It might be worth reading about how police performed aerial bombardment and gunned down union workers during the labor movement (late 19th, early 20th centuries) in the US, notably the Battle of Blair Mountain [1]. Even though this nears over a hundred years worth of distance, the effects ripple through today.
I’m sorry you think that, you’d be wrong on the assumption though.
third image is already from 2014, not an impressive case density then, is it?
Don't be lazy, blaming others for an unscientific bias in your own post is a logical fallacy.
sure.
First, you wrote that most police and police unions are not antagonistic towards sectors outside of the usa.
Now, you wrote what is called a red-herring or a strawman.
You made a very strong but incorrect statement at first. Strong statements are easy to debunk, just with a little proof. I provided a link to pages of that. It's very telling that you now characterize that as "one case every four year average". That's telling, indeed.
if you think that is research, there's no more point to discuss.
the statement stands. the fear of police is deeply ingrained in the American society and the antagonism is deeply American.
dropping fallacy names at random is not gonna help your case either.
the populace here deeply trusts and support the police. there have been few bad cases and the individuals responsible were immediately ousted and eventually had justice brought to them, with little to none cameradrie that you'd see in the 'police Vs everyone' characterization you're trying to blanket upon the world.
there's zero systemic abuse of justice of the likes that we see in the American news circles, no matter how you wish that the rest of the world is as bad as they are, it is not.
What I showed was a google search of images. You have failed to show any as belonging to a different subject than the search requested. The reason for that is that the searches accuractly showed pictures of police beating people in Europe.
> there's zero systemic abuse of justice of the likes that we see in the American news circles, no matter how you wish that the rest of the world is as bad as they are, it is not.
Why do you pretend I engaged confirmation bias, when you consistently write statements of that nature? You have literally created a strawman of what you beleive to be inside my head. No matter how much you believe that you are smarter than everyone around you, all you have written is a textbook, stereotypical set of logical fallacies.
I followed Mother Jones to Industrial Workers of the World, which necessitated a visit to American Federation of Labor, which led to Knights of Labor and Terence Powderly and the Haymarket Riot:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_Riot
Btw, just from the logos and the titles of AFL and KoL, I got the sense that they were masonic in origin. And sure enough, per wikipedia, "[t]he Catholic Church had opposed the unions as too influenced by rituals of freemasonry. The Knights of Labor removed the words "The Holy and Noble Order of" from the name of the Knights of Labor in 1882 and abandoned any membership rituals associated with freemasonry."
LOL at the hand-shaking execs in the logo of AFL. Life is truly stranger than fiction.
I can recommend watching The Molly Maguires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Molly_Maguires_(film)
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/early...
So I don't think this is even hypocrisy - effective police union leaders have very different approaches from effective private sector union leaders.
(That said, both public schools and the post office have meaningful private-sector competitors, in the sense that the government can decide that they just don't need to fund so many teachers or postal workers anymore, and systems like vouchers for private schools make it look even more like a private-sector market.)
Yet, that’s what they do. The Packard car company is one such victim.
Unions bankrupted Twinkies.
The work rules imposed in union contracts required the company that makes Twinkies, which also makes Wonder Bread, to deliver these two products to stores in separate trucks. Moreover, truck drivers were not allowed to load either of these products into their trucks. And the people who did load Twinkies into trucks were not allowed to load Wonder Bread, and vice versa.
All of this was obviously intended to create more jobs for the unions' members. But the needless additional costs that these make-work rules created ended up driving the company into bankruptcy.
The labor leader John L. Lewis called so many strikes in the coal mines that many people switched to using oil instead, because they couldn't depend on coal deliveries. A professor of labor economics at the University of Chicago called John L. Lewis "the world's greatest oil salesman." The higher costs of producing coal not only led many consumers to switch to oil. They also led coal companies to substitute machinery for labor, reducing the number of miners.
There is also a reason why labor unions are flourishing among people who work for government. No matter how much these public-sector unions drive up costs, government agencies do not go out of business. They simply go back to the taxpayers for more money.
They have given the non-landed class of people a life that even a century ago was unheard of.
