Today, in Charlotte North Carolina, riots are underway for the second day. Governor Pat McCrory declared a State of Emergency and deployed the National Guard to ‘assist local law enforcement’.
The riots began when a peaceful protest over the death of a black man shot by a police officer suddenly turned ugly.
State of Emergency in Charlotte
In what will surely become a topic for the pending election debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, State of Emergency Declared in Charlotte as Protester Shot.
Authorities in North Carolina have declared a state of emergency and called in the National Guard after protests over a deadly police shooting turned violent for a second night.
Pat McCrory, governor of the southern state, made the announcement late on Wednesday as groups of demonstrators smashed windows and started fires in Charlotte, the state’s largest city.The demonstrations began as a peaceful prayer vigil for Keith Scott, a black man who was killed by police on Tuesday. Officers said Mr Scott was carrying a firearm — a claim denied by neighbours and family. However, the commemoration turned violent after a splinter group marched downtown and a participant was shot by an unknown assailant.
“The main thing I am doing is providing assets to the police department,” said Mr McCrory after declaring the state of emergency.
As its biggest city, Charlotte is one of North Carolina’s most important political battlegrounds, a place where Democrats need a strong showing among African-Americans and Republicans need to win over independent white suburbanites.
Mr Trump this week said “our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before. Ever, ever, ever.”
The Clinton campaign said the police shootings were the latest in “a disgraceful series of insults toward the African-American community”.
Why So Many Bad Cops?
I have not investigated this shooting so I have no specific position at this time. In general, I am willing to say there are plenty of bad cops.
Why? The explanation is the same as the answer to this question: Why are there so many bad teachers?
Public union rules make it impossible to get rid of bad cops and bad teachers.
Trump is correct when he stated “our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before. Ever, ever, ever.”
If he gave one of the primary reasons, public unions rules and their untenable pension promises, his election chances would have immediately plunged.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
If you live in NC….stock up on some Bear Mace….works on rioters too.
One of the most compelling reasons there are bad cops? Who in their right minds would sign up to police these people in the first place. You have to either want to crack heads open or have a death wish. There is not much other reward in policing, despite a pension.
Pulling over pretty girls and seeing how badly they don’t want that ticket?
Yeah, thats exactly what they are doing in the Washington Heights neighborhood in Chicago, as well as Englewood, Morgan Park, on and on.
“Trump is correct when he stated “our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before. Ever, ever, ever.”
Worse than the 70’s in NYC? Or the 60’s in the southern states? Or before that?
By what measure?
“By what measure?”
How about in ‘hopelessness’? Even in the wake of monstrously evil slavery, black families were intact, and proud black men had an important place in them. Today most African Americans don’t even know their fathers. Barack Obama is the quinticential American black man; bitterly driven to redeem his absent father’a memory by tearing other people down.
You might enjoy the Tupac Shakur song “How long will they mourn me”. Here it is if you care to check it out. https://youtu.be/hjM8_WjzvA8
Well, Trump said it, so it must be factual and true, right?
Maybe it isn’t a case of bad cops. Maybe it’s bad citizens.
Whoa….whoa….easy there buddy….you’re stepping away from the narrative.
Uncle Sugar and Soros need to show that ALL cops (white or black) are incompetent and can’t be trusted.
Then time to federalize the police.
Now…remember that little ditty from James Madison:
“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”
That’s how Uncle Sugar get’s around it.
Just read that 1.2 million dogs are killed annually by cars in the US alone. Something like 1 million animals of all species are killed EACH DAY by cars worldwide. Cars are inherently dangerous to animals.
Police are inherently dangerous to people, as they are imbued by the State with the authorization to use deadly force and are armed for just such behavior. With as many police and as many police/citizen encounters, it is miraculous that there aren’t orders of magnitude more killings. The ones that do occur are statistically-guaranteed to happen. They’re “baked in the cake” as we say.
The only way to eliminate “bad cops” is to do away with policing. Good luck with that.
Awesome progressive thesis: crime exists because police exist. Get rid of police and crime will disappear.
Tell me, how do you feel about fire departments? And hospitals, etc.
