With this UAW Win, the PATCO-Reagan Anti-Union Era Is Over

The United Auto Workers have officially landed big wins at the Big Three.

The union reached a tentative deal with General Motors on Monday, less than 48 hours after the autoworkers union ramped up its strike at the Spring Hill Assembly plant, the company’s largest manufacturing plant in North America.

As a result, General Motors employees will receive some of their biggest gains in decades, with a 25 percent pay bump in base wages over four and a half years, reported The Washington Post. The other terms of the deal are not yet known.

“I think it’s great,” President Joe Biden told reporters as he boarded Air Force One on Monday. The Biden administration had become increasingly involved in the negotiations as the six-week strike wore on, even grabbing a bullhorn at one GM strike in September to tell workers to “stick with it,” reported the Associated Press.

The fruits of the collective agreement are a sign that the anti-union era sparked more than 40 years ago is over. In 1981, the Reagan administration crushed a Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, or PATCO, strike, firing federal employees who refused to return to work and turning the tide against American labor relations for decades to come.

The deal is the third big win for the union in the last week. On Wednesday, UAW negotiated a historic arrangement with Ford that would increase salaries by 25 percent over five years and bring back major benefits lost during the Great Recession. Then, on Saturday, Jeep manufacturer Stellantis also gave in and offered a similar deal.

Altogether, nearly 50,000 employees out of 150,000 union members picketed the Big Three in a series of walkouts that started September 15.

UAW President Shawn Fain used an escalating bargaining strategy to achieve the contracts, keeping a reserve of employees at work while peeling some out as the weeks grew. For the first time, the union negotiated with all three auto companies simultaneously, leveraging the threat of walkouts at major auto plants to create a bidding war between the manufacturers. Then, when talks stalled, Fain expanded the strike.

As a part of the agreement, workers will return to their jobs while the union organizes ratification votes, according to Reuters. That process is expected to take a week or more, though if workers reject the arrangement the strike will go on.

The National Rifle Association posted an old video of Mike Johnson opposing gun safety measures, essentially bragging about how it has the new House speaker in its pocket.

The NRA’s Sunday night tweet was also just a few days after a gunman killed 18 people in Maine, the biggest mass shooting in the state’s history and the country’s deadliest mass shooting of the year thus far.

In the 2019 video, Johnson—who is an NRA member—says that gun ownership is one of Americans’ “fundamental freedoms” and accuses Democrats of infringing on basic rights by trying to pass gun safety regulations.

“As NRA members, we understand the Second Amendment is grounded in fundamental freedoms,” Johnson says. “We make the point on the Hill all the time when these gun bills come up and when Democrats are trying to push their agenda on the people. We remind them that the Second Amendment is grounded in those fundamental freedoms―those inalienable rights that we have to personal liberty and personal security and private property.”

The NRA’s boastful tweet came at the tail end of a weekend that saw 12 different mass shootings, according to the Gun Violence Archive. The nonprofit defines a mass shooting as an attack when at least four people are injured or killed, excluding the shooter.

Between Friday and Sunday, shooters opened fire in Indianapolis, Chicago, Atlanta, and Tampa, as well as cities in Texas, Kansas, Maryland, New Mexico, Ohio, and Johnson’s home state of Louisiana.

Last week, the state of Maine waited in terror during a two-day hunt for a man who killed 18 people and wounded 13 more in the town of Lewiston. Authorities found the shooter’s body in a trailer on Friday. He appeared to have shot himself.

There have been 580 mass shootings in 2023 so far, which averages to about two mass shootings per day. These attacks have resulted in 616 people killed, 2,426 people injured, and countless people traumatized.

But according to Johnson, “at the end of the day, the problem is the human heart.”

“It’s not the guns, it’s not the weapons,” he insisted on Fox News a day after the Maine shooting.

Donald Trump’s social media addiction may soon cost him big time.

Judge Tanya Chutkan on Sunday reinstated an October 16 gag order on the former president in his federal election subervsion trial, denying a request to freeze the order while his defense scrambles to appeal it, noting that the order will remain in effect while a federal court undergoes its review, reported The New York Times.

“The First Amendment rights of participants in criminal proceedings must yield, when necessary, to the orderly administration of justice,” Chutkan wrote in a statement issued alongside the original order, which still permitted Trump to critique the current government and its administration, to claim his prosecution is politically motivated, to claim his innocence, or to make statements criticizing current political rivals in the presidential election.

But just hours after the order was brought back, Trump ran his mouth on social media—attacking both Judge Chutkan and a potential key witness in the case.

