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Ending a nearly six-week long strike, one which Wall Street analysts said was adversely impacting the US economy and would hit the October payrolls reports, late on Friday workers at General Motors’ US plants approved a new labor deal following contentious negotiations over pay and production plans, ending the longest work stoppage at GM since 1970.

In the Friday vote Friday, members of the United Auto Workers union ratified an agreement that will increase hourly wages and keep open a plant that GM planned to idle early next year, but also allow the carmaker to move forward with closing three other factories, according to media sources.

Under the labor pact, permanent hourly workers will receive 3% pay raises and 4% lump-sum bonuses in alternating years of the contract, and an $11,000 ratification bonus, according to a summary from the UAW. Workers’ healthcare costs will remain the same. The deal also includes a path for temporary workers to become permanent and a plan to build a new vehicle at Detroit-Hamtramck, one of the factories tagged to be idled.

The strike started in September when roughly 48,000 hourly workers went on strike in a dispute over pay, healthcare costs, temporary workers and GM’s decision last year to idle four US plants. On October 16, the UAW and GM announced they had come to a tentative agreement, paving the way for an end to the automotive industry’s first walkout in more than a decade.

The end of the strike comes as a relief to GM and its workers, who did not receive their normal wages for the length of the walkout, while costing GM at least $2 billion as the strike halted activity at more than 30 US factories and led to temporary lay-offs at other plants in Canada and Mexico.

“We delivered a contract that recognises our employees for the important contributions they make to the overall success of the company, with a strong wage and benefit package and additional investment and job growth in our US operations,” said Mary Barra, GM chief executive and chairman.

“We are all so incredibly proud of UAW-GM members who captured the hearts and minds of a nation,” said UAW vice president and Director of the UAW-GM Department, Terry Dittes. “Their sacrifice and courageous stand addressed the two-tier wages structure and permanent temporary worker classification that has plagued working class Americans.

The largest American carmaker has pledged to invest $7.7 billion in US plants over the four-year contract, and is expected to spend an additional $1.3 billion on other plans, including a new battery plant near the shuttered Lordstown, Ohio, facility.

As the FT notes, the UAW selected GM as its so-called target company for this year’s labour negotiations. Their deal will be used as a template in upcoming talks with Ford and Fiat Chrysler.

While the strike may be over, it is expected to hit US employment numbers due next week, having already knocked durable goods orders in September. According to Bank of America, “the upcoming jobs report will be quite gloomy, with job creation of only 25k with a risk of a negative number given the drag from the GM strike. Along with the slowdown in job creation has come a stalling of wage growth with a variety of measures showing that wage growth has failed to accelerate further this years.” The strike’s impact rippled across the manufacturing sector, as companies that supply GM with parts laid off thousands of workers.

GM shares, which had dropped more than 5% since the strike began, jumped in after hours trading.

Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, your finances and your prosperity.

Air Force Missile Command finally retires 1960s era Floppy Disks

I suspect our younger readers might not know what a floppy disk is, let alone have ever seen one.

Whereas today we have USB drives etc. to copy and store files, the standard used to be ‘floppy disks’ several years ago.

(As a kid in the early 1980s, I used to play on my dad’s computer, which had dual 5 ¼ inch floppy disk drives. It was a real beast of a machine…)

A 5 ¼ inch floppy disk had a maximum capacity of 1.2 megabytes. Today even the smallest USB stick is at least 1,000x the size.

The history of floppy disks goes back to the 1960s when 8-inch floppy disks were developed.

And the 8-inch floppies could store a whopping 80 kilobytes of data– that’s barely enough space to store a single email.

It’s now late 2019, and the United States Air Force has finally phased out 8-inch floppy disks.

Up until now, the Air Force had been using these floppy disks to store data crucial to operating its intercontinental ballistic missile command, control, and communications network!

Click here for the full story.

Now it’s discrimination for straight men to refuse sex with “women” who have penises

An adult filmmaker in the United Kingdom contacted a local woman who had recently posted seductive photos on social media and asked if she would like to participate in a pornographic scene with him.

Unbeknownst to this man, the woman he contacted is transgender and still has male bits and pieces.

When he found this out, the man withdrew his offer to shoot a scene with her. It wasn’t the scene he was looking for, and he wasn’t personally willing to participate in the act.

