This is from the SLOG. The soft counterinsurgency and the hard counterinsurgency are friends with benefits.
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[SOURCE]
Next Generation of Seattle Police To Be Less White and More High
Posted by Unpaid Intern on Mon, May 6, 2013 at 3:03 PM
Posted by news intern Ansel Herz
The mostly white, mostly sober face of the Seattle Police Department is changing. More Seattle police officers may have more melanin and more cannabinol according to new hiring guidelines issued today.
The force is currently 76% white. In the next five years, at least 300 police officers need to be hired to replace those finishing out their careers. The department says it’s partnering with Atlantic Street Center, Filipino Community of Seattle and El Centro De La Raza in order to hire more people of color.
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[Source]
Guatemala declared an emergency in four southeastern towns on Thursday, suspending citizens’ constitutional rights in an area where deadly protests over a proposed silver mine have erupted in recent weeks.
Guatemalan president Otto Perez announced the move in an effort to quell protests targeting the mine belonging to Canadian miner Tahoe Resources Inc. Two people have been killed in the demonstrations.
The company’s security guards shot and wounded six demonstrators on Saturday, said Mauricio Lopez, Guatemala’s security minister.
The next day, protesters, who say the Escobal silver mine near the town of San Rafael Las Flores will contaminate local water supplies, kidnapped 23 police officers, Lopez said.
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I guess maybe we should call this the mainstring media?
A reporter from Seattle’s KIRO 7 News gets sprayed in the face with silly string at today’s May Day march. KIRO is notorious for giving pro-police slants to rallies.
Photos by Red Spark
From Viewpoint Magazine
by James Cersonsky
The $8.25 man, Bloomberg Newswrote in December, has worked at McDonald’s for twenty years. Still, he can’t get forty hours a week or anything more than minimum wage. He can’t make rent payments, can’t afford a computer, and has to go to the Apple store to update his Facebook. After picking cigarette butts out of a bathroom drain, he has to clean off before his next job—at another McDonald’s. The $8.25 man is cheap goods compared to the $8.75 million man. The $8.25 man would have to work roughly a million hours to make what McDonald’s’ CEO made in 2011. The $8.75 million man stands atop an industry that added jobs at double the U.S. average post-recession. Between 2008 and 2011, McDonald’s profits alone rose from $4.3 billion to $5.5 billion. If the $8.25 man became a $15 man, a report from the Economic Policy Institute suggests, the labor market wouldn’t lose any jobs. In downtown Chicago’s retail and food service sectors, raising the minimum wage to $15 would cost $103 million, small change compared to the $14.2 billion in revenue accrued by these sectors in 2011. Even if the aggregate raise were passed on directly to consumers, prices would go up only 2.6%.
But who is the $8.25 man?
In the popular imagination, the $8.25 man is, unfortunately, what you see on TV: younger and less child-dependent than the growing majority of his real-life counterparts. He is also, unlike the central figure of Bloomberg’s well-traveled, well-narrated piece, statistically unlikely to be a man. Nationally, women make up 66% of food preparers and servers, 70% of waiters and waitresses, and 74% of cashiers.
In the post-2007 progressive eye, low-wage workers are the face and hope of the 99%. If Michael Bloomberg is the figurehead of neoliberalism with a healthy diet, fast food workers are the sickle-wielding poster-people of the new American labor movement. As with Wal-Mart workers and domestic workers, their jobs are growing in number—and ripe for unionization. The public is, moreover, well-primed by social critiques like Super Size Me and Bloomberg’s anti-junk food soapboxing. In two cities, the organized struggle is heating up. In New York, food service workers are pushing for recognition of an independent union, the Fast Food Workers Committee, with support from community groups and established trade unions. In Chicago, food service and retail workers from the downtown “Magnificent Mile” have a similar drive, “Fight for 15,” under the aegis of the independent Workers Organizers Committee of Chicago.
