It's time to make Chicago taxi passengers -- and drivers -- feel safer -- and more comfortable

Sexual assaults by taxi drivers may be extremely rare – 7,000 Chicago cabs taking only 30 passengers a day multiplies to over 76 million rides a year.  But female passengers want to feel safe – and taxi drivers want to actually be safe. 

I have hacked in New York City, Chicago and San Francisco.  The one safety feature that made me feel safe – the only one – was the on board/satellite camera in San Francisco.  It made you feel like someone is with you.

Partitions in Chicago are pointless because everyone leaves them open anyway.  They just deprive the passengers of heat in the winter, air conditioning in the summer, not to mention enough room for their feet.  Nobody wants them – except maybe management, which may not want to pay for cameras.

The large Crown Vics now going the way of the cavernous old Checkers may mark the perfect time to make the switch that should have been done a decade or more ago – to a security mode that can make passengers and drivers feel safer and more comfortable too.

A hike to $15/hr in the federal minimum wage -- spread over 45 years -- would anyone have even noticed?

Could it plausibly cause such a small economic hiccup, to more than double the federal minimum wage, in just one, single year -- in, say, three quick jumps -- from $7.25/hr to $15/hr ... 

 ... 70 million workers (half our work force -- $15/hr being today's median wage) X average raise $8,000 (half the full $16,000 minimum wage jump) = a mere $560 billion increase in the cost of $15.6 trillion GDP output: yielding a piddling 3.6% direct inflation ...

 ... as to be barely noticeable? 

Now, imagine instead that starting from an even higher minimum wage (say, $10.50/hr -- just to pick a number out of a hat), we had spread the same raise to $15/hr over a whole 45 years (say, from 1968 to 2013 -- just to pick "arbitrary dates") -- and, that, per capita income grew 100% in the same 45 years to  further cushion the "shock" of 2% direct increase in GDP output costs (2% assuming the minimum wage would never sink back to, say, an "unthinkable" $8.00/hr by late 2007 -- or an "impossible" $5.75/hr in early 2007) ...

 ... would anyone have barely noticed a $30,000/yr minimum wage, today?

Hezbollah's strange Alchemy -- how Israel could take the wind out of its sails

I just read a book, "A Privilege to Die", which mapped out Hezbollah's strange alchemy which captures supporters into self-destructive modes of life (and death) most of all by returning their self-respect.

Move to a different scene: Scratch a supporter of Israel who calls critics "anti-Semitic" and you'll probably find a supporter of Israel who disparages Arab Spring ("they'll never be civilized") and despises Palestinians (ditto). Who do you guess spends their days consciously depriving Arabs of their self-respect -- and perpetuating the psychology of eternal war -- (most) Israeli Jews? 

Israeli Jews are not New York Jews. 1 1/2% of Israelis hail from the states. Western democratic attitudes are not extremely deeply rooted. The going attitude in Israel towards it's neighbors reminds me of the WWII Japanese attitude towards conquered peoples more than anything else.

If Israelis want peace they are first of all going to have to adopt more fully Western democratic postures towards their neighbors -- or should I just say a more (upper?) middle class (more adult?) outlook. What could it hurt?

American minimum wage might have been $20/hr with double-indexing!

If the minimum wage had gradually grown 50% from 1968 to present (from $10.50/hr to $15/hr) as per capita income grew 100% I don't think anyone should have objected strenuously to $15/hr today. In many economies the minimum wage is indexed to automatically grow in step with both inflation an increases in average income -- in which case the American minimum wage would be even higher than that ...

... depending on whose growth and income numbers you go by. The most commonly accepted inflation measure (CPI-U, used by the BLS) says the minimum was $10.50 in 1968. Another (sounds like CPI-U-RS, used only by the Census) say it was only $9.25/hr. Double-indexing (inflation and growth) would not give a much different overall index result however because when inflation registers lower, growth registers higher (because money is worth more) ...

... in which double-indexing case the American minimum wage would be closer to $20/hr.

