Category: Justice Page 3 of 5

The Enforcer Class

On June 10, 2015

If you are a left-winger who wants to, in effect, overthrow a racist oligarchical system, the police are not your friends. Nor, need I point out, are corrections officers. Nor is most of the court system.

These people belong to the enforcer class. Police and corrections officers are paid not just in money but in license to brutalize. In most cases, they can get away with beating people up and even killing them. To stop a police officer from skating on murder requires riots, as a rule, and even that doesn’t usually work. The FBI has cleared themselves of every killing an FBI officer has performed for decades.

This is not incidental, this is not an accident; this is how our lords and rulers want the enforcement system to run.

Police are selected and trained and socialized to either become thugs or to cover up thuggery. Imbeciles will say things like “not all cops,” but it is virtually unheard of for the “good cops” to inform on the bad cops–they keep their mouths shut. This is wise on their part, of course, because the vast majority of police would turn on them in seconds if they were to betray the blue wall of silence.

America, per capita, imprisons more people than any other country in the world. Many of these people are non-violent drug offenders who used a drug which is less harmful than alcohol or cigarettes. Solitary confinement is widespread, prison rape and battery are widespread, and there is plenty of evidence of prison guard collusion in said rape and battery.

If you are an African American male, you are far more likely to have spent time in prison than in university.

And police lie routinely about those they arrest. How many people are in prison who didn’t commit the crime of which they are accused? How many would have been convicted if police hadn’t concealed exculpatory evidence? The answers to these questions are unknown for obvious reasons, but I would stake a great deal that it is a non-trivial number.

All of this assumes the accused even had a trial–most people in prison have never had one: They plead out. That’s absolutely not an indication of guilt, it is an indication that they couldn’t afford to fight the system. Justice is very expensive, and prosecuting attorneys advise defendants against going to trial. If people lose (which, again, doesn’t necessarily indicate guilt), they’ll get book thrown at them.

The American “justice” system cannot operate without plea bargains. The state arrests too many people for that. Hardly anybody gets justice, people get railroaded to prison without a trial, based on the word of police who are willing to lie, and once they are felons, their lives are permanently destroyed.

The people who run this system are not your friends. They do not like you. They enjoy the authority they have, and if you “disrespect a cop,” even if you’re firmly within your rights, if they think they can get away with it, they will fuck you up, enjoy it, and firmly believe that you deserve it. Then they’ll lie about it.

Not your friends. Not your allies. The hard fist of the oligarchy, the boot stamping on your face over and over again.

If you do not understand this you are living in a fantasy land and delusional in the face of real, hard power.

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In Light of Eric Garner

By Ian Welsh

On December 5, 2014

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Understand this, if you understand nothing else:

the system is working as intended.

It is true that a prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a sandwich, and it is tempting to blame the prosecutor, Donovan. Certainly he made a decision, but he made the decision that the system wants: police are almost never prosecuted for assault or murder and on those rare occasions that they are, they almost always get off.

Donovan did what the legal system wanted him to do.

As for the police in question, well, they did what the legal system wants them to do, as well:

“Get away [garbled] … for what? Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I’m tired of it. It stops today. Why would you…? Everyone standing here will tell you I didn’t do nothing. I did not sell nothing. Because every time you see me, you want to harass me. You want to stop me (garbled) Selling cigarettes. I’m minding my business, officer, I’m minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone. please please, don’t touch me. Do not touch me.”

” I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe,” he said, as officers restrained him.

What you will hear defenders of the police say is “he was non-compliant.”

Non-compliant.

If a police officer tells you to do anything, you do it immediately. If you do not, anything that happens to you, up to and including death, is your problem.

The legal system exists, today, to ensure compliance.

Graph of incarceration in the US over time

From Wikipedia

American oligarchical society rests on people not effectively resisting. All gains now go to the top 10%, with the rest of society losing ground. Incarceration rates blossom in 1980, which is also the year that the oligarchical program is voted in and becomes official. (Trickle down economics can be understood no other way.)

Any part of the population which is inclined to resist, must be taught that it cannot resist. Get out millions to demonstrate against the Iraq war: it will not work. Protest against police killings of African Americans, it will not work.

Nothing you do will work.

You will comply, and you will learn that resistance is futile.

The more outside the mainstream you are, the more you will learn it. African Americans, Latinos, poor whites (in that order.) Those who are fundamentally authoritarian, but somewhat opposed to the system (like the Bundy ranch) are treated more carefully (though the militia movement has its martyrs). But the fundamental lesson of life is to do what your lords and masters tell you to, and to not protest any law or order, no matter how nonsensical, trivial, or unjust it is.

