Dec 23, 2013
By Clark.
Effluvia
"I'm a good judge" … said by government employee and judge Gisele Pollack who, it seems, sentenced people to jail because of their drug use…while she, herself, was high on drugs.
But, in her defense, "she’s had some severe personal tragedy in her life".
And that's why, it seems, she's being allowed to check herself into rehab instead of being thrown in jail.
…because not a single poor person or non government employee who gets caught using drugs ever "had some severe personal tragedy in her life".
I'm reminded of something I read earlier today:
techdirt.com
We've discussed the whole "high court/low court" concept here a few times before — in that those who are powerful play by one set of rules, while the rest of us have to play by a very different set of rules.
…
The end result seems clear. If you're super high up in the political chain, you get the high court. Reveal classified info to filmmakers? No worries. Not only will you not be prosecuted or even lose your job, the inspectors will scrub your name from the report and, according to the article, the person in charge of the investigation will "slow roll" the eventual release of the report until you switch jobs.
But if you're just a worker bee and you leaked the unclassified draft report that names Panetta and Vickers? Well, you get the low court. A new investigation, including aggressive pursuit by the government, and interrogations of staffers to try to find out who leaked the report.
Twenty years ago I was a libertarian. I thought the system could be reformed. I thought that some parts of it "worked"… whatever that means. I thought that the goals were noble, even if not often achieved.
The older I get, the more I see, the more I read, the more clear it becomes to me that the entire game is rigged. The leftists and the rightists each see half of the fraud. The lefties correctly note that a poor kid caught with cocaine goes to jail, while a Bush can write it off as a youthful mistake (they somehow overlook the fact that their man Barrack hasn't granted clemency to any one of the people doing federal time for the same felonies he committed). The righties note that government subsidized windmills kill protected eagles with impunity while Joe Sixpack would be deep in the crap if he even picked up a dead eagle from the side of the road. The lefties note that no one was prosecuted over the financial meltdown. The righties note that the Obama administration rewrote bankruptcy law on the fly to loot value from GM stockholders and hand it to the unions. The lefties note that Republicans tweak export rules to give big corporations subsidies. Every now and then both sides join together to note that, hey! the government is spying on every one of us…or that, hey! the government stole a bunch of people's houses and gave them to Pfizer, because a privately owned for-profit corporation is apparently what the Constitution means by "public use".
What neither side seems to realize is that the system is not reformable. There are multiple classes of people, but it boils down to the connected, and the not connected. Just as in pre-Revolutionary France, there is a very strict class hierarchy, and the very idea that we are equal before the law is a laughable nonsequitr.
Jamal the $5 weed slinger, Shaneekwa the hair braider, and Loudmouth Bob in the 7-11 parking lot are at the bottom of the hierarchy. They can, literally, be killed with impunity … as long as the dash cam isn't running. And, hell, half the time they can be killed even if the dash cam is running. This isn't hyperbole, mother-fucker. This is literal. Question me and I'll throw 400 cites and 20 youtube clips at you.
Next up from Shaneekwa and Loudmouth Bob are us regular peons. We can have our balls squeezed at the airport, our rectums explored at the roadside, our cars searched because the cops got permission from a dog (I owe some Reason intern a drink for that one), our telephones tapped (because terrorism!), our bank accounts investigated (because FinCEN! and no expectation of privacy!). We don't own the house we live in, not if someone of a higher social class wants it. We don't own our own financial lives, because the education accreditation / student loan industry / legal triumvirate have declared that we can never escape – even through bankruptcy – our $200,000 debt that a bunch of adults convinced a can't-tell-his-ass-from-a-hole-in-the-ground 18 year old that (a) he was smart enough to make his own decisions, and (b) college is a time to explore your interests and broaden yourself). And if there's a "national security emergency" (defined as two idiots with a pressure cooker), then the constitution is suspended, martial law is declared, and people are hauled out of their homes.
Next up from the regular peons are the unionized, disciplined-voting-blocks. Not-much-brighter-than-a-box-of-crayolas teachers who work 180 days a year and get automatic raises. Firefighters who disproportionately retire on disability the very day they sub in for their bosses and get a paper cut.
A step up from the teachers and firefighters are the cops: all the same advantages of nobility of the previous group, but a few more in addition: the de facto power to murder someone as long as not too many cameras are rolling. The de facto power to confiscate cameras in case the murder wasn't well planned. A right to keep and bear arms that far exceeds that of the serf class: 50 state concealed carry for life, not just just for actual cops, but even for retired cops.
