Not really looking forward to the knocking on doors thing this election year. Some in our small group are actually not going to do it this year, basically out of the fear of violence. And I certainly understand their point. trump’s election has brought the wingnut populists all over the place, but az is kinda special in this area..
“We move along to Arizona, where a guy named Bobby Wilson is running for the state legislature and, dammit, I can’t do better than the job done by Alison Steinbach of the Arizona Republic.
All was going more or less as expected. Then, it was Bobby Wilson’s turn to speak.
Wilson, one of two Republican candidates who attended the July 9 meeting, took the mic and told a story of how he shot and killed a crazed attacker in an act of self-defense while a teenager.
That attacker, it turned out, was his mother.
He said his life story illustrates the importance of having “a good guy there with a gun” rather than gun-control legislation.
“You can pass all the laws you want to in this world, and when you’ve got somebody out there that wants to harm somebody, they’re going to do it if you don’t stop them,” Wilson told the crowd.
The audience was shocked, as video posted online showed. The crowd, brought together by Moms Demand Action, a nationwide movement against gun violence, burst into boos and heckles….
His mom? As Steinbach puts it with admirable understatement:
But there is more to Wilson’s story — a lot more.
The tale begins in Hugo, Oklahoma, in 1963, when Wilson was 18 years old. It includes charges of familial murder, a home destroyed by fire, years of amnesia and the start of a winding path that led a young man to a legal career and, now, ambitions to serve in the Arizona Legislature.
The candidate told only part of this story to the Tucson audience.
“(She) was hell-bent on killing me in my sleep one night. At three o’clock in the morning, I woke up to find a rifle in my face—a semiautomatic rifle at that—and the bullets started to fly, and I started diving for cover,” Wilson said.
…
Court records and newspaper articles from the time suggest there may be more to the story than Wilson’s account.
You think?
Those records show he was charged with the murder of his mother and sister, and soon after his arrest he confessed to those charges. He later recanted his confession and claimed he had amnesia about the events of the night in question. The charges against him ultimately were dismissed by an Oklahoma judge.
Read the whole thing. The spin on this campaign is going to be awesome.”
Lack of cognizance or “mens rea” is rarely accepted by the courts. Juries do not believe a crazy person can do something without knowing (mens rea) he or she committed an evil act (actus rea). Judge must know him.
Higher union wages turn into consumer dollars next payday – forming a new equilibrium. Consumers of unionized firms do end up consuming less; unionized employees do get to consume more: but the market sees only the same number of dollars coming at it – it knows not from what direction.
The only difference the market may perceive is different preferences where to spend those dollars: some firms may see less demand and drop employment slots; others see more demand and add slots.
Nothing about this takes a dollar from non-union wage earners.
* * * * * *
Know your markets before you know your machinery. Two decades of looking at the dismal science has convinced me that learning your machinery before learning your markets is comparable to learning molecular biology and hoping you know how a bear works without looking inside.
For instance Mr. Sherk above will fill you ears with tears about labor union “monopolies” forcing unfair prices – OPEC like! Knowing that lower 40% of households take only 10% of overall income while the rest take 90% tells you right away that the 40% are nowhere near sporting monopoly market power to cower everyone else. :-O
Ditto, even if (hopefully) the bottom 40% doubles their take from 10% to 20% by raising consumer prices (average firm labor cost 12%) through collective bargaining – they’d only be “muscling” their way into barely living wages.
No need to argue that union monopoly (one seller) offsets employer monopsony (one buyer). No need even to state that consumers have millions of other choices and are always the ultimate arbiters (and limiters) of every labor/ownership contract – that it is always a three-sided deal with the ultimate consumer easily able to walk away from the other two (unless it’s the only restaurant in town).
No need; but nice to back yourself up with – once you know your labor market, first.
* * * * * *
A multi-point labor market may be harder to labor organize but it is more long term survivable. Retail firms may open and close but employees can shoot back and forth between. Once the big steel mill or town factory shuts down employees may hit a dead end. Medicine is another multi-point labor market – it is everywhere and becoming ever more evenly spread as government financing spreads.
Imagine the happy labor market if every employee could join a union any time she wanted to – and said free labor/consumer market balanced equal-equal welfare transactions among all (no race-to-the-bottom for the labor side).
