We Say Fight Back!

Seize Solidarity House

The corrupt and Quisling leadership of the United Auto Workers Union has sent its 50,000 General Motors worker-members out on strike–a strike the labor bosses probably never wanted, as with the wildcat school workers’ strikes of recent months.

While William Serrin in his, “The Company and the Union,” showed how the UAW used a counterfeit strike in 1970 to exhaust the ranks and then ram through a terrible contract, the social atmosphere is much different now–social uprisings all over the world.

It could be things will get out of hand. I surely hope so. There is every reason for more wildcats in Chrysler, Fords, and beyond.

Here is a glaring contemporary reason.

Nine UAW bosses have been charged with crimes ranging from embezzling from the union’s treasury, to the tune of millions, to accepting bribes from the auto bosses in terms of cash, plush resorts, golf trips, and much more–all well documented in the Detroit press.

The two top UAW bosses, including president Gary Jones will be charged. In the highlight announcements of this strike, Jones is nowhere to be found.

Clearly, the bribery and embezzlement involved both the auto companies and the UAW. There was a rotten exchange–gifts and money for the delivery of sellout contracts; cheating on ratification votes when necessary.

These crimes, however, are but a thin layer over the bigger heist every major union in the US conducts day by day. We shall get to that greater hustle shortly. First, what to do now?

If this strike is to be won, it will have to be through direct action by the rank and file, self-organized in workers councils across all of auto (not just the false “target” GM) and including non-member supporters–spouses, students, teachers, radicals.      www.counterpunch.org/2019/09/17/seize-solidarity-house/

 

Climate strike – live: Millions across world demand urgent action to save planet in largest environmental protest in history (an eco friendly way to end capitalism?)

Tens of thousands of mostly students have taken to the streets of Australia and other Asia-Pacific countries as a day of worldwide demonstrations against climate change gets underway.

Millions of people around the world are expected to take part in what could be the largest climate protest in history. British students are preparing to walk out of lessons and lectures and adults are being encouraged to join them as they strike.

Protests inspired by the teenage Swedish activist Greta Thunberg are planned in around 150 countries as people demand world leaders take immediate action to limit the harmful effects of manmade climate change ahead of a environmental summit at the United Nations in New York on Monday, as the UN General Assembly opens.   www.independent.co.uk/environment/global-climate-strike-live-protests-greta-thunberg-speech-demonstrations-a9112986.html

Nurses in Four States Strike to Push for Better Patient Care

 

The Little Red Schoolhouse

Zionist-U.S. Orders Duke and U.N.C. to Recast Tone in Mideast Studies (people make gods, gods don’t make people)

The Education Department has ordered Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to remake the Middle East studies program run jointly by the two schools after concluding that it was offering students a biased curriculum that, among other complaints, did not present enough “positive” imagery of Judaism and Christianity in the region.

In a rare instance of federal intervention in college course content, the department asserted that the universities’ Middle East program violated the standards of a federal program that awards funding to international studies and foreign language programs. The inquiry was part of a far-reaching investigation into the program by the department, which under Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, has become increasingly aggressive in going after perceived anti-Israel bias in higher education.

That focus appears to reflect the views of an agency leadership that includes a civil rights chief, Kenneth L. Marcus, who has made a career of pro-Israel advocacy and has waged a yearslong campaign to delegitimize and defund Middle East studies programs that he has criticized as rife with anti-Israel bias.

In this case, the department homed in on what officials saw as a program that focused on the region’s Muslim population at the expense of its religious minorities. In the North Carolina program’s outreach to elementary and secondary school students, the department said, there was “a considerable emphasis placed on the understanding the positive aspects of Islam, while there is an absolute absence of any similar focus on the positive aspects of Christianity, Judaism or any other religion…   www.nytimes.com/2019/09/19/us/politics/anti-israel-bias-higher-education.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

No school should go without a nurse, a social worker and a librarian

Seven years ago, I stood proudly as a member of the Chicago Teachers Union during the 2012 teachers’ strike that catapulted both poor working conditions for teachers and poor learning conditions for students into the limelight.

Since then, teachers’ strikes have happened across the country. And now all eyes are on the CTU: Will Chicago teachers strike again?

Many people have drawn parallels to 2012, but the situation is much different. In 2012, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked teachers to work a longer school day and year without any extra compensation. An independent fact-finder sided with the CTU and said teachers should be paid for that extra time. Emanuel didn’t buckle, and teachers went on a seven-day strike until he did.   chicago.suntimes.com/2019/9/4/20849150/chicago-teachers-union-contract-talks-nurses-librarians-social-workers-suburban-schools?fbclid=IwAR29CaenCcrxYvbOx-RENLc88k1Np_zNmddUu6DBv3FYisPuEMu9WV-DjFI

Wayne State Board of Governors rejects code of conduct

A proposed code of conduct and responsibilities for the Wayne State University Board of Governors was rejected Friday, highlighting anew the ongoing split between members.

