What was suspicious about the box that made them look?
Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home
151–160 of 194 posts
Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I understand they are "partisan" not by design but as a result of representing their interests (which, in my opinion, should always represent the aggregate of the workers the union represents -- which is sadly not so) 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.
Whatever the cause may be, that counts as "partisan". 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 reali…
There is no US industry so dominated by unions that you are forced to be a member of one, if a worker takes a union job they know what they're getting in to.
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.
Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
Police are agents of the state and the state serves nothing but itself.
Evidently not.
Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I understand they are "partisan" not by design but as a result of representing their interests (which, in my opinion, should always represent the aggregate of the workers the union represents -- which is sadly not so) 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.
Whatever the cause may be, that counts as "partisan". 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 reali…
It's funny that you lament the suppression of class-action lawsuits without considering why they are in decline. They are in decline because corporations want them to go away.
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.
Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
I love that this is in Teen Vogue. It used to be that you'd only see this in Socialist Worker Daily or something.
For 70 years all this stuff was deliberately suppressed. But of late the corruption and raw incompetence has become too much.
Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Money will only get you so far in your public facing political ambitions if you are politically incompetent (Bloomberg) or devoid of charisma (Steyer). But money got both of them to the stage.
> But money got both of them to the stage. 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 mega…
> 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..
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?
Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home
#158Disclaimer: didn't read the article, am responding in general to the title. Also, I am in no way trying to discount the possibility that activists are being surveilled. What I recently have started to think about is how these sorts of stories COULD be used as a tool to further their cause if the "victim" wanted it to be. What better way to shine a light on a cause than to manufacture a story that shows they have real…
I've been seeing something semi-related quite a bit on Reddit. A lot of innocent/innocuous/non-political subs are now quite frankly "obsessed" with equality, rich-people/capital, race (black people in particular) and police violence. I guess you could say it's "hot" right now. E.g. Science sub-reddit having articles that talk about the cognitive science of voting, and studies that imply/prove that Republicans or anti-maskers are stupid (I paraphrase this one, can't recall the details). Or the documentaries sub now being unnaturally filled with documentaries related to the above-mentioned topics.
I understand people are trying to solve what they see as problems in society. And I understandably think politics and social-organization is broken at the moment. Especially if ordinary people have to resort to infecting normal spheres of life with politics/activism because they are essentially powerless, which I will agree with them on. Democracy is broken.
Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a fantastic link! This era in America's history is so rich with amazing stories, yet hardly ever touched by Hollywood .. 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 K…
Gangs of New York is another great movie, and the second floor of the FDNY museum in SoHo is a real eye opener to the 19th century crossover between fire crews and gang culture.
Thanks! The bit about the gangs was +interesting. Found this:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/early...
Re: Activists find camera inside box on power pole near union organizer’s home
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.