His conclusion is absolutely correct. The only way to be certain there are no bad cops, is to have no cops. And ditto for any other profession.
A more realistic and practical corollary, is to note that the fewer cops you have the less the chances of some being bad. And fewer cops, requires people to take more responsibility for themselves and their own security. As in, arm up, avoid risky places, don’t flaunt what you have, don’t be an easy and obvious target etc…
But also, get rid of all laws that are not strictly necessary, as all they do is make criminals out of people who wouldn’t otherwise be, and require armies of police that would not otherwise be required. As in, drug laws and other silliness.
When the end goal is a “citizenry” that takes no responsibility for themselves, and expect Massa Gommiment to come to their rescue no matter how idiotic they behave, there is no option outside a police state, where police gets ever more intrusive, ever more violent, and ever more dependent on shooting first and asking questions later.
Stuki, while you and I share the same ideal, I freely admit that anarchism is hopeless. Humans are too hopelessly flawed to ever take that much responsibility for their lives.
If humans are too flawed to take responsibility for their own lives, how come they aren’t even more too flawed, to take responsibility for the lives of others?
The world’s becoming more anarchic as we speak. Arab Spring tore down fairly authoritarian systems. Replacing them with nothing particularly stable, nor ever likely to be. The strands of Islam that are growing, are those with traits most similar to anarchistic Afghanistan, rather that more top down theocracies like Iran. And since the Muslims are pretty much the last men standing in the fertility game, as they go, so goes the world.
The totalitarianism of the late 19th and 20th centuries, stems to a large extent from communication technologies that made it cheap for the center to propagandize to the periphery, but difficult for those in the periphery to communicate amongst themselves. So, The Center gained a monopoly on disseminating “the truth.” That situation is now changing, with the internet, over time crypto currencies, 3D printed weaponry and bomb/toxin making instruction over the net…….
People will realize they have been suckered. That “the truth” as told by “the experts” is nothing but a scam. Including the “rule of law” said “experts” claim is so vital, despite 99% of it by now being nonsense simply rigged in their favor. People in the West are just a bit slow on the uptake. But they’ll get there, since continuing down any path even remotely in the same direction as the one followed by the West over the past century, is just going straight to Hades in an ever accelerating hurry.
Stuki, you write like Butler Shaffer. It is all wonderful theory, and if it were possible to get everyone on board I would welcome anarchy in a heartbeat. But humans are selfish, weak animals who seek to exploit their fellows at every turn. It’s in the code. We’re stuck with whatever we get, which is more of the same unless and until scarcity and death vanish forever.
Gosh Tim , do you even know how to read? Or is it thinking that causes you fits?
My “awesome progressive” thesis is that cops exist, just like hurricanes, earthquakes and plagues. Plan accordingly because they’re here to stay.
Was that so difficult to grasp?
Much like modern ‘communists’ who have never lived under a communist thumb, only those who have never experienced true anarchy advocate it.
It’s a fun theory, but it’s also completely divorced from reality.
I agree. If you are going to have police, you are going to have policemen who make errors. These might be bad policemen, or simply errors, or they may be cases where the police acted appropriately, but people jumped to the conclusion that they did not. No one waits to find out before resorting to violence these day.
So, what do you do? One thing we know, if you eliminate the police, the situation will be worse. Do you prefer a minor chance of being shot by a policeman or do you prefer mob rule? I’ll take the former, thank you.
I do agree that we need to eliminate union rules that make it difficult to prosecute and/or fire bad policemen (and teachers, and bureaucrats, etc). What is crazy, though, is our President is in a unique situation, as the first black President, to calm this situation and encourage improvements to the system, but when he says anything at all, he seems to incite more problems.
Why are there so many lawless blacks?
WHY NO PROTESTS IN SOUTH CHICAGO WHILE RAHM ENJOYS THE SIGHTS IN LONDON ON YOUR/MINE/OUR DIME???
Blacks are only 13% of the US population, but commit 65% of the VIOLENT CRIMES in America:
http://americanfreepress.net/?p=14864
When is the mainstream-media going to expose this NATIONAL CRISIS … ???
Never used to be until the gubberment stepped in. There’s the root of the problem.
