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Missouri

Workers Picket Outside Boeing Facilities Near St. Louis

Berkeley — Christy Williams stood outside the Boeing facility in St. Louis for hours on Tuesday next to her handwritten sign declaring: “We aren’t building toasters!” For the last three years, Williams and her son have helped build F-15 fighter jets at Boeing in the St. Louis area — something she called her life’s dream. “We’re putting our bodies at risk with the physical and strenuous (work), and on top of all the chemicals and other just the dirty air that we’re in there breathing,” said Williams, an assembly mechanic. “We signed on for this because we wanted to build the best fighter jet in the world.” On Monday, Williams walked out from her job alongside 3,200 workers at Boeing’s three facilities in St. Louis, St. Charles and Mascoutah, Ill., after her fellow members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers voted Sunday to reject a four-year labor agreement.

Missouri Tenants Suing To Keep Their Homes In Federal Tax Credit Program

Ramona Teeter planned to live at the Rosewood Estates, her home for nearly two decades, for the rest of her life. The 79-year-old is bold, direct, and does not fear asking questions. So six years ago, when the Springfield, Missouri, subdivision became eligible to leave the federal low income housing tax credit program, Teeter asked management if they had plans to opt out. Teeter says she was reassured that her affordable housing was safe. Now, she’s a leader in a Springfield tenants union suing their landlords to keep their homes past 2026, after the properties’ owner quietly left the affordable housing program.

Striking Tenants Withhold Rent For 247 Days And Win

Tenants in Kansas City are declaring victory after eight months on rent strike—the longest such action in the city’s history. Residents of Independence Towers, an 11-story building with a troubled history, won a contract with their landlord that stabilizes rents and imposes deadlines to complete plumbing and other major repairs. To reach the deal, tenants formed a union, waged a months-long pressure campaign and, ultimately, negotiated through an elected bargaining committee — an outcome that lends momentum to efforts to adapt labor union strategies for housing fights.

Turning A Neglected State Roadway Into An Economic Engine

Business Loop 70 looks like many American roads as it cuts through Columbia, Missouri. Four lanes of traffic; some sections with sidewalks, others without; a car dealership with a sea of available cars; an old single-floor mall set behind rows of parking, and an old brick smoke stack from a long-forgotten power plant. Yet that one-and-a-half-mile stretch of state highway contains a model of innovation for the nation. Every day, Carrie Gartner parks in front of a small storefront and steps into the offices of the Loop Community Improvement District, where for the past decade she’s been working to achieve the seemingly impossible: turning a random collection of properties along a state highway into a destination for families and entrepreneurs.

Elon Musk And DOGE Slash Funding For Major Black KC Neighborhood Councils

At exactly 7:17 p.m. on Valentine’s Day, Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council Executive Director Alana Henry received a terse notice from the USDA: the agency was canceling its three-year Farmer’s Market Promotion Program (FMPP) award to Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council. The cut was swift, shocking, and, for those who’ve been paying attention, all too predictable. The Ivanhoe Neighborhood Council (located in one of Kansas City’s historically Black neighborhoods) had already launched a visionary plan to boost food sovereignty and economic power in the community. Their programs offered training for local growers—many of them Black, brown, and small-scale—so they could sell fresh, affordable produce at neighborhood farmers markets.

Paid Sick Leave And Higher Minimum Wage On The Missouri Ballot

“By challenging feelings of isolation and polarization, breaking down division, and creating long-term relationships, we can achieve our goal of building a democracy and economy that works for all of us.”

Missouri Decided To Execute An Innocent Man

Marcellus Williams has maintained his innocence since the murder of Felicia Gayle in 1998. He was convicted of this crime without evidence, with the case against him resting upon two unreliable witnesses. Recently, DNA testing has confirmed that Williams’ DNA was nowhere to be found at the crime scene. Yet at 6 pm today, the State of Missouri is set to execute Williams for a crime that he did not commit. In January of 2024, prosecuting attorney for St. Louis County Wesley Bell asked to vacate Marcellus Williams’ murder conviction based on “clear and convincing evidence” of Williams’ innocence. As stated in Bell’s motion to vacate, “DNA evidence supporting a conclusion that Mr. Williams was not the individual who stabbed Ms. Gayle has never been considered by a court.”

The Private Pilots Flying Abortion Seekers Across The Midwest

In the fall of 2022, Mike climbed into the pilot’s seat with an idea. For the past few months, the private pilot had been volunteering with the Illinois-based Midwest Access Coalition, an abortion support fund that he’d come across in his post-George Floyd anti-racism journey. “I thought, there’s gotta be people out there helping people travel for abortions, because it’s not like every medical facility you go to provide abortion care,” says Mike. Next City has agreed to use Mike’s first name only to protect his safety and privacy as he engages in this sensitive work. “So I reached out to say, hey, I want to volunteer for anything you might need – driving, hosting, whatever.”