The policy has been worked on for a long time and is overdue, said Governor Marilyn Kelly, chair of the WSU board’s Bylaws Review Committee, which recommended its adoption.

But it was voted down by Governors Dana Thompson, Michael Busuito, Sandra Hughes O’Brien and Anil Kumar. Those four board members have been at odds with the other four governors on numerous issues in recent months, including actions taken at a June 21 meeting of the board that led to a lawsuit, which remains unresolved.

“I’m very disappointed that it failed,” Kelly said after the meeting. “It seems like the kind of commitment that people would find no difficulty with.”

The statement of responsibilities and code of conduct included numerous pledges including participating in the appointment, support and assessment of the president; understanding the mission of the university, preparing for and participating in all official board meetings and recognizing that the board’s principal role is to provide oversight, review and approve strategies while deferring to the administration for the management of daily business.  www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/wayne-county/2019/09/20/wayne-state-board-governors-rejects-code-conduct/2390845001/

UC President (and Homeland Security Fascist) Janet Napolitano to step down

University of California President Janet Napolitano, who has championed immigrant students and sexual abuse victims but whose management style has sparked criticism, announced Wednesday she was resigning as head of the nation’s premier public research university system.

Napolitano made the announcement at the UC regents meeting at UCLA. She will step down Aug. 1, 2020.

“The decision was tough, and at this moment bittersweet, but the time is right,” Napolitano said. “With many new board members, with a new governor and what will be seven years of service behind me, I think the university will benefit from some fresh blood.”

Napolitano, 61, said she would join the UC Berkeley Goldman School of Public Policy to teach and write in fall 2021 after a yearlong sabbatica  www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-18/uc-president-janet-napolitano-resigns 

The International Hot War of the Rich on the Poor

U.S. drone strike kills 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan

A U.S. drone strike intended to hit an Islamic State (IS) hideout in Afghanistan killed at least 30 civilians resting after a day’s labor in the fields, officials said on Thursday.  The attack on Wednesday night also injured 40 people after accidentally targeting farmers and laborers who had just finished collecting pine nuts at mountainous Wazir Tangi in eastern Nangarhar province, three Afghan officials told Reuters.

“The workers had lit a bonfire and were sitting together when a drone targeted them,” tribal elder Malik Rahat Gul told Reuters by telephone from Wazir Tangi.

Afghanistan’s Defence Ministry and a senior U.S official in Kabul confirmed the drone strike, but did not share details of civilian casualties.  www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-attack-drones/u-s-drone-strike-kills-30-pine-nut-farm-workers-in-afghanistan-idUSKBN1W40NW

Hastings makes good use of all these and more. Curiously, though, he neglects the memoirs of Colonel Bui Tin. Bui Tin is famous in Vietnam. He was the man who, in the absence of a more senior officer, accepted the surrender of the Southern government at the presidential palace in Saigon on 30 April 1975, after North Vietnamese tanks had crashed through its gates. Subsequently he became deputy editor of Nhan Dan, the Vietnamese Communist Party’s official newspaper. He was an eyewitness to many of the key events in the country’s post-1945 history and was on close terms with senior members of Hanoi’s ruling elite. In September 1990, disillusioned by the corruption and incompetence of the government, he went into exile in Paris. His memoir, Following Ho Chi Minh (1994), as well as a series of interviews he gave to the BBC World Service, are the best inside account of political life in the North. He remained in Paris, available for interview, until his death in August 2018. And yet he is nowhere quoted. The other surprising absence is Truong Chinh, the ruthless old Stalinist principally responsible for the brutal Chinese-style land reform carried out in the early 1950s. He rates only one passing mention.   portside.org/2019-09-14/vietnam-terror-was-absolute

The ‘Official Secrets’ Movie vs. Joe Biden’s Lies About the Iraq War

Trump to send US troops to Saudi Arabia following attacks on oil facilities

Deployment not ‘in thousands’ but officials refuse to provide full details 

Donald Trump is dispatching additional forces to Saudi Arabia following the attack on oil facilities that the US has blamed on Iran.

A week after Saudi oil facilities at Khurai and Abqaiq were damaged – in an operation that Houthi rebels in Yemen claimed responsibility for and which temporarily halved the kingdom’s oil production – the Pentagon announced it was be deploying a “moderate” number of troops primarily “defensive in nature”.

US marine general Joseph Dunford, chair of the joint chiefs of staff, and secretary of defence Mark Esper told reporters in Washington the deployment would not reach thousands of troops, but they declined to be more specific.   www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/donald-trump-us-troops-saudi-arabia-iran-yemen-oil-installation-attacks-a9114206.html?fbclid=IwAR0d9HTj4sHWO3ZATIS24cbJIsJ1TYmAPHgupGglYBNIyd6V557GXjfItGQ

Pentagon loses track of $500 million in weapons, equipment given to Yemen

The Pentagon is unable to account for more than $500 million in U.S. military aid given to Yemen, amid fears that the weaponry, aircraft and equipment is at risk of being seized by Iranian-backed rebels or al-Qaeda, according to U.S. officials.