At the same level of privilege as cops, but slightly off to one side is different class of nobility: the judiciary and the prosecutors. Judges and prosecutors can't execute citizens in an alley, a parking lot, or their own homes ("he had a knife! …and I don't care what the lying video says."), but they can sentence people to decades in jail for things that any clear-minded reading of the Constitution and the 9th and 10th amendments make clear are not with in the purview of the government. They have effectively infinite resources. They orchestrate perp walks. They selectively leak information to shame defendants. They buy testimony from other defendants by promising them immunity. By exercising their discretion they make sure that the bad people are prosecuted while the good people (i.e. members of their own clan) are not.
Above the cops, the prosecutors, and the judiciary we have the true ruling class: the cabal of (most) politicians and (some) CEOs, conspiring both against their own competitors and the public at large. If the public is burdened with a $100 million debt to pay off a money losing stadium, that's a small price to pay if a politician gets reelected (and gets to hobnob with entertainers and sports heroes via free tickets and backstage passes). If new entrants into a market are hindered and the populace ends up overpaying for coffins, or Tesla cars, or wine that can't be mail ordered, then that's a small price to pay if a connected CEO can keep his firm profitable without doing any work to help the customer. If the Google founders want to agitate for Green laws that make Joe Sixpack's daily commute more expensive at the same time that they buy discount avgas for their private flying fuck palaces, then isn't that their right? They donated to Obama's campaign after all!
I could keep myself up all night and into tomorrow by listing different groups of royalty and the ways they scam the system.
…except "scam the system" is a misnomer. I am not listing defects in a perfectable system. I am describing the system.
It is corrupt, corrupt, corrupt. From Ted Kennedy who killed a woman and yet is toasted as a "lion of liberalism", to George Bush who did his share of party drugs (and my share, and your share, and your share…) while young yet let other youngsters rot in jail for the exact same excesses instead of waving his royal wand of pardoning, to thousand of well-paid NSA employees who put the Stasi to shame in their ruthless destruction of our rights, to the Silicon Valley CEOs who buy vacation houses with the money they make forging and selling chains to Fort Meade, to every single bastard at RSA who had a hand in taking the thirty pieces of silver, to the three star generals who routinely screw subordinates and get away with it (even as sergeants are given dishonorable discharges for the same thing), to the MIT cops and Massachusetts prosecutor who drove Aaron Swartz to suicide, to every drug court judge who sends 22 year olds to jail for pot…while high on Quaalude and vodka because she's got some fucking personal tragedy and no one understands her pain, to every cop who's anally raped a citizen under color of law, to every other cop who's intentionally triggered a "drug" dog because the guy looked guilty, to every politician who goes on moral crusades while barebacking prostitutes and money laundering the payments, to every teacher who retired at age 60 on 80% salary, to every cop who has 50 state concealed carry even while the serfs are disarmed, to every politician, judge, or editorial-writer who has ever used the phrase "first amendment zone" non-ironically: this is how the system is designed to work.
The system is not fixable because it is not broken. It is working, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to give the insiders their royal prerogatives, and to shove the regulations, the laws, and the debt up the asses of everyone else.
Good heavens, and he didn't even get around to foreign policy, making no mention of assassination, torture, or infinite detention without trial.
I'm going to play devil's advocate and point out that the system does incentivize productivity - that is, it offers power to those who can produce the most, or the most innovative, products. It's true that Ivy League institutions churn out smart, loyal suits to staff these productive juggernauts once they get going, but "they system" still doesn't quite understand the magic that goes into getting them going, and so the startup world does exist, and it really is a full blown meritocracy (well, at least once you factor out information asymmetry particularly about finance, ownership, and the law).
So yes, the system is corrupt, but the people who are taking advantage of this corruption are, at least, normally not vetted by bloodline, but rather by the result of their actions. And this, perhaps, is the best we can hope for - and pray that these people have some morality (which is not selected for at all - the market seems perfectly willing to accept amorality that isn't illegal and which doesn't endanger profit).
>I'm going to play devil's advocate and point out that the system does incentivize productivity - that is, it offers power to those who can produce the most, or the most innovative, products.
Only to a certain degree -- if the money can't be made by scumming customers for example, or by subsidies, or by tens of other ways to tranfer funds from the population into some private company besides the direct exchange of good products for money.