My comments on my "Open Letter" at Angry Bear

My day of commenting on my "Open Letter" at Angry Bear blog:

http://www.angrybearblog.com/2013/02/open-thread-feb-16-2013.html

BEGINS:
Denis Drew Feb 16, 2013, 12:01:00 PM  

HATE TO HOG BANDWIDTH (no I don't -- I hate to get blamed) but here is the first round of my smoke-and-mirrors attempt to get progressive economists to tell the real world (not argue arguments with non-progressive dupes which nobody witnesses -- empty stadiums) what it needs to know. BIG PROBLEM TO GET PAST -- THE ONLY PROBLEM -- MALES ARE SO SLAVED TO PACK HUNTING COOPERATION THEY CANNOT, WILL NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT ANY PRACTICAL NEW PATH IF NOBODY ELSE IS ALREADY ON IT. If the mayor of Oakland were male I wouldn't have bothered to try to get anything rolling.

ENDS:
Denis Drew Feb 16, 2013, 4:21:00 PM  

coberly,
Allow me to use up more bandwidth with my own destroyed by the American labor market 30 years of taxi driving tragedy.

Between 1981 and 1997, Chicago allowed one 30 cent increase in the mile charge at which 1990 mid-point it started adding 40% more taxis, opening up livery unlimited, building trains to both airports and then, the shot in the head not the stick that broke the camel's back, free trollies between all the hot spots downtown.

I ended up 2000 miles away in San Francisco in a $600/month room to make a living. In San Francisco they are so liberal they treat you like you have a union even if you don't.

In New York in 1976 the last successful taxi strike raised the meter to $2.25/mile in 2004 dollars. By early 2004 the meter had dropped to $1.50/mile. Guys were going back to India for a better life. (An old Pakistani cab driver from nearby Evanston recently told me was going back to make a better living.)

The union was broken by moving to the (independent contractor) lease system. Under that system profit comes only after the company gets its money -- so the short meter hits the driver twice as hard.

Used to be a good job -- buy a house; put kids through college -- 60 hour weeks.

Just came from super market where new employees are paid less -- no longer a ticket to the middle class thanks to Wal-Mart underpaying its employees. Wal-Mart closed 88 big boxes in Germany because it could not survive paying the same as everyone else.

Think any of this registers at "Harvard"?

My open letter to Oakland Mayor Jean Quon -- the only law that can end violence

Open letter to Oakland mayor Jean Quan:
The only legislation that can realistically end gun violence in Oakland – and Chicago – is a labor law: doubling the minimum wage to $30,000/yr.  The Crips and the Bloods could not whip a decent paying Ronald McDonald

 Crackpot?  More than doubling the federal minimum wage from $7.25/hr to $15/hr ($600/wk) would cause less than 4% direct inflation:

$3.87/hr (half/average raise)  X  2080 hours (full work year) = $8,049/yr  X  70 million workers (half the workforce -- $15/hr is today’s median wage) = $563.4 billion.  (3.5 million workers at the minimum wage would get a full $16,020 raise may be left out to simplify eighth-grade math.)  Divide $563.4 billion by a $15.8 trillion GDP and we get 3.6% direct inflation (not counting leap frog pushups which may not add up to that much – LBJ’s median wage was only 25% higher than his minimum – high minimum wages often approach median level in other economies).  

Oakland won’t educate its way out of poverty and crime.  Catch 22: political scientist Martin Sanchez-Jankowski, from neighboring UC Berkeley -- who spent nine years in five poor New York and Los Angeles neighborhoods (and ten years before that researching street gangs) -- explains in his 2008 book Cracks in the Pavement that ghetto schools don't work mostly because students (and teachers!) don't expect anything decent awaiting for them in the labor market, so think it hopeless to make the effort.

In 1956 majority leader LBJ steered an $8.50/hr ($1/hr nominally) minimum wage bill through the US Senate.  In 1968 (hourly increments and retail workers added in years between) president LBJ piloted a minimum wage of $10.50/hr ($1.60/hr nominally) into law -- per capita income having expanded 25% in the dozen years intervening.

Per capita income has doubled in the two generations since 1968.

There would be a dismal gap even between a minimum wage of  $15/hr, or $30,000/yr and a reality-based minimum needs (poverty) level for a family of three – and even between a median wage 25% higher of $18.75/hr, or $37,500/yr. 