With Yemen in turmoil and its government splintering, the Defense Department has lost its ability to monitor the whereabouts of small arms, ammunition, night-vision goggles, patrol boats, vehicles and other supplies donated by the United States. The situation has grown worse since the United States closed its embassy in Sanaa, the capital, last month and withdrew many of its military advisers.

In recent weeks, members of Congress have held closed-door meetings with U.S. military officials to press for an accounting of the arms and equipment. Pentagon officials have said that they have little information to go on and that there is little they can do at this point to prevent the weapons and gear from falling into the wrong hands.  www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/pentagon-loses-sight-of-500-million-in-counterterrorism-aid-given-to-yemen/2015/03/17/f4ca25ce-cbf9-11e4-8a46-b1dc9be5a8ff_story.html?fbclid=IwAR2y4N–mw9P6cgE4Viij0ruKp8eoWRaw8gSzy5HOaXTmxT3Dobr6s-d88w

A Marine Looks Back at His Battles in Afghanistan

…We didn’t understand the Afghans. They mostly hated us for destroying their homes, accidentally killing them and showing up in helicopters and telling them to respect a government in Kabul that they cared little about. The Afghan Army was near useless then. When the Afghan troops weren’t high on hashish, we were worried they were going to shoot us. They resembled nothing like the reliable allies our generals spoke of in public.”’

I think it’s safe to say we lost Marja, our little part of the war. The rest of us are just waiting for all of it to end, to write in our journals: the war in Afghanistan 2001-20??. To start making some cohesive narrative out of the whole mess of our youths before our children can read.

Even as we want it all to stop, we know on one level that it won’t. After any peace deal, now, later, in another decade, we’ll still be fighting the war in one place.

Our heads.  www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/world/middleeast/marja-trump-taliban-afghanistan-peace.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

 

13 Camp Pendleton Marines charged in human smuggling operation

 Thirteen Camp Pendleton-based Marines detained in a human smuggling probe in July are facing a variety of related charges under military law, the 1st Marine Division said Friday.

Wall Street to General Motors: End strike and ram through cuts

Shut down the strike by GM workers quickly and force through massive concessions. This was the meaning of a statement this week by credit rating agency Moody’s, which called the strike a “credit-negative” for the company, increasing the likelihood that Moody’s might downgrade GM’s credit.

If the strike is not wrapped up within one to two weeks, Moody’s warned, “the financial burden of a strike will become more material and the prospects of a contract that avoids erosion of the company’s current competitive position is less likely.”

In plain language, it means that if GM and the United Auto Workers cannot shut down the strike quickly and force through major concessions, Wall Street will punish the auto giant by making it more expensive for the company to borrow money and by tanking its stock value.

This demonstrates that striking GM workers are not simply confronting GM CEO Mary Barra and other executives, but the entire capitalist class. Behind GM stands its Wall Street investors, who are demanding that the company do everything to ensure a high rate of profit in the face of what is expected to be a protracted downturn in the auto industry.

This is despite 10 years of near-record profits in the auto industry, which produced a bonanza for GM’s wealthy investors. For the most part, these profits have not been used to invest in new production or emerging technologies. Instead, they have been wasted on stock buybacks, including $10 billion since 2015 alone, and billions more in dividend payments.  www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/21/wall-s21.html

GM CEO Barra was top-paid Detroit auto executive in 2018

General Motors Co. Chairman and CEO Mary Barra was paid $21.87 million in total compensation in 2018 to make her the highest-paid Detroit Three executive.

Barra’s 2018 compensation is a slight decrease from the $21.96 million the company paid her in 2017. Still, the GM chief executive’s pay outpaces Ford CEO Jim Hackett, who completed his first full year on the job in 2018, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV CEO Michael Manley, who took the top job on July 21.

Hackett was paid $17.75 million in 2018 and Manley was paid 600,442 euros ($708,498). FCA paid its late CEO Sergio Marchionne 6.6 million euros ($7.8 million).

Barra’s pay in 2018 included a $2.1 million base salary, the same she was paid in 2017, and $14.5 million in stock awards, according to GM’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission released Thursday. Ford and FCA made those filings earlier this year.  www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/general-motors/2019/04/18/gm-ceo-barra-top-paid-detroit-auto-executive-2018/3508616002/?fbclid=IwAR1e92EVlYjdIqApGQPQd7JdIe8-WrbwnlSnQc654VqUOmsTfQ4BLBj1Xaw

‘We had no warning:’ Wife of GM employee on strike wakes up from surgery without insurance

SPRING HILL, Tenn. (WZTV) — Thousands of workers are still on strike as the United Auto Workers Union and General Motors still have not reached a deal. To make matters worse, the UAW announced GM is cutting health insurance for those striking.