She has subsequently called the police, claiming that, because the man refuses to sleep with her, his transphobic discrimination is unfairly holding back her modeling career.

And believe it or not, police are investigating the incident as a hate crime.

Click here for the full story.

Last Weekend no one was shot in NYC for the first time since 1993

Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” was the number one hit in the US the last time New York City had a weekend where no one was shot.

That was 1993.

It took 26 years for another weekend to go by in NYC without a shooting.

We just wanted to say congratulations to New York City for having a weekend free of shooting deaths.

That’s a pretty sad track record for a city with some of the tightest gun control laws in the country…

Click here for the full story.

China tells a citizen protesting overseas to “think of your family”

An Chinese citizen living in Germany recently participated in a hearing in Berlin that was investigating Chinese human rights abuses. Then he got a strange phone call.

It was from his sister, who he hadn’t heard from in years. She asked him to stop speaking out against the Chinese government.

And then an unnamed Chinese official took the phone and told him “You’re living overseas, but you need to think of your family while you’re running around doing your activism work in Germany,” he said. “You need to think of their safety.”

Click here for the full story.

While Rudy Giuliani has tried to keep a low media profile in recent weeks, it has not been easy for Trump’s personal attorney, and now NBC reports that on the night of Oct. 16, Giuliani accidentally “butt-dialed” a reporter he had spoken to earlier in the evening, accidentally leaving a 3 minute voicemail during which he is heard speaking to someone else located in the same room.

According to the report, Giuliani can be heard discussing “overseas dealings” while lamenting a need for cash, although the full context of the conversation is indiscernible.

“You know,” Giuliani says to an unknown person, at the start of the recording. “Charles would have a hard time with a fraud case ‘cause he didn’t do any due diligence.” It’s unclear who Charles is, or who may have been implicated in a fraud. In fact, much of the message’s first minute is difficult to comprehend, in part because the voice of the other man in the conversation is muffled and barely intelligible.

Giuliani then says something else that’s crystal clear.

“Let’s get back to business. I gotta get you to get on Bahrain.” According to NBC, Giuliani has connections in Bahrain which he visited last December and had a one-on-one meeting with King Hamad Bin Isa al-Khalifa in the royal palace.  Giuliani runs a security consulting company, but it’s not clear why he would have a meeting with Bahrain’s king.

Giuliani can then be heard telling the man that he’s “got to call Robert again tomorrow. Is Robert around?” Giuliani asks.

“He’s in Turkey,” the man responds.

Giuliani replies instantly. “The problem is we need some money.”

The two men then go silent for a while then Giuliani speaks again: “We need a few hundred thousand,” he says.

While the context here, too , is unclear, the NBC report notes that Giuliani is known to have worked closely with a Robert who has ties to Turkey: his name is Robert Mangas, and he’s a lawyer at the firm Greenberg Traurig (which until May 2018 was also Rudy’s employer) as well as a registered agent of the Turkish government.

Mangas’ name appears in court documents related to the case of Reza Zarrab, a Turkish gold trader charged in the United States with laundering Iranian money in a scheme to evade American sanctions. We profiled Zarrab previously in “Mysterious Turk At Center Of “Secret Gold” Trade With Iran, Vanishes From Federal Jail.”

In 2017, Giuliani was brought on to assist Zarrab, when the former NYC mayor traveled to Turkey with his former law partner Michael Mukasey in hopes of striking a deal with Turkey’s President Erdogan to secure the release of their jailed client. Giuliani and Mangas were both employed by Greenberg Traurig at the time. The firm and Mangas had registered with the Justice Department to lobby the U.S. government on behalf of Turkey, according to an affidavit from Mangas.

At that point, Giuliani partner can be heard responding to the “few hundred thousand” comment:

“I’d say even if Bahrain could get, I’m not sure how good [unintelligible words] with his people,” the man says.

“Yeah, okay,” Giuliani says.

“You want options? I got options,” the man says, to which Giuliani responds “Yeah, give me options.”

The exchange took place at the 2:20 mark in the voicemail message. The other man does most of the talking in the remaining 40 seconds, and it’s difficult to piece together what he says.