A realistic poverty line for a family of three is $45,476 in 2012 dollars according to the 2001 Ms. Foundation book Raise the Floor (table 3-2 on p.44 -- includes $8,786 medical insurance cost).  Raise totals up from a comprehensive list of expenses, including taxes to get its figure.  (Raise provides extensive explanations for its minimum needs parameters in Appendix B, citing Solutions for Progress -- allots $3,000 to yearly medical expenses even if the family has insurance.) 

$19,090, supposedly covers the minimum needs for a family of three under the 1955 era federal formula.  Both the Ms. and government formulas calculate about $6 per person/per day for food – the ancient federal methodology multiplies the cost of food three times and leaves it at that.  Which is why you won’t see the federal measure quoted much anywhere except as a formula multiple (2X, 3X, 4X).

A wage even 50% higher than today’s median, of $22.75/hr or  $45,000/yr, would barely support a family of three. 

"Since 1973 [note: the last year national income gains were shared across-the-board], productivity has grown roughly 80 percent while median hourly compensation improved by roughly 11 percent.”  Something more elemental than “raising the floor” needs to be prescribed. 
http://stateofworkingamerica.org/fact-sheets/wages/  

Anyone can work up a list ruses by which the average American’s interests are being hung out to dry these days.  I was just going to say the only thing not foisted upon us so far is foreign firms buying up local water rights and charging them back to us triple.

Then I remembered Chicago leasing its parking meter system for 75 years for $1.15 billion: 
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-09/morgan-stanley-group-s-11-billion-from-chicago-meters-makes-taxpayers-cry.html
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/business/2010/10/why-does-abu-dhabi-own-all-of-chicago-s-parking-meters/18627/ 
******

Up the road from Oakland City Hall – up College Avenue – on the UC of Berkeley campus labors as progressive a progressive economics faculty as anyone should wish.  They could you tell you, Madam Mayor, and tell everyone else at the same time [this essay may hopefully edge them in the latter direction] about a species of labor legislation that can potentially re-write the American social contract front to back, economic to political.

Legislation that has been tried and tested over half a century in the first world (Germany, France) moving to the second and third worlds (Argentina, Indonesia) as well as right next door (French Canada).  Legislation bringing to Americans a labor market setup devised – not by Karl Marx – but by post WW II German and other continental industrialists – not to empower labor -- but to stifle union wage races-to-the-top that would divert money from industrial bases rebuilding.  (England did not take this path which is why it fell behind – which I’m pretty sure I read in Berkeley’s, Barry Eichengreen’s 2008 The European Economy Since 1945.)

Europe's fabled welfare state was offered as a compensation for labor price moderation. Magic bullet: legally mandated, sector-wide collective bargaining – wherein everyone working the same category of job (e.g., retail clerk) in the same geographic locale (where applicable) works under one common contract with all employers – thwarts the race-to-the-bottom just as surely – just the right barraging balance.

The late David Broder, dean of the Washington press corps, said that, when he came to D.C. 50 years ago, all the lobbyists were union – which meant: naturally balanced campaign financing, someone minding the store on the average person’s interests, all backed by the majority of voters -- perfect democracy.

Your friendly economics faculty up the avenue can tell you all about all of this – but you’ll have to ask.

First hint of my smoke and mirrors plan to connect the Oakland City Government to the Berkeley economics faculty (and/or others)

First hint of my smoke and mirrors plan to connect the Oakland City Government to the Berkeley economics faculty (and/or others)


http://www.angrybearblog.com/2013/01/open-thread-jan-25-2013.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FHzoh+%28Angry+Bear%29

How to swing Justice Anthony Kennedy – on Roe v. Wade

The latest strategies to overturn Roe v. Wade turn on Roe’s missing explanation for why the life of the fetus is not compelling enough to override Roe’s fundamental privacy. The most quoted, most honest liberal commentators have been saying the same for years.

Harvard's Lawrence tribe wrote in his 1973 law review: "One of the most curious things about Roe is that behind its own verbal smokescreen the substantial judgment on which it rests [any substantive valuation of fetal life] is nowhere to be found."  (HLR, Vol. 87:1, p. 7 – Roe offered “no reason at all” why viability should make fetal life compelling either; ibid. p 4)

A negative claim that the Roe court never explained itself has gotten no where with wobbling–on-the-edge justices for 40 years. An undeniable claim that prolife legislation meets Roe’s core test of legitimate abortion prohibitions should be undeniable – at least to Roe’s less than fully committed high court supporters.