I used to think that making (already illegal) union busting a felony – even at state level – was the way back to a free labor market. I didn’t imagine the management/labor civil war that could be unleashed cross country as criminal justice systems grappled with the decades emboldened (illegal) union busting genie resisting with all its bloated might being squished back into the law abiding bottle:
Instituting a brand new enforcement arm to cover 160 million employees trying to retake collective bargaining rights?
New enforcement branch office buildings?
New courthouses?!
New prisons to put away losing managements – if this works?
Legions of lawyers dragging every last (criminal) case down to its last appeal within appeals?
Management with a million and one excuses for “easing out” organizers?
Billions of billionaire backing emboldening every last line of defense?
RICO prosecutions (plural) to begin when management excuses start to pile up and overlap – after the necessary years to qualify as a pattern?
Elliot Ness had it easy with Al Capone compared with corralling millions of “legit” business owners back into (lawful) collective bargaining ways with 160 million solidarity deprived employees.
Imagine the happy labor market if: Why Not Hold Union Representation Elections on a Regular Schedule?
Andrew Strom — November 1st, 2017
“Republicans in Congress have already proposed a bill [Repub amend — see below *] that would require a new election in each unionized bargaining unit whenever, through turnover, expansion, or merger, a unit experiences at least 50 percent turnover. While no union would be happy about expending limited resources on regular retention elections, I think it would be hard to turn down a trade that would allow the 93% of workers who are unrepresented to have a chance to opt for unionization on a regular schedule.” https://onlabor.org/why-not-hold-union-representation-elections-on-a-regular-schedule
Wheels within wheels of justice: the Democratic market-make-over amendment to the NLRA would corral a lot of blue collar voters (former Obama voters, remember?) back into the Democratic win column – so we could pass said amendment in the first place.
No wonder why the gop added russian interference into elections, they have been doing what they can for decades and decided to outsource some of the work as it is a lot cheaper(free, if with concessions)
“As the Brennan Report proves, apres Roberts, le deluge.
Federal standards for purges were set in the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Since 2013, Florida, New York, North Carolina, and Virginia have conducted illegal purges. Moreover, Brennan Center research has uncovered that four states (Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, and Maine) have written policies that by their terms violate the NVRA and provide for illegal purges. Alabama, Indiana, and Maine have policies for using data from a database called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program (Crosscheck) to immediately purge voters without providing the notice and waiting period required by federal law (Indiana’s practice has been put on hold by a federal court). Arizona regulations permit Crosscheck purges during the 90 days prior to an election, a period during which federal law prohibits large-scale purges. These eight states are home to more than a quarter of registered voters across the nation.
Also, the phenomenon that the report describes, like so many other things that have gone wrong with our democratic republic since 2000, got a big boost from the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore. A fire-sale voter purge was crucial to the Republican campaign strategy in Florida. Voter after voter, many of them African American, found themselves disenfranchised because their names were “similar” to the names of convicts who, under Florida law, were not allowed to vote.
(One of the more famous examples was that of a pastor named Willie D. Whiting from Tallahassee who was denied a chance to vote because his name was too close to that of Willie J. Whiting, a convicted felon.)
Writing in The Nation, the ever-essential Ari Berman brings the story all the way from Pastor Whiting’s front stoop to the steps of the Supreme Court building.
Ted Cruz, a 29-year-old domestic-policy adviser on the Bush campaign at the time and a former law clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, put together Bush’s legal team. One of his first calls was to John Roberts, whom Cruz knew from the close-knit network of former Rehnquist clerks, nicknamed the Cabal.
“We started to assemble a team of the best lawyers and in particular the best Supreme Court lawyers in the country, and John’s name naturally came near the top of the list,” Cruz told The New York Times in 2005.
Roberts, who had clerked for Rehnquist in 1980 and was now in private practice, caught the next flight to Tallahassee.
Because it sold its soul to the poxy refugees of American apartheid, the Republican party now has raised within it three generations of lawyers and politicians and activists who make it their life’s work to disenfranchise minority voters and to cut off any effort by the federal government to remedy this consistent strain of bigoted activist ratfcking on which so much of the Republican party has come to depend for its survival. Nobody ever needed the Russians for that.”
Not really looking forward to the knocking on doors thing this election year. Some in our small group are actually not going to do it this year, basically out of the fear of violence. And I certainly understand their point. trump’s election has brought the wingnut populists all over the place, but az is kinda special in this area..
“We move along to Arizona, where a guy named Bobby Wilson is running for the state legislature and, dammit, I can’t do better than the job done by Alison Steinbach of the Arizona Republic.