Three strikes laws and the end of judicial discretion are about this. During the 80s the legal system was taken away from the judges and given to the prosecutors and the police. Almost all sentences are plea-bargained: the person with almost all the power in the system is the prosecutor. He or she is judge and jury for the vast majority of cases, and even when a case does go in front of a judge, the judge’s discretion is extremely limited. Your third crime stealing a bike? Too bad, we’re throwing the key away.

Compliance when given specific orders and learned hopelessness about protest or organizing are the aims. Ordinary citizens must understand that they cannot change the system if elites do not agree with the changes they want made. If they try, they will be arrested and receive a criminal sentence, meaning they can never again have a good job.

In this system the wolves or goats identify themselves. An injustice is committed, people protest and the most aggressive protestors (which doesn’t always mean violence) are arrested. Certainly the organizers are. Those people are, as a result, usually destroyed economically even if they aren’t locked up for years.

The system is doing what it is meant to do. It teaches compliance, it teaches hopelessness and it identifies those who will not obey laws that don’t make sense (marijuana possession, for example), or who will fight or organize against the system and then it destroys them economically and often psychologically through practices like solitary confinement and prison rape.

The system will not change until those who want it to change have the raw power to force it to change, because it does serve the interests of its masters by destroying or marginalizing anyone who is actually a danger to oligarchical control of the system.

Race is an effective tool in this system, dividing the lower classes (and almost everyone is lower class now) against each other. No matter how bad a poor white’s life is, well hey, he ain’t black. He or she can feel superior to someone, can have someone to kick down at.

And understand this, most of what police are paid in is social coin: the right to demand immediate obedience and fuck people up; the solidarity of the blue line; the feeling of belonging and power, is what makes the job worth having for (probably most) of the people who are now attracted to it.

Being a thug; having social sanction to be a thug, is enjoyable to a lot of people. Since that’s what cops get to do, those are the sort of people who tend to be attracted to the job. The police are the biggest toughest gang around, and belonging to them has most of the rewards of gang life, without the dangers of going to jail.

Working as intended

Ferguson and the brokenness of America’s “Justice” System

By Ian Welsh

On November 26, 2014

Comments

There isn’t much to say that others haven’t, but let’s go through it anyway:

There was never any chance that Darren Wilson would be charged;
the prosecutor acted as defense attorney, not as prosecutor;
A grand jury, for all intents and purposes does what the prosecutor tells it to;
Doing the announcement at 8pm at night was intended to incite violence;
Police in America are completely out of control, and police have a license to kill;
this is bad for anyone, but it is terrible for African Americans and Muslims.

At this point, in America, calling the police for anything short of a murder is more likely to make your situation worse than better if you aren’t solidly middle upper class or better, and white. If you are black or Muslim, you might not even want to call them for murder.

Police can beat your, rape you or kill you, and the odds are very high they will get away with it. In far too many cases they are nothing but the strongest gang.

The police are so militarized that they amount to a domestic army, stationed in every city. The civil forfeiture laws, RICO statutes and the cost of an effective defense, plus the removal of most judicial discretion and the fact that the vast majority of cases are plea bargained, not tried, means that for most accused of a crime there is no justice.

The police have huge incentives to charge people with crimes, because they can seize the assets of those charged (well, strictly speaking, they can seize your money without ever charging you, and do.) For profit prisons and prison guard unions support prosecutors and judges who will imprison more people, not less. The incentives in the system are almost all towards incarcerating more people and seizing more assets, because that’s how police and prosecutors improve their personal situation.

Prisons are rural support projects where poor whites are paid to lock up poor blacks.

The entire system stinks from one end to another. The simple solution would be to repeal all drug ordinances, make civil forfeiture illegal, get rid of the RICO statutes, most of the anti-terrorism statutes and mandate that plea bargains are illegal and all criminals must have a trial. The fact that the current system cannot run if a trial is necessary is the point, too many things are crimes which should not be.

If you really want to make the system work, make all private lawyers for criminal charges illegal, and use only public defenders, chosen by lot. I guarantee that the pay and competence of public defenders would soar and their case load would drop as soon as rich people realized that they could be the one being defended by an overworked and underpaid lawyer.

How To Stop Deliberate Fouling of Aquifers by Frackers

By Ian Welsh

On October 16, 2014

Comments

Yup:

Industry illegally injected about 3 billion gallons of fracking wastewater into central California drinking-water and farm-irrigation aquifers, the state found after the US Environmental Protection Agency ordered a review of possible contamination.

According to documents obtained by the Center for Biological Diversity, the California State Water Resources Board found that at least nine of the 11 hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, wastewater injection sites that were shut down in July upon suspicion of contamination were in fact riddled with toxic fluids used to unleash energy reserves deep underground. The aquifers, protected by state law and the federal Safe Water Drinking Act, supply quality water in a state currently suffering unprecedented drought.

Now. Will anyone go to jail for this?

No.

Did they save a lot of money doing this, and therefore make money?

Yes.

Will they continue doing it?

Yes.

