Comments

1
"The difference is that the safety of you as an electrician doesn’t implicate the civil rights of somebody else."

What?
An editor can really be handy sometimes. Especially at a newspaper.

Give the lady credit for pretending it was a coherent English sentence.
2
Police enforce the laws written by the capitalist class. They are not the friend of workers and unions seek to distance themselves from such a brutal instrument of capital, no matter how powerful or tempting a joint strike would be.

Which is silly to even talk about, the cops would never show solidarity with workers.
3
Show solidarity with a public that defames them and undermines them whenever possible? Even in notorious cop-hating Seattle some of this left wing anti-police shit is beyond belief. Right now there's an initiative that will make it possible to jail them for doing their job. Kill a human shit stain like Che Taylor while he's reaching for an illegal gun? Now you're on trial for murder.
4
Good all pigs should face a tribunal.
5
It might be more instructive to think about what motivated the AFL-CIO to finally become fully integrated in the 1930s. They used to think racism was good for their members. What changed their minds?

Also, it would be helpful to begin by pointing out that it has never been safer to be a cop. If greater respect for civil rights puts cops at risk, how come so many more of them were killed 10 years ago? Or 30 years ago?

And of course safer working conditions for electricians and others infringes on somebody's property "rights". Finishing your basement or putting on an addition without a permit and outside of code is a way of life for white Seattle. Nobody in Seattle puts a new roof on their house with fully-documented, union workers with safe working conditions. A new roof is a $5,000 to $10,000 job, not $20,000-$30,000. Bourgeois Wallingford does not build to code. If white Seattle lived by all these rules, then a hell of a lot of white Seattle could no longer afford membership in the homeowner class. Not going to happen.

Not so different after all.
6
That was way too much like watching a schoolteacher gently explain to a kindergartener that he will have to stop screeching and throwing things before anyone will listen to him.
7
Did you girls see the police officer in Chicago who was heated by a Michael Brown variety thug?

She didn't draw her weapon because she was afraid of the public backlash, afraid she might jeopardize her job, pension, and family's well being.

You creeps will get the policing you deserve eventually.
Karma is a bitch.
8
@5

...how come so many more of them were killed 10 years ago? Or 30 years ago?


Because violent crime is at historic lows, and has been declining for 40 years now?

You really don't need anything other than that to explain the improvement in safety for police officers; don't overstate your case.
9
@8 violent crime is not at any kind of low in Chicago. At least not to extra 1000 people who were shot this year.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.chicagotr…
10
Pigs aren't workers, they're enforcers for the capitalist class.
11
Stuckey can "push back" against the "false narrative" about SPOG bargaining against the public's civil rights all he wants, but the record is clear.

In the July 2007 issue of The Guardian, SPOG prez Rich O'Neill wrote:

The members of the OPA Review Board obviously do not like their limited role. Ms. Secrest was even quoted as saying , "We are a toothless dog with no bark." If that is the way they feel, then I have some suggestions.

[snipped for brevity]

#4 Lastly, have your ideas for a "Tooth Filled Barking OPA Review Board" brought to the bargaining table. Everything is negotiable and it just depends on how much "kibbles and bits" that you will offer us. But here is another tip. You better go to COSTCO and get the really big bags!


There it is folks, from the guild president's own mouth. The same former guild president, by the way, who reportedly led the opposition to the recent contract that was voted down.
12
And while I'm on the subject, I implore Ms. Grant and anybody else who cares about organized labor to recognize this:

Collectively or otherwise, the city and the guild have no right to sit down and bargain away the civil rights safeguards of a public that is not at that table.
13
This is a great example about the total cluster that unions have become here. It used to be (and still is in many places) the case that unions worried about one thing: workers rights. This other ancillary bullshit like LGBT or other social issues weren't relevant. The co-opting of the labor movement by social liberals are at fault for isolating police.
14
@13: Back when the AFL wouldn't organize women, people of color, immigrants, or "unskilled" factory workers? As a union worker and activist, you can gtfo with your old timey bigoted bullshit.
15
LGBTQ, immigrants, and black people are workers, cops employed to break strikes by an oppressive anti worker state are not. Nice to know which side you're on.
16
@8 The rate of police officers killed in the line of duty peaked about 1970. Crime in the US peaked around 1990. So your correlation has kind of a 20 year time lag that needs to be explained away. The decline in police deaths correlates more closely with the impact of the civil rights movement.
17
@9

The homicide rate in Chicago peaked in 1994, when there were 990 homicides, for a murder rate of 33.4 per 100,000 people. So 595 murders in 2016 works out to a rate of about 22 per 100,000. The Chicago murder rate was 50% higher 20 years ago.

Who is feeding you this crap? Even with the uptick in 2016 compared to 2015, crime in Chicago is nothing -- not even close -- to what it was in the early 1990s. Obviously people today have a tendency to work themselves into a tizzy over crime because today's low crime rates are the new normal, so any increase sets off a panic, among those who have no grasp of history, especially.

Please wait...

Comments are closed.

Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.


Add a comment
Preview

By posting this comment, you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.