Hit the Grift Where It Hurts: Join May Day Strong

Avatar photoby

We are striking with the May Day Economic Boycott because the current Trump regime treats the working class like disposable batteries to power their daily grift. We protest the ongoing assault on civil liberties and an economy actively rigged for billionaires who laugh from their bunkers. It is time to hit them where it actually hurts: the bottom line. No work, no school, no shopping. Survive the dumpster fire by simply refusing to fuel it.

Call Congress: 202-224-3121

💬 Add your voice: Comment on today’s post
Share

60 thoughts on “Hit the Grift Where It Hurts: Join May Day Strong”

  2. not working day no different for the 119th

    Attribution: Do Nothing Congress by Rick McKee, The Augusta Chronicle, GA

  4. from today’s Guardian CEO pay soared in 2025, 20 times faster than workers’ pay
    CEO pay increased 20 times faster than worker pay around the world in 2025, according to a new analysis from Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation, the world’s largest trade union federation.
    When adjusted for inflation, global worker pay declined 12% between 2019 and 2025, the equivalent of 108 days of free work during that time period. In comparison, CEO compensation increased by 54% between 2019 and 2025.
    The average CEO received $8.4m in total compensation in 2025 compared to $7.6m in 2024.
    The analysis also found billionaires were paid $2,500 a second in dividends in 2025, according to the investment portfolios of more than 1,000 billionaires. For every two hours in the 2025, the average billionaire received more in dividends than the average worker earned in annual pay.
    The wealth of billionaires has reached record highs in 2026, with the wealthiest gaining $4tn over the past 12 months, a 13.2% increase from 2025.
    Inequality in the US was worse than the global average, with CEO pay increasing 20.4 times faster than worker pay in 2025.
    For 384 CEOs in the S&P 500 where CEO compensation data was available, pay increased by 25% from 2024 to 2025, while average hourly earnings for workers at private companies increased 1.3% in the same period.
    “This analysis exposes the billionaire coup against democracy and its costs for working people,” said Luc Triangle, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, in a statement. “Companies promise us a virtuous cycle, but what we see is a vicious cycle led by mega corporations – they undermine collective bargaining and social dialogue while billionaire CEOs capture the wealth created by productivity gains.”
    The top-paying 1,500 corporations across 33 countries that report CEO compensation for 2025 were covered under the analysis. Among these corporations, researchers found a 16% gender pay gap, noting women at these companies essentially work for free after 4 November every year.
    The top 10 highest paid CEOs received more than $1bn collectively last year, with four corporations – Blackstone, Broadcom, Goldman Sachs and Microsoft paying their CEOs more than $100m in 2025.
    “We can’t continue to let a handful of super-rich people siphon off the rewards of work that belong to millions. Governments must cap CEO pay, fairly tax the super-rich and ensure minimum wages at the very least keep pace with inflation and ensure a dignified living,” said Amitabh Behar, executive director of Oxfam International, in a statement.
    “These measures can do far more than redistribute income; they can create economies that reward work, invest in communities and hold powerful interests accountable,” added Behar. “This is how we turn a system rigged for the few into one that works for everyone.”

  5. what nonsense, especially the “no school” part

    a single day economic boycott is unmeasurable

    libprog ideological leaders are impotent and stupid

  8. let down your friends family and coworkers because the internet told you to

    is the dumbest messaging ever

    not my hobby horse

    have a good day 😐

  10. May Day Update:
    North Carolina school closures: Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Cabarrus County, Gaston County, and Kannapolis City Schools all threw in the towel and canceled classes today. CMS alone stared down 1,800 pending teacher absences before officially rebranding today as an “optional teacher workday.” — WCNC-PBS

  11. May 1 is not just May Pole Day. It is special in Finland. Saluted with Sima, a lightly fermented lemon drink. We celebrate spring and more.
    Happy Vappu to you

    I misplaced my Finnish Vappu meme folder, so this one will have to do.