Countries that have decent levels of union involvement have much better working conditions and standard of living than countries that don't.
Blaming unions for failed companies is incredibly flimsy argument against unions as a whole.
Sure there are unions that contributed to the collapse of some companies, people make mistakes.
Bad management is a far more leading cause of business collapse than unions.
I'm not disagreeing with that (the beginning of that sentence, which you cut off, was "Sometimes, of course, they do better at this than other times").
The fact that, at the end of the day, the Packard car company no longer exists demonstrates my entire point. A police union who took the same tactics wouldn't have caused their police force to no longer exist.
There is a natural consequence on private-sector unions that overreach that doesn't exist for public-sector unions. Sometimes private-sector union leaders don't realize this, but when that happens, that's the end of the unionized workplace. Not so for public-sector unions. An effective private-sector union has to keep its employer alive if it wants to keep its members employed. (Yes, there are many ineffective private-sector unions, see Sturgeon's Law.) An effective public-sector union has no such obligation.
Now, if you want to argue that unions are bad in general, that's fine, but I think that's completely off-topic - I was responding to the claim that members of police unions should feel solidarity with members of private-sector unions. My claim is that those two types of unions work in fundamentally different ways and so one should not expect solidarity. Maybe both types of unions are bad - if so, they're bad in different ways.
> There is also a reason why labor unions are flourishing among people who work for government. No matter how much these public-sector unions drive up costs, government agencies do not go out of business. They simply go back to the taxpayers for more money.
Right, uh, that was exactly the whole point of my comment? I'm not sure why you're saying this like it's a new observation?
If this installation went according to that same format, this activist may know full well why the camera is there - assuming he attends neighborhood meetings.
If this installation didn't go according to tbat format, I am completely against people being specifically surveiled without a warrant. Volunyary video of the place where people live is one thing, the other is completely against the foundational principles of this country and the natural order that should be followed by our government.
https://www.google.com/search?q=skycop+camera&source=lnms&tb...
Did you consider, if this camera box existed and was covert, how it was located immediately after it was placed? Who was it that climbed the pole to open a box that said, "High Voltage," and take pictures of the inside? If the actual box looked nothing like a Skycop deployment, why was the finger of blame pointed at MPD? There is more to this story than the blurb that was reported in this article.
Your assertion that this is likely a skycop seems to however not based on any evidence.
That's completely false. I said there is likely more to the story than was reported - and there is more to the story. I did not say that the activist or article is lying. That is solely your inference.
The article, however, is incomplete and inaccurate. This particular activist has a long history with MPD. Two years ago, he was involed with a lawsuit against MPD. This house belongs to his grandmother, so he wasn't specifically being surveiled. The police have arrested his cousin and non-related drug-dealers while at his grandmother's house - in possession of drugs. They also served papers at that address for another one of his cousins for aggravated assault.
As I wrote, there is more to this story than is written in this article. At best, this article was superficial.
> Apart from the video and that there being no good reason for him to lie
Yes, there are resaons for him to lie, but I didn't sat that he lied - I don't know whether he lied or not. But, why did he jump to the conclusion that MPD was surveiling him, personally, at an address that isn't his?
This is the website that he has had for years for his activism. It's been completely empty for years. http://15.org
> Your assertion that this is likely a skycop seems to however not based on any evidence.
I said based upon the thousands of already deployed skycops, the camera used by MPD, that if this was by MPD my understanding was that this was a Skycop camera.
The union should stay out of such political matters; especially if they expect their continued funding to be above political reproach.
That funding is a private tax, backed by force of law, imposed on the income of the workers. Via political "donation" a large part of it goes to politicians, ensuring that the politicians continue to allow it. This is deeply corrupt. We have here a money pipeline from the worker's paycheck to the politician, with the union and politician splitting the ill-gotten cut of the paycheck.
Billionaires who failed to get anywhere in the Democratic primary: Bloomberg, Steyer.
Remember, all political campaign funding plus all think tank funding plus all media funding is less than the US spends on almonds each year. Money doesn’t buy political influence in the US, it flows to it.