Because that’s how they are most useful for the junta. Who can then use them to scare others into giving up ever more of their former freedoms, so they can be “protected” against those scary black guys…. It’s the same reason there are so many scary Muslims. And Mexicans. And other hobgoblins.
This situation could be diffused very easily — if a cop kills an innocent unarmed person – prosecute him.
Ask yourself – why are they being let off?
They are being let off because chaos is coming — collapse is coming — and provoking the blacks is an excuse to get crowd control onto the streets before the collapse — the people will demand it…. and that crowd control will ensure that the chaos related to financial collapse is pre-empted.
Likewise in Europe — let hundreds of thousands of refugees in — then use that as an excuse to get troops onto the streets… again – as the incidents escalate the people will demand troops to keep them safe.
It is all part of the master plan to try to control the calamity that will strike when the global economy collapses.
The video cam apparently shows Scott approaching a police car with a gun in his hand, so this is total BS…But for sure, Soros money was involved in whipping up this mob outside their neighborhood…
I do not mean this specific situation — rather the overall situation in terms of police vs the black community
These are deliberate provocations…
With the end game being troops on the streets.
We will get troops on the streets – the excuse will be the violence against cops — but the real reason will be to deal with chaos when the global economy collapses.
And it will collapse -that is guaranteed
They haven’t released any video.
Mish is fine in blaming unions for playing a part in creating this mess. That should be obvious to everyone. Where Mish misses the forest is that if it’s not unions then it will be something else. History has a 100% track record of some group trying to exercise its power over another group. His utopian Libertarian outlook works fine to find problems with any “organized” attempt to make life better for the masses. It’s called life. The “free market” brings forth an equal amount of bureaucratic mess as does govt unions. Finding problems is easy offering workable solutions well that’s a whole new ballgame that few no how to play
Please answer this: When has the free market ever created a problem?
When companies were allowed to dump toxic waste with impunity for decades in the rivers on the east coast and elsewhere in the US.
The companies then go BK or sell off the best parts and leave a Stub Co. with the environmental liabilities.
Superfund (i.e., the US taxpayer) pays to clean it up.
___________
If you want about 1,000 more examples I’ll be glad to oblige.
Well said Joe.
C’mon Joe, everybody knows corporations are creatures of big.gang.guv. The (Brit common law) history behind your example was the Crown deciding that small farmers couldn’t sue factory polluters. The king needed big money too much – all those palaces! Just a very few guys, on the take, changing the course of history thru Stare decicis. After all the sacred LAW is important, isn’t it?
Nonsense.
You are right about US legal system. Common law is more powerful than statutory law or constitutional law. In USA the judges gave themselves a lifetime appointment as federal judge.The Un elected judiciary makes common law rules more powerful than the Constitution. The judges gave all police officers qualified immunity from civil prosecution . The judges and their servants can kill whoever they want without any civil prosecution. Less than 1 percent of police murders are ever successfully prosecuted due to qualified immunity. The US system is similar to Sanhedrine council which was based on Talmud that is common law system. Under talmud justice is always promised but hypocrisy abound and injustice florishes. The talmud and common law system are merely method for power to abuse the weak. Study difference between talmud and karaites. Americans are slaves to judicial tyranny by corrupt judges appointed for life that can not be civilly prosecuted for life. The corrupt judges of us supreme court decided African Americans were only 3/5 a human in dred scott decision. The US supreme court supports slavery and oppression. The Supreme court is self appointed Sanhedrine deciding slavery abortion and gay rights. Who interprets rules is more important than the legislators or president.Democracy is a sham in common law systems.
Ginseng of Supreme court is worth 25 million dollars. She does not obey god…..she thinks she is God with Un elected lifetime appointment
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-supreme-court-police-shootings-20151109-story.html
Hit men that are police kill with immunity from prosecution. Less than 1 percent of police murderers are ever civilly or criminally prosecuted. Cops kills their enemies and he can get immunity.
Two problems with your example:
The government “owned” the rivers.
The rivers weren’t privately owned.
Try again.