* * *

This was not the first time Giuliani was caught butt-dialing someone: the late-night Oct 16 call came 18 days after a mid-afternoon Giuliani butt-dial, in which Giuliani left another 3-minute voicemail to an NBC news reporter in which Trump’s lawyer is heard talking to at least one other person. The conversation appears to pick up almost exactly where Giuliani’s phone call with the reporter left off, with Giuliani insisting he was the target of attacks because he was making public accusations about a powerful Democratic politician.

“I expected it would happen,” Giuliani says at the start of the recording. “The minute you touch on one of the protected people, they go crazy. They come after you.”

“You got the truth on your side,” an unidentified man says.

“It’s very powerful,” Giuliani replies, and then spends the entire three minutes railing against the Bidens.

“There’s plenty more to come out,” Giuliani says. “He did the same thing in China. And he tried to do it in Kazakhstan and in Russia.”

“It’s a sad situation,” he adds. “You know how they get? Biden has been been trading in on his public office since he was a senator.”

Shortly after, Giuliani turns to Hunter Biden. “When he became vice president, the kid decided to go around the world and say, ‘Hire me because I’m Joe Biden’s son.’ And most people wouldn’t hire him because he had a drug problem.”

“His son altogether made somewhere between 5 and 8 million,” Giuliani says. “A 3 million transaction was laundered, which is illegal”, Giuliani continues.

Last week, Hunter Biden – who had kept an even lower profile than Giuliani ever since the Ukraine scandal broke out – said that he will step down from the board of the Chinese investment company that he joined in October 2017. Separately, one of Hunter Biden’s early business partners was Christopher Heinz, stepson of former Secretary of State John Kerry. But even Heinz objected to Hunter Biden’s decision to work for the Ukrainian gas company and ultimately cut ties with him.

The recording ends the same way it began. “They don’t want to investigate because he’s protected, so we gotta force them to do it. And the Ukraine, they’re investigating him and they blocked it twice. So what the president was [unintelligible word], ‘You can’t keep doing this. You have to investigate this.’ And they say it will affect the 2020 election.”

“No it….” Giuliani adds, but the recording cuts off before he can finish the thought.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

Throughout human history we have seen great nations rise and fall, and for many of them it was not actually an external threat that took them down.  When the social decay inside a society gets bad enough, it is just a matter of time before that society falls apart.  That is why what is happening to the United States is so deeply troubling.  Everywhere around us there is evidence that the social order in this country is rotting.  At one time we were the most respected nation on the entire planet, but now we have become the laughingstock of the world.  And instead of setting a good example for the rest of us, our leaders are some of the greatest examples of corruption and filth.

Our founders would be absolutely nauseated if they could see what our federal government has become today.  There is so much corruption in Congress that nobody is really fazed when yet another scandal breaks.  This week, the public learned about the twisted sexual adventures of Democratic congresswoman Katie Hill, and there isn’t that much public outrage because we have come to expect this sort of thing from our representatives.  The following is how the Daily Mail summarized some of the key facts in this case…

• Hill was pictured kissing and brushing her young female staffer’s hair, who DailyMail.com can identify as Morgan Desjardins from Santa Clarita, California

• The then 22-year-old began a throuple relationship with Hill and her husband Kenny Heslep shortly after she started working for Hill in 2017

• Texts and photos between Hill, Heslep and Desjardins reveal their throuple was steamy at first, but ended with Hill leaving them ‘high and dry’

• The congresswoman was also seen posing naked while smoking a bong on 9/11 in 2017, as a tattoo of a Nazi-era Iron Cross on her bikini line is on full display

It has also come out that Hill and her husband posted nude photos of her on “wife sharing” websites in 2016.

Is this really who we want representing us in Washington?

Hill has also been accused of having an inappropriate sexual relationship with legislative director Graham Kelly.  At first she lied and completely denied it, but after a ton of evidence came out she was finally forced to admit what happened…

On Tuesday, Hill said she did not have a relationship with legislative director Graham Kelly, but she walked back that account the next day, saying in a letter to constituents that she got involved with Kelly “during the final tumultuous years of my abusive marriage,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

“I know that even a consensual relationship with a subordinate is inappropriate, but I still allowed it to happen despite my better judgment,” the letter read.