All was going more or less as expected. Then, it was Bobby Wilson’s turn to speak.
Wilson, one of two Republican candidates who attended the July 9 meeting, took the mic and told a story of how he shot and killed a crazed attacker in an act of self-defense while a teenager.
That attacker, it turned out, was his mother.
He said his life story illustrates the importance of having “a good guy there with a gun” rather than gun-control legislation.
“You can pass all the laws you want to in this world, and when you’ve got somebody out there that wants to harm somebody, they’re going to do it if you don’t stop them,” Wilson told the crowd.
The audience was shocked, as video posted online showed. The crowd, brought together by Moms Demand Action, a nationwide movement against gun violence, burst into boos and heckles….
His mom? As Steinbach puts it with admirable understatement:
But there is more to Wilson’s story — a lot more.
The tale begins in Hugo, Oklahoma, in 1963, when Wilson was 18 years old. It includes charges of familial murder, a home destroyed by fire, years of amnesia and the start of a winding path that led a young man to a legal career and, now, ambitions to serve in the Arizona Legislature.
The candidate told only part of this story to the Tucson audience.
“(She) was hell-bent on killing me in my sleep one night. At three o’clock in the morning, I woke up to find a rifle in my face—a semiautomatic rifle at that—and the bullets started to fly, and I started diving for cover,” Wilson said.
…
Court records and newspaper articles from the time suggest there may be more to the story than Wilson’s account.
You think?
Those records show he was charged with the murder of his mother and sister, and soon after his arrest he confessed to those charges. He later recanted his confession and claimed he had amnesia about the events of the night in question. The charges against him ultimately were dismissed by an Oklahoma judge.
Read the whole thing. The spin on this campaign is going to be awesome.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a22487247/mike-pences-family-business-indiana-pollution/
there are a lot more like this guy still running out here, arpaio(unbelievable) and the imbecile dentist, gosar:
” “I’m a dentist, OK. So I read body language very, very well.”
brutal out here.
Lack of cognizance or “mens rea” is rarely accepted by the courts. Juries do not believe a crazy person can do something without knowing (mens rea) he or she committed an evil act (actus rea). Judge must know him.
Markets over machinery / Labor civil war — or regulated peace
“Successful labor cartels benefit their members. But their gains come at the expense of other workers and consumers.” Says James Sherk.
https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/what-unions-do-how-labor-unions-affect-jobs-and-the-economy
Higher union wages turn into consumer dollars next payday – forming a new equilibrium. Consumers of unionized firms do end up consuming less; unionized employees do get to consume more: but the market sees only the same number of dollars coming at it – it knows not from what direction.
The only difference the market may perceive is different preferences where to spend those dollars: some firms may see less demand and drop employment slots; others see more demand and add slots.
Nothing about this takes a dollar from non-union wage earners.
* * * * * *
Know your markets before you know your machinery. Two decades of looking at the dismal science has convinced me that learning your machinery before learning your markets is comparable to learning molecular biology and hoping you know how a bear works without looking inside.
For instance Mr. Sherk above will fill you ears with tears about labor union “monopolies” forcing unfair prices – OPEC like! Knowing that lower 40% of households take only 10% of overall income while the rest take 90% tells you right away that the 40% are nowhere near sporting monopoly market power to cower everyone else. :-O
Ditto, even if (hopefully) the bottom 40% doubles their take from 10% to 20% by raising consumer prices (average firm labor cost 12%) through collective bargaining – they’d only be “muscling” their way into barely living wages.
No need to argue that union monopoly (one seller) offsets employer monopsony (one buyer). No need even to state that consumers have millions of other choices and are always the ultimate arbiters (and limiters) of every labor/ownership contract – that it is always a three-sided deal with the ultimate consumer easily able to walk away from the other two (unless it’s the only restaurant in town).
No need; but nice to back yourself up with – once you know your labor market, first.
* * * * * *
A multi-point labor market may be harder to labor organize but it is more long term survivable. Retail firms may open and close but employees can shoot back and forth between. Once the big steel mill or town factory shuts down employees may hit a dead end. Medicine is another multi-point labor market – it is everywhere and becoming ever more evenly spread as government financing spreads.
Imagine the happy labor market if every employee could join a union any time she wanted to – and said free labor/consumer market balanced equal-equal welfare transactions among all (no race-to-the-bottom for the labor side).
