Links on Cops, Wage Stagnation, Phil Gramm, etc.

(1) Cops:  I just posted Kristian Williams' article in our current issue, Poverty Crime, Privileged Crime: Policing and Economic Inequality.  You might remember an earlier piece he wrote for us: Cops for Labor (D&S, Sept/Oct 2011), which I thought of when I saw a piece by Mario Vasquez at Working In These Times, Univ. of California Academic Workers’ Union Calls on AFL-CIO To Terminate Police Union’s Membership.  Sounds like a great idea.

(2) Revisionism Thwarted: Jordan Weissman, Slate, No, This Graph Does Not Prove That Everything Is Fine With American Capitalism.  Nice riposte to an attempt by Clive Crook at Bloomberg View to minimize the gap between productivity and average worker pay (there are lots of details, but the key point is that he tries to lump in all "workers," including highly paid management. Weissman does a nice take-down.

(3) Gramm Opposes Exploitation--of CEOs:  Alexis Goldstein, Because Finance Is Boring blog (and also at Medium), Former Texas Senator: CEOs are the real victims. This is really repulsive--Phil Gramm is such a clown, and Goldstein's take-down is great. “The one form of bigotry that is still allowed in this country is bigotry against the successful,” i.e., CEOs, Gramm told the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday. My co-editor, Alejandro Reuss, quipped that this kind of bigotry is especially bad because it is based on inherited traits that the members of the group did nothing to bring on themselves (i.e., family wealth).

(4) Another Illinois Victory:  AFSCME Council 31 (Illinois) press release, Unions win court ruling that Chicago pension cuts are unconstitutional A confirmation of an earlier ruling we reported on here.  Here's the Chicago Tribune's story on the ruling: Judge finds city's changes to pension funds unconstitutional.  Again, this is because the constitution says you can't renege on pension promises. This should be simple, right?

(5) Latest Greek Links:

• Joseph Stiglitz, New York Times, Greece, the Sacrificial Lamb
• Frank Hoffer, Social Europe, What Next After Tsipras Dashed Schäuble’s Hopes For Grexit?
• Daniel Munevar, Social Europe, Why I've Changed My Mind about Grexit
• Yanis Varoufakis interview (from back on July 13), New Statesman, Our Battle to Save Greece
• Mark Steele, The Independent, The Greek debt crisis: a tale of ritual humiliation (satire)
• Matias Vernengo (blogger for us at Triple Crisis), The Wire, Europe in Its Labyrinth, Greece on Its Knees
• John T. Harvey, Forbes.com (from July 7, right after the referendum), Five Reasons the Greeks Were Right (nice citation of our piece by Katherine Sciacchitano and John Miller, Why the United States Is Not Greece, from our Jan/Feb 2012 issue).