> (in case you’re keeping track: all donations to all candidates, all lobbying, all think tanks, all advocacy organizations, the Washington Post, Vox, Mic, Mashable, Gawker, and Tumblr, combined, are still worth a little bit less than the almond industry. And Musk could buy them all.)
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
So what? They lost comprehensively. The point of politics isn’t to be heard. It’s to win so you can get what you want done done. If being heard led to political change US politics would be a great deal more libertarian. You don’t just need to be heard you need to persuade people to believe what you believe and to vote for you. Money doesn’t do that. It buys you a bigger megaphone but if no one likes the message they hear from you they won’t vote for you. Then you end up like Bloomberg, having spent a ton of money on a Presidential bid that failed utterly.
The point of politics is to get what you want done done. You don't have to win to do that. In fact, if you can achieve your goals without spending four years of your life being president of the US, that sounds so much less stressful.
The current president seems to crave attention, so that’s different. Many other wealthy men of power are happy to influence from behind.
A megaphone is a naive and unsuitable analogy.
Money buys you the two-party system where the only viable candidates are the ones that have been paid for, that do the bidding of the lobbyists and special interests that actually dictate national policies and run the country.
Money buys you the mass media, that surrounds and saturates the public with messages, dis/misinformation and values skewed to suit your agenda.
Money buys you the power to shape laws and regulations, so that your industry is.. You get the idea.
"Money governs access to political power in this country."
As an American, I'm ashamed to learned over the decades how much this statement is true. Didn't you see how money bought the presidency? How else did we end up with utterly corrupt and incompetent (or maliciously competent) politicians running the country?
We can agree to disagree on this point. :)
It is interesting to hear the other side of the argument. Perhaps I've become cynical over the years, witnessing what "duty to nation" really means in practice.
As far as national interest goes, public well-being seems low in priority, far below enriching those who hold the reins of power. The attempts to justify these skewed priorities, in my opinion, fall apart from the view of the people, who must live with the resulting social conditions.
How do you know he lost a billion dollars? Did you see his tax records? I'm pretty sure it's ain't because of the lack of trying if it was so.
In a normal situation, I can't imagine any scenario that a businessman can lose a billion dollars by becoming president. But this is the only guy that is literally capable of failing upwards.
--
Criminal indictments with the current administration : 215.
With Obama: 0, but... Obama did 8 years. The current one isn't even at 4.
I love how you point out that our criminal justice system wasn't prosecuting the criminals because it was infested with corrupt Obama appointees.
It's not zero though. Here's one convicted just last week:
"Former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to making a false statement in the first criminal case arising from U.S. Attorney John Durham’s review of the investigation into links between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign."
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ex-fbi-lawyer-kevin-clinesm...
The crime was altering an email so that it would work as evidence to get the FISA court to allow spying on the Trump campaign. That is far worse than the incident with Nixon.
Moreover, unions are legally prevented from contributing to political campaigns, while corporations are allowed to do so.
Therefore, the comparison breaks down at every single level, and no useful conclusion can be reached from it.
Political speech rights in the US belong to individuals, who do not lose them by coming together in corporate organizations, whatever their form. This is just.
Unions don't.
This is why Unions should be allowed to campaign independently, but not corporations.
If all of the shareholders decide to contribute with their dividends, they are already allowed to, which gives them an advantage. That ought to be more than enough.
You take a job writing software for camera boxes on power poles. It happens to be direct employment with a police department, and it isn't management, so somehow you wind up forced to join the police union. Every election, they give millions of dollars to the republican candidates. They supported Bush. This year, they give Trump $42,000,000 to thank him for his support for the police. It's about $5000 per year of your paycheck that is going to this. Do you mind?
And an explicitly partisan union would be a shot in the foot of the organizers. That's not exactly how you build solidarity.
Please do correct me if I'm wrong! That's my favorite way to learn. I've grown a lot from being the least-informed gal in the room.
It infuriates many of the workers. They start off angry from being forced to pay an undesired membership fee, essentially a private income tax, and then the union pours salt in their wounds by lobbying to maintain the forced relationship and by supporting politicians that anger the workers.
Imagine being forced to fund your most hated politician. That is the reality for millions of American workers.
