The strike continues. Credit: Billie Winter

No deal at Boeing: Boeing Machinists voted Wednesday to reject the company’s latest contract offer, continuing their strike that began on September 13. According to the Seattle Times, some union members said the deal failed to deliver high enough wage increases; others are holding out for the return of their pensions. (The company claims pensions are a nonstarter.) Machinists rejected the proposal with 64 percent voting no. The deal would have increased general wages 35 percent over four years, raised Boeing’s 401(k) contribution, and guaranteed four percent annual bonuses.  

Of course, the strike isn’t Boeing’s only problem: The company reported this week that it lost more than $6 billion last quarter. New CEO Kelly Ortberg says company executives should spend more time on the factory floor to “prevent the festering of issues and work better together to identify, fix, and understand root cause,” KING 5 reports. 

For the West Seattle heads: The Sound Transit board may vote today on the route and station locations for light rail to West Seattle. The answer we won’t get? How the agency plans to cover the rising cost of that line, pegged last month at around $7 billion. 

Closing arguments in Kroger-Albertsons merger trial: In case you forgot about this one, Kroger and Albertsons, two companies that control more than half of the grocery stores in the state, want to merge. The Federal Trade Commission and Attorney General Bob Ferguson aren’t having it. They argue the merger would mean less competition and higher prices. The two sides made their closing arguments this week, so the decision now rests in the hands of a judge. That said, court-watchers expect a federal ruling in December that could potentially supersede any state rulings. 

Seattle’s tech industry continues to cut jobs: In pursuit of the almighty “right-sizing/reorganizing,” Seattle’s tech industry dropped 6,100 jobs this year, a four percent decline, the Puget Sound Business Journal reports.

Did you know our boot-licking city council is actually held hostage by a “very militant wing of the labor movement?” So says the Seattle Times Editorial Board and the owner of Moshi Moshi Sushi, who are still whining that the council failed to protect the City’s two-tiered minimum wage that allows “small” businesses (who employ fewer than 500 workers) to pay less than larger businesses. The Ed Board is big mad that Council Member Joy Hollingsworth folded immediately under a wave of pressure and that Mayor Bruce Harrell “didn’t budge” to help restaurant owners pay workers less. Their conclusion: “The loudest voices” still run the show at City Hall. We wish. 

More media critique: KUOW published a glowing summary of the work Republican gubernatorial candidate Dave Reichert did to catch the Green River Killer, a case that elevated his political career. In the piece, they heavily imply that he deserves credit for the arrest of Gary Ridgway. The story’s image features a collage with two photos of Reichert next to Ridgway’s mug shot. The following lines, emphasis mine, suggest that he was integral to the case: “It wasn’t until science caught up, when Reichert was sheriff, that the state crime lab was able to incriminate Ridgway….But those policing tools, painstaking and exhausting, teed up the scientific discovery.” 

While Reichert did reopen the case when he became sheriff, his supervisor told the Seattle PI that the noted homophobe and transphobe “was more of an impediment to the investigation,” as The Stranger reminded readers back in 2010. According to his supervisor, Reichert’s police work was shoddy, and his obsession with a different suspect took up valuable time and resources, and it almost bungled the case: 

KUOW’s reporting mentions Reichert’s obsession with the wrong guy, but it effectively dismisses a six-part Seattle Times series about the investigation’s bad police work by handing Reichert the microphone so that he could basically say, YOU DON’T KNOW, YOU WEREN’T THERE. Nice work!

Another woman accuses Trump of groping: A former model named Stacey Williams says convicted sex offender Jeffery Epstein walked her into Trump Tower in 1993 to meet Trump, who promptly “pulled her toward him and started groping her,” the Guardian reports. Williams said the two men shared a smile after the incident. Though she’d shared parts the story before, she delivered the details on a call with Survivors for Kamala, which supports the Harris campaign. 

Harris admits the obvious: At a CNN town hall, someone asked Vice President Kamala Harris if Donald Trump fit the mold of a fascist, and she agreed. “A growing number of Trump’s former top aides” join her in this assessment, including former Chief of Staff John Kelly, according to the Washington Post. She went on to call him “increasingly unhinged and unstable,” and she warned (now I’m paraphrasing) that the so-called ‘adults in the room’ will not stand ready to smack the nuclear football out of his hands, making him more “dangerous” than ever. 

“I need the kind of generals that Hitler had,” Trump exclaimed in 2020 during a private conversation at the White House, according to the Atlantic. The magazine also points to a passage in The Divider: Trump in the White House, which recounts a time when Trump asked his former chief of staff, John Kelly, why he couldn’t “be like the German generals.” Kelly reportedly said that “that German generals ‘tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.'” Trump replied, “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him.” 

Despite the obvious: Nate Silver thinks Trump will win, but he also thinks you shouldn’t trust that bet. He argues Trump might over-perform the polls due to Dem losses in party identification and the “Bradley effect,” or, to update the term, the “Hillary Clinton” effect, where a lot of “undecided voters” are really just voters who don’t want to say they don’t want to vote for a woman president. On the other hand, he argues, pollsters could be making any number of errors, and marginal voters might not show up, which could hand Harris the victory. In the face of uncertainty, there’s only one answer: Vote. How? We got you covered. 

