Dear California voters (Monday November 14th 2005)
Even with the one day one trial law mandatory
jury duty in California can still be difficult
for some people who are summonned because the
summons is always to a distant courthouse that is hard
to get to and might occur on the day of a college
test or a critical workday or result in young
children being left unsupervised for at least one day.
Are there any voters in California who are willing
to vote for or advocate converting all courts to
use all volunteer juries instead of continuing
the mandatory jury summonses ??
(click on
add your comments
below to reply to this question)
Eric Matteson

Does anyone bother to read the Constitution especially the 5th, 6th and 7th amendments ?

Why not just give the rest of your power to government, they'll take care of you...translation: "BRIDGE FOR SALE"

Go to www.fija.org, and go learn something.

I want you to understand that
I did check the Constitution
very carefully and
even though the Constitution has
jury trials there is NOTHING
IN THE CONSTITUTION ITSELF
TO PREVENT PEOPLE FROM
VOLUNTEERING FOR JURY DUTY
http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/constitution.billofrights.html
is the link to check the
Constitution Bill of Rights yourself.
the Constitution DOES NOT require
compulsory jury service and
the constitution DOES NOT PREVENT
converting to all volunteer juries
in every court in the United States.
------------------------------------------------
The totally seperate thing that
requires a constitutional
ammendment is the other option of
abolishing jury trials
altogether.
Eric Matteson

All-volunteer juries would have the same problem as Internet polls- a self-selected sample is never going to be accurately representative of the population.

Three TV show executive producers were summonned
to jury duty in California after one day one trial
law was started. One Day one trial no longer
allows high income people with important
jobs or businesses to get excused from jury
duty. Those three TV show producers wrote
episodes of their shows that complain
about forced
jury duty and not being able to get excused
any more. Those very
wealthy TV show executives
have a secret plan to
lobby congress to ammend the U.S.
constitution to
ABOLISH JURY TRIALS ALTOGETHER
so they will never be summonned to
serve on a jury ever again after that..
Should the U.S. constitution
be ammended to abolish jury trials altogether ??
Eric Matteson

It's your duty to serve on the jury. Of course rich people are not exempt. Since when did this country return to monarchy and oligarchy? The fact that we have a monarchical oligarch as a President is not sufficient reason. Not only do we need jury duty, we need more money for jurors.

The current compensation for jurors- 9 bucks a day but the first day doesn't count- is derisory. When I was tapped for jury duty last year, I got a total of 17 bucks, while losing out on $320 in wages for those two days.

That wasn't anything like catastrophic, but for people who earn less or have greater financial obligations, e.g. families to support, the loss of even a couple of days of work could be a real problem, and serving on a trial that runs for a week or more a disaster.

Bugger the terrible hardships of the rich juror. If we want juries to be composed of a representative sample of the community, we need to make it possible for working and middle-class people to serve without having to suffer.

The current compulsory jury duty system in 2005
is flawed. Compulsory jury duty creates a
hardship for both poor people and rich people.
Rich people have to work very hard at their
jobs or busineses and being forced to take
time off of important work to serve on a jury
can result in the loss of millions of dollars
and possibly even layoffs of employees.
There are two possible ways to change the courts
to get rid of compulsory jury duty.
one is to change the U.S. constitution
to abolish juries altogether. The
other way is to change every court
to use all volunteer juries.
Which is the better option ??

When the arresting posse is the jury and
hangs the defendent it is like police officers
serving on a jury. In California police officers
are disqualified from serving on juries.
Anti DP advocates are irrelevant in
California. In California death row inmates
almost always die from natural causes
while waiting for endless appeals to be decided.
There already is no death penalty in California!!
......................
Ammending the constitution to abolish
the privilege of accused having a trial by jury
is a difficult process. The house and senate
need a 2/3 supermajority vote and then
3/4 of the states legislatures need to ratify the
proposed jury abolition ammendment within
a time limit.
One version of the ammendment would use
three professional judges to determine
guilt in every court case instead of a jury
http://groups.google.com/group/alt.tv/browse_frm/thread/ec6bd637e783188a/0ab64411fa9bff66?tvc=1&hl=en#0ab64411fa9bff66
..
Are you sure that you want to abolish jury duty
altogether instead of just switching
to a voluntary jury system ??
Eric Matteson ericmatteson2003november@hotmail.com

"There are two possible ways to change the courts
to get rid of compulsory jury duty. "
false dichotomy; no there are more than 2 of your choices.

There are many alternatives as in a previous post, raising the pay of jurors.
The rich already own the courts.