  13. Any last minute bets by noon east coast time tomorrow

    Horse Trainer Jockey Odds Trailmix Rider

    1. Renegade, Todd Pletcher, Irad Ortiz Jr., 4-1 Jamie

    2. Albus, Riley Mott, Manny Franco, 30-1

    3. Intrepido, Jeff Mullins, Hector Berrios, 50-1

    4. Litmus Test, Bob Baffert, Martin Garcia, 30-1

    5. Right to Party, Kenny McPeek, Chris Elliott, 30-1 Pogo

    6. Commandment, Brad Cox, Luis Saez, 6-1 Blue Bronc

    7. Danon Bourbon, Manabu Ikezoe, Atsuya Nishimura, 20-1 Chris (Jamie’s son)

    8. So Happy, Mark Glatt, Mike Smith, 15-1 Ivy

    9. The Puma, Gustavo Delgado, Javier Castellano, 10-1 Renee, Show bet Patd

    10. Wonder Dean, Daisuke Takayanagi, Ryusei Sakai, 30-1

    11. Incredibolt, Riley Mott, Jaime Torres, 20-1 Katie

    12. Chief Wallabee, Bill Mott, Junior Alvarado, 8-1 Patd

    13. Silent Tactic, Mark Casse, Cristian Torres, 20-1 Scratched

    14. Potente, Bob Baffert, Juan Hernandez, 20-1 Winterlinde

    15. Emerging Market, Chad Brown, Flavien Prat, 15-1

    16. Pavlovian, Doug O’Neill, Edwin Maldonado, 30-1 Craig

    17. Six Speed, Bhupat Seemar, Brian Hernandez Jr., 50-1

    18. Further Ado, Brad Cox, John Velazquez, 6-1 Dave B.

    19. Golden Tempo, Cherie DeVaux, Jose Ortiz, 30-1 Sturgeon

    20. Fulleffort, Brad Cox, Tyler Gaffalione, 20-1 (Scratched)

    21. Great White, John Ennis, Alex Achard, 50-1 Patd (show)

    22. Ocelli, Whit Beckman, Joe Ramos, 50-1

    Also eligible

    23. Robusta, Doug O’Neill, Emisael Jaramillo, 50-1

    24. Corona de Oro, Dallas Stewart, Brian Hernandez Jr., 50-1

  17. Either Dumbass got a new assistant to draft his stupid TS comments or it’s fake.

    I’m boycotting school today (just like I’ve done every day since LP graduated from City College).🙄

    With the exception of GoMart, gas (regular) is between 4.16.9 and 4.39.9 in EB today. That’s a $.40 cent jump since earlier in the week and a 62% jump since Jan. 1. (Brent crude is at 108.36- same price as on March 20, but up $52/bbl since Jan. 1. The Orange idiot says it’s not so bad. I beg to differ

  18. A follow up on last nights Route 66 comments. After Woody Guthrie headed down Route 66 to the “promised land” he got a regular job as a performer in a “hillbilly” radio show. Where he wrote onte of my favorite “Woody Guthrie” songs, A very political song full of Okie dog whistles, against the bankers and insurance companies lawyers that “stole: their land and put them out on the road.

    Jack

  19. MAY DAY UPDATE

    • On-the-ground reporting confirms that demonstrators operating with the organization Free DC have successfully shut down multiple intersections across Washington, D.C.
    • A coalition of Amazon workers and Teamsters mobilized in Manhattan this morning, marching directly on Amazon’s corporate offices to demand the termination of the company’s contracts with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security.

  20. Sometimes life gets in the way of better laid plans. I did go grocery shopping this morning. Our 30+ yr old refrigerator died earlier this week. We had a new one delivered yesterday. Haven’t had a shiny new appliance in a long time.

  21. A 10% reduction in sales today basically sayes nothing if it is then made up in the weeks that follow. The economy is too large for a minority group to effect it at large.
    You would be much more effective if you had a “reach out day” find 10 of your neighbors who believe as you do and pool your limited resources. Do simple things like bulk yard signs to pass out to like minded neighbors. Signs with simple sayings ” I vote Democrat for a better future”, “proud Democrat voter lives here”. Above all organize from your living room, invite your neighbors over. Even it annoys your partner or room mate.

    Jack

  23. BTW, I just did a check with vista print
    1 yard sign costs $12, but buy 100 and the cost drops to$4 a sign. So reach out, organize! Also from experience place an order with them and they will send you multiple 1/2 off discount offers.
    As I said , organize!!!
    Jack

  24. all good ideas Jack, it’s just that everyone sucks now

    i try to not, these American humans out here are making it difficult

  25. As you organize and grow don’t let the paper work scare you. In Missouri it take 3 people and 25 dollars to form a nonprofit corporation, great examples of incorporation papers are free online. Just look at the incorporation papers of other nonprofit fillings. They are right there , public information.
    To have a bank account you will need a tax ID number, it is free and easy to get from the IRS
    Don’t let it scare you. If I can do it then you can. Even a registered with the IRS 501c3 charity.

    Jack

  26. MAY DAY UPDATE

    Sunrise Movement protesters in Portland Oregon and other cities have physically occupied the lobbies of hotels where DHS officials are staying.

  27. Anon
    Years ago I was whining to a fellow neighborhood leader about how we never got anything from the city and she imparted this bit of wisdom
    “If you don’t ask, you don’t get”
    Most people never ask, they just whine (as I was at the time), about the injustice of it all.
    Jack

  28. Don’t forget this is about growing and flexing the network for getting out the vote in November. In zoom calls with organizers I’ve noticed they seem very focused and competent about using these events to get that done.