I was a kid on a family trip to Lake Michigan in the 70s. Dead fish all over the beach. A chick with a BIG rake trying to gather what she could of them. Then, Lake Erie – dead. Oh yeah, we consumed PBBs and PCBs for years because it got in the cows feed. I am glad I survived this and moved to the Pacific Northwest where people care about the food they eat, the water they drink and being sustainable. Home, sweet, home! Oh, we also have some dank Kush here as well!
The reason companies “were allowed” to do this, is because government allowed them to. And had their back, against promises of campaign contributions. Get the junta out of that racket too, and see how long those residing downriver of the polluter is “allowing” him to continue doing so…..
A pretty general rule of a free society is, if there is ever a systemic problem of some sort, keep getting rid of rules and laws preventing those aggrieved from coming up with, and executing, a solution.
Inadvertently in every cycle. Freedom generates resources. Bad people, wanting that $$$, “talk their book” that some initiation violence is legitimate. Soon society is suffused with violent thoughts and actions and collapses. That new freedom from Authoratai generates new resources. Rinse and repeat.
I got a great deal of humor out of your question. It said everything. I will give you a large list later. Late me give you a few now. Redlining was a free market banking mechanism to keep segregation in place. Child labor use at near slave labor wages. Free market created an education system that benefited itself not the pupil. Car companies not making fixes to cars because the lawsuits over deaths would be less than changing production. Insurance companies working in collusion to underpay consumers. Companies buying Congress. Tried calling a cable company lately. Tried working with health insurance before Obamacare – bad before just as bad today. Banks working …. all hell why am I wasting my tell responding to just an ignorant question… this is just from one minute of thought
Excellent!
Not to quibble, but everything you listed persists to this day … all under the centrally-planned Statist economy. Looks like we’re our own worst enemies.
Testify !….my brother
Too many stupid comments against the free market since none exist in the world anyway.
We live in a government created government run social world and it will continue to decline. Like life in general, man’s societies evolve in response to their environment – which is a near monopoly government system. A system which rewards certain groups, of which you will get more, and punishes other groups, of which you will get fewer.
Such as finance versus manufacturing.
Far, far from the worst. Mr. Trump and others who believe this is the worst don’t know much about the history of this country. Here’s one (of many) that trumps today’s racial problems, (pun intended). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Summer_(1919)
The “Rev” Jesse Jackoff was on Hannity this afternoon spouting his excuses. He is the universal symbol for totally less than useless.
This “bad cops in a war against blacks” farce is a false paradigm encouraged by a certain “victimhood” party for political gain.
Chicago Violence Stats Site
http://heyjackass.com/
2016 Chicago Police-involved Shootings
Shot by police – 6 killed, 12 wounded
Police shot – 8
All shootings in Chicago for 2016
Killed – 488
Wounded – 2666
Race of Victims/Assailants
78.2% black
16.8% hispanic
5% white/other
‘Unbearable’ police shootings should become ‘intolerable,’ Hillary Clinton says
http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/trailguide/la-na-trailguide-updates-unbearable-police-shootings-should-1474486557-htmlstory.html
“We have two more names to add to a list of African Americans killed by police officers in these encounters,” she said Wednesday at the start of a speech in Orlando, Fla. “It’s unbearable. And it needs to become intolerable.”
Those shootings being statistically nanoscopic when compared to minority on minority shootings… but being the ones receiving all of the media’s attention.
Incredible, but par for the course. A non-issue being blown completely out of proportion for political reasons which only leads to more violence. Absolutely disgusting and contemptible.
Ginseng of Supreme court is worth 25 million dollars. She does not obey god…..she thinks she is God with Un elected lifetime appointment .the judges created immunity to protect corrupt judges and cops.immunity was never approved by congress. Only 1 percent of police murders will be prosecuted due to immunity.
A NOTE TO EVERYBODY –
THERE IS NO EPIDEMIC OF UNJUSTIFIED POLICE SHOOTINGS let alone a war of cops against minorities!!!
See my Chicago stats above as just one example. Also, once the media attention disappears, bother to INVESTIGATE what actually happened once it has been investigated instead of just reading the headlines and you will usually find quite a different story from the initial one… but few pay attention that long, do they?
STOP falling for the media hype!