The news is devastating for families, as they now have to worry about how they’re going to pay for everything from medication to major surgery. Union leaders telling FOX 17 News members went in for cancer treatments and to pick up prescriptions on Monday and that’s how they found out they were uninsured.

Laura Prater heard the news when she woke up from a $40,000 stomach operation.

“All of a sudden I am risking getting this major hospital bill we honestly couldn’t afford,” says Prater, whose husband Clayton is an electrician at the GM plant in Spring Hill.   fox17.com/news/local/we-had-no-warning-wife-of-gm-employee-on-strike-wakes-up-from-surgery-without-insurance?fbclid=IwAR35qJEe6Fj3O1idFejitcNETLW5UQ0tbQhizeQZhhwEW4NGD7Vzez4X5Lohttps://www.metrotimes.com/news-hits/archives/2019/08/20/nearly-12000-detroit-homes-lost-water-over-delinquent-payments-since-april?fbclid=IwAR173kQUUVTDMg_47oiRf0uAj-1mLaa8hPekKJeCzXQKd2ur-x6uFXekswk

Here’s how rich every US senator is

The halls of Congress are crowded with millionaires

 

Thomas Piketty Is Back With a 1,200-Page Guide to Abolishing Billionaires (that won’t work)

Thomas Piketty’s last blockbuster helped put inequality at the center of economic debates. Now he’s back with an even longer treatise that explains how governments should fix it –- by upending capitalism.

The French edition of “Capital and Ideology,’’ weighing in at 1,232 pages, comes out on Thursday (English speakers will have to wait till next year for a translation). It’s a sequel to “Capital in the 21st Century,’’ which has sold more than 2.5 million copies in 40 languages since 2013, according to its publisher.

Nobody can be sure how many of that book’s buyers actually got through all 900-something pages. But its impact has been undeniable.

Six years on, there are more politicians pledging to redress the skewed distribution of income and wealth. (One of them, U.S. presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren, worked with two former Piketty aides to design a wealth-tax proposal.)

And it’s become common to hear inequality described as an urgent problem by billionaires like Warren Buffett and Ray Dalio.

“The time has come to exit this phase of making property sacred, to go beyond capitalism,’’ the economist told French magazine L’Obs.

Piketty says he’s improved as a writer. “If you read one of them, read this one,’’ he told L’Obs.

And he says his new book addresses two shortcomings of the last one, which was too focused on Western economies, and didn’t give enough space to the political ideologies that lie behind inequality.  www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-12/piketty-is-back-with-1-200-page-guide-to-abolishing-billionaires

richgibson.com/beyondcapital.htm

How The Loss Of U.S. Psychiatric Hospitals Led To A Mental Health Crisis

A severe shortage of inpatient care for people with mental illness is amounting to a public health crisis, as the number of individuals struggling with a range of psychiatric problems continues to rise.

The revelation that the gunman in the Sutherland Springs, Texas, church shooting escaped from a psychiatric hospital in 2012 is renewing concerns about the state of mental health care in this country. A study published in the journal Psychiatric Services estimates 3.4 percent of Americans — more than 8 million people — suffer from serious psychological problems.

The disappearance of long-term-care facilities and psychiatric beds has escalated over the past decade, sparked by a trend toward deinstitutionalization of psychiatric patients in the 1950s and ’60s, says Dominic Sisti, director of the Scattergood Program for Applied Ethics of Behavioral Health Care at the University of Pennsylvania.

“State hospitals began to realize that individuals who were there probably could do well in the community,” he tells Here & Now‘s Jeremy Hobson. “It was well-intended, but what I believe happened over the past 50 years is that there’s been such an evaporation of psychiatric therapeutic spaces that now we lack a sufficient number of psychiatric beds.”

A concerted effort to grow community-based care options that were less restrictive grew out of the civil rights movement and a series of scandals due to the lack of oversight in psychiatric care, Sisti says. While those efforts have been successful for many, a significant group of people who require structured inpatient care can’t get it, often because of funding issues.   www.npr.org/2017/11/30/567477160/how-the-loss-of-u-s-psychiatric-hospitals-led-to-a-mental-health-crisis?fbclid=IwAR3cCKDlJGSZWxJh8p7b7yDxyaPSeh5Mlo2MpwPzBt522BJWkAxYI4oq0Dc

A blow to US… China to invest $280bn in Iran sectors targeted by sanctions

China is planning to invest $280 billion in Iran’s oil, gas, and petrochemical sectors that are being affected by US sanctions, according to Petroleum Economist magazine.

The energy affairs magazine quoted a senior source who was linked to the Iranian Oil Ministry, as stating that this enormous investment represents a key point in a new agreement between the two countries. This was confirmed during Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s visit to China in late August, to present a roadmap for the strategic comprehensive partnership agreement, which concluded in 2016.

