Modern History (1800 – present)

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Autoworkers Staged Their First Big Strike in the 1930s. Here’s How They Won.
September 20, 2023

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) On Tuesday, leaders of the striking United Auto Workers vowed to expand their labor action against the Big Three automakers Friday if contract talks break down. Now in its second week, the strike has drawn widespread attention, but it’s only the latest indication of the broader resurgence of union organizing by the likes of Starbucks workers, big city teachers’ unions, Marvel digital effects workers, Uber and Lyft drivers, and, of course, Hollywood actors and screenwriters. In August, the threat of a United Parcel Service strike with Teamster support resulted in a new contract, and some of Amazon’s massive warehouses are simmering with labor unrest.

“It was an exhilarating period and it gave one new faith in what we call democracy.”

Yet all of today’s labor organizers stand on the shoulders of their forebears who, during the mid-1930s, amid the depths of the Great Depression, established or expanded key unions in the steel and auto industries and founded all of the Hollywood guilds. Central to many of their advances was a fresh tactic: “sit down strikes,” wherein workers would stay put in their factories and workspaces, not to be easily dislodged. This strategy brought about widespread victories, benefiting everyone from Woolworth’s lunch-counter workers to (as we’ll see) assembly line workers at GM and Ford. Unions remained powerful for decades, although a concerted effort by business leaders and their Republican friends in Congress, and moving of jobs overseas, would ultimately erode their membership gains. Today, only about 10 percent of US employees belong to a union.

The following commentary, adapted from my recent oral history book and PBS film, Memorial Day Massacre: Workers Die, Film Buried, takes us back to that earlier era and tells the story of how things went down in the 1930s.

The article continues with comments from Howard Zinn, John Hope Franklin, Victor Reuther, Studs Terkel, and Gore Vidal.

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... ssion/

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Wow.

22 years, and I'd never seen this clip before.

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Russia’s Slaughter of Indigenous People in Alaska Tells Us Something Important About Ukraine
by Casey Michael
October 27, 2023

Introduction:

(Politico) In the racial-reckoning summer of 2020, local leaders in a small American town gathered for a contentious vote on whether to take down a statue that honored a man who was, as one assessment read, “steeped in racial division, violence and injustice.” Would they join local leaders from cities in Virginia, Alabama and other states to remove a memorial praising a figure who symbolized a “historical trauma” that still caused anguish and anger among their constituents?

The town council listened, and debated, and finally decided. By a margin of 6-1, the seven members voted to join the floodtide of decisions elsewhere to take down another symbol of historic oppression.

This statue, though, had nothing to do with the Confederacy or the Civil War. Rather, this vote took place in Alaska, in the small coastal town of Sitka (population 8,400), located on an island about halfway between Anchorage and Vancouver, British Columbia. And the statue was of a Russian, a merchant by the name of Aleksandr Baranov, a key figure in Russia’s conquest of Alaska over 200 years ago. The resolution authorizing the removal said Baranov, who was Alaska’s first colonial governor, “directly over[saw] enslavement of Tlingit and Aleut people,” a policy that was “often justified under a theory of racial and cultural superiority.” Baranov’s criminality — which included, among other things, the “violation of Native women” and “murder and theft of Indigenous property” — was so depraved that local Tlingit nicknamed him “No Heart.”

The removal of Baranov’s statue never cracked into the national news cycle. And maybe that’s understandable, given the protests rocking the rest of the country at the time. But it’s also understandable for a related reason: Russia’s colonization of Alaska — and the rampant violence, spiraling massacres and decimation of local Alaska Native populations that came along with it — is hardly well-known among the broader American body politic. Even with new reassessments of European colonization of North America, as well as the recent spike in scholarship regarding the U.S.’s bloodied imperialism across the American West, Russia’s role in smothering and seizing Alaska stands apart as an overlooked chapter of colonialism on the continent.

Read more here: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine ... 0123352

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How Gilded Age Lawmakers Saved America From Plutocracy
by Daniel Schulman
November 13, 2023

Introduction:

(Mother Jones) On December 3, 1901, in his first annual message to Congress, Teddy ¬Roosevelt¬¬ began to articulate the new anti-¬monopoly doctrine that would define his presidency. “Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions,” he said in the address, read aloud to Congress by a succession of clerks who took turns slogging through the 80-page, leatherbound volume, “and it is therefore our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.” He asserted that the federal government should assume “power of supervision and regulation over all corporations doing an interstate business.”

The US economy had by then undergone decades of consolidation in which entire industries—oil, steel, sugar, tobacco, whiskey—were swallowed up into trusts, monopolistic arrangements wherein unlimited corporate assets, operating in a multitude of states, could be controlled by a single entity. America’s railroads, the arterial system of the economy, weren’t yet an outright monopoly, but things were barreling in that direction—they were ruled largely by six factions, which commanded about 165,000 of the nation’s 204,000 miles of trackage.

Northern Securities, formed in November 1901 under the permissive corporate laws of New Jersey, represented a new leap in the concentration of railroad ownership. This massive holding company (a new twist on the trust concept) controlled the Northern Pacific; Great Northern; and Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy railroads, whose lines collectively dominated northwestern rail traffic, and its board contained representatives of many of the six major railroad interests, including the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Goulds.

To Roosevelt, this budding monopoly was an irresistible test case of the government’s regulatory clout. Several months after his speech, his administration sued to dismantle Northern Securities under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, an 1890 law that had mostly lain dormant since its passage. The case eventually rose to the Supreme Court, which, in March 1904, sided with the administration in a 5–4 decision. Roosevelt went on to use the Sherman Act—and the precedent set by the Northern Securities case—to sue dozens of trusts, including John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly.

Read more here: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2 ... tocracy/

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60 years ago today...

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/22/poli ... index.html

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Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (left), US President Bill Clinton (middle), and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (right) at the White House in 1993.

The Oslo Accords were a pair of agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO): the Oslo I Accord, signed in Washington, D.C., in 1993; and the Oslo II Accord, signed in Taba, Egypt, in 1995.

A large portion of the Palestinian population, including various Palestinian militant groups, staunchly opposed the Oslo Accords; Palestinian-American philosopher Edward Said described them as a "Palestinian Versailles".

Far-right Israelis were also opposed to the Oslo Accords, and Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by a right-wing Israeli extremist for signing them.



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