image captures this split only at the surface. It describes two paths separating from a common starting point, one rising and one falling, without explaining why the split occurs or why it persists.

By framing the outcome as an imbalance or an unusual pattern, the metaphor suggests something temporary or accidental. Under monopoly conditions, however, this gap is neither. It is the routine operation of an economy in which profits are secured not by expanding employment or raising wages, but by cutting jobs, keeping pay flat, and shifting economic risk onto households — a process enforced through labor law, credit systems, and public policy.

This pattern did not emerge suddenly, and it did not begin with the pandemic, inflation, or recent policy shifts. The split now described as “K-shaped” has been widening for decades. What today’s figures make visible is the cumulative result of a long shift of income and power away from wages and toward profits. To understand how the economy came to operate this way, it is necessary to look at how income has been divided over the past half-century.

Fifty years of upward transfer

The data on income distribution tells the story plainly. In 1974, the top 20% of households captured 43.5% of total national income. By 2024, their share had grown to 52.2% — a gain of 8.7 percentage points. Every other income group saw its share decline. The bottom 20% fell from 4.3% to 3.1%, a drop of roughly 28% in their portion of national income.

This redistribution reflects monopoly capitalism’s inherent drive to concentrate wealth, a tendency that was temporarily constrained from the 1940s through the early 1970s. Strong unions, laws that limited Wall Street speculation and made it harder to move factories overseas, and the political pressures of that period — including the existence of the Soviet Union, socialist China and the anti-colonial national liberation struggles worldwide — extracted real concessions from the ruling class. 

Starting in the 1970s, facing overproduction and overaccumulation — more goods produced than could be sold profitably, more capital accumulated than could find profitable investment — the ruling class launched a sustained counteroffensive. Through union-busting, tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of finance, and the movement of production to where labor was cheaper and less organized, the ruling class broke that compromise. The widening divide visible in income data since 1974 marks not the beginning of a new trend but the success of that counteroffensive.