The horizons of the $8.25 man, beyond a living wage, are less certain. In his famous 1972 essay in the New York Review of Books, Christopher Lasch took issue with the economism of Jack Newfield and Jeff Greenfield’s Populist Manifesto and Michael Harrington’s allegiance to the sabre-rattling, high-seated AFL-CIO. The challenge, he wrote, is to develop “a theory of class and an understanding of the way in which class interests, seldom presenting themselves directly in economic form, are mediated by culture, which in turn acquires a life independent of its social origin.” The question, carried on by decades of cultural historiography and half-lived Italian debates surrounding class composition, can be rehashed simply: Is the low-wage workers’ movement a “labor” movement? Or a movement for black and brown power? Or a twenty-first century “other women’s movement”? Or, when the workplace is no longer a factory but an urban commons dotted with chain stores, a movement to reclaim “the public”?
In New York and Chicago, workers struggle within and against a political economy of urban space: a dynamic reconstruction of big cities with upscale retail in the center, low-wage labor pushed to the periphery or walled into projects, and McDonald’s everywhere. As part of this architecture, workers are, like fast-food CEOs, political actors—agents of the system as much as its victims. In Andrew Herod’s formulation, “Workers are not dropped from the air into some preexisting economic landscape but are thoroughly connected to the production of space through their struggles to work out geographical solutions to the problems of ensuring their own self-reproduction.” At the highest stratum of labor geography, trade unions advocate different wage rates for different regions in order to maximize their overall leverage. Within locales, workers can, as in the Justice for Janitors campaign in the early 1990s, appropriate public space to unify struggle across spatially fragmented workplaces. As Sarah Jaffe writes about New York, “organizers have moved to find strategies that make sense to workers, that aren’t trapped in the same old formulations that worked in factories but don’t make sense in food service.”
MORE…
This comes from Indian Country. His name was Jack Keewatinawin.
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[SOURCE]
A memorial sits where Jack Keewatinawin, a 21-year-old mentally ill Native man, was fatally shot by the Seattle Police Department following a response to a 911 call, that has a neighborhood raising questions about how the events unfolded.
Neighbors Dispute Police Account of Shooting of Native Man in Seattle
Courtney Lewis lives in what had been until last month a pretty quiet Seattle neighborhood. Lewis’s home is a friendly place, where children in the neighborhood regularly gather to play. She has always been close to Henry Northwind, the Cree man who lives next door with his son, Jack. Over the three years they have lived there, Henry’s son, Jack Keewatinawin, became good friends with her son, Tino Lewis-Sosa. They often played video games together, or tossed a football around in the yard. Jack, who turned 21 in early February, had mental issues, but no one in the neighborhood had ever had a problem with him. Neighbors say the poor boy was “always scared” of the demons and ghosts that haunted him, but was never a threat to his friends and neighbors.
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This article, from Jacobin, continues the discussion about class in generational terms, this time focusing on the increasing tendency toward collective living (out of necessity, rather than lifestyle) that is becoming prevalent among downwardly-mobile millenials.
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[SOURCE]
We don’t need gay marriage to ruin one man, one woman, one mortgage relationships; austerity is doing just fine.
A curious thing happened in the Beltway last week: for the 48 hours surrounding two landmark gay marriage Supreme Court oral arguments, the millennial political class’ collective Facebook feed blushed bright red. Obama-handshake profile pictures gave way to a sharp crimson square designed by the Human Rights Campaign’s marketing department.
Between torrents of memes and legal commentary on Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s skim milk analogy, Samuel Alito’s rusting Burkeanism, and Elena Kagan’s “batting average,” another item, a report about adults turning to cooperative households to save money, passed without remark in liberal circles.
Two million Americans over the age of 30 now live with a housemate or roommate, and shared households make up 18 percent of U.S. households – a 17 percent increase since 2007.
One group of women sold their homes and bought a house together in Mount Lebanon, Pa., after they all got divorced.
“It made amazing economic sense,” said one of the women, Jean McQuillin. McQuillin, Louise Machinist and Karen Bush call their home a “cooperative household.” Each woman has her own bedroom and bathroom, and they share the common areas of the house, chores and expenses.
The suspicion of a generation of queer leftists is at last confirmed: the lifestyle upending Western Civilization’s social cornerstone looks less like committed gay and lesbian families and more like the Golden Girls.
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