Another example – remember the major hype about THIS? Don’t you? Where did that “crisis” go? Here’s a satire of the mainstream hysteria about it at the time. People were just as freaking gullible about THIS non-problem thanks to sensationalist media:
Do you think those statistics would hold true If illegal drugs were not illegal? i.e no War on Drugs in 1971.
The WOD and welfare (enabling fatherless families) have both heavily contributed to the crime problem in minority communities. I don’t know what your intended point is.
The point that should be derived from the text figure extractions from that web page I posted above should be that the VAST number of gun fatalities and injuries come from minority on minority violence… but THAT isn’t sensational news is it? To repeat, for Chicago thus far in 2016:
2016 Chicago Police-involved Shootings
Shot by police – 6 killed, 12 wounded
Police shot – 8
All shootings in Chicago for 2016
Killed – 488 (only 6 by police)
Wounded – 2666 (only 12 by police)
Race of Victims/Assailants
78.2% black
16.8% hispanic
5% white/other
Direct confrontation seems a foolish way for an oppressed minority. Has that method ever succeeded?
Tell these adult children to leave their guns at home.
At least once – around 1776 or so…
Cops belong to the larger political elite club, mainly due to the excessive power that the police unions have over the elected leaders. Why else would a job that only requires a high school degree or GED in many urban environments pay average compensations well in excess of $200,000 a year? Becoming a cop these days is almost like a political appointment.
Cops know they are mostly above the law so many of them ignore the laws, knowing full well that the political and justice systems will have their backs.
If you knew that if you were pulled over for a traffic violation that you were immune from a citation – would you have much respect for our traffic laws?
This is all common sense to me. I have no idea why other people can’t figure it out.
Oh, and there’s a myth that there are good and bad cops. But how many good cops turn in the bad cops? ha.
You draw your own conclusions.
Peaceful demonstrations are fine with me and most other people I believe. The problem is when it turns violent and chaotic the rule of law should pervade, but it does not. Looting small business or trying to invade Wal Mart does not constitute a demonstration and the fools should be arrested and hauled off to jail. Enough of this crap already.
The problem is police that shot these young blacks should be held liable just like or I would be held liable. Yes the unions are partially to blame. Training, training, training is not happening or they are putting these cops on the beats too soon. Continuing training must not be happening much anymore. The use of deadly force is a serious decision if you have never been there you have no idea.
Shooting any human being in the back unarmed or 6 police officers taking down an older man for selling cigarettes in front of a store! I could go on but that is excessive use of force. Police protect one another and clearly some need to be indicted and stop the cover ups.
On the other hand if you have never been a situation where deadly force is in play you have no idea what can happen. Been there done that in two wars. It changes you forever is the easiest way to say it.
It is the easiest thing in the world to avoid getting shot by a cop – just do as you are told. Don’t resist. Don’t pull out your gun. Don’t act like you are pulling out your gun. Don’t get out of the car unless you are told to. Don’t ever run away. In other words, don’t be stupid.
Btw, having been a cop, if I would have tried a tazer against a perp with a gun, I would have been fired or kicked out of the training academy. The woman cop did exactly what her training specified to enable her to go home at the end of the day.
So the training is wrong. Thanks for confirming.
Police are not judge, jury, and executioner. You are not Judge Dredd. Your job is to de-escalate. The rules to open fire should not be more lenient than what soldiers face in war. You do not get to open fire unless the civilian opens fire on you. Will police deaths go up? Probably, though as Dallas and other instances have shown that is already starting to happen directly because of the current “shoot first,” “take no chances” policy.
Anyone with the smallest bit of intellectual honesty know that if those men where white women they would not have been shot. Think of it in those terms. If the answer to “should they shoot” is still “yes”, then maybe the shooting was justified. (And only maybe.) It is time for the police to stop being pussies with guns in their hand and to do their job of protecting the rights of the citizens they serve.
“You do not get to open fire unless the civilian opens fire on you.”
Be serious…
I am. And past history certainly shows that police do not have the ability to apply discretion when it comes to this.
The failure is that the cops protect the government, not the people.
