Haymarket

[4est_4est_Gump]

Here was a scholar’s dream: untapped evidence about a landmark moment in history. Messer-Kruse looked at Haymarket from brand-new angles, embarking on the CSI: Haymarket phase of his research. The trial transcript made him question the claim that friendly fire was at least as deadly to the police as the actual bomb, so he consulted old maps and built a scale-model diorama in his basement. Cardboard cutouts represented buildings. Plastic green soldiers stood in for police and protesters. One time, his wife came down the steps to find him fixated on his miniature scene. “A beautiful mind,” she said before turning around and heading back up, in an allusion to the then-current movie about John Nash, a brilliant professor who sinks into madness. “I was just trying to understand the evidence,” says Messer-Kruse.

This unusual approach seems to have paid off: Messer-Kruse believes that although it’s impossible to rule out lethal friendly fire, several policemen were probably shot by armed protesters — a fact that chips away at the belief that the anarchists were peaceful. Messer-Kruse also worked with chemists to study the forensic remains of Haymarket’s violence. He determined that the original trial experts brought in to study the bomb and bullet fragments had done their jobs well. He furthermore concluded that one of the Haymarket defendants — Louis Lingg, who killed himself before authorities could carry out his death sentence — almost certainly built the bomb.

These findings made their way into Messer-Kruse’s first formal work of scholarship on Haymarket: a 2005 paper printed in Labor, a top academic journal. Around the same time, Messer-Kruse organized a symposium on his work at an annual labor-history conference at Wayne State University, in Detroit. “I expected skepticism,” he says. “Instead, I encountered utter and complete denial of the evidence.” The standing-room-only crowd refused to question what had become an article of faith in left-wing mythology. “They seemed to think that our purpose as historians was to celebrate Haymarket, not to study it or challenge it,” he says. The most provocative attack came a year later, when Bryan D. Palmer of Trent University, in Canada, published a rebuttal to Messer-Kruse. The Haymarket anarchists, he wrote, were “humane, gentle, kindly souls.” Evildoers oppressed them: “The state, the judiciary, and the capitalist class had blood on their hands in 1886–87,” he wrote. Those of us who “drink of this old wine adorned with the new label of Messer-Kruse . . . may end up with the sickly sweet repugnance of blood on our lips.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/338656

The Left loves its little fables...

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Timothy Messer-Kruse doesn’t remember her name, but the question she asked in his college classroom a dozen years ago changed his career — and now it may revolutionize everything historians thought they knew about a hallowed event in the imagination of the American Left. “In my courses on labor history, I always devoted a full lecture to Haymarket,” says Messer-Kruse, referring to what happened in Chicago on the night of May 4, 1886. He would describe how a gathering of anarchists near Haymarket Square turned into a fatal bombing and riot. Although police never arrested the bomb-thrower, they went on to tyrannize radical groups throughout the city, in a crackdown that is often called America’s first Red Scare. Eight men were convicted of aiding and abetting murder. Four died at the end of a hangman’s noose. Today, history books portray them as the innocent victims of a sham trial: They are labor-movement martyrs who sought modest reforms in the face of ruthless robber-baron capitalism.

As Messer-Kruse recounted this familiar tale to his students at the University of Toledo in 2001, a woman raised her hand. “Professor,” she asked, “if what it says in our textbook is true, that there was ‘no evidence whatsoever connecting them with the bombing,’ then what did they talk about in the courtroom for six weeks?”

The question stumped Messer-Kruse. “It had not occurred to me before,” he says. He muttered a few words about lousy evidence and paid witnesses. “But I didn’t really know,” he recalls. “I told her I’d look it up.” As he checked out the standard sources, he failed to find good answers. The semester ended and the student moved on, but her question haunted him. “My interest grew into an obsession.” As Messer-Kruse began to look more closely, he started to wonder if the true story of Haymarket was fundamentally different from the version he and just about everybody else had been told.

And Elizabeth Warren is a Cherokee...


... probably a Princess, like Otahki...

 

[Wat_Tyler]

We can't blame someone for having a copy of TM31-210, so I say we blame Mrs. O'Leary's cow . . . again.