I used to think that making (already illegal) union busting a felony – even at state level – was the way back to a free labor market. I didn’t imagine the management/labor civil war that could be unleashed cross country as criminal justice systems grappled with the decades emboldened (illegal) union busting genie resisting with all its bloated might being squished back into the law abiding bottle:
Instituting a brand new enforcement arm to cover 160 million employees trying to retake collective bargaining rights?
New enforcement branch office buildings?
New courthouses?!
New prisons to put away losing managements – if this works?
Legions of lawyers dragging every last (criminal) case down to its last appeal within appeals?
Management with a million and one excuses for “easing out” organizers?
Billions of billionaire backing emboldening every last line of defense?
RICO prosecutions (plural) to begin when management excuses start to pile up and overlap – after the necessary years to qualify as a pattern?
Elliot Ness had it easy with Al Capone compared with corralling millions of “legit” business owners back into (lawful) collective bargaining ways with 160 million solidarity deprived employees.
Imagine the happy labor market if:
Why Not Hold Union Representation Elections on a Regular Schedule?
Andrew Strom — November 1st, 2017
“Republicans in Congress have already proposed a bill [Repub amend — see below *] that would require a new election in each unionized bargaining unit whenever, through turnover, expansion, or merger, a unit experiences at least 50 percent turnover. While no union would be happy about expending limited resources on regular retention elections, I think it would be hard to turn down a trade that would allow the 93% of workers who are unrepresented to have a chance to opt for unionization on a regular schedule.”
https://onlabor.org/why-not-hold-union-representation-elections-on-a-regular-schedule
Wheels within wheels of justice: the Democratic market-make-over amendment to the NLRA would corral a lot of blue collar voters (former Obama voters, remember?) back into the Democratic win column – so we could pass said amendment in the first place.
* https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/2723/text
Foxconn Deal Allows Low-Ball Wages
Documents show state will allow 93 percent of workers to earn less than $15 hour.
By Bruce Murphy
https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2018/07/17/murphys-law-foxconn-deal-allows-low-ball-wages/
No wonder why the gop added russian interference into elections, they have been doing what they can for decades and decided to outsource some of the work as it is a lot cheaper(free, if with concessions)
“As the Brennan Report proves, apres Roberts, le deluge.
Federal standards for purges were set in the 1993 National Voter Registration Act (NVRA). Since 2013, Florida, New York, North Carolina, and Virginia have conducted illegal purges. Moreover, Brennan Center research has uncovered that four states (Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, and Maine) have written policies that by their terms violate the NVRA and provide for illegal purges. Alabama, Indiana, and Maine have policies for using data from a database called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program (Crosscheck) to immediately purge voters without providing the notice and waiting period required by federal law (Indiana’s practice has been put on hold by a federal court). Arizona regulations permit Crosscheck purges during the 90 days prior to an election, a period during which federal law prohibits large-scale purges. These eight states are home to more than a quarter of registered voters across the nation.
Also, the phenomenon that the report describes, like so many other things that have gone wrong with our democratic republic since 2000, got a big boost from the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore. A fire-sale voter purge was crucial to the Republican campaign strategy in Florida. Voter after voter, many of them African American, found themselves disenfranchised because their names were “similar” to the names of convicts who, under Florida law, were not allowed to vote.
(One of the more famous examples was that of a pastor named Willie D. Whiting from Tallahassee who was denied a chance to vote because his name was too close to that of Willie J. Whiting, a convicted felon.)
Writing in The Nation, the ever-essential Ari Berman brings the story all the way from Pastor Whiting’s front stoop to the steps of the Supreme Court building.
Ted Cruz, a 29-year-old domestic-policy adviser on the Bush campaign at the time and a former law clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, put together Bush’s legal team. One of his first calls was to John Roberts, whom Cruz knew from the close-knit network of former Rehnquist clerks, nicknamed the Cabal.
“We started to assemble a team of the best lawyers and in particular the best Supreme Court lawyers in the country, and John’s name naturally came near the top of the list,” Cruz told The New York Times in 2005.
Roberts, who had clerked for Rehnquist in 1980 and was now in private practice, caught the next flight to Tallahassee.
Because it sold its soul to the poxy refugees of American apartheid, the Republican party now has raised within it three generations of lawyers and politicians and activists who make it their life’s work to disenfranchise minority voters and to cut off any effort by the federal government to remedy this consistent strain of bigoted activist ratfcking on which so much of the Republican party has come to depend for its survival. Nobody ever needed the Russians for that.”
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a22499568/brennan-center-report-voter-purging/