  29. cool let’s associate legitimate politicians with unaccountable random chaos makers

    Great strategy

    fucking idiots i swear

  30. Are we bending the moral arc or just screaming into the void? Today, we unpack “Why We Protest.” It beats doomscrolling in sweatpants. Let’s find a silver lining in the dumpster fire.

  31. Anon
    I tend to agree with you, we are far past the stage of just needing attention, which is all occupying a building does.
    Sometimes you need the attention to your cause but it always comes at a cost. Been there done that. Don’t regret it but I understand the cost.
    BTW one other thing I learned from that experience, it brings the crazies out of the woodwork and they tend to interfere with finding workable solutions.
    Jack

  33. Anon
    Wishful thinking never solves anything.
    The problem with American politics, we are always looking for the “white knight” rather than shouldering our share of the burden.
    Together we are better!
    In contrast to, “by ourselves we are lost”
    Jack

  34. that sentiment in itself is wishful thinking

    it’s all over, the oligarchs won

    oh well

  35. Thomas Friedman NYT

    Trump Is the One Without the Cards at the Poker Table

    By Thomas L. Friedman

    Opinion Columnist

    President Trump often falls back on poker metaphors. He told President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that he had “no cards” when it came to standing up to Russia. Trump told Iran’s leaders that they had “no cards” when it came to standing up to him.

    Would somebody please tell me when it’s poker night at the Trump White House? Because I’d really like a seat at that table.

    Trump is betting that by blockading Iran to prevent it from exporting its oil, he can force Tehran to negotiate on his terms. But some experts think Iran has enough income and can store enough oil to hold out for at least several months.

    Meanwhile, Iran is betting that by choking off the Strait of Hormuz — and driving up gasoline and food prices for Americans and all their allies — Trump will eventually act in accord with his TACO label: Trump always chickens out.

    This is painful to watch. Trump and Tehran are each saying: “I will hold my breath until you turn blue.” We’ll see who gasps first.

    The real question is: How in the world has Iran’s regime lasted this long — two months — against the combined military might of Israel and America? The answer: Trump does not understand how much asymmetric warfare has reshaped geopolitics in just the last few years.

    But I don’t want to be too hard on our president. He is not alone. Iran is to Trump what Ukraine is to Vladimir Putin, what Hamas and Hezbollah have been to Benjamin Netanyahu and — wait for it — what the next generation of cyberhackers will be to China and America and every other nation-state.

    Think about it: Last June, Ukraine smuggled 117 cheap drones into Russia hidden inside trucks and destroyed or damaged about 20 of Russia’s strategic aircraft, including multimillion-dollar long-range, nuclear-capable strategic bombers.

    This year, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps used $35,000 Shahed-136 drones to strike two Amazon Web Services data centers, costing tens of millions of dollars, in the United Arab Emirates (a third Amazon data center, in Bahrain, was damaged in a nearby strike), knocking them offline and disrupting banking and other services across the Persian Gulf region.

    Previously, Hamas commanders said that they fashioned small rockets from piping from abandoned Israeli settlements, unexploded Israeli bombs and other munitions and even parts from a sunken British World War I warship off the Gaza coast. Israel was forced to use Patriot missiles costing $4 million each to intercept them.

    In other words, we’re already in a new era in which small powers and small groups can leverage information-age tools — guided by GPS and digitally controlled — to gain asymmetric advantages.

    “We have always thought of power in terms of the ability to create mass destruction,” John Arquilla, a former professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School and the author of the forthcoming “Troubled American Way of War,” told me in an interview. In an interdependent world, “the many and the small now have the ability to create mass disruption in the physical or the virtual world” — from the Strait of Hormuz to cyberspace.

    Trump recklessly started this war without allies, without any scenario planning and, obviously, without any real understanding of Iran’s assets in asymmetric warfare. Nevertheless, it would be a disaster for the region and the world if Iran’s malign regime emerges from this war intact and unreformed, because an even more powerful asymmetric tool kit for bad guys is just arriving.

    Here’s what’s truly new and disturbing: We are rapidly moving from the age of asymmetric warfare based on information-age tools that can wreak mass disruption to what my technology tutor, Craig Mundie, a former head of research and strategy at Microsoft, calls an age of asymmetric warfare based on “intelligence-age tools” that can cheaply wreak disruption at a much larger scale anywhere on demand.