My brother is a retired deputy sheriff. He isn’t a bad guy. But I could see him kill an innocent person, purposefully. The problem is that modern police training always puts officer safety first. Cops are told to kill first under any circumstance where they feel threatened. And how they feel, versus how they should feel could be two very different things. Court rulings put how a cop feels at the moment paramount, and cops know this.
Secondly, cops are trained to control a situation with “command presence”. They become very used to being in charge and sometimes get enraged when someone doesn’t show them the appropriate deference. Put the rage, stress, officer safety, and a .357 together and you get a lot of dead innocent people.
Thirdly, a lot of people who apply to police positions are ex-military. Many who’ve been in combat and are trained to kill the enemy. Sometimes it can get confusing who the enemy is. My brother once said there are 2 kinds of people: cops and criminals. They just don’t have enough prison space for all the criminals (us).
There was a study done in Houston recently that looked at the races of innocent people killed by cops. Proportionately, black people weren’t killed at a higher rate than white people. I’m guessing black folks might just be a little better organized to get the message out.
“Put the rage, stress, officer safety, and a .357 together and you get a lot of dead innocent people.” And one more thing: cops are like everyone else: some are calm and smart, others may be excitable and not too bright. Some of the latter cannot make the proper decision given plenty of time and calm circumstances. In stressful seemingly life-threatening situations when the decision must be made in a few seconds, the result is inevitably sometimes fatal. I don’t see any way around that unless the “beat” cops are going to be disarmed. No chance of that. However, cops that make mistakes should be held responsible for their mistakes just like everyone else. It would be a big incentive for them to be more careful.
It’s about time we have robocops!
Ice Cube said it best when he rapped “You better check yourself before you wreck yourself, because d—s up the a-s is bad for your health
Less than 1/100 of cops who kill are convicted of civil crime due to immunity created by common law. They can not be convicted unless they “knew ” what they were doing is wrong.Aw shucks I did not know is a good enough excuse. The cops can also lie with immunity based on common law .US is common law not constitutional law country.The judges operating under common law control system. Common law is never approved by people so its not democracy but tyranny of the judges. The federal judges never had their lifetime positions approved by people either. No the common law rules the judges created gave judges absolute immunity even when corrupt[bribed] .The common law system claims to represent the common man but it allows the crooked judges to take bribes and their servants to kill people with immunity. Like the Sanhedrin counsel. Learn difference between Karaites vs Talmudist.
The problem is the over criminalization of everything, starting with prohibition and all the way down to how you can change lanes, ride a bike, and even walk.
Gee Shamrock are you suggesting we may be just a bit “overpoliced?
My 6 year old grandson was told by a state park campground cop (same authority as a regular cop) that he could not ride his push scooter without a helmet. At least we didn’t have to go post bail for him.
Well, Mish, when it comes to the big scheme of things, death by police is the most preventable and avoidable cause of death. Indeed, after heart attacks and cancer, death by doctors is the most common cause of death, and death by a bad cop is probably down there with shark attacks and lightening strikes. But have a nice day.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/us/training-officers-to-shoot-first-and-he-will-answer-questions-later.html?_r=2
They aren’t bad, they’re trained to be insane – literally Paranoid.
Statistically most victims of black crime are other black people.
Statistically most victim of white crime are other white people.
That is exactly what Tupac Shakur said many times. It’s like, we are scared of criminals/bad people too. I quote
“All my homies drinking liquor
Tears in everybody’s eyes
Niggas cried to mourn a homies homicide
But I can’t cry
instead I’m just a shoulder
Damn, why they take another soldier”.
I wonder if the shoe were on the other foot, would we be so callus towards minorities in the US?
The problem isn’t cops , per se. The problem is the police DEPARTMENT , the county attorney and city hall.
Here’s the CORE problem behind this particular overblown issue, the foolish belief in a real economic recovery, and the current farce passing as a presidential race:
Chances of hiring bad cops goes up when hiring more cops.
The deacon at the local Catholic Church was a cop in LA in the 60s and 70s. He bragged about ripping perps out of cars and just beating the holy hell out of them because they looked like criminals. He reminded me a lot of the cop that beat up Michael Corleone in The Godfather.