According to the magazine, Beijing also pledged to invest $120 billion in Iran’s oil sector and industrial infrastructure.

This vast amount will be disbursed during the first five years of the agreement’s entry into implementation, with possible additional investments in subsequent similar periods, if both parties agree.

In return, Iran will grant Chinese companies the priority right to participate in tenders for any new, frozen or incomplete projects to develop oil and gas fields, as well as all petrochemical projects, including the provision of technology and staff to implement these projects.   www.middleeastmonitor.com/20190907-a-blow-to-washington-china-to-invest-280-billion-in-iranian-sectors-targeted-by-sanctions/?fbclid=IwAR2Tqno2oGpC9lONvQw8N4UV897RA525ogFgR3-SBapGGR7e05J95FZ7aiY#.XYLFROk4iuA.facebook

The Emergence of Fascism as a Popular Mass Movement and The War on Reason

The Man Behind a Toxic Slogan Promoting White Supremacy

Though the writer had already lived in his castle for a quarter of a century, it was only three years ago that he finally restored it to its original purpose as a fortress.

The writer, Renaud Camus, rebuilt the top 10 feet of the 14th-century tower, giving him an even more commanding view of his surroundings: the village of 40 souls below; the Pyrenees, faintly visible some 100 miles south despite the midsummer haze; and, in every direction, the peaceful, rolling hills of the “eternal France” that he describes as under assault from what he calls hordes of immigrants.

Up in his castle, the France that Mr. Camus imagines has made him one of the most influential thinkers on the far right in his own country and elsewhere. In his writings, he describes an ongoing “invasion” of France by immigrants bent on “conquest” of its white, European population. To him, the immigrants are “colonizing” France by giving birth to more children and making its cities, towns — and even villages — unlivable.

Others have espoused similar ideas. But Mr. Camus’s portrayal of demographic change — le “grand remplacement,” or the supposed “great replacement” of France’s original population by newer arrivals, mostly from Africa — has become an extremist talking point, cited by mass killers in distant parts of the world.   www.nytimes.com/2019/09/20/world/europe/renaud-camus-great-replacement.html

3 UAW picketers hit by truck at GM plant in Swartz Creek

Breaking : @UAW Local 659 president says 3 union strikers, 2 men and one woman, were hit by the same truck driver in separate incidents. It happened outside CCA plant in Swartz Creek. @nbc25fox66  twitter.com/joelfeick/status/1174027177064640512/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fnbc25news.com%2Fnews%2Flocal%2F3-uaw-picketers-struck-by-truck-in-swartz-creek

The Final Lesson Donald Trump Never Learned From Roy Cohn

The unrepentant political hitman who taught a younger Trump how to flout the rules didn’t get away with it forever.

…It’s the past quarter or so, though, of Tyrnauer’s film that is perhaps most salient at this stage of Trump’s first term. It deals with the less discussed but arguably much more trenchant lesson of Cohn’s life—not his decades of dark-arts untouchability but his brutal comeuppance. Cohn did not, in the end, elude the consequences of his actions. He could not, it turned out, get away with everything forever. He was a braggart of a tax cheat, and the Internal Revenue Service closed in; he was an incorrigibly unethical attorney, and he finally was disbarred; and only six weeks after that professional disgrace, six months shy of 60 years old, Cohn was dead of AIDS.  www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/19/roy-cohn-donald-trump-documentary-228144

Degenerate Rulers File: Florida Judge Denies Bid by Epstein Victims to Nullify Non-Prosecution Deal

The suicide of Jeffrey E. Epstein in a New York jail last month has rendered moot the attempts by his victims to invalidate a 12-year-old agreement not to prosecute him on federal charges in connection with a wide-ranging sex trafficking investigation, a federal judge ruled on Monday.

Judge Kenneth A. Marra of the Federal District Court in West Palm Beach, Fla., had ruled this year that prosecutors had violated the law when they failed to tell victims about the 2007 agreement not to prosecute Mr. Epstein, raising the possibility that the agreement could be nullified and that the victims could finally get their day in court. The case continued even after Mr. Epstein was arrested in July on new sex trafficking charges filed in New York.

But Mr. Epstein’s death has removed the basis for the victims’ request to rescind the non-prosecution agreement that has been the subject of so much legal and political scrutiny over the past year, Judge Marra ruled on Monday. In a blow to the victims, the judge also said he could not invalidate the agreement’s protections of any of Mr. Epstein’s potential co-conspirators, theoretically leaving the door open for those people to claim in the future that they are immune from federal prosecution.

However, in a separate filing in the case unsealed on Monday, the federal government told the court in 2011 that the agreement applied only in Florida, not to any charges that might be filed in another state.  www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/us/epstein-ruling-florida.html

The investigation into Jeffrey Epstein was broader than previously known, and involved an allegation of recent travel with girls, newly released documents show.

