Lynne Abraham to Michael Nutter: Gun Laws Unconstitutional, Will Not Enforce

[LittleRedToyota]

i think nineseven hit the nail on the head.

but, the question is...what do you do about it?

the only answer that actually has much of a chance to work is: take the kids out of the environment--break the cycle. in other words...take them from their parents. and that just ain't gonna happen.

so, how else can we at least try to break the cycle?

step 1: stop paying people to have kids. no more additional welfare because you have another kid. now, i agree we cannot just abandon the kids, so...instead of giving the "parent" (to use the term loosely) money for the kids, give the kids what they need directly.

"here is where you can bring your kid and he/she can have a free well-balanced, nutritional meal. you can bring the kid there 3 times a day if needed."

"here is where you can bring your kid for free health care"

"here is where you can send your kid to play basketball all night instead of hanging out on the street getting into trouble."

etc.

but no more cash to the "parent".

step 2: turn all welfare into workfare. "we are not going to *give* you another penny. but, you can show up here, and we will have some work for you to do to *earn* some money. the city will get its potholes fixed, garbage cleaned up, abandon lots cleaned up, etc. and you will develop some self-respect that comes from earning your own way."

step 3: simultaneously, the effected communities need to change their value systems from within. the leaders of these communities need to teach their followers that they need to help themselves...and that providing for their own financial security should be at the top of their priority list as it enables everything else in life.

here is a great example of how this is not happening here in pittsburgh at least:

over the last few years, there have been a lot of murals painted on the sides of buildings by local artists...legally, with the city's approval and, i would even guess, possibly some public funding (which means the messages in the murals are being approved by city/community leaders).

it's cool...it makes the city look nicer and discourages graffitti.

looking at the mural that are painted in the economically depressed neighborhoods in the city is very telling, though.

they portray young women as brides and/or pregnant and/or with a bunch of little kids following them around. this is completely the wrong message to be sending to high school aged women in these communities. these women should be being encouraged to do well in school, go to college, and establish a career before starting families. the murals should show young women walking around college campuses with textbooks in their hands...they should show women in business suits or in a professional setting...not pregnant and getting married at age 19.

now, the murals don't cause the problems, of course...but they do reflect the attitudes of many of the people in those neighborhoods. they see woman as nothing more than baby making machines, and a woman's "value" corresponds to how many kids she has. this has to change.

likewise, these murals portray young men with fists clenched and screaming out demanding "change" from someone else. again, this is entirely the wrong message to send to young men in these communities. they certainly should be encouraged to stand up for themselves and fight for their rights, but they should not be taught to expect someone else to change things for them...rather, they should be being taught to do it for themselves. again, murals with young men walking aound a college campus carrying text books, young men in professional settings, etc. would be a good start

obviously, there is much, much more to it than murals...the murals are just windows, but they are telling. there needs to be a fundamental shift in the attitude of many people in these communities away from one of dependency. and, frankly, it is up to the leaders in those communities to make it happen. leaders in these communities need to start attaching a stigma to being on government assistance. needing someone else to help pay your way means you are failing in life. it doesn't mean you cannot pick yourself up and start succeeding in life, but it does mean that you are currently failing at life. and, as long as you continue to be on government assistance, you are continuing to fail at life and should be ashamed of it. and, that shame should motivate you to do something about it.

the leaders in these communities need to start instilling that outlook on life. outsiders cannot do it for them. however, outsiders can help by stopping just giving people stuff. they need to earn it. we should provide avenues to enable that, but no handouts.

[policemedic]

Originally Posted by gregorio

Well said! It's the same reason they don't strictly enforce the car insurance laws. If they went around and towed all of the cars driving illegally in Philadelphia, there would be a wholesale change of elected officials in City Government. That's why our car insurance rates are so much higher than just outside the city.

I can tell you why we don't impound for insurance in Philadelphia with two words- Angel Ortiz.

While we were running the Live Stop pilot program in portions of South Philly and Center City, we were impounding for everything the law allowed. That means anyone who didn't have a valid driver's license, valid insurance, and valid registration got towed.