Before I vote YES on a TAX INCREASE
to raise pay for jurrors I want to be absolutley
sure that they are serving VOLUNTARILY
by passing an all volunteer jury initiative
FIRST.
The pay increase would only help poor
jurrors. Hollywood scriptwriters and big
name actors
and business owners need to be free to not have to
show up at jury selection because they
have very important jobs.
Eric Matteson

If they think this duty is below their citizen pride then they can do what I do when time is money.
I say " yes I'd love to serve on a jury as I'm studying constitutional law."
I guarantee you will not serve.

Things are getting worse.
Even people who used to be automatically
exempt from jury duty such as doctors
and ACLU civil rights lawyers are being
summonned at least to jury selection.
Even with only one day for jury selection
without being put on a case could cause
hardship for a doctor because his favorite
patient might die from lack of medical
care while that doctor is wasting his
time at jury selection for one whole day
only to be automatically rejected for
having too much education.
The compulsory jury duty system we have
in 2005 is much hated.
There are two alternatives.
1 ) abolish jury trials altogether with
a constitutional ammendment.
2 ) change to an all volunteer jury
system in every court.
....
Which is the best change ??
Eric Matteson

>>> Rich people have to work very hard at their
jobs or busineses and being forced to take
time off of important work to serve on a jury
can result in the loss of millions of dollars
and possibly even layoffs of employees.

What the FUCK are you talking about? Rich people take vacations ALL the time, and their businesses do not collapse. ALL the time, they're at meetings, conferences, secret meetings, vacation, working vacations, whatever. NOT ONE IOTA of productivity hinges on them; at least not short-term productivity. What they have is control over capital.

The workers may be able to run the factory themselves. They certainly can for the short term.

The working people, however, *do* suffer when they have to do jury duty. The poor work harder, they get paid less, and the pittance you get for jury duty does not compensate for the $60 you lose from not working that day. SIXTY BUCKS, fool. That's $7 x 8 hours and change. The workers do things like take care of their kids, take care of their aging parents, and have to feed themselves. It's very hard to find people to do this for you if you can't pay them, and you are not covering expenses. You can get excused from jury for these reasons -- which ultimately is a euphemism for "not enough money."

Also...

If someone's on a tight schedule, they should be allowed to reschedule for jury duty. Specify the downtime, and do it then.

As for raising taxes, you can forgo your compensation if you care so much.

BA, you are wrong. You talk about wealth as if it's a system of moral rewards, as if wealth is the product of "hard work".

Without doubt, for most people, you have to work hard to make money. But work alone isn't enough to get rich. You have to work, have a reasonable level of compensation, and be able to save money (accumulate capital).

Many people work very hard, and don't get rich, or even comfortable and safe against poverty.

Also, many people, like Bush whom you admire, acquired all their wealth by inheritance. Under capitalism, it's capital that's rewarded rather than work. (That's why everyone in a capitalist economy wants to save money and invest it in low risk assets.)

As for the necessities of management:

The entire industrial system is based around automating work, and getting people to comply with work rules. That's why one person can manage a company with several dozen workers, and reap a large(r) salary.

In most workplaces, the owner is absent. Managers run the company. If the manager exits for a week to do jury duty, it's no big deal -- there are assistant managers. A couple weeks absence, and problems can occur, but, if the workers are empowered to take on managerial tasks, the entire business can move forward for much longer, even indefintely.

This is because management work is largely about communication, project planning, and fixing situations that the automated system fails to handle. They provide authoritative answers. When the economy is tight, the managers also act as "slavemasters" and pressure workers to produce more for less money.

The process of workers taking on managerial tasks only breaks down when the workers take on all managerial tasks, and then stop representing the goals of the owners. They will start to produce in ways that benefit themselves more than the owner. They will steal surplus and sell it on the underground black market, and take all the profit for themselves.

The managers exist primarily, not for their ability to work, but to actively promote the goals of the owners (that is, the stockholders or real owners, not the CEO or President).

Actually the most preferred method as well as the most usual, is inheritance from robber baron family members.
[ G W Bush comes to mind ]

I agree fully that it's critical to own your own business to become wealthy. If you can't own it outright, then becoming a partner or another high-revenue generation semi-owner also works. They key is *ownership*. If you don't *own* part of your workplace, you're going to get screwed out of some of your labor.

It's not enough to work for yourself. You must also have others work for you, and you must take a fat cut of their "profit" as your own. Bill for $100 an hour, but pay the person doing the work $40 an hour. Or sell $100 of product, and pay the workers $7. Then, you must replicate this process to grow the company so that the more people you have working for you, the wealthier you become.