 

Solidarity for Never

Feds charge another UAW leader, say he received kickbacks

Federal prosecutors Friday charged the former top aide to United Auto Workers Vice President Joe Ashton with receiving $123,000 during a bribery and kickback conspiracy that defrauded union workers.

Jeff Pietrzyk, 74, of Grand Island, New York, is accused of conspiring with Ashton and former UAW official Mike Grimes to receive millions in kickbacks and bribes from UAW vendors who received rigged contracts to produce union-branded watches, jackets and backpacks, according to the court filing.

The contracts were awarded by a UAW training center jointly operated and financed by General Motors Co., which Friday was engaged in negotiations to end a five-day-old labor strike that has sent 46,000 hourly workers to the picket line.

Pietrzyk, who prosecutors say received approximately $123,000 during the alleged conspiracy, is the 11th person charged in a corruption scandal that has implicated the top echelon of the UAW, including President Gary Jones and former President Dennis Williams.

The criminal filing Friday appears designed to pressure Ashton into cooperating with federal investigators, who already have secured Grimes’ conviction, said Peter Henning, a Wayne State University law professor and former federal prosecutor.  www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2019/09/20/feds-charge-ashton-aide-widening-uaw-scandal/2386702001/

Embattled UAW president Gary Jones faces mutiny threat

Talks continue between the striking United Auto Workers and General Motors Co., but they may not at the automaker’s crosstown rivals — not so long as Gary Jones remains president of the union.

In a meeting last Friday of the UAW’s governing International Executive Board, the heads of the union’s Ford Motor Co. and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV bargaining committees questioned whether their teams would bargain with their respective companies if Jones remained president, four sources with knowledge of the situation told The Detroit News.

The brewing mutiny — delivered by Vice President Rory Gamble and Vice President Cindy Estrada, heads of the UAW’s Ford and FCA departments, respectively — suggests a fissure is appearing in the union’s 14-member governing board. One side believes the implication of Jones in a union corruption investigation makes him a liability in bargaining, undercuts his ability to lead and exposes the union to potential federal oversight.   www.detroitnews.com/story/business/columnists/daniel-howes/2019/09/18/howes-embattled-uaw-president-gary-jones-faces-mutiny-threat/2365169001/

Feds aimed guns, handcuffed ex-UAW boss Dennis Williams during raids

Retired United Auto Workers President Dennis Williams was held at gunpoint, ordered to lie down and handcuffed after confronting federal agents who arrived to search his California home in a long-running corruption investigation, three sources told The Detroit News.

Williams was outside smoking a cigar while waiting for agents to arrive at his $610,000 home in the early morning of Aug. 28, an indication he may have been tipped off about a series of raids unfolding across the country that targeted UAW officials, the sources said.

That heightens concern that evidence might have been destroyed or hidden as investigators target the top echelon of one of the country’s largest and most powerful labor unions, legal experts said.  www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2019/09/17/retired-uaw-head-dennis-williams-held-gunpoint-during-federal-raids/2309500001/

UAW official charged in conspiracy advising on worker deal with GM

A United Auto Workers senior officer is advising the team negotiating a new contract with General Motors Co. while facing criminal charges that he conspired with union President Gary Jones and others to steal member dues.

UAW Region 5 Director Vance Pearson attended negotiations in Detroit on Sunday, three days after federal prosecutors charged him with helping orchestrate a more than $1 million conspiracy that involved stealing dues and spending the money on personal luxuries, two sources told The Detroit News.

Pearson, 58, a former Jones aide who also serves on the union’s governing board, is not a member of the UAW-GM national bargaining team. He attended negotiations but did not vote on the strike, which began at 11:59 p.m. Sunday.

Pearson was photographed by The News walking into a meeting at the Renaissance Center on Sunday.

“Are you Vance Pearson?” a reporter with The News asked him.

“No, ma’am,” said Pearson, who is free on bond but expected to attend a federal court hearing related to the criminal case Tuesday in Missouri.

Rich LeTourneau, shop chairman of Local 2209, which represents about 4,000 members at GM’s Fort Wayne Assembly Plant, confirmed that Pearson was at a meeting Sunday with about 200 leaders of local UAW units discussing how to move forward in negotiations with GM. Following the meeting, the UAW called for its members to strike at 11:59 p.m. Sunday. www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/general-motors/2019/09/16/accused-uaw-thief-vance-pearson-negotiates-worker-deal-gm/2341056001/

GM dumped health care for striking workers. That poured gas on fire, expert says

Within 36 hours of the UAW strike against General Motors, the Detroit automaker announced a decision to shift worker health care payments to the union immediately — a strategy that risks dragging out the strike, labor negotiators say.

“They’re pouring gasoline on the fire,” said Harry Katz, the Jack Sheinkman Professor of Collective Bargaining at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University.