When the pilot program ended and Live Stop went citywide, the good councilman made enough waves about poor people in his district being unable to afford insurance and how unfair it would be if they couldn't drive that the PD and Traffic Court caved and we can no longer impound for insurance.

By the way, wanna guess what the crime rate was in his district?

[tmg19103]

Some complain that a "culture of poverty" with its ensuing violence that you see in parts of Philly has encouraged a sense of dependency on government in the form of a welfare state, and to an extent I agree. Of course, in recent months, this same bureaucracy - the Federal Reserve, the Federal Housing Authority, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - has generally ignored the struggles of middle class homeowners, but they jumped right into action, inclusive of printing hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air, to save multi-millionaire Wall Street bankers from their own disastrous bets, allowing them to keep their yachts, lear jets and second and third homes. When Bear Stearns approached bankruptcy, the Feds orchestrated JPMorgan's acquisition of it. Here's what mega-rich Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz told his already wealthy employees last month after his firm, one of the largest investment banks in the country, almost went under due to its own bad business decisions: "We here are a collective victim of violence". Yup, just another case of the Man keeping the Man down.

Part of the reason we don't talk much about poverty is that no one really knows what to do about it. The left wrongly wants to blame poverty on evil Republicans and to advocate more redistribution of wealth and spending on social programs. The right, meanwhile, tends to blame bloated welfare programs for keeping the poor trapped in their condition, as well as the culture of poverty with its deeply entrenched social problems—which, all too often, translates into blaming the poor themselves. After Katrina some right wing pundits referred to the New Orleans poor as ''sheep" and ''parasites."

Most decent people, whatever their politics, should distance themselves from such crap. Some people are poor because of bad luck or catastrophic illness, but chronic, multigenerational poverty that goes back to the days of slavery is another matter that I don't think can be easily explained.

It's a touchy subject. One can easily come across as patronizing and condescending, as preaching to the poor from one's middle or upper class perch—or, worse yet, as bashing the poor for their lack of good character. I personally don't think that good cultural habits are a matter of inherent virtue. Most of us, if born into bad circumstances of a culture of poverty in West Philly, would have quite likely ended up trapped in the same self-defeating, self-destructive, violent patterns.

Spending more money won't cure poverty, and reforming culture is something that's easier said than done. On the public policy standpoint we can look to improve the schools and keep criminals locked up while having more parole officers to keep ex-cons in line. I am personally not for welfare handouts, but I do think there needs to be more opportunity in these impoverished areas so youngsters can see a future so they don't go out and commit crimes or get pregnant at such young ages. As it is now, they see no hope for their futures so they just don't care. If anyone can change the culture of poverty, it's community activists working in the trenches. And such change is likely to take a long time, if get accomplished at all.

No easy answers, but easy to put your foot in your mouth on this issue. I happen to have an interesting perspective on this. A white guy who lived at 40th and Lancaster in the heart of the West Philly ghetto for two years (rent was right as I paid my way) when he went to the Wharton School. Many of those trapped in the ghetto I met were good people who worked hard to barely get by. Those who were on the wrong path I could not really blame though they were and are responsible for their actions. On the other hand, I have zero patience for a rich kid who went to Wharton who destroys the middle class buy keeping their wages down so he can now get paid 362 times his average worker with him as CEO. There is a distortion here at both the top and bottom, and one can argue that those at the top, by only helping themselves, are destroying the middle class while perpetuating the culture of poverty at the bottom as they themselves have no social conscience.

[Philadelphia]

Originally Posted by tmg19103

Some complain that a "culture of poverty" with its ensuing violence that you see in parts of Philly has encouraged a sense of dependency on government in the form of a welfare state, and to an extent I agree. Of course, in recent months, this same bureaucracy - the Federal Reserve, the Federal Housing Authority, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - has generally ignored the struggles of middle class homeowners, but they jumped right into action, inclusive of printing hundreds of billions of dollars out of thin air, to save multi-millionaire Wall Street bankers from their own disastrous bets, allowing them to keep their yachts, lear jets and second and third homes. . . .

I agree with much of what you said in your entire post.

