Inside the UAW’s Southern StrategyThe UAW has pledged to spend US$40 million through 2026 to expand its ranks to include more auto and electric battery workers, including many employed in the South, where the industry is quickly gaining ground. Based on my five decades of experience as a union organizer and labor historian, I anticipate that, recent momentum aside, the UAW will face stiff resistance from Toyota, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Benz and the other big foreign automakers that operate in the South. The pushback is also coming from Southern politicians, many of whom have expressed concern that UAW success would undermine the region’s carefully crafted approach to economic development.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/12/inside-the-uaws-southern-strategy/War on Gaza: All signs point to a strategic defeat for IsraelFor 75 years, the western world was indifferent. But this war is forcing Israel’s western backers to see the full horrors of the crimes being committed in a campaign they described five months ago as just. Even a progressive critic of Israel like US Senator Bernie Sanders said five months ago that the war against Hamas was just. The degree of brutality and glee shown by Israeli soldiers as they go on their daily killing sprees; starving Gaza, and then dropping leaflets in Arabic telling Palestinians to feed the needy; killing 400 people waiting for aid, and then vowing to flood Gaza with aid; all of this is too much to sweep under the carpet when this war stops. A rubicon has been crossed. With this war, Israel has entered the elite rank of pariah states. It is now the ugliest of the ugly. It’s impossible to forgive. It cannot be justified, nor can it be put into context. Liberal Zionism has become a contradiction in terms. It’s too much of a stretch. Acting like this, Israel has become not the home of a beleaguered people persecuted around the world for millennia, but the Fort Knox of Jewish supremacism, the natural heir to white supremacists. This is having a transformational effect on Jewish people worldwide, in whose name and common past these crimes are being committed.
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