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Prestor Jon wrote:

 skyth wrote:

Sure most people aren't going to get outraged and vote a politician out of office because he/she voted in favor of a law that diminished the earning power and worker rights of restaurant dishwashers but likewise there won't be much influence on politicians to pass such laws in the first place.

I disagree. Passing the law gets the politician a check from the restaurant owner's association which he can use to fund his campaign/buy advertising to get more votes. And it isn't even noticed by most people as most people don't care about dishwashers. There's even the narrative that they only are dishwashers because they are lazy so deserve the lower wages.

It's still dependent on the issue being big enough to elicit an amount of money donated to a campaign that outweighs any negative pushback from voters or political opposition. Politicians can't afford to just do anything for a dollar, they are vulnerable to unhappy voters and opposition attacks. Issues that are small enough to fly under the radar are unlikely to generate enough donation money to guarantee legislative support. Is making dishwashing a job that's exempt from minimum wage laws important enough to the restaurant association that their members are willing to spend enough money on enough politicians to guarantee it's passage?

Look at coal jobs, there's no saving the coal industry and there's no massive amount of money from coal companies that was donated to the Trump campaign but he still made a lot of pandering promises about preserving coal jobs. Why? To win the votes of workers in the coal industry because votes are still the metric by which elections are won.

If corporations and rich people could just buy whatever legislation they wanted we'd be living in a very different world but thankfully that's not how it works.

It's been progressively getting worse for workers. This is partially due to wealth distribution going more and more towards the rich and them being able to buy propaganda to convince people.

And in the dishwashing law...The pushback on it is 0, but they get something for it, thus it's a shoe in.

Awkward
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/07/17/bride-to-be-called-911-for-help-and-was-fatally-shot-by-a-minneapolis-police-officer/

40 year old white female yoga instructor, shot by police while talking to an officer.

The woman, wearing pajamas, approached the driver’s side door and was talking to the driver, the newspaper reported. The officer in the passenger seat then shot Damond through the driver’s side door, the three people told the newspaper.

If true, this means the passenger side officer discharged their weapon in the vehicle, across their partner...

Neither of the responding officers had turned on their body cameras, and police have not yet said why one of the officers shot her. The squad car camera did not capture the incident, either.

Of course they didnt...

Things like this are why I think not having your body camera working should be grounds for instant dismissal.

Prepare to see another get away with it.

 Future War Cultist wrote:
Things like this are why I think not having your body camera working should be grounds for instant dismissal.

One would think...but alas...

 Vaktathi wrote:
Awkward
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/07/17/bride-to-be-called-911-for-help-and-was-fatally-shot-by-a-minneapolis-police-officer/

40 year old white female yoga instructor, shot by police while talking to an officer.

The woman, wearing pajamas, approached the driver’s side door and was talking to the driver, the newspaper reported. The officer in the passenger seat then shot Damond through the driver’s side door, the three people told the newspaper.

If true, this means the passenger side officer discharged their weapon in the vehicle, across their partner...

Neither of the responding officers had turned on their body cameras, and police have not yet said why one of the officers shot her. The squad car camera did not capture the incident, either.

Of course they didnt...

Immediate firing and jail time.

End. Of. Story.

 Kanluwen wrote:

Spoiler:

 Vaktathi wrote:
Awkward
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/07/17/bride-to-be-called-911-for-help-and-was-fatally-shot-by-a-minneapolis-police-officer/

40 year old white female yoga instructor, shot by police while talking to an officer.

The woman, wearing pajamas, approached the driver’s side door and was talking to the driver, the newspaper reported. The officer in the passenger seat then shot Damond through the driver’s side door, the three people told the newspaper.

If true, this means the passenger side officer discharged their weapon in the vehicle, across their partner...

Neither of the responding officers had turned on their body cameras, and police have not yet said why one of the officers shot her. The squad car camera did not capture the incident, either.

Of course they didnt...

Immediate firing and jail time.

End. Of. Story.

Won't happen.