Trader Joe – You are clueless what free trade means. Your hopeless answer proves it. Real Neal emailed a nice rebuttal to your nonsense and Curtis’ nonsense …
One hallmark of a free market is respect for private property rights, and the protection of property owners’ access to recourse against those who trespass on or interfere with the peaceful enjoyment of their property. As a 35+ year trial lawyer, I can assure you that the companies alluded to by Trader Joe were uniformly protected by government at all levels and the courts, state and federal, from legal actions brought by injured private property owners to stop their polluting. Certainly not the sort of treatment a company could expect to receive in a free market environment, because in a truly free market no one could put their thumb on the scales of justice to ‘allow’ the bad actors, cronies, zombies, rentiers etc to continue to injure others. Even the solution cited by Trader Joe is proof that the acts and outcomes were not those of a free market. The Superfund legislation was created to address the concerns of citizens that the environment was being polluted to the injury of us all. However, government’s solution was to socialize the cost of the environmental damage, often shielding the bad actors from the consequences of their bad acts and just as often leaving the injured property owner in no better condition than before. Just another “US taxpayer” bailout of the politically well connected, and certainly not a free market solution.
Regarding Curtis’ original comment, “The “free market” brings forth an equal amount of bureaucratic mess as does govt unions.” one should ask, ‘When has a ‘free market’ been tried in the U.S.?’ Without a concrete affirmative answer to this question, we cannot know if the free market suffers from the malignancy Curtis ascribes to it. (My research leads me to conclude that Curtis’ assertion is unlikely true.)
What we can know is: (1) that there is no evidence that public unions have made anything they touched better or cheaper, which is the goal in a free market, or (2) that unions are unwilling to operate in an open manner that gives their ‘members’ anything that smacks even remotely of a ‘free market’ choice when it comes to coerced union membership. Until we have actually tried something that resembles the free market, naysayers should be slower to blame all the bad outcomes they see on it.
Lastly, Curtis’ statement that, “. . . offering workable solutions well that’s a whole new ballgame that few know how to play” seems to agree with Trader Joe’s conclusion that free markets are the problem and the “few” (i.e., government elites) have to do something. Such a conclusion, clearly reached with all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, is what got us where we are.
Mish,
I challenge you to find any country at any time that has tried a free market. I would expect that you cant’t. And if you can’t, I challenge you to consider that such a thing simply cannot exist. That’s the conclusion I have come to.
Stuki, while you and I share the same ideal, I freely admit that anarchism is hopeless. Humans are too hopelessly flawed to ever take that much responsibility for their lives.
All about crime in the U.S. using the government’s own figures. Take the time and educate yourself:
I agree Jon. The free market is wonderful, idealistic, utopic philosophy and works perfectly in the theoretical world. But in the real human world, a world of death and fear and scarcity and decay, humans get all the misery they deserve and desire. It can be no other way for humans.
http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/riot-language-unheard-9-mlk-quotes-mainstream-media-wont-cite
From an outer point of vue, many parts of the US seem to have a problem with their police. I am not sure solutions are simple, yes you propose some.
Ideas to be carfully implemented should be :
* Make sure cops can be sued for misconduct
* Make sure unions can be sued for supporting any kind of misconduct. Or even better, criminalize public unions.
* Make it very clear that any cop initiating violence will have no special rights unless enforcing a court ordered decision against an identified individual. So no pulling of a gun without a court warrant, especially at a traffic stop
* Have a rule like a 500$ pay dock for every cop in the country (retired one included) everytime a guy is killed, whichever the reason, right or wrong. This will make trigger happy pigs less appreciated in the Police HQ, and reorient police training
* Fire all SWAT assholes. I think at most 10 SWAT teams are required for the whole USA, and should intervene ONLY in hostage or shooting agressor situations. No Knock raids should be a very rare exception, most arrests should come as polite requests with only implicitly threatened usage of force
* Legalize pot, paid sex, undeclared menial jobs, fast driving (or at least double all speed limits) and remove any law criminalizing lack of safety towards yourself or your family. Your safety is your own problem.