“This induces the workers to get more angry. GM thinks this will scare them or get them to rethink the cost of their benefits. I think it’s going to backfire. It’s quick, rash and insensitive.”   www.freep.com/story/money/cars/general-motors/2019/09/18/gm-strike-uaw-health-care/2361671001/

How teachers, hotel workers and supermarket cashiers inspired 50,000 General Motors workers to go on strike.

Successful strikes beget more strikes. When nearly 50,000 General Motors workers walked out at 11:59 p.m. Sunday, it was just the latest in the largest burst of strikes in decades. Last year’s victorious teachers’ strike in West Virginia was the initial spark, helping inspire statewide walkouts in Oklahoma and Arizona as well as strikes in Kentucky, Colorado and Los Angeles.

The G.M. strikers could taste labor’s newfound successes and momentum.

The teachers’ unions felt unusually robust public support, as parents and students marched with them. Union leaders and union members felt a new boldness from the surge of good will. This helped inspire a strike last fall by 7,700 Marriott workers in eight cities, and those workers trumpeted a message that resonated far beyond their industry: that their pay increases were not nearly keeping up with soaring housing costs, so they could not survive on one job.

The hotel workers’ success in turn helped inspire the strike by 30,000 Stop & Shop workers in New England in April. Union leaders there were surprised by the deep community support the grocery workers received   www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/opinion/uaw-gm-strike.html

Regarding Stephen Greenhouse on the UAW Strike vs GM

Former Times labor beat reporter Greenhouse again demonstrates his thin grasp of American unionism in general and the UAW in particular.

This is the crux of “unions.” Labor peace–no strike clauses–is sold by union bosses in exchange for dues income off which the petty-bosses live very well–in effect a bribe. Unions exist to forestall the obvious–-class struggle.  US unions are not what most people think they are.

Greenhouse fails to note that this big crime, under the rubric of “Partners in Production,” that is, the common interests of the Labor Bosses and the Big Bosses, combined against the work force, led to second tier, disgusting, crimes.

Ten top UAW officials, including the current president and the past president, have been either convicted or charged with stealing millions from union funds, or accepting bribes from the auto companies, in exchange for ramming through concession riddled contracts.

What recent labor militancy Greenhouse notes was initiated by rank and file wildcat strikes, opposed by both the labor bosses and the employers.

That is the example workers need to follow, casting corrupt leaders aside and taking direct action on the job.

Dr Rich Gibson

 

Activists are trying to influence labor unions in New York City. Accusations of spying, subterfuge and “red-baiting” followed.

 

Spy versus Spy

Secret F.B.I. Subpoenas Scoop Up Personal Data From Scores of Companies

During the early period of the Cold War, the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, to search for a mind control drug that could be weaponized against enemies.

MK-ULTRA, which operated from the 1950s until the early ’60s, was created and run by a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Journalist Stephen Kinzer, who spent several years investigating the program, calls the operation the “most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control.”

Some of Gottlieb’s experiments were covertly funded at universities and research centers, Kinzer says, while others were conducted in American prisons and in detention centers in Japan, Germany and the Philippines. Many of his unwitting subjects endured psychological torture ranging from electroshock to high doses of LSD, according to Kinzer’s research.  www.npr.org/2019/09/09/758989641/the-cias-secret-quest-for-mind-control-torture-lsd-and-a-poisoner-in-chief?fbclid=IwAR1TozhrmODQYpeJ2JeIbJkA_oFYD1f23lbRi66MW-NorHHcP0_Li2_jTz8

The Magical Mystery Tour

The Supreme Court Considers Mandatory Government Funding of Religious Education

In Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, the Supreme Court will address a question that would have been unthinkable to ask even until quite recently: Can a state be forced to underwrite religious education with taxpayer dollars? Although the court has previously allowed the government to adopt school-voucher programs that provide indirect government aid to religious schools, it has never suggested that the U.S. Constitution somehow requires them to do so — and certainly not in the face of state constitutional rules barring taxpayer funding of religious education.  Yet that is essentially what the petitioners are seeking in Espinoza, the latest in a disturbing line of cases attacking the very foundations of the separation of church and state.    www.aclu.org/blog/religious-liberty/religion-and-public-schools/supreme-court-considers-mandatory-government?fbclid=IwAR0FG4xwKzBuzzxoJo_PTeXiAobU1zAeS-Istp7SJCyTyrwSXXVD1stjXwc

Saudi Arabia executions spike in 2019 – with 134 crucified and beheaded including six who were kids when arrested

The slain were tortured and slaughtered by brutal methods – including crucifixion and beheading, according to a human rights organisation.

The “alarming rise” in state executions comes despite Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s pledge to reduce the use of the death penalty.

In a report presented at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, The Death Penalty Project revealed a further 24 people are at “imminent risk” of execution.

They include three children, prominent political opponents of the crown prince, clerics, and human rights campaigners.