Peregrine once said that if there is a weapon discharge or serious injury on the beat and your camera is off, you should at a minimum be fired. As time has gone on, I'm increasingly agreeing with him. \

The cop in question messed up big time though: he shot an attractive, blonde white woman. He's got the usual paid leave for now but I expect some actual consequences this time.

Shooters identity revealed: Mohamed Noor, 2 year veteran, first Somali to join that particular department.

UPDATE (12:45 p.m.): The officer who shot and killed Damond has been identified as Mohamed Noor. Noor joined the force in March 2015 and became the first Somali officer to patrol southwest Minneapolis.

Shocking and weird case.

I wonder if how fatally he'll resist arrest.

Ouze wrote:Peregrine once said that if there is a weapon discharge or serious injury on the beat and your camera is off, you should at a minimum be fired. As time has gone on, I'm increasingly agreeing with him. \

The cop in question messed up big time though: he shot an attractive, blonde white woman. He's got the usual paid leave for now but I expect some actual consequences this time.

nels1031 wrote:Shooters identity revealed: Mohamed Noor, 2 year veteran, first Somali to join that particular department.

UPDATE (12:45 p.m.): The officer who shot and killed Damond has been identified as Mohamed Noor. Noor joined the force in March 2015 and became the first Somali officer to patrol southwest Minneapolis.

Shocking and weird case.

BobtheInquisitor wrote:I wonder if how fatally he'll resist arrest.

Yup...I'm now expecting to hear that he somehow arrested himself, and was fatally shot while arresting himself.

I know it's all racial and stuff, but I fully expect the black cop shooting a white woman to be the only cop convicted of murder. And then this case will be pointed to as the example that the blue line doesn't exist because somebody got convicted. That might just be my lack of faith in our justice system talking though.

Prestor Jon wrote:
Yes there are limitations but specific pro industry/anti worker legislation in niche industries is also going to be a very limited source of campaign contributions that would incentivize passing the legislation at all.

Sure, but the point is you move from one to the next, to the next. Reduce protections in one industry, then the next, and so on.

And in case it's gotten lost over the conversation, I'm not saying this is anyone's secret plan or any conspiracy nonsense like that. I'm just pointing out that expecting voters as a group to vote to protect each individual collection of workers is impractical at best. There are big reasons that collective action came in to being long after elected representation - in and of itself elections were not enough to establish or protect worker's rights.

Sure most people aren't going to get outraged and vote a politician out of office because he/she voted in favor of a law that diminished the earning power and worker rights of restaurant dishwashers but likewise there won't be much influence on politicians to pass such laws in the first place.

There are always industry specific special interests working to get reforms of all kinds through government. I'm working with a half dozen odd groups right now that are way more niches within industries than kitchen hands within the restaurant industry.

The biggest impetus to change is the inertia of the status quo. Why isn't Federal minimum wage set to grow with inflation? Why does it take so long to get Congress to increase Federal minimum wage? Because with low unemployment, a growing economy and stock market it's difficult to dig down below the surface and address underlying problems when the newsworthy (if outmoded) indicators are good enough.

Federal minimum wage isn't set to grow with inflation because the minimum rate of pay that is unlikely to negatively impact unemployment isn't fixed and rising with a single inflation measure. Consider the stagflation of the late 70s, there you have high inflation coupled with skittish supply uncertainty, boosting minimum wage by inflation would have killed jobs. But then consider the big easy of the 90s, low inflation but tight demand for labour, there you could have increased minimum wage by much more than inflation with no negative impact on employment.

Minimum wage should have an assumed yearly increase, sure, but it shouldn't be mechanical. It needs to be based on the recommendation of a technical committee. But given the partisan nature of minimum wage in the US that's not viable right now.

Corporate interests can't just write checks and get politicians to do whatever they want. Politicians still need to be able to create a narrative that is appealing enough to the electorate to engender support for legislation. Business can flex their monetary muscle and get govt to protect the status quo, to keep wage growth stalled and labor costs down but they can't buy major setbacks to worker rights because the govt has a vested interest in not upsetting the applecart.