Roe constrained legislatures with a test that is supposed to constrain only judges. The judiciary may not legitimately balance rights versus substantive interests using their personal, controversial judgments of the weight of the opposing interests. Roe ruled that where abortion law is concerned that legislatures are constrained exactly the same way – I will call this a “consensus test."

The Roe Court itself could have legitimately adopted the most reasonable and broadly available consensus available on when life begins – I will call this the "medical consensus" – we will get back to that.

Roe’s core decision was: "In view of all this we do not agree that, by adopting one theory of life, Texas may override the rights of the pregnant woman that are at stake."

" In view of all this …"
The whole history of abortion practices dating to antiquity;
reasons, ancient and modern, for prohibiting abortion;
the discovery of a fundamental constitutional right to bodily privacy;
places in the Constitution where the word "person" does not include the preborn;
precedents leaning away from abortion rights, precedents leaning toward;
Roe’s not very current list of theories of when life may begin – with which we will concern ourselves – but which being mostly theological need no comment:
conception,
mediate animation,
quickening,
viability,
birth.

Roe’s signers would have us believe they (and legislatures) could not tell when life had begun even by four weeks overdue – but would have no trouble at 12 weeks early arrival. Time to apply science – medical science.

That's all -- almost.

A couple of other things. One week under a fixed medical consensus line will be 95% the same baby – an undeniably compelling state interest – goodbye consensus test. Last of all: when medical science makes possible removing fetuses temporarily for care and returning those legal persons to the womb to complete gestation, will the courts allow one class of fetuses slave and the other free?

The issue that can expose Israeli ethnic cleansing to the American eye -- in reverse [EARLY DRAFT -- new stuff]

The ethnic cleansing smoking gun: Israel barring Palestinians from returning to the 22% of their homeland supposedly left to them (pre-nibbling) by the Israelis in 1949 – the West Bank and Gaza.

For years I’ve wondered whatever could anyone do for Palestinians in refugee camps around the Middle East -- the plight of Lebanese based refugees seemed particularly bleak – deprived of a chance for Lebanese citizenship, short changed on participation in that economy as well as in schooling and medical care for fear their inclusion might upset Lebanon’s (many) ethic partisan power balances – and as likely to return to today’s Israel as to move to Mars.

It took me all this time to think: why shouldn’t refugees in Lebanese camps very simply be allowed to move over the border to their own gradually more internationally recognized Palestinian homeland -- the West Bank and Gaza?  Who could argue in the international forum against the right of a people to return to their own country – that exists waiting for them right now – least of all the Israelis who waited 2000 years to assert their claim to a country they assert remained theirs all along?

Especially when the 400,000 desperate Palestinian refugees in Lebanon make such a neat numerical match for the 400,000 land nibbling Israelis.  (If 1492 American Indians had been as densely packed as West Bank Palestinians there would have been 10 billion waiting for Columbus at the water’s edge – 1000 per square mile – if we leave out the colder reaches above the 48 states.)

“Security” the Israelis will scream – adding 10% to the Palestinian population of the West Bank will pose a fatal threat to Israel.  Palestinians will add a lot more than that over the next ten years by births over deaths. 

Security – for what?  When 10,000 Israeli nibblers tried to settle in Gaza it tied down half an army division to protect them.  Sharon, and admitted ethnic cleanser (“Jordan is a Palestinian state; Syria is a Palestinian state”) reached the conclusion the game wasn’t worth the candle and pulled out.  Not before 20,000 Palestinian family members were bulldozed out of their homes to make way for “security” roads for the army and nibblers to travel on back and forth from Israel. 
http://electronicintifada.net/content/history-destruction/1665
http://article.wn.com/view/2012/08/30/Infographic_Palestinian_homes_demolished/

Now, no more settlers, no more army in Gaza – even though artillery rockets periodically rain down from Gaza, even on Israel’s capital.  Now, hundreds of checkpoints riddle the West Bank and security roads have been take to a new level with a Jew-only road system criss-crossing between nibblements and Israel – that Palestinians may not even cross over.  All so Jews may never have to see a Palestinian. 

