The US injustice system punishes the poor, excuses the wealthy.
In the USA there are poor people in jail for lack of bail, people who are allegedly to be presumed innocent. These people are serving time under suspicion. They are not criminals, they are suspects. These suspects are not being given equal protection under the law. They are being detained unjustly because they lack the funds to escape incarceration. The cost of detaining these suspects is placed squarely at the feet of taxpayers, meanwhile the private prison industry is profiting off of their detention.
I recently saw a meme detailing how a white collar criminal is facing up to six years in jail for committing a three billion dollar fraud. The same meme tells a story about a homeless man robbing a bank for a hundred dollars, this crime brought a fifteen year sentence.
The idea that all are equal under the law is nonsense. We have seen cases where the suspect was caught raping someone and was given what amounts to a slap on the wrist because their privilege was under threat. There are a ridiculous number of cases where judges give biased rulings to people of privilege, the numbers staggering. The justice system favors wealthy white men, there are so many examples of privilege in courts that we take for granted that wealth buys innocents in the US courts system.
The system of so called “checks and balances” is built on the premise that landowners are given more rights than those who don’t own land. It’s built into the constitution. The way law enforcement interacts with the poor is a reflection of this history of class war in the US. Police patrol poor neighborhoods more frequently, police are more likely to detain poor people because the wealthy have high value lawyers who can end an officer’s career, where as the poor are unlikely to be able to afford legal representation and are therefore unlikely to have the resources to defend their rights in court.
This disparity between the rights afforded to the poor and the free reign granted to the wealthy is an example of the direction our country seems to be heading. We seem to be a country with different tiers of rights. There is a class war happening in the US, it’s not widely reported on as a class war, still a class war IS what it is.
Does class war seems like too harsh of a term? Is it uncomfortable to consider that we live in a country at war with the underprivileged citizens? Do you have a defensive reaction to these ideas? Is it possible that you consider yourself a part of the privileged class?
While the healthcare industry continues to bankrupt citizens here in the US, while home loans are issued in a racist manner, while police killings disproportionately affect people of color, while tax cuts are given to the wealthy, while food aid is removed from the poor, while veterans of our military are abandoned on the streets, the political class who is allegedly in place to serve the public continue to fail in their duty to provide for the basic needs of the citizens of the US. The corporate class of banksters, real estate brokers and insurance agents are given easy outs for their criminal behaviors while the lower classes cannot even walk across the street without fear that they will be prosecuted as criminals for walking.
The bias against the poor is stoked by media. News reports portray the poor as leeches or drains on society. The programs which support the needs of the poor are portrayed as being handouts, and the poor are blamed for the condition of their finance. This despite the fact that escaping poverty is virtually impossible in the modern day US. People who are born poor are almost guaranteed to remain poor.
Wealthy people are given permission to ruin the environment, they are allowed to pollute without worry of being held liable for the effects their toxic loads will have on present day people, and there is virtually no concern given to the long term effects of pipeline leaks, mining dumps or chemical . If anything the government has been doing all it can to insulate the polluters from responsibility for the toxic behaviors.
In the US we have been largely idle while our nation slides into a fascist state. Fascism as defined by Mussolini is a “perfect marriage of corporation and state” is a reality in the US. Construction projects which have been found to be illegal and un-permitted are protected by police and politicians. These projects are a threat to the people who live in the path of the pipelines or the blast zone of the terminals. The projects also harm animal life and the environment. In theory these types of dangerous and illegal projects will be halted by the permitting process. The reality is that wealth buys the right to violate laws. In reality there is no harm which can be done in the name of profit which law enforcement will punish when the wealthy are the perpetrators.
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I read a post on the BBC website a few months ago about a man who had been jailed for murder in the 1980s. He was eventually freed. I'm not commenting on the justice of the actual case, but this sentence stuck in my mind:
The man came from Compton in LA. It occurred to me that with street violence rife in that area in the 1980s and beyond, many young black men living there and participating in gang culture were effectively signing up for a lifetime of way below minimum wage cheap labour.
It makes me wonder who the actual gangmasters are, if you get my drift!
It's a hard knock life. People create systems which justify these institutions. We can create better systems.
The use of prison labor to extract value from people has become the standard in many industries. I feel like it represents the modern face of enslavement.
Absolutely - it is the modern face of enslavement. It's happening in the UK too.
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