Terror attack in Turkey: An attack at Turkey’s state-run aerospace company killed five people and injured 22, CNN reports. Videos showed an explosion and assailants carrying guns. Although a group has not claimed responsibility, Turkey’s defense minister blamed the Kurdistan Workers’ Party and the country hit PKK targets in Iraq and Syria.  

The US and Canada sanction pro-Palestine prisoner group: Samidoun can no longer move money around to “raise awareness and provide resources about Palestinian political prisoners, their conditions, their demands, and their work for freedom for themselves, their fellow prisoners, and their homeland,” Al Jazeera reports. The countries say the group funds the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which both countries designate as a “terrorist group.” 

Don’t forget about the jab: People 65 and older and those who are immunocompromised should get a second dose of the latest COVID vaccine, the CDC says. (And the rest of us should get one, too.) 

Arizona man arrested after shooting at Democratic Party office: No one was injured in the shooting at a Phoenix-area campaign office, but police say the 60-year-old man had more than 120 guns, 250,000 rounds, and a grenade launcher. They believe he was “preparing to commit an act of mass casualty,” the New York Times reports.

Rich Smith is The Stranger's former News Editor. He writes about politics, books, and performance. You can read his poems at www.richsmithpoetry.com

59 replies on “Slog AM: Boeing Machinists Reject Contract, Seattle’s Tech Industry Keeps Cutting Jobs, Trump Admires Hitler’s Generals and Faces Another Groping Allegation”

  1. @50: Arab Israelis have served in the Knesset, so your claim that Israel is “not a democratic state” shows you’re relying on your own definition of “democratic,” just as you have with “apartheid” and “genocide.”

    “…inevitably results from colonial oppression…”

    That’s hilarious, coming from someone who has cited the results of discriminatory imperial policies in the Palestine of centuries past as a justification for saying Jews have no right to live in what is now Israel.

  2. @50: “literally dozens of anti-Arab discriminatory laws in Israel”

    lol, false!

    “law of return for which any and only Jews and their offspring qualify, while the citizenship law denies the right of return to Palestinians Arab who fled for their lives”

    Israel is the homeland of the Jewish nation, not the homeland of the Arab nation. However, the Arabs who chose to remain in Israel under Jewish sovereignty enjoy the same rights as every other Israeli citizen. For the Arabs who chose not to remain in Israel under Jewish sovereignty, there may yet be a state for them, too, someday. One condition is that they will have to give up trying to conquer Israel by force of arms. Many non-Israeli Arabs are willing to accept this condition, but many others are not. (And you admire them for it, ha ha! ☺️)

    “By law, over 93% of the land can only be transferred/leased by Jews. etc”

    Ha ha ha! This one was such a whopper I had trouble figuring out what you were even talking about at first. 😂 I extended my usual charity toward you and presumed you were misunderstanding actual facts and laws instead of simply making them up whole cloth. With that charitable perspective in mind, I think maybe you are under the mistaken impression that the Israel Land Administration only leases land to Jews. That is false. It leases land to Israeli citizens and Jewish non-residents. But as anyone with even the most cursory knowledge of the Middle East knows, Jews comprise fewer than three-quarters of the citizens of Israel. Non-Jewish Israeli citizens are free to lease land on exactly the same terms as Jewish ones.

    I think what’s actually going on here is that you have such a unique and particular hatred for Israel that you eager to believe all sorts of untrue things about Israel. It really is anti-semitism, Averagebob, it is not just harmless and fair-minded criticism. 😀 But I suspect you knew that already! 😉

  3. the Israel Land Administration is half controlled by the government and the other half by the Jewish National Fund, a Zionist organization established in 1901 to collect funds for the purpose of purchasing land for the exclusive benefit of the Jewish people

    https://www.adalah.org/en/law/view/533

    https://www.adalah.org/en/law/view/529

    https://www.adalah.org/en/law/view/538

    https://www.adalah.org/en/law/view/537

    Israel: Discriminatory Land Policies Hem in Palestinians

    Human Rights Watch

    Decades of land confiscations and discriminatory planning policies have confined many Palestinian citizens to densely populated towns and villages that have little room to expand. Meanwhile, the Israeli government nurtures the growth and expansion of neighboring predominantly Jewish communities, many built on the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed in 1948. Many small Jewish towns also have admissions committees that effectively bar Palestinians from living there.

    “Israeli policy on both sides of the Green Line restricts Palestinians to dense population centers while maximizing the land available for Jewish communities,” said Eric Goldstein, acting Middle East executive director at Human Rights Watch. “These practices are well-known when it comes to the occupied West Bank, but Israeli authorities are also enforcing discriminatory land practices inside Israel.”

    [..]

    The Israeli state directly controls 93 percent of the land in the country, including occupied East Jerusalem. A government agency, the Israel Land Authority (ILA), manages and allocates these state lands. Almost half the members of its governing body belong to the Jewish National Fund (JNF), whose explicit mandate is to develop and lease land for Jews and not any other segment of the population. The fund owns 13 percent of Israel’s land, which the state is mandated to use “for the purpose of settling Jews.”