You *need* to hire people because there's an upper limit to what wage you can demand most labor. The value of labor tops out at around $200,000 per year, give or take some. It simply does. There just aren't many jobs that command more than that. That can be considered a kind of social "maximum value of labor." Anything above that is excess. (My opinion there.)

To break out past this barrier, you hire people to do your work, pay them less than you charge for their labor, and collect the profits into your pocket.

The owners of the business, ultimately, are dependent on the hard work of the non-owners, to maintain profits above the maximum market value of the owner's labor.

In summation -- the harder the toilers toil, the richer the rich will become, because they have *ownership* of the company. With this ownership those who already own, are able to legally have claim to some fraction of the wealth the worker creates. This is a kind of legalized theft.

There are other ways to derive more income, via royalties or rent, but these involve the ability to mobilize capital, and invest it. That collects profits indirecly from labor through interest or capital appreciation. Ultimately, it's workers who create the wealth that makes the rich folks rich.

You're not being logical, but, that's your forte. There are workers at ebay. Their work produces more revenues than they receive in compensation, and that's why ebay has a (slim) profit margin.

Also, it wasn't Meg Whitman that made eBay. It was Pierre Omidyar. Whitman came over from, I think, Hasbro. Much of eBays capital infusion came from internet stock speculation after its IPO, which sent the company's valuation into the billions of dollars. At the time, the valuation of eBay was based, primarily, on the fact that people were trading beanie babies for hundreds of dollars, causing fees on the service to skyrocket.

eBay is a great example of the idiocy of capitalism. A bunch of bored people trading cheap stuffed dolls helped prove that the "market" could produce "wealth" (or at least transactions) over objects that had no real value. Even the people trading beanie babies knew they were running on vapors, but they did it anyway, because, well, they knew there were people more deluded and fooled than themselves!

(At some level, this degree of ignorance and foolishness is possible only because of American domination over capitalism. It's massive irresponsibility that allows us the luxuries of that kind of speculation. Billion Dollar Beanie Babies = Dead Iraqi Babies.)

There are also thousands of people who "work" on eBay without being workers for eBay. It's like any marketplace -- the participants invest time and money in making a marketplace, so that potential customers will visit the market with the expectation that overall transaction cost reductions will result in a lower overall price.

The main difference between eBay and a traditional market is that eBay lowers the entry cost into the market, because each vendor can maintain a smaller inventory, and not have to maintain a physical presence in the market.

A swap meet booth operator, or a boutique crafter (two businesses with low capital costs) might have $1,000 - $5,000 of inventory, while an eBay seller can have well under $1,000 of inventory and maintain their store 24/7. However, net revenues are also reduced, due to these very same dynamics.

This is not really good or bad. It is just further proletarianization of the so-called "Freelance Nation." The labor unions need to really learn how to organize in this sector of proletarian contract workers.

Also, eBay is not the fabled idealized capitalism. Part of the eBay business model is based around monopolizing communication between buyers and sellers. They restrict the ability of each party to communicate with the others. They force sellers and buyers to interact via eBay, and pay for the privilege. They are creating information vacuums, and trading on the value of that information.

I'm really starting to understand why communists always use the word "illusions" to describe the spectacle. Part of capitalism's "ideology", is about constructing illusions about how it works.

eBay has a lot of programmers as well as sysadmins. Systems as large as eBay require programming as part of the system administration. What these people "produce" is "uptime" and a database that, over time, becomes more and more expensive to replicate. (That's the accumulation of capital right there.) (More on this below.)

I didn't say the workers at eBay were "superexploited", only exploited. That's because eBay has a small profit. If they weren't making a profit, I'd have said they were not being exploited yet. I'm using a standard marxist definition of exploitation there.

I don't think eBay has a monopoly yet, but are pretty close. They can still be toppled. There are still people doing things on Yahoo auctions, and people are still going after eBay. As for exploitation of their customers: all monopolies are potentially exploitative, because they can jack up prices well above the cost of production.

At this time, they are realizing some small profits, and I think that indicates that the prices they charge aren't that far above the cost of production. (That includes costs like pointless advertisement.)

The big sellers on eBay don't negate the fact that eBay's lowered the price of entry into the market. That's one reason why they got so large. (The big IPO was another reason.)

The low cost of entry reduced (and continues to reduce) the power of capital to lock out small players from competing against larger players. However, as I noted above, eBay's big IPO has allowed eBay to write a lot of software, effectively building up a body of technological capital that's formidable and difficult to compete against.