Unions represent the interests of unions. Workers would be better served by class-action lawsuits, which sadly are being suppressed due to a supreme court decision that allowed forced arbitration. That supreme court decision was not based on constitutionality, and thus could be undone with a simple ordinary act of congress. Unions could also be wiped out by congress. Doing both at the same time would make sense. Class action lawsuits are a far less corrupt way to address worker abuse.
My preferred solution to this kind of problem would be more akin to worker ownership or at very least worker involvement in steering decisions (board positions, etc). But I also despise forced arbitration. Absolutely abhorrent.
I don't understand why you're connecting forced arbitration to unions. Also, it's hard to see how unions aren't a form of free speech.
The scenario you advocate is:
1. Unions are outlawed.
2. Class-action lawsuits are fully restored.
3. Employees seek redress from their employer by filing a class-action lawsuit for every instance of abuse.
This is not a stable scenario. You can't just set it up and expect it to stay that way. Laws change. Corporations delight in changing laws for their own benefit. The inevitable and near-immediate result of this:
1. Corporations lobby the government to make class-action lawsuits (in general, or just specifically workers vs their employer) illegal, or to allow employment contracts to require forced arbitration.
2. Corporations rewrite their employment contracts to require forced arbitration, which always favors the corporation because it has more resources than a single person and is the one paying the arbitrator. I can guarantee you they will include a clause like this even if it's illegal, because who's going to stop them?
3. Corporations can now deal with workers one-on-one, which is a recipe for abuse.
4. Any worker who agitates to start a new class-action lawsuit is summarily dismissed for violating their employment contract.
5. In the interim period before class-action lawsuits by workers are neutered and made impossible, corporations will simply drag the cases through the court system slowly, accepting the ongoing lawsuits as a cost of doing business. They will always by definition have more resources and more ability to absorb this cost than the workers.
The only way workers can exert any power over their employer is by organizing and striking, because that's the only way to comprehensively disrupt the corporation's capital flow and bring them to the bargaining table before the workers run out their savings. The end result of this strike must always be the formation of a union, or the strike is ultimately pointless. A union must be formed so that the employer knows any attempt to abuse its workers will result in an immediate response which hurts their bottom line. A class-action lawsuit takes years to play out, and workers don't have that long!
The formation of a union requires the following:
1. The corporation recognizes the union and agrees to deal with it by signing a contract.
2. The corporation agrees not to retaliate against union members for union activities.
3. The union is allowed to conduct its activities and collect fees to pay administrative costs, legal fees, and for political activism (to defend its right to exist against corporate lobbying).
3. The contract must always stipulate that the corporation will not hire non-union workers. Allowing this would be a death knell for the union because the lack of such a clause means the corporation will just hire non-union workers in the future until the union has been starved of funds and collapses.
These are just basic facts and inference supported by the history of the labor movement. Your assertion that workers hate the fees and hate the politicians supported by the unions is in dire need of citations and references. Your entire post seems less like a logical, well-thought-out argument and more like blatant anti-union propaganda.
The whole idea of employment (as opposed to being a founder) is that you take a job that is lower risk and lower reward. Instead of taking home every penny (minus taxes) that your software sells for, you take home some fixed number in your employment agreement, and management (or shareholders) take the rest. If it doesn't sell, management's still on the hook for paying you until they lay you off, but if you work hard and do a fantastic job and write the world's most intuitive and reliable and high-fidelity software for camera boxes on power poles and you make them tens of thousands of dollars a year in sales, they keep the profits. Maybe they'll give you a small bonus.
Now, what do they do with the profits that you made them? Several things, but donating to politicians is probably one of them. Go look up your own CEO's donations and tell me if you mind.
I should also add I don't think unions should not be involved in politics; I think they are used as crutch for democratic representation. The real solution is removing corporate lobbying.
The whole point of the union is collective bargaining and providing a united front, and they need to be able to defend their right to exist in the political arena. If they can't make political contributions, it won't be long before they are outlawed. It's not like they wield disproportionate influence, anyway. They are far outspent by the capital class, as evidenced by the gradual erosion of union power and the passage of anti-union laws such as "right to work" in recent decades.