St. Louis’ Turn-Of-The-Century Transit Renaissance

Heartland Urbanist, Columbus-based organizer Matt Caffrey digs into the story behind St. Louis’s light metro system. In the mid-1980s, while many other transit agencies were moving toward developing trams – slow street-running light rail – St. Louis made the bold choice to build a light rail system on dedicated right of way. Opened in 1993, it’s now a 46-mile light rail system with two lines and 6.7 million riders in 2022. It’s also, he explains, a massive driver of private investment. Part of the reason why residents and visitors are able to take advantage of this system was local organizers with a St. Louis nonprofit, Citizens for Modern Transit.

Voters Reject Stadium Sales Tax To Help Fund New Royals Ballpark

Jackson County voters handed the Kansas City Royals and Chiefs a major setback on Tuesday, rejecting a stadium sales tax extension that would fund a new downtown baseball stadium and renovations at Arrowhead Stadium. Question 1 would have repealed Jackson County’s existing 3/8th-cent sales tax and replaced it with a tax at the same level until 2064. The results mean that the existing sales tax will end in 2031, when the Royals and Chiefs’ leases expire, and can only be used on the existing Truman Sports Complex properties.

Toyota Workers At Critical Engine Plant Launch UAW Union Drive

Auto workers at a Toyota engine plant in Troy, Missouri, have signed up 30 percent of their 1,000 co-workers to join the United Auto Workers (UAW)—a first at Toyota, the world’s largest automaker, on the heels of the union’s announcements of organizing campaigns at Volkswagen, Hyundai, and Mercedes-Benz. Workers at the plant just outside St. Louis build 2.6 million cylinder heads per year. Should they stop building them, it would cut off supplies for all of the company’s engine plants in North America. Toyota is still working to build up its supply of chips and other inventory, following pandemic lockdowns and global supply-chain snarls.

Block The Bombs: Palestine Activists Protest Boeing Facility In Missouri

Hidden in plain sight along a particularly drab stretch of Route 94, just west of the Missouri River in St. Charles, MO, lies a large, plain white building. Almost completely nondescript apart from its size, it is distinguishable from the road only by a pair of small signs identifying it as Boeing Building 598. It is, at present, perhaps the deadliest building in the state. Amidst an ever-growing civilian death toll exacted by Israel’s relentless bombing campaign against Gaza, the displacement of the vast majority of the city’s 2 million residents, and numerous other human rights atrocities of various descriptions, the increasingly urgent calls for a ceasefire finally appear to have gained significant political momentum.

One-Stop Shops Can Change The Game For City’s Small Business Growth

In February, researchers at the Institute for Justice published a study analyzing barriers to starting small businesses. “Too often, entrepreneurs struggle with local regulatory burdens, finding themselves trapped by high fees, long wait times, and complex paperwork,” the report begins. “These burdens amount to a death by a thousand cuts, unless aspiring business owners can successfully navigate them before reaching opening day.” The study analyzed the steps required to open a business in 20 large and mid-sized U.S. cities, and their findings were stunning. Opening a restaurant in Boston involves a staggering 92-step process. In Detroit, it’s 77 steps. In Atlanta, it’s 76.

The Two Types Of Death Penalties

A political prisoner is a person targeted or imprisoned because of their political actions, affiliations and/or beliefs. A political prisoner is also an individual, who while incarcerated, transforms themselves from a social prisoner by gaining clarity, embracing and maintaining political struggle. Thirty-seven-year-old Kevin “KJ” Johnson is scheduled to be executed by the State of Missouri on November 29th; most would not view him as a “political prisoner.”  However, given the poverty, neglect, suffering and abuse that comes with being a captive in domestic colonies and urban enclaves within a capitalist and imperialist state, from the onset Kevin was undoubtedly a victim of US politics and policing. On July 5, 2005, 19-year-old Kevin “KJ” Johnson witnessed his 12- year-old brother, “Bam Bam” collapse while police conducted a search of their grandmother’s home. 

Call For Solidarity After FBI Raids African People’s Socialist Party And Uhuru Movement

The specter of a Biden administration-authorized Department of Justice (DOJ) initiated McCarthy-era witch hunt was posed in bold relief last week as FBI agents took aim at a Black liberation organization that has been a sharp critic of the U.S./NATO-backed war in Ukraine and a defender of poor nations threatened with U.S. sanctions, coups, embargoes and blockades. These include Cuba, Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Iran. Replete with flash/bang grenades deployed at 5:00 am on Friday, July 29 to startle African Peoples Socialist Party (APSP) leader Omali Yeshitela and his wife at their home in St. Louis, Missouri, FBI agents, carrying federal search warrants, ordered them to come out with their hands up. They were handcuffed and ordered to sit on the curb.
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