Shooting in Little Rock
I used to live in Little Rock, so waking up this morning to the news of the shooting in Little Rock was a bit of a shock. Fortunately, the expletive expletive who did the shooting was a bad shot and nobody got killed.
I don’t even know how to comment on this, though, so I’m going to just to put it up… This is a screenshot I just took from the night club’s website which shows the act that was performing last night. I guess what with the events of the last few hours it didn’t occur to anyone to take it down:
Click to embiggen.
There’s a video floating around (look for it yourself) showing the shooting. There were an awful lot of shots fired very, very quickly. No innocent bystander with another gun could have stopped the shooter before he killed quite a few people; the only saving grace is that the shooter was incompetent.
I don’t have much to add except that there must be some happy medium, some better outcome for a country than where we are now. We need to arrive at a point of where there are fewer guns that can shoot as quickly, or fewer such guns in the hands of people who would use them, or fewer people who would use them floating around. I suspect all of the above is the best option, but I have no practical ideas how to get there.
Looks like a “gangsta” photo.
I dis “super tough” gang noise — “the fellas on my block just happen to be the toughest, most dangerous on the entire planet” — sideways gun hands …
… because if Walmart were paying $20-$25/hr like it could (and it will), we wouldn’t be hearing about any of this (if fast food with 33% labor costs can pay $15/hr, then Target with 10%-15% labor costs can pay $20/hr and Walmart with all-time-low 7% labor costs could be able to pay $25/hr).
Tough guy gang bragging can’t be take that seriously if it loses out to grocery store jobs. But American born workers wont show up for $10/hr jobs.
In 1996, I left behind in Chicago — in my mother’s and brother’s house in a cool neighborhood, free rent, free utilities, free use of the Lincoln Town Car and more — to live in a dilapidated hotel in San Francisco where the lights in your room went out 4-5 times a day (just put everything on a big computer battery) and the elevator once a week — very cool location (near Market and Van Ness) — so I could make $20/hr instead of $10/hr, objectively worse off.
But, I didn’t want to work for nothing.
Chicago had one 30 cent increase in the meter-mile rate between 1981 and early 1997 — at which 1990 midpoint the city started building subways to both airports, opened up unlimited limos, put on free trolleys between all the hot spots downtown (leaving night taxis basically to pick up stragglers and days employees) AND 40% more taxicabs.
Couldn’t have done this in a high union density country — immigrants or not. (Couldn’t have done it in an union absent country without immigrants, it’s true, at least add a dollar to the meter).
Immigration without unionization is the fatal blend (also to the Democratic or any non-xenophobic party).
[snip]
Neither rust-belt Americans nor Chicago gang-bangers are interested in up-to-date kitchens or two vans in the driveway. Both are most especially not interested in $10 an hour jobs.
Both would be very, very especially interested in $20 an hour jobs.
80 years ago Congress forgot to put criminal enforcement in the NLRA(a). Had union busting been a felony all along we would be like Germany today. Maybe at some point our progressives might note that collective bargaining is the T-Rex in the room — or the missing T-Rex.
[snip]
A week ago I proposed — starting in California — using ballot initiatives to make union busting a felony. (Really need a RICO tie-in eventually to prevent employers playing dueling definitions — w/o any criminal sanctions at all most won’t dare organize.) At 5% of registered voters to get on ballot and 45% of desperate employees earning less than $15 an hour nationally (not sure how fits California but living costs higher too) I predicted we could have people lined up around the block to sign.
Occurs to me this week that one of the best publicity angles for this movement would be to “stage” lines around the block — maybe even before the initiative is actually ready just to make the point.
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Run, I think this belongs here because it all comes to the same missing function: “How do you fund a healthcare system when the costs of the components (pharma, hospital supplies, hospitals clinics, doctors, etc.) are uncontrolled and the provision of the product or healthcare is fee for services?
You can choose any healthcare model from any country (Medicare is single payer) and nothing will stop the financialization of medicine without a countervailing force: labor unions. Goes for financialization of education and everything else. Every expose just give more bad guys more ideas about how to sucker us — with nobody (no labor unions) minding the store.
looks like I goofed on one of my again