What will stop this sort of thing from happening?

Sending senior executives, CEOs and board members to maximum security prisons, after impounding all their assets under criminal forefeiture laws, thus forcing them to rely on public defenders. Prosecute them under RICO statutes to make sure you sweep the executive suite.)

(No, I don’t approve of criminal forfeiture laws as they exist right now (seizure before guilt is proved), nor do I approve of RICO. But if they’re being used against ordinary people, they should be used against the executive class. Best way to get them repealed, too.)

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DDOS Attacks Effective: Omidyar

By Ian Welsh

On December 4, 2013

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So, the CEO of EBay, parent company of PayPal, writes to suggest leniency in the punishment of the people accused of running a denial of service attack against PayPal because of PayPal’s boycott of Wikileaks. His claims of powerlessness, of being against PayPal’s boycott but unable to do anything about it are amusing, but as a commenter to his post notes, what is interesting is his confirmation that DDOS attacks actually inflict costs, unlike normal protests:

If we want to make parallels between real-world protests and online protests, that means that one thousand people can have the effect of six million people demonstrating in front of your office. That seems like an excessive impact in the hands of each person. It’s like each protester can bring along 6,000 phantom friends without going to the trouble of convincing each of them to take an afternoon off and join the protest in the street.

That’s why I’ve concluded that the use of these attack tools is vastly different than other forms of protest.

Normal protests don’t get to 6 million except in extraordinary circumstances. What he really means is “this works, this inflicts actual costs.”

As for all the apologetics for PayPal, MasterCard and Visa, I note simply that American Express did not cut off Wikileaks. I guess a major multinational can resist the Federal government if it chooses? Anyone aware of any harm AmEx has suffered due to not cutting Wikileaks off?

I want to remind readers of a simple rule: your Lords and Masters respond only to pain and personal inconvenience. Either you must cost them real money, or you must get in their personal space in a way they can’t ignore. Gays got much of what they wanted from Obama because they heckled him in person, and they cut off the money.

The people involved in the DDOS will receive vastly disproportionate sentences, it will be interesting to see how many receive more jail time than the average rapist. Meanwhile, those who caused the financial collapse by acting in clearly fraudulent ways, costing the economy trillions of dollars, continue to go unpunished and live the high life.

Law that is selectively enforced cannot make even the slightest claim to be just. If we had a legal system that came down on everyone like a ton of bricks, one could say “well, I don’t agree, but they are just enforcing the law”.

Maybe I’ll live in such a country before I die.

A Challenge To the No Fly List

By Ian Welsh

On December 3, 2013

Comments

Is ongoing. An American citizen who cannot fly has taken the US government to court. The most amusing part, to me, is this, from the Judge:

I want to categorically reject one thing: If information is publicly available in some other way, the government does not have the right to retroactively clamp it down and remove it from the public record. Even if it could have been protected as SSI within the government, if the plaintiff obtains this information independently, the government can’t clamp that down.

But this is a rearguard cry, a last plaintive defense. The principles of justice are simpler:

You have the right to see the evidence against you, and to face your accusers;
You can’t be punished without a trial.

The no-fly violates both these principles: you are punished without a trial, and you have no right to see the evidence against you. Even if we assume that in extremis the government might have to forbid someone to fly because they pose a danger to the flight, one can’t make a case for a multiple-year ban, at best it should be a few days while the government puts together the case and takes you to court.

Administrative judgments which take away out liberty or punish us without a trial (including binding arbitration agreements) are an affront to justice and freedom both. They are “trust us, we’re the government”. No; the government must prove its case before damaging private citizens.

Any country that does not allow people to see the evidence against them, face their accusers and have a trial before punishment is de-facto an unjust, unfree country.

Ethical Degradation

By Ian Welsh

On May 28, 2013

Comments

We make distinctions between crimes, even the same crimes. Unintentional killing is ranked lower than intentional killing, and pre-meditated (planned) killing is ranked higher than crimes of passion (finding your husband in bed with another woman and killing him.)

We also make distinctions between people who kill one person, two people, three people and so on. A person who has killed more people, gets a longer sentence.

This is known as proportionality. All murders are not the same, nor are all thefts, nor are all acts of fraud. The amount of harm they cause varies, and the amount of punishment they are due varies by reason: we punish the woman who kills her cheating husband when she finds him in bed with another woman a lot less harshly than we do a cold calculating murder to get the life insurance reward.

Distinctions between crimes, between bad things are important. They are important for policy reasons and for ethical reasons.

The inability to make these sort of ethical distinctions, to say ‘well Fred killed one man, a military man, and that’s just as bad as Stalin killing millions” is an ethical failure. It is an abominable ethical failure. Scale matters and crime and justice are not boolean. More to the point, it is far more important to stop the mass murderers of this world, whether they are Stalin, Mao or lesser mass murderers (note the distinction!) like George Bush and Barack Obama.