Couple things to consider. The Wall St. bankers that got bailed out not only employ many thousands of middle class workers but are also critical to a free flow of capital that allows many others to employ thousands of middle class workers. There's much more to it than Lear jets and yachts. That said, it does just go to show that both the poor and the rich have some major issues with discipline and responsibility, and it does point out how easy it is to blast the poor for lack of responsibility while ignoring the failings of the Lear jet set.

Likewise, those at the top do not destroy the middle class or keep wages down all on their own. Those at the top are the shareholders who both follow the "golden rule" (heh, heh) and provide the build up and investment of capital needed to provide all those middle class jobs. As long as the fat cats in management bring home the bacon, the shareholders are not going to get over-excited about disparity of wages.

Wages are a function of supply and demand and are affected by globalization. In some sense, (we) workers bear some responsibility for lack of competitiveness and relatively recent changes in terms of globalization have added a lot of pressure. As unfortunate as it may seem, expectations may need to be adjusted in the short term to retain jobs that will add to our economic power over the long haul. Nobody, not the shareholders and not the workers, have really been willing to make any sacrifices on that score (with some exceptions, such as certain union give backs to save jobs).

The focus on management salaries may be misplaced in terms of relative total cost. Millions to a CEO is a spit in the ocean in terms of the total labor costs of a large organization. But it does get headlines.

Well, I've rambled enough. The important points, I guess, are the ones you made concerning opportunity for lower skilled workers. Until we all are willing to pay more for a head of lettuce or a McDonald's lunch, illegal immigration remains on the radar as an excused way to fill the jobs "Americans won't do." Until we are all willing to make the sacrifice to steer clear of WalMart cheap Chinese goods and buy what's made here and pay what it really costs to make stuff here, none of us can really complain that jobs keep fleeing overseas and that there are few options for a lower skilled worker to climb out of poverty. Last, until some in this country learn that the regulatory and tax structure here, while maybe well meaning, stifles growth and actually ends up causing great harm to the poor (as well as the middle class), nothing will ever really change.

Locally and in the short term, we need more cops, more DAs, more prison beds and more recidivist programs.

[Buckmark.35]

Originally Posted by NineseveN

I grew up in gang neighborhoods. I grew up with gangs and gangbangers, for most of them, it's not the culture that drives them, that's for surbanized kids of status. What drives them is the basic need to survive. When you live with apes, you just can't keep clean; and when you're surrounded by predators, the only language a predator understands is, well, that of another predator. On some level, these predators identify with what the artists and media they prefer are saying. They're not hiding behind it, they're nodding their heads and saying, "yeah, my life is like that".

Most of the kids in the inner-cities aren't really criminals at their core, they're nothing more than organisms engaging in mimicry (both Batesian and Mullerian). If you somehow wiped Philly's population off of the map, the problem would go away, but only for a short time. There's an environment there that tends to breed predators, and unless that changes, cleansing is only a short-term adhesive bandage. Inner-city crime in this country has more to do with environment than it does with cultural or entertainment media.

I understand what you're saying, and I do respect your POV becuase you lived there, hell you know more about it than I do. What I would argue is that the gangbangers who equate what those artists are saying to normal life, that is the culture. Culture isn't something that you just decide one day you're going to identify with. Those kids in the burbs who buy CD's and get tattoos on their weekly allowance aren't a real part of that culture. Those that live it. Those that are the real gangbangers like the ones you grew up with.. they are the fuel of that culture. It's what they know, and it's what's comfortable to them. The culture is what is glorified by gangsta rap and other genres. It takes the culture to make the rap, not the rap to create the culture.

I can see what you're saying, and really there is no easy solution to gang and street violence. People that are more comfortable robbing someone, than earning an honest living, do not want to help themselves. They're perfectly content doing what they're doing, and that's what feeds the crime culture. What's the solution to that? I don't know. These are just my observations.

[tmg19103]

Originally Posted by Philadelphia

Likewise, those at the top do not destroy the middle class or keep wages down all on their own. Those at the top are the shareholders who both follow the "golden rule" (heh, heh) and provide the build up and investment of capital needed to provide all those middle class jobs. As long as the fat cats in management bring home the bacon, the shareholders are not going to get over-excited about disparity of wages.