 

[RobDownSouth]

Your "opening remarks" leave a lot to be desired this morning, Chief.

Might want to consider switching to "lolcats and colored fonts mode" earlier than usual.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Perfect fall guy...


Also: ALWAYS BLAME THE COPS

(even as you use them politically to demand more taxes)

 

[Wat_Tyler]

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Halfway to China, the earth turned into "like a million degrees" (Al JaGoreAh) and he burned in the fiery hell reserved for those who refuse to believe in Gaia and Glow Ball Warning.

 

[Wat_Tyler]

Damn rednecks:

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

Drillin' for that Dakota crude!

 

[Wat_Tyler]

I go in to sign up for a new stimulus package today.


I still need to figure out what i want to be when I grow up tho'.

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I’m in the commercial real estate business, and have managed commercial properties for more than 20 years. A friend of mine has been in the real estate services business, providing everything from janitorial services to window washing to parking lot repairs for about as long. In fact, the company I work for was his first account. In the last 20 years, he has expanded from a handful of full-time employees to 150 full-time employees. I recently discussed with him his concerns about the effect of Obamacare on his business. Most of his employees are in lower-skill occupations and so only earn $10 - $15 per hour. He cannot afford to tack on health care benefits equal to another $3.50 to $5.50 per hour without going broke. His more affordable alternative would be to pay the $2,000 per employee fee, which would effectively erase his entire 2012 profit from his business. In essence, this one provision is the equivalent of a 90% - 100% tax on his typical net business income. Worse yet, since the law does not allow the $2,000 per employee charge as a deductible business expense, he’ll have to pay federal income tax on approximately $240,000 of business income he didn’t get. Implicit in the law (or perhaps it is explicit) is the notion that it is the responsibility of employers to provide health insurance to their employees, and if they don’t they are bad people, greedy capitalists exploiting the working class, and deserve to be punished.

What is my friend to do? He can raise his prices and risk losing business from people like me who will then need to cut back on his services, or who will go to his smaller competitors with fewer than 50 employees who are not (yet) subject to the fee. Or he can cut back the hours of his employees until he has fewer than 50 working full-time. Or he can fire most of his employees and tell them they are on their own as independent contractors, and he may be able to subcontract with them from time-to-time for specific jobs. None of these alternatives are good for the business owner, his customers, his employees, or the economy in general.

This is what you get when people sheltered all their lives in government and community organizing, with little knowledge of how businesses actually operate, are put in charge of crafting far-reaching economic policies. This is what you get from people who don’t recognize businesses as the drivers of employment, economic growth, and higher standards of living, but see them as entities that need to be regulated, managed, and controlled by government for the “public good.” This is what you get from people who deride the idea that successful businesses are created by their owners working long hours, developing good ideas, and putting capital at risk, but instead are the creations of government and the community at large.

The iniquity of the law, in that it places a much higher burden, as a percentage of payroll costs, on companies in lower-skilled/lower-wage industries versus companies in relatively higher-skilled/higher-wage industries, is one argument against Obamacare. But there is no question that the law delivers pain to almost everyone. Unions, for instance, are now complaining that the requirement to eliminate annual and lifetime benefit caps, a feature in many policies, including many administered by unions, by itself will, by the estimate of one Atlanta area Sheet Metal Workers Union representative interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, push the price of union labor up by $0.50 to $1.00 per hour to cover the extra costs associated with eliminating those caps. Perhaps unions, being friends and supporters of the Obama administration, will be successful in obtaining federal subsidies or further waivers from the law (equality under the law has not been a hallmark of this administration), but the cost will just be shifted somewhere else, such as on to employers or taxpayers, with the same depressing effect on economic activity.

http://spectator.org/archives/2013/02/06/the-coming-obamacare-recession/print

 

[4est_4est_Gump]

I go in to sign up for a new stimulus package today.


I still need to figure out what i want to be when I grow up tho'.

What a drag it is getting old...

 

[Wat_Tyler]

It beats the alternative, I suppose, since dyin' ain't much of a livin'.

 

[JohnnySavage]

Haymarket is a town in Northern Va.

Wine, horses and trophy wives.