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Morning Links
Friday, March 16th, 2012- Photos of peopleless places.
- Eugene, Oregon police officer gets a $250,000 settlement for his demotion after he raised concerns about “multiple, inadvertent discharges of high-powered weapons by SWAT team members.”
- Headline of the day.
- Google now has more revenue than the entire U.S. newspaper industry.
- Family of Rachel Hoffman, the 24 year-old Florida woman murdered after she was pressured to work as a police informant, gets a $2.4 million settlement.
- The Nation sticks up for corporate welfare.
I don’t resent that people get the big settlements, but it’s obvious that settlements don’t affect police and judicial misconduct.
What does tend to affect misconduct?
Those photos are amazing.
Google now has more revenue than the entire U.S. newspaper industry.
By several orders of magnitude, Google is more useful and accessible than the entire US newspaper industry. By the same margin, it also provides access to more news at all levels.
So for The Nation, far right means ending corporate welfare. What the fuck is wrong with people and how they categorize individuals?
Settlements don’t affect police and judicial misconduct because they’re paid with tax money. The only way to make settlements work is to hold those responsible for the misconduct personally liable.
“•Family of Rachel Hoffman, the 24 year-old Florida woman murdered after she was pressured to work as a police informant, gets a $2.4 million settlement.”
Pressured, huh? As opposed to what? Volunteering?
This is the worst part of the Rachel Hoffman story:
“Ryan Pender, the Tallahassee police officer who devised the sting and was in charge of Hoffman that evening, was fired but later reinstated.”
He should be in prison alongside Bradshaw and Green.
“Rachel’s Law, passed in 2009, says law enforcement officers can’t promise an informant a reduced sentence in exchange for undercover work, and allows an informant to consult with a lawyer if one is requested.”
I’m not a fan of laws named after dead people, but I kind of like this one. Can anybody see a reason that I shouldn’t?
i don’t get the corp welfare position of the Ex-Im bank. if this is true:
The agency is funded by industry fees, not taxpayer money …
then what do i care? well, unless its employees are federal employees or similar. then its just another agency i could do w/o.
@ CSP,
Unlike other dead people laws, this one restricts government rather than empowers it. I wish more dead people laws were written in this manner.
I’m just going to leave this here: http://failblog.org/2012/03/16/funny-facebook-fails-failbook-capitalism/
You know when comedic conversations on Facebook start sounding like Radley Balko’s RSS feed that something is starting to change. People are starting to take notice. Or at least I hope so.
New York passes bill to collect DNA from all criminals; even misdemeanors like jumping a subway turnstile — http://www.npr.org/2012/03/15/148692189/n-y-passes-dna-requirement-for-convicted-criminals
@9 dsmallwood
Industry fees = taxing industry = costs passed on to consumer
May be a second order tax, but it is coming from the average american citizen.
Also, the below market loans are being given to those with political connections. ExIm bank loaned 10mil to solyndra
A lot more could be said about the ExIm bank. If you want, read sallie james on the topic
@AMB #11
But don’t read the comments.
@1 @5 General Population or a hemp rope seem to be the only way to get police to change their ways.
And thou still shall not lose thy job.
Bernie Sanders had something to say about the Ex-Im Bank.
I sure am curious as to why the difference of opinion.
As far as the bank being “self-supporting” – it only became so in 2007 and is self-supporting in the same way Fannie and Freddie and Sallie were self-supporting. Which is to say – the profits are privatized, the losses are socialized.
[...] Radley Balko finds a headline-of-the-day contender: [...]
As if I needed another reason to avoid NY like the plague – get arrested ( even for something bogus), have your DNA in their database for possible link to any crime anywhere for the rest of your life… nice.
DNA matches are supposedly accurate to things like “1 in 9 million” and such like that, which sounds great… until you have 20+ million in your database, then guess what happens?
Punishment of those who commit it. Having some unrelated third party pay damages does not fit that bill.
@17 jerryskids
Super-cynical mode:
People are stupid and like the idea of winning a trade war/the trade imbalance. This is regardless of left/right or democratic/republican. Second and third-order effects be damned.
Although, contra bernie sanders, it is not obvious that keeping certain jobs on-shore is preferable to pushing certain jobs off-shore. Distortion of markets is not a good thing. Distorting to compensate for another distortion is, at the absolute very optimal, a second-best option
11 year old boy sets up NCAA pool at school. Principal calls in SWAT team.
Just kidding. Principal calls in parent, boy doesn’t get into any trouble at school. Mom laughs about it. Kid learns that gambling is sorta illegal and not appropriate at school.
(That was an Oklab, aka, a reverse Balko.)
@ rmv | March 16th, 2012 at 4:30 pm
It is almost impossible to get people to understand Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage.
Someone – I forget who – once called it ‘the most important non-obvious principle of economics’.
@22 – Because it’s no longer applicable in a world of mobile capital.
” … if capital freely flowed towards those countries where it could be most profitably employed, there could be no difference in the rate of profit, and no other difference in the real or labour price of commodities, than the additional quantity of labour required to convey them to the various markets where they were to be sold.”
http://www.econlib.org/library/Ricardo/ricP2a.html#Ch.7,%20On%20Foreign%20Trade
@23 Leon wolfeson
Labor does not flow freely from one country to another.
if capital freely flowed towards those countries where it could be most profitably employed
Pure ideology, right there.
So, for the Eugene cop, does that 1A verdict cast the lie to all the administration officials (of any capacity) who say they can only speak anonymously to the press “due to the sensitivity of the topic?”
> Eugene, Oregon police officer gets a
> $250,000 settlement for his demotion
That’s $110,000 more than Nino Lyons got for being wrongly imprisoned for 3 years.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-03-15/florida-man-wrongly-jailed/53554610/1
March 15, 2012
Justice Dept. Agrees To Pay $140,000 To Man Wrongly Jailed
By Scott Gunnerson, Florida Today
The Justice Department has agreed to pay nearly $140,000 to a Florida man who spent three years in jail while prosecutors concealed evidence that could have set him free.
The Justice Department had conceded in court papers that it is required to compensate Nino Lyons for the time he was wrongly jailed, but it argued the amount should be far lower — $5,000 for each year.
@24 – Thanks for missing the point! (And of course, it does within the EU+EFTA, for instance…) The point was capital. And capital is most definitely free flowing in the American (but not Chinese) model.
It’s why the right are trying to force wages down to Chinese levels…
“inadvertent discharges”
I believe the more correct term is “negligent discharge”.
@27 Leon wolfeson
Thanks for being condescending!
Comparative advantage is still applicable due to the relatively immobile nature of labor(as an input in the production function).
Forcing wages down = nonsensical marxist pap