This is the same brand of ethical failure that locks up non-violent drug offenders for life, that doesn’t jail bankers who commit fraud (because they didn’t do anything violent, even though people die as a result of what they do), and so on. It is of a piece. There is no justice without proportionality and anyone who is incapable of drawing distinctions between crimes is an ethical imbecile.

To use one of the phrases of the day “this is why we can’t have nice things.” Specifically, this is why we cant have a justice system that works, a just foreign policy, politicians who aren’t monsters and citizens who aren’t complicit in mass murder. If you think what the Woolwich murderer did is anywhere close to as bad as what George Bush or Tony Blair did you are unable to make even gross ethical distinctions, and are unsuited to exercise the responsibilities of citizenship.

Tens of thousands of murders are worse than one murder. Understand this. If you can’t, recuse yourself from the public sphere, please.

On Economic Justice

By Ian Welsh

On February 21, 2013

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Who should get how much?

Who deserves how much money?

How do we decide?

It is, I believe, nonsense to say that we deserve whatever we happen to earn. The value of our money is not something which is reliant on us as individuals, but is based instead on the productive capacity of our society, something which individuals have almost nothing to do with. Being born in America or Belgium is worth much more than being born in Nigeria or Bangladesh. You didn’t choose your parents, you didn’t choose your upraising, you can’t be said to “deserve” much if anything as a result.

People whose parents are poor don’t get into university as much as those whose parents are wealthier, nor do they graduate as often. Being lower on the socio-economic stratum reduces performance independent of ability, as the Spirit Level documents. As the joke about George Bush ran, he was born on 3rd base and thought he hit a triple. But the concept applies to so many of us.

Deserve is a very slippery word.

Perhaps we deserve more if we contribute more to society? If this is the case then we can only look at, say, the bankers and brokers of Wall Street, Bay Street and Fleet Street and say “they don’t deserve their money”, because they damaged the world economic system, damage which caused many people to lose their homes, caused food inflation and hunger, and certainly led to many deaths and much suffering which would not have occured otherwise. Financialization of the economy gave them great rewards at great cost to many of their fellow citizens. And it required trillions of dollars to bail them out, and even after they were bailed out, the damage they did was not undone.

Only by the most debased principles can, say, bankers, be said to deserve their money, the same principle that lead Thucydides to write that the strong do as they will, and the weak suffer what they must. The same principles that say anything someone can steal or take, they deserve.

Is that justice? Does that create a society we want to live in? As we have, more and more, come to believe that people deserve to keep whatever they make, however they make it (as evinced by the erosion of progressive taxation), has it made our societies better places to live?

And, to go back to the initial point about the value of money being social and not individual, does it make sense to say an individual “deserves” their money when most of what their money is worth is created by other people?

As I’ve said before, too many jobs today do harm, do evil, rather than good. The health insurance industry in the US makes its money essentially by denying care. Hydrocarbon companies actively stand in the way of stopping climate change. Many food companies produce food which they know leads to diabetes, obesity and chronic disease.

These jobs, these industries, actively decrease the well-being of individuals and of society. They decrease the real value of money, because money which cannot buy well-being is worse than worthless, it is actively harmful.

Who does more harm to society, someone on welfare, or a banker who contributed to the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression? Who deserves more? I find it hard to say that the banker deserves more than the person on welfare, for he or she has done vastly more harm. Perhaps the banker works harder, but is working harder to do harm so praiseworthy? Is it worthy of reward?

No compassionate society can base distribution of money or goods entirely on contribution to society. If we say that those who don’t contribute deserve nothing, we move quickly into dystopic territory, because someone who receives no goods, dies. If we take the harm principle too seriously, we could easily move into a scenario where we would find the arguments for killing those who do harm overwhelmingly strong. And make no mistake, those in power, private or powerful, can do more harm than almost any garden-variety criminal can. Even a serial killer doesn’t kill as many people as a bad policy can.

Justice recognizes that so much of what we are, so much of what we do, is based on circumstances. Humans are malleable, most people, under the wrong circumstances, will do the wrong thing. Most people, under the right circumstances, will do the right thing, too. That does not mean that we can tolerate too much of the wrong thing, it does not mean we say “oh, they couldn’t help themselves”, it simply means that we put the emphasis on correction, not vengeance; it simply means that we are compassionate, as we would hope others would be compassionate to us.

So we give a good living to those who contribute little, we correct those who do harm, if necessary through criminal sanctions, but better by finding work for them where their talents can do good, not harm. We do not allow major industries which do more harm than good. We recognize that people do change, and someone who is not contributing as much as we might want right now may contribute more in the future.

Knowing that most of the value of money is not individual, that even the most rewarded are rewarded because of the society and times he lives in, we put a cap on rewards.

(Note: There is much more to say about economic justice.)