    Beginning in 1948 and in subsequent decades, Israeli authorities seized hundreds of thousands of dunams of land from Palestinians (10 dunams equals 1 hectare). Much of the confiscation took place between 1949, when Israel placed most Palestinians in Israel under military rule, and 1966, when military rule ended. During this period, Israeli authorities confined Palestinians in Israel to dozens of enclaves and severely restricted their movement. They also used various military regulations and new laws to seize land belonging to Palestinians who had become refugees or Palestinian citizens who were internally displaced, including by declaring land to be “absentee property,” taking it over, and later converting it to state land. One historian estimates that of the 370 Jewish towns and villages established by the Israeli government between 1948 and 1953, 350 were built on land confiscated from Palestinians.

    https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/israel-discriminatory-land-policies-hem-palestinians

  4. “Land policies in more recent years have not only failed to reverse the earlier land seizures, but in many cases further restricted the land available for residential growth. Since 1948, the government has authorized the creation of more than 900 “Jewish localities” in Israel, but none for Palestinians except for a handful of government-planned townships and villages in the Negev and Galilee, created largely to concentrate previously dispersed Bedouin communities.”

    https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/israel-discriminatory-land-policies-hem-palestinians

    ergo, Thumpus the thug is either extremely poor;y informed or a liar. I lean towards the later because I am generous.

  5. @54: Wait, are you conflating localities with all possible land leases? And what happened to the claim that 93% of Israel’s land is reserved for Jews? Ha ha ha, what a mess, Average Bob!

  6. 55 Is that all you’ve got?

    Anyone with an ounce of good faith would acknowledge that the law of return combined with the Absentees’ property law, the land acquisition law and the Israel land administration law (links at 53) are the discriminatory legal framework for dispossessing and preventing Palestinian Arabs of their right to the land. It explains how Arab land ownership decreased by 94% within the green line since 1948. It’s called colonial ethnic cleansing. Your weak posturing won’t affect any of it.

  8. @57: averagebob’s revisionist zeal could make Winston Smith professionally jealous. My favorite recent examples, @50, are, “the citizenship law denies the right of return to Palestinians Arab who fled for their lives during conflicts,” and, “revokes the citizenship of those who acquired residency in neighboring Arab states.” The latter is actually standard practice in most countries, which is why bilateral dual citizenships of any kind are rare, and the former is easily corrected, simply by adding the words he omitted: “… who fled for their lives during conflicts THEY’D STARTED.”

    His obsession with Israeli land-use laws comes in the context of his repeatedly citing the results of anti-Jewish land use laws by prior empires as ‘proof’ the Jews should be considered aliens in what is now Israel.

  9. from the Chris Hedges Report:

    Genocidal Scorecard

    The latest U.N. report chronicles Israel’s advances in its genocidal assault in Gaza. Israel is intent, the report warns, on expelling the Palestinians, recolonizing Gaza and turning on the West Bank.

    A United Nations report, published on Monday,

    https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/n24/279/68/pdf/n2427968.pdf

    lays out in chilling detail the advances made by Israel in Gaza as it seeks to eradicate “the very existence of the Palestinian people in Palestine.” This genocidal project, the report ominously warns, “is now metastasizing to the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.”

    The Nakba or “catastrophe,” which in 1948 saw Zionist militias drive 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, carry out more than 70 massacres and seize 78 percent of historic Palestine, has returned on steroids. It is the next and, perhaps, final chapter in “a long-term intentional, systematic, State-organized forced displacement and replacement of the Palestinians.”

    Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, who issued the report, titled “Genocide as colonial erasure,” makes an urgent appeal to the international community to impose a full arms embargo and sanctions on Israel until the genocide of Palestinians is halted.

    She calls on Israel to accept a permanent ceasefire. She demands that Israel, as required by international law and U.N. resolutions, withdraw its military and colonists from Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

    At the very least, Israel, unchecked, should be formally recognized as an apartheid state and persistent violator of international law, Albanese states. The U.N. should reactivate the Special Committee Against Apartheid to address the situation in Palestine, and Israel’s membership in the U.N. should be suspended. Short of these interventions, Israel’s goal, Albanese warns, will likely come into fruition.

    “This ongoing genocide is doubtlessly the consequence of the exceptional status and protracted impunity that has been afforded to Israel.” she writes. “Israel has systematically and flagrantly violated international law, including Security Council resolutions and [International Criminal Court] ICJ orders.

    This has emboldened the hubris of Israel and its defiance of international law. As the ICC Prosecutor has warned, ‘if we do not demonstrate our willingness to apply the law equally, if it is seen as applied selectively, we will be creating the conditions of its complete collapse. This is the true risk we face at this perilous moment.’”

    –by Chris Hedges; Oct 30, 2024

    oodles More:

    https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/genocidal-scorecard

    who ya gonna Believe?

    tS’s right-wing contingent

    of Pro-Genocidal supporters

    Or the former NYT Middle Eastern

    Bureau Chief, who resigned rather

    echo the nyt’s full-throated Support

    for the Cheney/bush Invasion of Iraq?

    tough Choice,

    eh?

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