“I have just learned that the very Biased, Trump Hating Judge in D.C., who should have RECUSED herself due to her blatant and open loathing of your favorite President, ME, has reimposed a GAG ORDER which will put me at a disadvantage against my prosecutorial and political opponents,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Mere hours before, Trump also attacked one of the potential witnesses in his D.C. trial, which hinges on four felony charges related to his effort to subvert the 2020 election: former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr.

“I called Bill Barr Dumb, Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy, a RINO WHO COULDN’T DO THE JOB. He just didn’t want to be Impeached, which the Radical Left Lunatics were preparing to do. I was tough on him in the White House, for good reason, so now this Moron says about me, to get even, “his verbal skills are limited.” Well, that’s one I haven’t heard before. Tell that to the biggest political crowds in the history of politics, by far. Bill Barr is a LOSER,” Trump posted.

Either Trump won’t learn his lesson or he just doesn’t care about the consequences. The former president was also slapped with a gag order in his New York bank fraud trial with Judge Arthur Engoron, which Trump has violated twice so far, first earning a $5,000 fine and then a subsequent $10,000 fine along with the threat of jail time.

Israel’s military began a heavy aerial bombardment of Gaza after nightfall on Friday and announced that it is “expanding” its ground operations into the territory—but did not declare a full-scale ground invasion that has been expected for weeks.

Internet and phone service in Gaza has been mostly, if not entirely, cut off amid the bombing. The International Committee of the Red Cross cannot reach its medical personnel. A Washington Post reporter said the paper cannot reach its colleagues, either.

Some people, communicating via satellite phones, have described the attack as the “heaviest bombardment yet,” according to independent journalist Sharif Kouddous.

“People can’t call ambulances or civil defense. We are being bombed in an unprecedented manner,” said an unidentified journalist at a Gaza hospital, according to a translation by The Nation’s Palestinian correspondent, Mohammed El-Kurd. “The sky around us just lights up [with explosions], and no one knows what’s going on.”

The Post reported earlier Friday that the Biden administration has urged Israel to rethink its plans, backing a “surgical” operation reliant on drone strikes and special operations forces instead of an all-out ground invasion, which they fear could lead to mass Palestinian civilian casualties and the loss of Israeli soldiers. Such an invasion would also threaten to upend negotiations with Hamas to free around 200 hostages.

It remains to be seen if what’s occurring tonight is a limited ground operation, as the U.S. has pushed for, or something worse.

Since Hamas’s October 7 attack, Israel has cut off access to water, food, and power in Palestinian territories. Israeli attacks have killed at least 7,028 people in Gaza and injured more than 18,000, according to figures from the Gaza Health Ministry. On the Israeli side of the conflict, more than 1,400 people have been killed and another 5,400 injured.

A poll published Friday found that only 49 percent of Israelis want to hold off on the ground offensive against Hamas, down from 65 percent last week.

Representative Dean Phillips announced Thursday that he’s opening a bid as President Joe Biden’s Democratic primary challenger. But as the election landscape shapes up to be another razor-thin rematch between Biden and former President Donald Trump, the effort begs the question: What the hell is Phillips thinking?

Phillips, a multimillionaire former chairman and co-owner of Talenti Gelato, and heir to one of America’s largest liquor dynasties, was elected to Minnesota’s 3rd congressional district in 2018—the first Democrat to win the seat in nearly 60 years.

And for the last 15 months, Phillips has been campaigning for “prominent young Democrats” to challenge the 80-year-old president, reported The Atlantic, believing it’s time for Biden, who he has described as a “president of great competence and success,” to “pass the torch.” Failing to find that candidate, the 54-year-old Phillips has apparently decided to throw himself into the race.

“Democrats are telling me that they want not a coronation but they want a competition,” Phillips said during an interview on CBS’s Face the Nation.

He might be onto something. Although the self-described eternal optimist’s chances of unseating the incumbent president are slim, they’re not zero. A recent poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that 77 percent of Americans believe Biden is too old to be effective for another presidential term.

That same poll found that Democrats thought both Biden and Trump, age 77, were too old for the gig, while just 28 percent of Republicans felt that Trump’s age would make him ineffective for another term.

Yet if Phillips somehow, against all odds, beats Biden in the Democratic primary—will he be popular enough to keep Trump from office? It’s probably safe to assume that this is the first time many Americans are even hearing about Phillips.

The Democratic establishment is also still firmly behind Biden.

“Biden’s already beaten Trump once,” Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Jim Messina, told The Atlantic. “He’s the one guy who can beat him again.”