Apparently, we are working on it. Just read "The Crash Course" by Chris Martenson, PHd. The era of cheap X (X=oil, silver, food, soil, US dollar, Euro, lead, gold, etc.) is over, resources are going to get revalued fairly soon, and without an additional planet to mine/refine/plunder/exploit, we will be forced to switch to Prosperity-aimed living, instead of growth-aimed living. Or substanence-aimed/survival-aimed living, our choice.
I expect power structures and our economy to also experience significant change, although I will not conjecture for good or evil, just change. Those prepared may come out considerably better than those not. And with it, another chance to majorly rewrite the rule system.
The opportunity, as I see it, is that most current government bodies find the changes uncomfortable, so will likely pursue "kick the can down the road" policies, giving others a chance to set the tone, the beat, and the new rules.
Marginally ? Have you seen anarchy ? You get warlords, feudalism, that kind of stuff (see Somalia).
I'm assuming the writer lives in the US; I think he greatly exaggerates the issues; the system works; most people live with enough food, enough necessities and without the threat of violence; we CAN make it better, but I'd much rather improve on it than try to come up with a new one.
BTW, I haven't seen ANY system that works wholesale better than ours; have y'all ?
Low standards. The post Stalin Soviet Union also provided everything you mentioned. But I'm not happy to be a serf, even if a serf who is likely to have enough gruel for a comfortable existence.
What's better? I don't presume to be able to build a new society from the fount of my head. But relentless, diverse experimentation, and creating the space for that experimentation, seems like a solid approach to me.
The post Stalin Soviet Union also provided everything you mentioned.
No, it didn't, at least not on its own. Even post-Stalin, the Soviet Union couldn't feed its people from its own resources; it relied on large food imports from other countries (including the US). And it still relied on violence to keep people in line, just not as overtly as Stalin did.
It couldn't feed people on its own, except by manufacturing goods and trading them for food? That's hardly damning of the USSR (though it certainly is worthy of damnation, for other reasons); other countries do the same thing now, for both agricultural and manufactured goods. The point is, people had enough food to survive, which is the point I was addressing. Similarly, you could avoid state violence by accepting the system without complaint. A terrible way to eke out an existence, but not a difficult one if you have low expectations of human dignity.
It couldn't feed people on its own, except by manufacturing goods and trading them for food?
Where did I say it got food from the US (and other countries) by trading manufactured goods? How many Soviet manufactured goods do you remember seeing in Western countries?
What the Soviet Union actually "traded" for food was concessions on treaty issues like nuclear weapons. Which was particularly convenient for them since most of what they conceded was not actually verifiable, so the "concessions" amounted to making promises they had no intention of keeping, in exchange for actual stuff.
The point is, people had enough food to survive, which is the point I was addressing.
No, the point you were addressing was that the system in which the people lived was able to provide for them, which was not true of the Soviet Union. If the West had not agreed to play the USSR's con game of trading non-verifiable concessions for actual stuff for decades, the USSR would have collapsed a lot sooner than it did.
You have a very mistaken view of Soviet trade, if you think "we promise not to develop nuclear weapons, if you give us grain!" It's wishful thinking, akin to a leftist claims that the USA gets all its manufactured goods by enslaving developing countries.
The Soviet Union imported large amounts of grain due to a deeply broken agricultural system, which I believe we're in full agreement on. But this wasn't in exchange for merely making unverifiable promises to the West (why would the United States have agreed to that, even?). Much trade was with other socialist countries, for one. And although Western countries received few Soviet manufactured goods, they, then as now, imported large quantities of Soviet commodities, particularly oil and natural gas.
Indeed, its reliance on oil for hard cash is what led in part to its downfall, as oil prices collapsed in the 80s, putting significant strains on the system as the pie got much smaller while more and more resources were needed to satisfy rising consumer demands and ill-conceived land wars in Asia.
I'll admit such a view is simplistic, yes. However, I think it played more of a role than you appear to believe it did.
Much trade was with other socialist countries, for one.
I'm not sure this makes much difference, since those other countries were just as messed up. (I also have a hard time taking any numbers that can be found for this at face value anyway, just as I am skeptical of pretty much any numbers that were internally generated by Eastern Bloc countries. Not that Western countries' numbers are miracles of accuracy either, but at least they get a lot more independent checking because the underlying data is more easily available.)