    This is a very important distinction. The age of information — that is, the period of computers, smartphones, the internet and GPS — gave us tools that amplify the power and reach of a trained operator. It vastly increased the power of any one coder, drone operator, ransomware thief, hacker, social media influencer or disinformation specialist. It made any small unit more powerful, but humans needed to have some basic knowledge to operate these digital tools. And human intent always directed them.

    In the age of intelligence, artificial-intelligence agents that are built on large language models — like Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT — can now be directed by humans with a single command, and they will autonomously execute, and self-optimize, multistage cyberattacks on their own.

    To put it differently, information-age tools vastly amplified trained operators within organizations, including terrorist organizations. Intelligence-age tools replace trained operators with vastly more intelligent, autonomous and skilled A.I. agents with more destructive reach at little cost.

    These intelligence-age “capabilities that can superempower individuals, that many thought were 18 months or two years away, are now here,” Mundie told me. “When the dual-use nature of these A.I. technologies becomes fully democratized — and that is where we are heading soon — they will present a material threat to all developed societies” by superempowered actors “who historically never had any cards to play before at all.”
    […]
    It is hard to exaggerate how destabilizing these rapid advances in A.I. sophistication could become, and it is why Mundie and I have been arguing for a while now that the two A.I. superpowers — the United States and China — need to figure out how they can (and surely will) continue to compete strategically while cooperating to neutralize these new asymmetric intelligence-age threats — not unlike the United States and the U.S.S.R. did to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Cold War.

    Otherwise, neither of them will be safe. Nor will anyone else be.

    Now there’s some scary stuff.

  37. MAY DAY UPDATE
    3,500 events in US spotlight ‘no school, no work, no shopping’ May Day protest and economic blackout. Walkouts, marches and other gatherings held for ‘May Day Strong’ demonstrations across the country.

    • Memphis: Protesters effectively became human speed bumps, lying in the streets to block the entrance to Elon Musk’s xAI datacenter.
    • Wall Street: About 100 members of the Sunrise Movement physically bottlenecked the New York Stock Exchange. They chained themselves to the front and blocked the exits for about an hour before being arrested and removed.
    • Washington, D.C.: Intersections across the capital were entirely shut down by “Free DC” demonstrators, creating verifiable localized gridlock. Streets closed around the Capitol building.

  44. Looking at the videos, looks like May day was a bust. Those pictures from LA were pathetic, to say thousands was generous, Chicago was almost as bad. These are big cities, they have bigger block parties.

    Jack

  46. Hey everyone! Just checking in. It’s a been a busy week at work for me. Daily overtime to make up for what we don’t get done during our normal working hours. Ready to relax this weekend. Gas prices are ranging from $4.79-$4.99 here. The Tulip Time Festival started today. Most of the tulips are past their peak, so if people come to just see the tulips they will be disappointed. I made a meme for Willie Nelson’s birthday.

  47. Corey, you’ve got until midnight to tell Jamie your pick!

    Join our pre-show at 11am ET…
    20 years of Derby Day bragging rights onTrail Mix. The field is wide open, but the ghost of $250k sire “Into Mischief” haunts the track. Entries locked soon. Pray for a miracle.

  50. Sometimes I find humour in the how those in the normal statistics live. I just saw a post about how to find “vintage” things for your Mother on Mother’s Day. My mother is almost 99 years old. If there was something “vintage” for her it would be in a museum as an antique.

  54. FB somehow found out I picked So Happy. Don’t tell me they’re not eavesdropping.

    He is 59 years old, 29 Kentucky Derbies behind him and two wins on his résumé: Giacomo in 2005 and Justify in 2018, the Triple Crown. Tomorrow Mike Smith rides So Happy,breaking from post 8 at 15-1 odds, coming off a 2¾-length win in the Santa Anita Derby. A victory on Saturday would make him the oldest jockey ever to win at Churchill Downs, breaking Bill Shoemaker’s record — he was 54 when Ferdinand won in 1986. The story is already written. The horse just has to run it🐎

  55. Slapping this mint harder than reality hits on a Monday morning. Thank god the Derby is only two minutes long—any longer and Trump might issue an executive order to ride the horses himself just to get the cameras back. Grab your bourbon and prepare for the madness.

Name is required. Email and website optional — we only ask for civility.

Regulars: Already registered? Log in here so your name fills in automatically.

New here? You can comment without an account — just pick a name and type. If you want a permanent login, you can register here (optional).

First time here? New voices always welcome. The regulars only bite when provoked.

Leave a Comment

The maximum upload file size: 100 MB. You can upload: image, audio, video, document, spreadsheet, interactive, text, archive, code, other. Links to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and other services inserted in the comment text will be automatically embedded. Drop files here

Join the Trail Mix

Get an alert when Craig goes live, and the link when our Open Thread heats up.