As for organizing eBay sellers - the unions don't really know how to organize them, yet. You could have argued the same about the movie industry, where movie crews are made up of independent contractors, but, that is one of the most organized industries in the country. It can be done.

Organizing eBay would involve replacing some of the functionality of eBay, allowing a critical mass of people be able to switch their selling to another venue, without significant losses. It's not like industrial organizing.

Re.Exploitation
by Bush Admirer Saturday, Nov. 26, 2005 at 11:35 PM

John - I'm trying to think of a good example of exploitation that has actually happened under Capitalism. It's tough ( here let me help you with this one.
Haiti
All of South America
Slave labor in Prisons
Slave labor in China
and a whole bunch of others that are too numerous to mention) to come up with one but I think I have it.

That would be the excessive benefits ( like weekends, health and safety standards, work hour regulations and other such awful things) the UAW was able to squeeze out of GM by holding the company hostage via threatened strikes ( don't the slaves know their place?!) and work stoppages.

Did you know that each and every vehicle rolling off the GM assembly line has about $1,050 in employee health benefits ( cause we all know that universal health coverage doesn't put profits into the right hands as pharmaceutical companies and heath care 'providers' lobby intensively to thwart the majority will of the people and crush any attempt to institute a cost saving national tax supported health plan as all other industrial country has) embedded in the cost of manufacture?

It's pretty tough to make a profit and stay in business when you're being exploited ( and as books are cooked and pensions are looted, aside from the normal pilfering of company assets for 'golden parachutes' and fat stock option etc...) like that John.

Though it would be very expensive, I think GM needs to just pack up and move operations to a state where the workers are inherently ( China!) anti-union. South Carolina ( MY home state! where poverty is endemic as well as the racism and corruption -Sheepdog :>) comes to mind. They might also look at moving operations offshore. Anything to escape exploitation by the ( who totally sold out to the management ) UAW.


Report this post as:- an insertion by Sheepdog....

You get a glimpse into how the judicial system we have works or doesn’t work. It’s not what you think it is till you see it and experience it. Eric raises some points to consider. They should pay jurors more and maybe they could do more night courts or weekend options for people who have conflicts with their work. Most employers say nice things how they understand and may give you some paid days for it, but the reality is that you still have to work unpaid overtime to make up the work you missed and that is not fair. So the state should pay jurors more to cover that. There is an economic hardship excuse you can ask for but it’s hard to get approved.

The issue is that the state is drafting you, forcing you to do jury duty. All anti-authoritarians should have an issue with this. Johnk is right about the jury needs to stay public and part of one’s civic duty. The jury must be of one’s peers or that is the end of any kind of civil society. But how you do that and not compromise people’s basic right to freedom of choice is the hard part.

The screening part to seat a jury is interesting. A court would never seat some one like BA if they found out his views stated here. He would have to lie to get on a jury.

To keep this thing on topic. Exploitation is getting paid $7 for jury duty.

Superexploitation is living in a company town, where the big boss has the power to set the prices of your wages as well as the things you buy and the rent you pay. By keeping the exploited very poor, the workers there are unable to amass any capital to use as leverage to negotiate a better situation.

I forgot to thank you Sheepdog. Thanks!

Also, I didn't know this, but the first president of eBay (meaning the first guy hired by Omidyar) was an MBA by the name of Jeff Skoll. He's now a philanthropist who funds films that right wingers would hate. A quote from his bio:

"The world is a small and inter-connected place. We cannot ignore the plight of others in less fortunate communities or parts of the world... many of the blights of the modern world (environmental destruction, crime, drugs, terrorism) emerge from the inequities between haves and have-nots."

His company helped make the movie Syriana happen.

I was afraid that since I didn't have a respondent on the envelope...
Glad to help.
:>)

Eric Matteson types of juries table
All Volunteer jury	No jury	forced jury duty
All volunteer jury is fair to all.	Lack of volunteer jury is unfair to defendants.	Forced jury duty is unfair to everyone because everyone is summonned at a bad time for them.
can be implemented with vote of legislatures or people (first choice volunteer)	abolishing juries requires a constitutional amendment to U.S. constitution. (second choice abolish juries)	Forced jury duty is being challenged by voters. because it is unacceptable.
cases will be decided by twelve educated volunteer jurors who at least finished high school.	At least one judge will decide guilt or non-guilt.	Twelve incompetent bums who are unable to get out of jury duty have randomly decided defendants fates.