Palestinian terror rockets and bus bombings are never expected to make Jews pack up and leave Israel – to drive Israel into the sea.  They are pathetically desperate attempts to force Israelis to give up nibbling away on what is left of their homeland and withdraw the security that enables the nibbling to proceed on and on. 

Is the world going to be appeased that Palestinians returning to their own homeland will require more security to protect Israeli ethnic cleansing?  Because to move Jews in they have to keep Palestinians out?  I am especially thinking of the American world.
******************
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New stuff to work in:

95% of suicide bombers are trying to force foreign troops from what they see as their soil.  (Robert Pape's Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism)
Menachem Begin began his terrorist career blowing up the King David Hotel during WWII -- becoming inventor of the car bomb -- killing 98 British soldiers trying to force end the British mandate on what he saw as his soil.
The British military occupation was no way near as intolerable as the Israeli occupation of what is left of the historic Palestinian homeland -- the Brits were not moving in and displacing the population either: use NYC and NJ as approximate size example -- imagine women having babies on any of hundreds of choke-point lines (every day?).

"Palestin[ian] terrorists carried out their threat and began shooting five of one hundred and six Israeli school children held hostage for eighteen days in a sec ... "
At 40:40 of the fanciful movie "Time after Time".  H.G. Wells chases Jack the Ripper to 1979 San Francisco -- Jack shows Wells how bad the future is by clicking a remote though TV channels -- Palestinian terrorists first station.  Wondered where that came from in such a goofy movie?  Then it occured to me that only present day Israeli terrorists go to such extremes:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/19/world/israel-arrests-settlers-it-says-tried-to-bomb-palestinians.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/18/world/bomb-explodes-at-palestinian-school-hurting-5-children.html

The point I am hopefully heading for here is that Israel has to stop deluding itself that it faces an irrational terrorist enemy that can only be resisted forever -- what else to do if you are the good guys -- and start waking up to itself as the author of all its own troubles and thinking about practical working out of some way to live peacefully with Palestinians which includes not gouging the happiness out of the lives of millions day by day.  Is it really worth living in Purgatory forever and subjecting others to Hell just for a little residential real estate?

I've just finished David Remick's "The Party Faithful -- The settlers move to annex the West Bank -- and Israeli politics" about what I call the "Super Jews" who are convinced they are the future of Israel.  This is highest expression of Judaism, perpetuating a clash of civilizations (maybe world-wide!) to pick up a little sandy real-estate? Maybe they should call themselves "The Prosaics."
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/01/21/130121fa_fact_remnick  
 And for the most (supposedly) religiously motivated settlers Judaism reaches its Zenith when the men neither fight in the army nor work in the economy and the children are receive no secular education (math, science, local language). http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20130122/crown-heights/english-is-absent-math-doesnt-count-at-brooklyns-biggest-yeshivas?utm_content=ddrew2u%40sbcglobal.net&utm_source=VerticalResponse&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=English%20is%20Absent%20and%20Math%20Doesn%27t%20Count%20at%20Brooklyn%27s%20Biggest%20Yeshivas&utm_campaign=Bodega%27s%20%27Attack%20Cat%27%20Menaces%20Passing%20Pupscontent#ixzz2Iizm4p42 

http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20130123/williamsburg/barred-from-talmud-studies-girls-get-english-math-at-brooklyn-yeshivas?utm_content=ddrew2u%40sbcglobal.net&utm_source=VerticalResponse&utm_medium=Email&utm_term=Barred%20From%20Talmud%20Studies%2C%20Girls%20Get%20English%20and%20Math%20at%20Brooklyn%20Yeshivas&utm_campaign=City%20Bars%20Serving%20Specially-Brewed%20Beer%20for%20Hurricane%20Sandy%20Reliefcontent 

The 1983 Social Security retirement tax deal accomplished an all-critical benefit for one group of people: politicians

The 1983 Social Security retirement tax deal accomplished an all-critical benefit for one group of people: politicians.  By setting the payroll tax much higher than needed to meet current outgo they avoided cyclically facing the unpopular need to raise payroll taxes to keep up income with growing outgo -- indeed they postponed the (their) need for many decades.

The screwy unfortunate effect has been to pay for regular budget items (army, navy and USDA) with the (flat) payroll tax (with a cap to boot) in the beginning and, then, to pay retirees income in the out decades partially with (progressive) income tax -- then paying about 25% of the retirees needs.