Wages are a function of supply and demand and are affected by globalization. In some sense, (we) workers bear some responsibility for lack of competitiveness and relatively recent changes in terms of globalization have added a lot of pressure. As unfortunate as it may seem, expectations may need to be adjusted in the short term to retain jobs that will add to our economic power over the long haul. Nobody, not the shareholders and not the workers, have really been willing to make any sacrifices on that score (with some exceptions, such as certain union give backs to save jobs).

The focus on management salaries may be misplaced in terms of relative total cost. Millions to a CEO is a spit in the ocean in terms of the total labor costs of a large organization. But it does get headlines.

Well said in your overall post. As for the part I quoted above, I'll add my thoughts to what I already agree with.

Corporate America used to have what I will call, for lack of a better term, an unsaid social contract with both blue collar and white collar employees. It was basically along the lines of: You work hard for me and I will give you a fair wage and job security. I think my point on CEO pay is valid to what has gone wrong with the system. Since 1973, real wages adjusted for inflation for the average American worker are up 1%. In the meantime CEO pay has gone up in the hundreds of millions per year in large companies and these CEO's are rewarded by Wall Street for downsizing, rightsizing and cutting costs left and right. Since the social contract between management and the American worker has disappeared in the name of profits, there is resentment and this affects worker productivity.

This all started in the 1980's due to foreign competition. It brought about deregulation of large industries, union busting by management, loss of jobs overseas, stagnating wages and a shift from management responsibility (due to the bottom line) on healthcare and retirement pensions to placing these resposnibilities on the employees with ever increasing costs. This has been the issue for the middle class, any many of those displaced former middle class blue collar workers who used to live the American dream in a moderate manner are now left high and dry.

So, what has happened to these for middle class, laid-off blue (and white) collar workers? They have formed a new welfare class, yet they still have decent educations, smarts and skills due to real world work/business experience. They are working hard at lower paying jobs to try and get back to where they were - always keeping their eyes open for a job that will pay them what they once earned.

What does this do? This pushes those with less means and lesser educations further down the totum pole and that is why we have so many areas wracked with poverty and the ensuing issues that come with poverty - single mother households, drugs, crime, etc. It is not just an inner city thing. It is just as bad in Appalachia.

There are no easy answers and illegal immigration just makes it tougher - especially for those already in poverty. I don't personally blame them for not wanting to work for the half of minimum wage jobs with no benefits that illegals are happy to have.

It's a very complex situation and I certainly don't have the answers. I have sympathy for just about everybody up and down the food chain who is struggling - except for CEO's and there other top execs. In the big scheme you are right - what they are taking home is not much for the bottom line of the company, but it demonstrates that any and all social contracts and personal responsibility for those with so much wealth for those who work so hard for them with minimal if an wage increases are out the window.

There is no doubt in my mind that this all trickles down to those who live in cultures of poverty and it only makes things worse for them. At the same time, violence and illegal acts are no excuse for being delt a bad hand through birth. I can understand seeking to take advanatage of any and all welfare if you have tried to get out and have not other option, but lock up and properly monitor upon release the criminals. That is one area were the government has truly failed. Sometimes I really wonder what my taxes are paying for, but that goes to a whole other topic on government incompetence and largess.

What is needed is Americans helping Americans - not the casting of blame. CEO's making $100 million a year should be giving charitably to urban renewal in those cultures of poverty and not so much to their performing arts centers that only the rich attend. Middle class workers with business sense can help use their skills by volunterring to work with community activists in ghettoes with job training programs. One thing for sure - the government can't seem to fix the problems created by poverty, whether you subscribe to liberal or right wing views. America needs a new social contract between Americans without the bickering, resentment and greed.

Easier said than done.

[GunLawyer001]

Originally Posted by tmg19103

Corporate America used to have what I will call, for lack of a better term, an unsaid social contract with both blue collar and white collar employees. It was basically along the lines of: You work hard for me and I will give you a fair wage and job security.

You lost me right there, there's no factual basis for that belief. American business has never had a dominant culture like that. Japan used to, but no longer does.