It isn't as simple as being purely about money. Nothing is that crude. Consider for instance the Koch brothers. Their influence doesn't come from cutting cheques straight to politicians campaign's. That stuff helps, but it's only a small part of what they do. Most of the money goes to thinktanks located either in DC or in universities around the country. Those thinktanks aren't even literally contracted to produce certain work, its more than funding is only given to groups that have likeminded attitudes to the Koch brothers. This means the attitudes of the Koch brothers might be a small minority within each academic field, but in terms of research output and media presence these groups get an outsized presence. Over a couple of generations that flows through, not just in to academia but also out in to the greater population.

The deregulation drives of the 80s, 90s & 00s weren't unloaded on the country through purchased votes in congress. That deregulation happened with the consent and support of the majority of technical experts on the left and right, and with a population who certainly wasn't uniformly opposed. We can talk all day about whether deregulation was good or bad (and come to the eventual conclusion that some was needed, some was good, some was problematic and a bit was really stupid), but it happened in large part through the work of many industry sectors working to push money towards people arguing deregulation was needed for futher productivity gains.

Money doesn't just shift votes, it also shifts opinion.

History shows us that politicians don't have much trouble in maintaining support from an electorate even when they're not improving their situation but that doesn't mean politicians can get away with actively hurting the electorate. Likewise workers will always face major obstacles to making major changes, their need to organize large groups of people together in a common cause that are willing to take substantial risks to make any gains and the combination of the govt's investment in the status quo coupled with the monetary power of business. So we get progress to the point where things are better than they were but are still far from being as good as they could be. That equilibrium isn't going to be changed anytime soon.

The equilibrium changes if the message that unions, and by extension collective action by workers, are relics of the past.

And again, I don't want to defend unions as they are today. Corruption and unprincipled actions by unions themselves are a major cause of the current situation. But the equilibrium you describe above comes about in part by the presence of collective action, or at least the threat of such.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Ouze wrote:
The cop in question messed up big time though: he shot an attractive, blonde white woman. He's got the usual paid leave for now but I expect some actual consequences this time.

He shot an attractive, blonde, Australian white woman.

As a result the story is getting quite a lot of coverage here.

Prestor Jon wrote:


If corporations and rich people could just buy whatever legislation they wanted we'd be living in a very different world but thankfully that's not how it works.

Funny, they did a study on what groups really rules in America by (amongst other things) looking at how likely a policy is to be implemented depending on what group in society favours it. The result will shock you! (probably not)

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

This is like the basic plot to Shots Fired. White cops kill black people for little to no reason and get off scot free repeatedly. Black cop kills white person, will probably go down for it. Although I do want him to be convicted it would be a hollow victory because it would demonstrate that black people in American are truely unequal in the eyes of the law.

To be fair - it is a women. It's unimaginable to a lot of people that a women could be perceived as a threat. It would be the same situation if the women were black. Except it would be the front page story on every new paper. I hadn't even heard about this story until I read about it on this thread. That's how little coverage this gets.

 Xenomancers wrote:
To be fair - it is a women. It's unimaginable to a lot of people that a women could be perceived as a threat. It would be the same situation if the women were black. Except it would be the front page story on every new paper. I hadn't even heard about this story until I read about it on this thread. That's how little coverage this gets.

I've seen this story get a lot of coverage online and it's not unimaginable that a woman could be perceived as a threat it's unimaginable that a woman, unarmed and in her pajamas, who had called 911 because she thought she heard/saw a prowler would be perceived as a threat when police arrived and be lethally shot.

It was on the front page of CNN, Foxnews, and MSNBC's sites for most of yesterday and still is on FNC today.

Again, this was a pretty blonde white woman - that she was Australian is just the cherry on what was already a big news sundae.

we should probably take this to the dedicated thread for this though

Xenomancers wrote:To be fair - it is a women. It's unimaginable to a lot of people that a women could be perceived as a threat. It would be the same situation if the women were black. Except it would be the front page story on every new paper. I hadn't even heard about this story until I read about it on this thread. That's how little coverage this gets.

Like this one from a few weeks ago (another link)?

Redirecting cop shooting discussiom to this thread:

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/733119.page#9498586