The treasury sells the bonds and then uses the money to pay for regular budget items -- so you can take your choice about whether the trust fund is make-believe; the money is not put aside for later.

This was doubly dumb if we consider that growth in productivity means that the non-progressive flat tax as levied in a less productive era when payers could least afford it and the progressive tax will phase in when payers can most afford to cough up.

When the fund finally runs out the tax collection method would logically revert back to 100% payroll tax support of retirees (not 75/25).  Maybe they will start another (make-believe?) trust fund to avoid that (and avoid cyclical tax raises too :-]).

BTW, average income doubles about twice as fast as population size so there should be no fundamental problem paying for retirees -- even when workers to retirees ratio drops to 2 to  1 -- and never go lower -- after 2050.

TR and FDR and HT and LBJ would be bellowing from the rooftops

   My reply to the American Prospect's 19 essays: 

A Strategic Plan for Liberals  November 28, 2012   41 years after the Powell Memo inspired the rise of the conservative infrastructure, what’s the road map for a progressive future?
**************** 

TR and FDR and HT and LBJ would instantly recognize what is sickest about 2012 America and would be bellowing it from the rooftops. If everyday Americans from 1968 could somehow have been informed that by 2007, LBJ's $10.64/hr minimum wage (adjusted, CPI-U *) would drop almost in half they would have asked whether earth was going to be hid by a comet or some equal disaster. (* http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1.60&year1=1968&year2=2012 )

The cratering of -- both -- the economic and political muscle of the average person can be explained in one word: deunionzation. Given naturally selfish human nature the all-in-one essential of economic or political justice in any society is fairly balanced power. No amount of corporate political muscle (indeed that is what corporations should be exercising in their own interest) is going to oppress an EFFECTIVELY unionized electorate.

Legally mandated, SECTOR-WIDE LABOR AGREEMENTS -- wherein everybody doing the same type of job, for instance retail clerk, in the same geographic locale work under one common contract with all firms -- is the only proven way (proven over half the century and around the world) to fairly balance both labor market AND political forum in an all-in-one stroke. 

Don't bother doing anything else to remedy so called "inequality" (the detached intellectual word for the Great Wage Depression/Post-Apocalyptic American Labor Market -- think Soylent Green) if you are not going to do sector-wide bargaining.

Twas post WWII European industrialists who first introduced sector-wide collective bargaining on country wide scales to prevent labor unions from going on a race with each other to the top -- so more resources could be invested into post war rebuilding. Europe's fabled welfare state (which everyone over here seems to think represents the big difference between us and them) was offered to labor as a compensation for the putting up with sector-wide. (England did not adopt sector-wide; why it fell behind the continent -- think I saw this in Barry Eichengreen's book The European Economy Since 1945.)

Conservatively (best as I can understand the figures) average income increased 80% (if not 100%) since 1968 while per capita income increased at most 25% and maybe fallen back. This means that 50% of the work force should be paid at least 50% more -- and ($7.25/hr) minimum wagers 100% more. That is a hell of a lot more all-important than whether 3-5% more of the workforce is unemployed than should be.

(Doubling the minimum wage to $15/hr would add only 4% direct inflation: http://ontodayspagelinks.blogspot.com/2008/08/3-cost-of-gdp-output-and-i... )

A couple of years back Northwest Airlines flight crews gave back a billion dollars in pay -- presumably to stay competitive and viable in the face of competing airline pay cuts. The following year Northwest awarded a thousand managers a billion dollars in bonuses. Supermarket unions all over the county are agreeing to two-tier contracts, sharply reducing the pay of what was once a terrific middle class job (right in the neighborhood) for new entrants under pressure from nonunion big boxes.

Airline and supermarket employees would kill for legally mandated, sector-wide labor agreements (as exist in Germany, France, Argentina, Indonesia and, yes, right next store in French Canada). TR and FDR and HT and LBJ would be bellowing all this from the rooftops.
************
************

Angry Bear back-and-forth:

1. coberly Nov 28, 2012 4:41:00 PM
   Denis
   
   I agree. But where do you start?
2. Denis Drew Nov 28, 2012 5:44:00 PM  
   coberly,
   
   Start with the doctors of economics talking to the patients instead of only to each other. What we have now is like doctors arguing over the cure for cancer among themselves but never informing the patients of the results.
   