When did American businesses have such a partnership or contract with workers? When the mine operators ran company towns that pushed their workers further into debt while they worked 80-hour weeks and got black lung? When union busters hired detectives to machine-gun striking workers? When it required Federal legislation to limit work hours, pay overtime rates, and get a day off once in a while? Did the Molly Maguires rise up to demand a lower co-pay and free child care, or was there a deeper problem?

I think that many CEO's are paid far too much, and that's an issue for the shareholders to address. But we don't officially live under socialism, at least not yet, and it's a false premise to imply that paying CEO's more means paying workers less. In fact, any business will pay its workers the market rate, and any excess income goes to the shareholders, who own the business. BTW, unions and retirement accounts own a HUGE chunk of the stock market, so those profits go to the workers who invested in the stocks.

On a separate but related note, I have little tolerance for people who discuss "poverty" like it's a migrating weather system, or a drought, or a plague that just strikes people. When a huge part of a city is poor, it's a sign that fundamental changes are needed. Maybe they should move somewhere where they could get a job. Maybe they shouldn't have started families first, THEN tried to figure out how they would pay for 18 years of obligations.

Poverty is just people who don't earn enough money. It's the default condition. Doing nothing keeps you poor, just like not walking towards your destination keeps you where you started. Doing the wrong things will keep you poor. To not be poor, you have to do the right things. We as a society offer 12 years of free education, so there's no excuse for being illiterate. Anyone who drops out of school without a job lined up will likely be poor. Any girl who gives birth at 16 will likely be poor, and so will her bastard children. Anyone with multiple arrests by age 18 will likely be poor.

Really, if you eliminate the criminals, the illiterate, and the economically non-viable "single parent households" from the math, how much poverty is left in Philadelphia? Shouldn't Philadelphia's government be fighting crime, illiteracy and pregnant unwed girls, instead of blaming guns and suburbanites?

Philadelphia has 30-story buildings filled with good jobs in banking, insurance, law, import/export, whatever you want; the city has to import suburbanites to fill these jobs. It has port facilities and an established infrastructure, an airport and highways. It has a bunch of colleges and trade schools. There are plenty of jobs, it's just that too many of the residents are useless parasites without skills or reliability.

Much like Soylent Green, Philadelphia's troubles are made from people.

[NineseveN]

Originally Posted by Buckmark.35

The culture is what is glorified by gangsta rap and other genres. It takes the culture to make the rap, not the rap to create the culture.

I get what you're saying, and to some extent I think you're right. But the glorification is used to sell CD's to kids that aren't glorified in it, they're simply engaging an emotional or psychological defense mechanism to cope with their reality. They glorify it to simulate choice, if you believe you're making a choice, it gets easier to cope with being powerless and scared because you're not dealing with it, you're just waxing over and ignoring it. All people do that to some extent, how much and how severe depends on a lot of things, mostly environment (at least initially).

Peace.

[schmol]

Here's a thought, how about we stop sending 12 billion to Iraq every month and start using it for the people in this country...

[GunLawyer001]

Originally Posted by schmol

Here's a thought, how about we stop sending 12 billion to Iraq every month and start using it for the people in this country...

I was under the impression that fighting global terrorism WAS "using it for the people in this country". The days are long gone when we could hide within our borders and be left alone. Hell, we can't even secure the borders from unarmed fruit pickers and pregnant illegals looking to birth a new citizen.

There may be disagreements about whether fighting Al Qaida in Iraq is an effective tactic (maybe I missed the other specific suggestions), but the truth is that we need to be fighting them SOMEWHERE, and they don't have their own country anymore since we took Afghanistan away from the Taliban. So we can either be eternally vigilant and hope that we spot the van with the nuke before it gets within range of any building in the USA with people in it, or we can find them and kill them wherever they are. I like plan B, myself.

At any rate, whether we spend my tax dollars on killing strangers in Iraq, or feeding/housing/educating strangers in Philadelphia, I'm benefited directly about the same. Actually, killing people who want me dead has the advantage over subsidizing the next generation of domestic thugs.