Mmmh, no edit button
For docking cop pay every time they kill someone, I meant county not coutnry
Here is what you or anyone else will never report. 70 pct of those arrested are from out of State according to Police records. This has George Soros written all over it. They have a pathetic sense of entitlement to protest a criminal who had a record for assault with a deadly weapon 2 times in 2 states and assault 3 times. as far as I am concerned this useless human was sent to the place he was deserved to be sent
I doubt you will read my comments Mish but i will post them in the vain hope spreading some intelligent information.
1. Read up critical race theory: That is, black people are victims of assault, racism, white supremacism and brutality by the white community all the time and that explains everything.
2. Read Colin Flaherty’s Don’t Make The Black Kids Angry and watch a few of his YouTube videos on the subject.
3. Understand that in the inner cities, ghettos, and other places of high concentrations of black populations that the highly dysfunctional “family”, meaning that no fathers are around to influence their children’s behavior, the average black tends to have the emotional maturity of a twelve year old child. This means that the behavior is often impulsive and immature.
4. Understand that living in the hood is means living by the law of the jungle. Violence is the normal way of life and this includes women.
5. Understand that this behavior is the result of operant conditioning (Skinner hasn’t been read for decades) and results in habituation of the very violence that rules that particular society.
I could go on and on but the truth is that no matter how many jobs you bring into the hood there will be very few takers. Why? Why work when you can get enough money through welfare, steal it, sell drugs, rob those who have it, etc.? You would be asking a great many individuals to acquire the habit of getting up for work and showing up on time. These people also have few marketable skills for the businessman.
Wow, what an interesting list of mutually exclusive ideas. First, #5: Skinner was a behaviorist: this means there is no subjective understanding by the actor and thus the actor has no real ideas which have anything to do causally with his or her objective human behavior. (He used operant conditioning while raising his daughter and drove her nuts.) Being a good positivist, for Skinner only observed measurable behavior is real, exists, which, of course, should rule out his creative subjective ideas for coming up with operant conditioning in the first place, and driving his daughter nuts. Apparently only Skinner’s subjective understanding is real and has behavioral consequences. And, of course, this white behaviorism clashes with #1 through 4, critical race theory, coined by a black lawyer at Harvard, derived from the Frankfurt School in white Germany with a rich history in white continental rationalism where only white real ideas are rational and only the rational is real, which is all about irrational unreal racist ideas in history, according to black Angela Davis, and further concluding that its all those unreal white folks fault for slavery, even though slave is derived from Slav, slaves that were white people captured by Muslims to be slaves when they were not on slaving trips to darkest Africa during that free trade era called free booty capitalism under Islam to buy or capture black slaves in a black slave market run by black Africans. Of course, none of these really interesting white ideas has anything to do with the price of poker in Charlotte today, or China for that matter, but they’re great for keeping the race hustle and the racist scam going. I hope that clears it up for you.
Nice of you to take the time to clear things up for me. You are correct when it comes to Skinner and Behaviorism. It is of no use in the training of dogs or people. Habituation does not help explain addiction. It’s too bad the Critical Race theory as it is taught at Temple University is tainted by old European white men. Yes, you are right, all these ideas have nothing to do with the problems in Charlotte or Detroit or Chicago or any other city with a poor inner city inhabited by blacks. Everyone knows that blacks are the victims of relentless white supremacy and racism all the time and that explains everything including the extreme black on black crime and violence and the over representation of the blacks in crime.
Your are correct, ignorance is its own reward. Have a nice day.
The problem with bad cops is not the unions but the propaganda that recruits them. The GOV has puked out all this hero crap for so many decades that everyone believes it. A cop, a fireman, an enlisted military man (not a drafted veteran), are just working a job. There are many more jobs more dangerous, like the guy picking up your trash. When he dies on the job is he a hero? The GOV pumps this hero crap so that young men, usually a bit twisted in the head, will work the job for pennies instead of dollars. If they really want quality individuals, pay them a high wage, or give them something you cannot get anywhere else, like a tax free pass on life. Then you will get quality men that have more to lose if they do a shitty job. You get what you pay for.
George Soros sponsored the riots in Ferguson, and the riots in Charlotte.
He is not a cop.