   I made this comparison while overhearing a neurosurgeon go through drawn out explanations why a patient in the next room why he really needed to do a spinal operation now (true; if my relative in the office I was in had put off the ambulance for one day he probably would have had a paralyzed leg for life -- leg motor nerves cut off from the spinal cord wont regrow -- the nerve opening was slowly closing on the other patient). A doctor told my relative that cardiac and neurosurgeons don't even start to work until they are 35. Yet; such super-tech doctors spend their entire lives explaining what they know to the untrained.
   
   Don't know where else to start -- our supposedly progressive politicians? Guys like Clinton and Obama are super-smart managers who (very impressively) deal literally with a world full of problems -- AS PRESENTED TO THEM BY THE LATEST POLICY WONK NETWORKS. They remind me of Theodore H. White's telling how Nixon came off versus Kennedy during the televised debates: Nixon as a very able seaman who could keep all systems on the ship working; Kennedy as a navigator who had someplace he wanted to go, not all out domestically of course. (Republicans want to steer the ship of state to Davey Jones locker.)
   
   Bill and Barack are combine the missing parts of Ike and Adlai: Ike's missing the core problem of his era (segregation); Adlai (according to HT) not connecting with the man in the street.
   http://www.angrybearblog.com/2012/11/open-thread-nov-27-2012.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FHzoh+%28Angry+Bear%29 

 

What would Gravedigger and Coffin Ed tell the New York stop stop-and-frisk jury?

What would Gravediggger and Coffin Ed tell the stop stop-and-frisk jury?



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZpbdAx96K0
 Go to 10:15 

Let’s start with a concept Judge Judy calls “de minimis”: the law does not concern itself with trifles.  If this were a civil law suit instead of a criminal trial – assuming a law existed that allowed government to sue anyone who obstructed its administration – the video of cops inviting demonstrators through a barrier and leading them right to the precinct entrance would make it impossible to sue them -- no?  If the cops could not sue them for a dime – in a civil action -- they should not be able to jail them for a day – yes?  

Let’s do some eighth-grade math: TV news cannot play 10 minutes in a row – and nobody would watch: if the cops arrested the demonstrators after 1 minute of singing instead of waiting 10 minutes, then, the let-me-help-you/I-must-arrest-you incongruity would have been too glaring for all the world to see.  Too obviously no harm was done.

No police service was hindered at point of delivery -- no officer was blocked from performing any public function.  Suppose some officers in the police building decided to go out the back way to avoid the small (22 people) demonstration in the front – is that a big deal?  Suppose a street sweeping machine had been unable to do its rounds on that block that day because of the hundreds of demonstrators in the way: should they all have been charged with a misdemeanor – and face up to a year in jail (which they would actually serve if they demonstrated again while on a year’s probation)?  What kind of crazy country are we becoming?

Would it be the right of one, lone demonstrator to block one street sweeper -- say, to protest something he or she thought Sanitation Department was doing wrong on one block?  No; because everybody cannot be obstructing every service anytime they think something is wrong.  But scores or hundreds of demonstrators tells of a weighty political issue that puts society's interest in First Amendment protected free speech above occasional delivery of incidental services.

It would be an intolerable chilling effect on freedom of speech if any officer or government employee who is impeded in any direction by demonstrators is able thereby to charge them with a serious crime.  That would give police the potential to break up or water down any demonstration whose content of speech they disagreed with simply by walking officers at or through demonstrators. In this case the police did it the other way around -- they tried to put the demonstrators in the way of the police (and hoped the 10 minute gap would make us forget).

Last of all -- before you of the jury listen to the prosecutor (who gets to speak last) – you know that prosecution is programmed to make the non-serious sound serious in a case like this (just as defense is programmed to do the opposite).  When prosecution tries to make you see of this little protest singing group in the worst the-sky-is-falling light – you can take that very lightly just by thinking how those two fine able officers in that marvelously hip film for its era, "Cotton Comes to Harlem" would have acted – how would Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson would have handled the exact same situation?  

   
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jqUMA3w7GZ0 
 Go to 10:15