Having a sexual relationship with a subordinate is so serious that it could potentially get Hill kicked out of Congress, but if she survives she will probably be re-elected in 2020.

So far, it is mostly Republicans that are calling for her to resign, but that is only because she is a Democrat.

When the extremely disgusting sexual behavior of Republican members of Congress is brought up, all of a sudden “conservatives” have all sorts of excuses about why they should be allowed to stay in office.

If you only condemn sexually immoral behavior when a member of the other party does it, you are a hypocrite.

Speaking of weird and twisted sexually behavior, it is certainly not limited to members of Congress.  For example, just check out what a Florida man recently did in the toy department of a Target store…

A man has been arrested for having sex with a stuffed ‘Olaf’ snowman toy in front of horrified shoppers at a Target store in Florida.

Cody Meader was detained on Tuesday afternoon after repulsed eyewitnesses claim they saw him ‘dry-humping’ the large snowman toy from Disney’s ‘Frozen’ at the store in St Petersburg.

I am almost hoping to find out that we was on drugs, because nobody in their right mind should ever do such a thing.

What is wrong with us?  It is almost as if a large percentage of the population has been transformed into drooling zombies without any social awareness whatsoever.

This next story is perhaps even more disturbing.  In one county in Georgia, a group of sex offenders is suing the sheriff because he was putting signs in their front lawns warning children not to trick-or-treat at their homes…

A group of sex offenders in the U.S. state of Georgia are suing a sheriff’s department after local authorities placed “No Trick-Or-Treat At This Address!!” signs on the front lawns of their homes.

While Butts County Sheriff Gary Long claims that the move is meant to keep children safe on Halloween, the pedophiles claim that the move was unjust and violates their rights to privacy and free speech.

But I haven’t shared the most shocking part of this story with you yet.

Last October, the sheriff put up more than 200 warning signs because there are that many registered sex offenders that live in his relatively small county…

On September 24, attorney Mark Yurachek filed a complaint on behalf of plaintiffs Christopher Reed, Reginald Holden, and Corey McClendon, all of whom served prison time for sexual offenses against children. The court filing accuses the sheriff’s office of putting up warning signs on the front lawns of over 200 registered sex offenders in the county last October.

Unfortunately, this is not an anomaly.

Today, there are more than 859,000 registered sex offenders in the United States, and that number is growing rapidly each year.

Switching gears, what would an article about social decay be without at least some discussion of the human feces in our streets?

Normally I bring up examples on the west coast, but today let me share with you what has been happening in downtown Miami…

“The situation is the worst I’ve seen in my 25 years here,” said business owner Jose Goyanes. “The stench is really bad, even after you hose it down. We see people urinating against buildings or pulling their pants down and squatting because they have nowhere else to go.”

Deposits of human waste can be seen in planters, doorways, gutters — or right in the middle of the block. The pavement behind the old Macy’s department store is soaked with urine. Feces ferment in front of vacant storefronts for days when there’s no landlord to clean up. People who work and live downtown are calling in a Code Brown.

Sadly, this is a perfect metaphor for what is happening to the country as a whole.

We need to call a “Code Brown” on the entire nation, because America is rapidly being transformed into a rotting, decaying cesspool of filth, corruption and wickedness.

“It’s not political” – just remember that!

Amid the avalanche of subpoenas and secret-squirrel hearings surrounding the Congressional impeachment inquiry, an Obama appointed District Court judge has ruled in favor of Democrats’ court order, compelling the U.S. Justice Department to turn over grand-jury materials from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election by Oct. 30.

The House Judiciary Committee had shown “that it needs the grand-jury material referenced and cited in the Mueller Report to avoid a possible injustice in the impeachment inquiry,” Beryl Howell, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Washington, said Friday in a 75-page ruling.

“In carrying out the weighty constitutional duty of determining whether impeachment of the President is warranted, Congress need not redo the nearly two years of effort spent on the Special Counsel’s investigation, nor risk being misled by witnesses, who may have provided information to the grand jury and the Special Counsel that varies from what they tell [the House Judiciary Committee].”

As The Hill reports, the order directs the Justice Department to turn over all information that was redacted from the Mueller report in order to protect grand jury secrecy. That includes more than 240 redactions from the first volume of the report alone.

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Full ruling below: