Tag Archives: #SocialJustice

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Virtue must be signaled!

Robert Aaron Long, 21, a guy with some serious, serious mental problems, shot up three Atlanta metropolitan area ‘massage parlors,’ killing eight people, six of whom were of Asian descent. Four were Korean. Naturally, it’s being called a hate crime by the left, though the details don’t quite match up.

But that doesn’t matter; the Usual Suspects are all over this as a hate crime, as though any deliberate murder isn’t an act of hate. From The New York Times:

Why Some Georgia Lawmakers Want Last Week’s Shootings Labeled Hate Crimes

Violence that left eight dead, including six women of Asian descent, will be the first stress test for a Georgia hate crime law.

By Astead W. Herndon and Stephanie Saul |March 21, 2021

A year ago, Georgia was one of four states that had no hate crime legislation.

But the deadly rampage last week that left eight people dead, six of them women of Asian descent, is now providing a test of a law passed last year — and a window into the way that the state’s increasingly diverse electorate has altered its political and cultural chemistry.

Georgia, after earlier false starts, passed its legislation following the shooting death of a young Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, who was stopped, detained and then shot to death by white residents in a South Georgia suburban neighborhood.

Now last week’s shootings, in which Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with eight counts of murder, are providing a major stress test for when the legislation can be applied, what it can achieve and how it plays into the state’s increasingly polarized politics.

Political leaders, civil rights activists, and national and local elected officials condemned last week’s attack as an act of bigoted terror, drawing a connection between the majority-Asian victims and a recent surge in hate crimes against Asian and Pacific Islander Americans.

Mr Long has already been charges with premeditated murder. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Georgia not only has capital punishment, but carries it out, having executed 76 people since the restoration of capital punishment in 1976. An obvious question is: why bother to charge Mr Long with ‘hate crimes’ if there’s really nothing more they can do to him?

Law enforcement officials and some legal figures have shied away from labeling the killings a hate crime, saying there is insufficient evidence of motivation. Prosecutors in two separate counties are still weighing whether to invoke the hate crimes law.

If the evidence for a hate crime is weak, charging under the hate crime stature becomes problematic. It adds to the length and expense of any trial, and runs a serious risk of acquittal on such charges.

But that has not stopped the shootings from resonating as bias crimes for many in Georgia, a state that has been at the forefront of the demographic changes coursing through the South.

“I don’t want to draw any conclusions, but it’s obvious to me that if six victims were Asian women, that was a target,” said Georgia State Representative Calvin Smyre, a longtime Democratic lawmaker who helped shepherd the hate crimes bill through the General Assembly.

And there it is: it’s just obvious to Representative Smyre that, because women of Asian descent were killed, they must’ve been targeted because they were Asian. But sometimes, just because someone thinks that something is obvious doesn’t make it true.

Eight people are dead, and Mr Long has been charged with their murder. He is facing life in prison without the possibility of parole or perhaps even a capital sentence on those charges. If he is convicted on those, there’s nothing more a hate crimes rider can do to him.

But virtue must be signaled! My question is: if the killings of the six Asian women was so horrible, and must be charged as hate crimes, does that make the deaths of the other two victims somehow less significant, less important? Are the two non-Asian victims somehow less dead than the six Asian ones?

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Bidenomics will depress, not increase, American workers’ wages

My good friend William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove notes some of the stuff that’s coming with the [shudder!] Biden Administration:

Biden Priorities: Amnesty, $15 Minimum Wage, Boys In Girl’s Bathrooms

By William Teach | January 17, 2021 | 7:51 AM EST

Hey, #NeverTrumper, you voted for this with your Trump Derangement Syndrome. This is what you agitated for by telling everyone to vote for not just Joe Biden, but Senators and Representatives. No crying. No whining. No complaining. Own it.

Big Business: Joe Biden’s Amnesty for Illegal Aliens Is a Legislative Priority

by John Binder | January 16, 2021

The big business lobby is cheerleading President-elect Joe Biden’s massive amnesty plan for the 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the United States, calling the initiative one of their many “priorities.”

Biden floated the amnesty plan with a number of open borders and business lobbying groups during a meeting this week. Some executives with the groups are calling the amnesty “the most aggressive” plan they have seen while working on Capitol Hill, suggesting it includes not only legislation, but executive orders to legalize most of the illegal alien population. (snip)

Today, 18 million Americans are jobless, and another 6.2 million are underemployed, all of whom want full-time jobs with competitive wages and good benefits. Their chances of securing higher wages and more job opportunities are crushed by the mass inflow of illegal and legal immigration.

There’s more at the original.

The Democrats were big on touting “good, well-paying union jobs” throughout their campaigns. But the obvious question is: why are union jobs well-paying? It’s simple: unionization uses the economic law of supply and demand, by restricting the supply of workers vis a vis demand for workers. If a company is forced to hire only unionized workers, then the supply of those workers is restricted by the number who are in the union.

It’s not just unions: any jobs which require professional licenses or certifications — doctors, nurses, teachers, commercial drivers — are inherently limited in the supply of available workers. Other skilled trades offer such certifications — electricians, plumbers — but their jobs don’t always require people to hold such paperwork.

But the vast majority of American workers do not hold such licenses or certifications, and the computerization of manufacturing has reduced the need for highly trained welders and the like. Most American jobs now require only a minimum of on-the-job training.

However, we have another restriction on supply when it comes to the supply of workers: citizenship or permanent residency status. To be in compliance with employment laws, employers must have copies of the documents which show that a prospective employee can legally work in the United States: a birth certificate, naturalization form or ‘green card.’ This keeps some illegal immigrants from getting jobs, at least with businesses which obey immigration laws.

But if the incoming Biden Administration passes some form of blanket amnesty, then multiple millions of currently illegal immigrants become legal immigrants, eligible to work in the United States, and rapidly increasing the supply of available legal workers.

So what happens? The economic pressures for employers to pay higher wages decreases dramatically. Economics has been called the dismal science because it is, well, dismal, because it is a science that describes people but is based on statistics, and numbers don’t care about people.

Along with this are the proposals to raise the minimum wage to $15.00 per hour, $7.75 an hour above the current federal minimum wage. If that’s done, what will happen?

If a worker earning $7.25 an hour gets raised to $15.00 an hour, that will be a 106.9% raise! Pretty good, huh? But let’s say a worker is already making $12.00. To get a 106.9% raise, he would need to get a raise to $24.83. Why would an employer give a raise to $24.83 to a worker who had been producing at a rate which justified $12.00 per hour? He would have to give that worker a 25% raise, to $15.00 per hour, which I suppose the worker would appreciate, but that previously $12.00 an hour worker would now be a minimum wage employee. Why would an employer give an employee a greater raise than necessary?

Would a worker already making $25.00 an hour, a concrete mixer driver, for example, get a raise? It wouldn’t be required, but now a guy doing a hard, dirty job in all kinds of weather would now be much closer to the minimum wage.

This is the economic effect that Bidenomics would create: downward pressures on wages due to a rapid increase in the supply of available legal workers, along with a pushing of non-minimum wage jobs closer to the minimum. When you have ‘social justice’ driving your economic thinking — and I use the term ‘thinking’ very loosely here — you wind up with policies which result in more, rather than less, poverty and income disparity.

Eventually, a minimum wage increase of that magnitude will trigger price inflation, as employers have to pay more money to the lest productive workers in our economy. The economy will rebalance itself, because that is simply how things work. Inflation will eat away at the wage increase, until the increase is meaningless in real terms, but with more workers pushed closer to the minimum, hourly workers will wind up poorer overall.

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Social Justice Warrior vs Social Justice Warrior

Despite today’s Democrats not being working class friendly at all, labor unions have been a Democratic Party mainstay for decades. But it seems that the left’s having gone all-out #SocialJustice is putting them in conflict with labor unions. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Controversial tax abatement bill pits Philly building trades unions against concerns for immigrant workers

by Sean Collins Walsh | November 30, 2020 | 7:03 PM EST

Councilwoman Maria Quiñones-Sánchez (D-Philadelphia) Public Domain, Link

A City Council bill designed to prevent unscrupulous contractors from receiving construction tax benefits sparked a debate about whether it could also open the door for a crackdown on undocumented workers in an unusually contentious committee hearing on Monday.At issue was a bill by Councilmember Bobby Henon that would prohibit projects using construction firms that improperly classify workers as independent contractors from qualifying for the city’s residential property tax abatement, which provides 10 years of tax benefits on the value of new construction and renovations.