At least six teens were executed this year after being arrested for supposed “crimes” when they were kids, the report claims.

An event hosted by The Death Penalty Project highlighted the “illegal and arbitrary executions” in Saudi Arabia as well as human rights abuses for both detainees and their families.  www.thesun.co.uk/news/9935530/saudi-arabia-executions-increase-134-crucified-beheaded/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebarweb

Judge lets Christian group pursue suit against WSU

A Christian student group at Wayne State University can move forward with its religious discrimination lawsuit against the school, a federal judge in Port Huron ruled Friday.

The InterVarsity Christian Fellowship sued the university last year after the school derecognized the group because of the organization’s policy mandating that its leaders must be Christian.

Wayne State argued that the group’s rule violates the university’s nondiscrimination policy. The school said it requires the same policy for Hindu and Jewish campus groups.

InterVarsity filed a 20-count complaint alleging that Wayne State violated its First Amendment rights to free speech and to freely exercise its religious beliefs.

Wayne State recertified InterVarsity three days after the group sued March 6, 2018.  www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/wayne-county/2019/09/20/judge-lets-christian-group-pursue-suit-against-wayne-state/2388049001/

Detroit’s female genital mutilation case takes a big legal hit

Activists fighting to end female genital mutilation worldwide are reeling at the latest decision involving Detroit’s FGM case, in which a doctor is charged with cutting the genitals of nine 7-year-old girls who cried and bled as another woman held them down.

The historic case has had a series of setbacks.

First, a federal judge in Detroit declared the nation’s FGM law unconstitutional.

Then, the Department of Justice said it wouldn’t appeal, concluding the 1996 FGM statute was too weak to defend.

Congress tried to intervene and fight for the law, but got shot down.

On Friday, the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals denied a motion by congressional leaders to defend the constitutionality of the FGM ban. It also granted the government’s and the defendant’s request to voluntarily dismiss the case.

Shannon Smith, attorney for the lead defendant in the case, Dr. Jumana Nagarwala, said the appeals court got it right.  www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2019/09/19/congress-female-genital-mutilation-detroit-michigan-prosecution-doctors/2369275001/

Jesus-Loving Former Ohio Mayor: The 4-Year-Old Girl I Raped Was a “Willing Participant”

The Best and Worst Things in the History of the World

Huck

Billions of North American birds have vanished

North America’s birds are disappearing from the skies at a rate that’s shocking even to ornithologists. Since the 1970s, the continent has lost 3 billion birds, nearly 30% of the total, and even common birds such as sparrows and blackbirds are in decline, U.S. and Canadian researchers report online this week in Science. The findings raise fears that some familiar species could go the way of the passenger pigeon, a species once so abundant that its extinction in early 1900s seemed unthinkable. And the results, from the most comprehensive inventory ever done for North American birds, point to ecosystems in disarray because of habitat loss and other factors that have yet to be pinned down. Researchers hope these numbers will be a wake-up science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6459/1228call for people and policymakers to take action to protect habitats and stop the decline.

John Brown Farm State Historic Site

High in New York State’s Adirondack Mountains is the home and grave of abolitionist John Brown. Many Americans know the song “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,” but most do not associate the words with this simple farm at North Elba, New York.

On the night of October 16, 1859, Brown and his followers assaulted the U.S. Arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, planning to use the captured arms in an extensive campaign for the liberation of the slaves in the South. Brown was captured on October 18, 1859, imprisoned at Charlestown, Virginia, tried by the Commonwealth of Virginia, and hanged on December 2, 1859. His body was returned to North Elba and was buried in front of his home on December 8, 1859. The remains of several of Brown’s followers, who fought and died at Harper’s Ferry, were moved to this small graveyard in 1899.

Brown’s final prophesy–“I, John Brown, am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done,”–was soon to be realized in the Civil War.  parks.ny.gov/historic-sites/29/details.aspx

 

White supremacist accidentally sets own head on fire while trying to burn down synagogue (video within)

Tristan Morgan had ‘an obsession with abhorrent antisemitic material’, say prosecutors

A far-right extremist accidentally set himself on fire while trying to burn down an historic synagogue.

Tristan Morgan was spotted walking away with a petrol can in his hand as smoke spewed from the 18th century building in Exeter, Devon, last summer.     CTV footage shows the 52-year-old using a small axe to break a window of the building before pouring liquid through it from a green petrol can.www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/exeter-synagogue-fire-video-far-right-extremist-court-tristan-morgan-a8990876.html?fbclid=IwAR1BuU7BmePa0fOHY-J6KNM8F9Gp7J9qz0h4wnG5-_bzmx3bGctqfdxA7k0

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn2EATepi6Q&fbclid=IwAR2-epBqZOQ90LAcf3EBnUn9h054tQn0MMYN3llZYybFEQdJBMbzt9_thOo

 

www.facebook.com/BobMenery/videos/1818032468342526/?t=99

So Long