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Comment by adrr | Hacker News Reader

Irony if this was done for political reasons that it was by law enforcement who have a strong union.

Not ironic at all. Police are the agents of capital and their union is thus in service of capital, not labor. They are conspicuously the only union which isn't protested very much by the powers that be. The union protects police from retribution by the people against whom they mete out punishment, who are essentially never capitalists.

To put it another way, there is zero solidarity between police unions and unions of other types. IWW does not allow police (or prison guards) into its organization.

Police are agents of the state and the state serves nothing but itself.

The state serves entities in power, not itself.

To give an example: In Switzerland being a direct democracy many people would say that the state serves the people who vote, but I know someone who says that Switzerland is in reality a plutocracy, so in this case the state would serve the one percent.

Well, there’s whom the state is supposed to serve and there’s whom they actually do serve. Any state that serves anything but the common good is a tyranny by definition. The US and most countries are globalist oligarchies and so you might say that the state is serving capital in our day and age. However, there is variation in the degree of oligarchic capture of the state and while it is good to reduce this capture, I am not sure I can name a single state in history that wasn’t a tyranny to one degree of another in practice (again, matters of degree). A good way of limiting the totalizing control of oligarchs is through a subsidiarian dispersal of political power. But direct democracy and mob rule are perhaps the worst options. It’s also an illusion because the mob is always just an instrument of power (communists for example mobilized the mobs by whipping jealousy).

I think the best attitude is one which presumes that corruption is an inevitable and endemic feature of all human societies and that while we can deal with some or much of it in small ways as these things occur, there is no solution. The belief in a solution ultimately leads to far worse things. Don’t immanentize the eschaton.

Evidently not.

This is such an unenlightened comment, in an era where money buys political power (Lessig's "economy of influence" might be worth looking into).

The state will about face and serve the people the nanosecond they start looking like they're gonna become a serious problem for the stability of the state.

The reason money buys power is because the people are divided or don't care. Money only wins when all else is equal.

Police are not agents of capital. They are agents of the government and nothing more. Police make a modest government salary and do not (at least in the US) have a history of reacting well to bribes.

Police meet out punishment all of the time to capitalists (a.k.a people with retirement accounts and savings accounts). I’m not sure why you think otherwise.

And since government has always sided with capital against labor, it usually amounts to police serving capital, at least in matters of capital VS labor.

Remember that the US has a history of using police and even armed forces to crush unions and strikes.

The government does not side with capital. If it did, we wouldn’t have unions at all, minimum wage, etc. Standard Oil would still be dominating and AT&T would never have been broken up.

To say the government serves capital, even in the US, is laughably wrong. Look at the mandate of the Federal Reserve, it’s literally designed for maximum employment.

The government serves those in power, many of whom are rich. Being rich is not enough to have the government serve you though.

The fact that it's not 100% dedicated to capital's desires does not mean that it doesn't essentially serve it.

Sure, if it were a purely capitalist state, we'd all be slaves, bought and sold by corporations, and we're not there of course.

But in monetary policy, employee benefits, tax breaks, environmental protection, social securityand virtually any other domain you care to name, government cares about the interests of capital first, and everyone else only a distant second.

So you admit it’s not dedicated to capital’s desires. Therefore the police are not there to serve capital, it’s that simple. They are agents of the government and whatever its interests are, which is serving those in power.

More refutations of how these are not in the interests of capital.

Monetary policy does not serve capital (see employment mandate).

Environmental protection does not serve capital (see the very establishment of the EPA).

Social security does not serve capital (it’s an unfunded liability that will need funding through further taxation or inflation).

The covid bailouts and current policies are destructive to capital. (Real negative interest rates are destroying capital)

This is merely a technical nitpick. A person with a savings account is technically a capitalist but they typically get most of their income from labor. Their interests are not those of the capital, e.g. they would lose from stricter anti-labour regulations.

It’s not a nitpick. Anyone with social security, 401ks, etc are all depending on capital markets to retire.

> Their interests are not those of the capital, e.g. they would lose from stricter anti-labour regulations.

This is incorrect. They would only lose if they were part of the effected labor pool.

Break up the California teachers union and pretty much everyone in California except for the teachers will benefit. Tax revenue shortfalls mean worse services and/or higher taxes for everyone else to pay for fat retirements for incompetent teachers.

Not ironic. Police unions are fundamentally different than other labor unions. This might spell it out for you:

https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-to-know-police-unions-l...

Thank you for sharing this. I learned a lot about police unions' tactics from this article.

I love that this is in Teen Vogue. It used to be that you'd only see this in Socialist Worker Daily or something.

The fact that it's Teen Vogue is 100% why I chose to link this and not any other article I could Google about cop unions.

What I find most encouraging is that they wouldn't be printing it if there wasn't a receptive audience.

Less than 4% of Teen Vogue's readership comes from actual teenagers.

Teenage targeted publications are actually pretty common ground for extremist viewpoints. It’s an audience pretty receptive to new ideas. Not having “adult responsibilities” nor having to really be a functioning member of society in general makes Marxism, Ayn Rand Capitalism, etc all pretty palatable and reasonable ideas (albeit normally to different cliques).

Fox and old white man media generally seems chock full of extremist propaganda and to have a throughly receptive audience. Frankly I think you're reguritating a Fox talking point.

Calling Ayn Rand Capitalism extremist is a Fox talking point now? Isn’t that channel usually associated with right wing extremism?

Is it possible that you didn’t understand the point I was making and you retreated into a political tribe reaction?

You should re-parse that sentence, because you're misrepresenting what I wrote.

You claimed I was regurgitating a Fox talking point. What talking point do you think that is?

The TP I'm referring to is the oft repeated idea that young people can't coherently weigh options because they are young, have no responsibilities, don't earn money etc. That's not what I see in the young people (approx 15-25) I know.

Oh and that when they are older they'll all become conservative voters of some type in the political centre, but that's another thread.

While there’s plenty of crap on Fox, this kind of attitude is also ignorant, narrow, and dismissive and fails to break out of the current American political dialectic. Social engineers often use various tactics like teen magazines to influence the young, often by appealing to sexual appetite (post-war Bravo in Germany comes to mind). Sexual liberation is an effective tactic for control. Communists, for example, have always sought to subvert societies from within and perhaps especially by targeting the young. Fox has its purpose, CNN has its purpose, and Teen Vogue has its purpose.

"Sexual liberation" propaganda? What decade are you from? Have you met any teenagers lately?

All political movements attempt to harness the energy of youth. But seeing men move the invisible levers to control the world's youth via Teen Vogue? In the era of Tik Tok and FB Instagram?

In the same vein, are there not a worryingly amount of adults with actual "adult responsibilities" that think conspiracy theories, failed political ideologies and screaming batshit insanity into social media are "palatable and reasonable ideas".

In fact, I'd argue they outweigh the younger audience by a far margin, are supported by media organisations and have done far more damage to our society and world.

Almost every young person I know wants one thing. A fairer, safer, more equal world. I can't say the same for most older people I know. If that makes them the extremists, then we are lost.

For 70 years all this stuff was deliberately suppressed. But of late the corruption and raw incompetence has become too much.

Different union.

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