“How do we ensure that the application of this isn’t discriminatory toward undocumented workers who have no recourse?” City Councilmember Maria Quiñones-Sánchez said during a Finance Committee hearing on the bill. “There’s no other way for the communities that I represent to see it any other way than they are potentially being targeted.”

After heated debate, the committee eventually approved the bill in a rare divided vote of 6-3, but not before Henon was forced to provide assurances that, before the bill comes to the Council floor for final passage, he would work to identify regulations that would ensure it does not endanger immigrant workers.

Bobby Henon used to be political director of Local 98 of the powerful International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and Philadelphia is a union town. Unions have tried to retain a stranglehold on all construction in the city, and they make projects more difficult for non-union contractors. [1]This is something I have seen first hand, having jobsite experience while working for a non-union ready-mixed concrete supplier in the Philadelphia suburbs, while providing concrete for a few … Continue reading Kensington, where Maria Quiñones-Sánchez’s[2]While the 2020 election in Pennsylvania was, according to the Democrats, completely free of fraud, Mrs Quiñones-Sánchez herself said that “the ward leaders opposing her have a history of … Continue reading district is based, was 38.9% Hispanic according to the 2010 census. While the exact percentage of the population which is in the United States illegally isn’t known, in 2016, the Rev John Olenick, then pastor of Visitation Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) Roman Catholic Parish in Kensington, said that his “parish consists of many undocumented people from places like Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, [the] Dominican Republic, and other countries.” Visitation BVM Church celebrates one Mass in English on Sundays, but three Masses in Spanish, which lets you know just how busy the parish is.[3]According to the church bulletin, the church has a Pastor, two Associate Pastors, another Redemptorist priest in residence, and a deacon. That’s more staffing than any parish of which I have … Continue reading We may not know the exact percentage of legal vs illegal immigrants are in Mrs Quiñones-Sánchez’s district, but it’s clear that there are a lot of them.

Henon said the bill was not meant to target immigrants and that it was merely meant to ensure construction firms were following employment law.

“This is not penalizing workers in anyway. This is protecting workers,” he said. “I am always open to having a conversation to try to work out some of the unintended consequences with our Revenue Department.”

But Quiñones-Sánchez said that filing as an independent contractor is the only option available to undocumented immigrants — who make up between 15% and 25% of the local construction workforce, according to a 2018 estimate by the city controller — aside from working completely off the books.

Quiñones-Sánchez said if Henon was primarily interested in safety, he would propose a bill aimed at ensuring undocumented workers are protected by safety rules, not one that would keep them off job sites.

Mrs Quiñones-Sánchez has just pointed out, though I doubt she meant to do so, that the illegal immigrants haven’t broken the law only by having crossed into the United States illegally, but continue breaking the law, every day, because they have to work for a living, but they have to violate our employment and tax laws to do so. Either they are presenting forged documents to employers to work on the books, which is a felony, or they are working off the books, for cash, meaning that they are breaking our income tax laws, another felony.

Economically, labor unions bargain for higher wages through the law of supply and demand. If they can force a company or an industry to use only unionized workers, they have effectively reduced the supply of potential workers to the population of union members. For non-unionized workers, allowing illegal immigrants[4]I do not use the mealy-mouthed adjective “undocumented” to soft-peddle the fact that such immigrants are here illegally. to compete for jobs is to increase the supply of workers vis a vis the demand for them, which exerts negative pressure on wages in general.

Mrs Quiñones-Sánchez, a liberal Democrat, opposes the ideas of Mr Henon, another liberal Democrat, because, as will inevitably be the case, the goals of the #SocialJusticeWarriors are inevitably contradictory. I just enjoy watching them fighting with each other.
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Cross-posted on RedState.

