Chan3kChris Taylor defeated five other rivals to lay claim to the Democratic nomination for the state Assembly's 48th District. Taylor, a leader of Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin, won the six-way Democratic primary in a Madison state Assembly race where there is no opposition in the general election. She had 32 percent of the vote with 95 percent of precincts reporting in unofficial results from Tuesday's primary.
That means Chris Taylor will be the winner in the Aug. 9 general election, barring a write-in candidate.
By the way, Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin says the recall elections are all about abortion. I agree.
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When asked why she is running for the Assembly seat, Taylor answered:
"I have spent most of my life advocating for basic human rights, including for people who often have no voice in the legislative process."
Ironic.
This is why we need order-of-preference voting. Maybe Taylor would have won anyway - her platform is not without supporters in Madison. But nobody should clinch the title with 32%. We got stuck with a county executive in Milwaukee that way with about 25% in the primary, and no alternative left standing but the cowardly Jeff Stone.
By the way Badger, I was out knocking on doors for your cause yesterday. That is... you do still support recall of Alberta Darling, right? So do I! I might add that if her Democratic challenger turned out to be pro life (unlikely, but it hasn't been a priority for me to find out), I would cheerfully vote for her, as long as she supports strong collective bargaining rights and a minimum wage of $10 an hour. How can anyone be pro-life and oppose such measures? How are all those children going to be housed and fed?
Siarlys: I advocate a minimum wage of $50/hour so I'm five times as pro-life as you are.
SJ, there's a difference between being pro-labor and being pro-Big Labor. I think that's where our paths diverge. I am for increasing minimum wage, but if it is not done gradually it raises unemployment. Poor living wages many times is a symptom though, not a cause unto itself.
Poor living wages is a symptom of WHAT? One of the mostly rhetorical (and ignorant) so-called "conservatives" is Cal Thomas, who recently repeated the tired propaganda line that if there were more millionaires in America, it would be a good thing, because it means that people are "succeeding." The problem with that is that money really doesn't grow on trees, so if a man made a million buying cheap, paying employees next to nothing, and selling high, someone paid the bill for his "success."
I'll agree with Steve to the extent that a minimum wage can't be an arbitrary figure. When I worked my first part-time jobs, the minimum was $1.65 an hour; McDonald's was advertising "You can get lunch at McDonald's for $1, and here's the change you get back." Essentially, lunch could be got for 1/2 hour's work at minimum wage. For most of the past twenty years, it has required a full hour at minimum wage to buy lunch at McDonald's, and I don't even like McDonald's any more.
I have a different approach: In addition to a flat amount minimum, the wage of the lowest paid employee in any enterprise shall be no less than 1% of the highest paid executive. That seems miniscule, until you remember that would mean with a $7 million CEO you have to pay janitors $70,000. I think janitors deserve it, and if there is enough revenue to pay the one, there ought to be enough to pay the other, else the CEO is overpaid.
I know union work rules can be a pain, even for workers. I also know how arbitrary and vindictive management personnel can be without objective standards for making decisions. During my brief time as a shop steward, I tried to resolve the conundrum of sick pay, as described here:
http://siarlysjenkins.blogspot.com/2011/03/providing-sick-days-and-keeping-abuse.html
I admit, experienced union officers were not interested in that approach. But its the kind of balance we need to achieve. When you talk about "Big Labor" though, labor has to be big, because management is VERY BIG. At best, its still an unequal struggle. My great-grandfather didn't want to join the United Mine Workers of America, but decided he couldn't handle the company without being in the union, and jumped in as an organizer.
Poor living wages is a symptom of WHAT?
The fundamental flaws of capitalism.
Oh, now we are in complete agreement. But does that mean we should be cautious about minimum wage laws, lest we offend the gods of capitalism? Or does it mean we should forget minimum wage laws and union contracts, to focus directly on the overthrow of capitalism? And, since we all know of many flaws in the last few attempts to do that, how should we structure our new cooperative commonwealth?
I'm not asking these things to be sarcastic, but you sounded very cautious about enforcing a minimum wage, and now you are denouncing capitalism as fundamentally flawed. So, we need to move forward from here be some means or other. I'm not sure prayer is sufficient.
No it means you don't fix a system overnight and folks are hungry when they're unemployed whether they are capitalists or not. I think you've read that I am a Distributist. There has never been a modern effort to implement the teachings on a wide scale.
Raising minimum wage increases unemployment. Capitalists do not take cuts to pay peons, they spread the burden amongst the peons. A gradual raise helps that. Of course, some jobs are not designed for an arbitrary mandated pay scale as well(means that startup companies have higher entry costs). Like Chesterton said, the problem with capitalism is that there are too few capitalists.
"Raising the minimum wage increases unemployment" is the standard lie issued every time a proposal is made to raise (or, originally, to implement) the minimum wage. It is mendacious, because it assumes all kinds of people are on the payroll out of the goodness of the employer's heart, who don't really do any essential work. There are such people at many enterprises, but they can be profitably laid off any time, with or without an increase in the minimum wage.
If a capitalist has hired someone to do a job, it means they need the job done. If the minimum wage increases, the capitalist will moan, groan, threaten, then pay it, because they need someone doing that job. The first time the minimum wage was adopted, employment actually increased, because the large number of low-wage workers had more money to spend, increasing demand, which necessitated producing more goods and services, ergo, more employment. Letting capitalists keep it all is a terribly inefficient way to create jobs.
I am reminded of the time Santa Monica, California proposed a local minimum wage higher than the state minimum. A local restaurant owner stated, on live TV, "that would cut 20 per cent of my profits." Well and good. If giving all his workers that kind of increase would cut 20 per cent of his profits, it should be done. That's the point. It's not like it puts him in the red, or even cuts 50 per cent of his profits.
Chesterton was the kind of arm chair philosopher who could count what he saw, without ever giving a thought to how they got there. By definition, if everyone was a capitalist, we'd have to import some aliens to be the working class, from somewhere. Then they would all want to be citizens. Then they would all want to be capitalists. Then we would have to import...
... I don't think you "get" Chesterton. He wasn't advocating for capitalism, he was making a point. We agree here to an extent, but my point is raising minimum wage doesn't fix capitalism. Wage slavery is something that is fixed by a socialist government mandating the prices of stuff. Socialism treats symptoms not causes.
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