References

References
↑1 This is something I have seen first hand, having jobsite experience while working for a non-union ready-mixed concrete supplier in the Philadelphia suburbs, while providing concrete for a few projects in the city itself. Unions can make it difficult for non-union workers to get to the jobsite, and concrete is a perishable product.
↑2 While the 2020 election in Pennsylvania was, according to the Democrats, completely free of fraud, Mrs Quiñones-Sánchez herself said that “the ward leaders opposing her have a history of Election Day shenanigans and campaign finance violations.” WHYY, the NPR station in Philadelphia, reported: “After the election, the city’s Board of Ethics found that the 7th Ward/Friends of Angel Cruz and Quiñones-Sánchez campaign committee had committed campaign finance violations for accepting excess contributions from other political committees.” Both campaigns, and Mrs Quiñones-Sánchez personally, had to pay fines levied by the city’s Ethics Board. Who knew that there were ever ethics in Philadelphia?
↑3 According to the church bulletin, the church has a Pastor, two Associate Pastors, another Redemptorist priest in residence, and a deacon. That’s more staffing than any parish of which I have been a member.
↑4 I do not use the mealy-mouthed adjective “undocumented” to soft-peddle the fact that such immigrants are here illegally.
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George Soros is still spending money to destroy responsible civilization Just like with Larry Krasner, he's dumping money into 'social justice' prosecutors

We have previously noted that Larry Krasner, then a Democratic candidate for District Attorney in Philadelphia, received a lot of money from billionaire America-hater George Soros in his 2017 campaign.

Philadelphia had plenty of experience in treating criminals leniently, and then being shocked, shocked! when criminals who could have and should have been behind bars at the time upped their game to shooting police officers.

Larry Krasner won the election to become District Attorney in Philadelphia in 2017, and was the beneficiary of a huge campaign contribution from leftist billionaire George Soros, is a leftist who hates the police and doesn’t pursue supposedly petty offenses, and ran on a platform saying he would:

  • Stop prosecuting insufficient and insignificant cases
  • Review past convictions, free the wrongfully convicted
  • Stop cash bail imprisonment
  • Treat addiction as an illness, not a crime
  • Protect immigrants while protecting everybody
  • Reject a return to the failed drug wars of the past
  • Stand up to police misconduct

The wholly predictable results? In 2018, Mr Krasner’s first year in office, city homicides jumped from 315 to 353, a 12.06% increase. The following year, homicides held almost steady, rising to 356, but this year, 428 people have been murdered in the city, as of 11:59 PM EST on November 12th, a 40% increase over the same day last year, good for 7th place all time in Philadelphia’s homicide history . . . with 49 days left in the year.

But, it seems that some people like lax law enforcement, regardless of how many dead bodies it leaves on the streets. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Retired Philly cops looking to unseat Larry Krasner lose first battle with billionaire George Soros

by Chris Brennan | November 13, 2020 | 5:00 AM EST

A political action committee organized this summer by retired Philadelphia police officers eager to oust District Attorney Larry Krasner next year said it supported 69 candidates in 17 states in last week’s election.

And while Protect Our Police PAC says 38 of those candidates won, it lost its first face-off with billionaire liberal philanthropist George Soros.

Soros, who spent almost $1.7 million to help Krasner win the 2017 Democratic primary election, gave $244,000 to a Georgia PAC backing Shalena Cook Jones, who defeated two-term Republican Chatham County (Savannah) District Attorney Meg Heap.

The Protect Our Police PAC took heat in the race, with complaints that a billboard it posted was racist because it made it seem Jones supported violent protest (Jones is Black, Heap is white) and that mailers attacking Soros’ involvement were anti-Semitic. The PAC denounced those as “false accusations meant to discredit and distract” and said, “We unequivocally denounce racism and anti-Semitism.”

PAC president Nick Gerace feels confident about 2021, vowing to “counter George Soros’ efforts to elect weak prosecutors who too often side with criminals rather than victims.”

The PAC gave $50,000 last month to State Rep. Martina White, Philadelphia’s only Republican state legislator and a regular Krasner foe. It also sent mailers to retired cops supporting the reelection of state Attorney General Josh Shapiro, an occasional Krasner foe.

Krasner has shrugged off the PAC so far, dismissing in an August fund-raising email the idea that “no one should ever challenge the thin blue line, no matter the abuse or discrimination that occurs in our communities.”

“(T)he abuse or discrimination that occurs in our communities”? A skyrocketing murder rate, aided by Mr Krasner’s lenient treatment of lower level crimes, doesn’t constitute abuse?

Oh, well, I guess that it doesn’t count as racial discrimination when one black guy kills another black guy, the most common description of murder in the City of Brotherly Love, does it?

Mr Soros was born on August 12, 1930, making him 90 years old now. His mission in life appears to be to destroy responsible civilization by backing ‘social justice’ causes, and Mr Krasner is right there, serving as one of his accomplices.
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