And although Western countries received few Soviet manufactured goods
In other words, you agree with me that this was not a significant factor. Ok.
they, then as now, imported large quantities of Soviet commodities, particularly oil and natural gas
I agree that the West got large quantities of oil and natural gas from the USSR; the question is, at what prices? And at what prices did we sell them grain and other foodstuffs in return? I suspect that the respective answers are "high prices" and "low prices"; the trades were not ordinary free market trades because of the political factors involved.
How is our current state that different from anarchy? Do we actually have rule of law, not to mention anything resembling justice; or only up to the point where it becomes inconvenient for the powerful?
So it works marginally better for those aligned to power or operating in the shade of its inefficiencies; sure, but you could also say this about the world Mad Max drove around in..
Anarchocapitalism, YouTube "machinery of freedom" for the ten minute primer. "The Problem Of Political Authority" for a good book presenting the case that the entire idea of political authority on which all states are built is internally inconsistent and unacceptable as well as why an ancap system would work well in practice.
It's the best alternative system I have seen so far I think, although I think instead of trialing it out by revolution in an enormous country like the US it will be good to see it in action first in the currently developing Honduran ZEDE's as well as seasteads when they become a reality. It's much easier to say it's a good plan when there is practice rather than just theory.
If you have a growth and the doctor advises you to remove it, do you ask him what will he replace it with?
Irrelevant, because the OP isn't advocating removing a growth; he's advocating "removing" my entire body structure. If a doctor advised you to get a body transplant, would you not feel the need to ask him what your body was going to be replaced with?
Only if you feel "the entire body" is the government, police, etc.
I'd say there are is an actual country, made of solid land, tons of assets, houses, buildings, shops, companies, and around 350+ million people that are outside of this "whole body" and they can build a new structure if it goes away.
Heck, some say those all are that started the USA in the first place.
A transplant of the entire body might be a bit much as an analogy, yes; but "removing a growth" is far too little. I'm not even sure replacing a single defective organ, which was the analogy another poster used, is enough to convey just how much "the system" now infiltrates every aspect of our lives.
some say those all are that started the USA in the first place
I'm not sure this analogy holds up very well either, because the British government's impact on the colonies was much, much smaller than the current US government's impact on the USA. To "build a new structure if it goes away" would be orders of magnitude more difficult now, and would involve a lot more pain, suffering, and violence.
Fewer people vote than own Internet-enabled devices.[1] Centralized anonymous participation in policy deliberation, creation, and education seems a logical step. Consider the following application:
Reducing the influence of Special Interest Groups is accomplished through moderation whereby moderators are randomly selected, from the entire population of users, and are empowered for a random interval of time.
The path to adoption begins at municipalities wherein contributions are initially restricted to civil servants, whilst benefits and drawbacks to upcoming policies are publicized. Once many cities are using the system to deliberate and solicit public feedback, usage at the Provincial (or State) level could follow.
Similar systems exist[2], however they are too complex for recording open and transparent discourse to achieve majority consensus on a particular policy.
Thoughts?
[1] I am reminded of this quote from V for Vendetta, "You now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror."
I don't see how any of the alternatives you refer to are "burning the system to the ground". They're just incremental changes to the system we have. (That's not to say I think they're necessarily bad ideas; just that they don't seem to be the kind of ideas that the OP is advocating.)
Burn the Fucking System to the Ground
Dec 23, 2013 By Clark. Effluvia "I'm a good judge" … said by government employee and judge Gisele Pollack who, it seems, sentenced people to jail because of their drug use…while she, herself, was high on drugs.
But, in her defense, "she’s had some severe personal tragedy in her life".
And that's why, it seems, she's being allowed to check herself into rehab instead of being thrown in jail.
…because not a single poor person or non government employee who gets caught using drugs ever "had some severe personal tragedy in her life".
I'm reminded of something I read earlier today:
techdirt.com
We've discussed the whole "high court/low court" concept here a few times before — in that those who are powerful play by one set of rules, while the rest of us have to play by a very different set of rules.
…
The end result seems clear. If you're super high up in the political chain, you get the high court. Reveal classified info to filmmakers? No worries. Not only will you not be prosecuted or even lose your job, the inspectors will scrub your name from the report and, according to the article, the person in charge of the investigation will "slow roll" the eventual release of the report until you switch jobs.
But if you're just a worker bee and you leaked the unclassified draft report that names Panetta and Vickers? Well, you get the low court. A new investigation, including aggressive pursuit by the government, and interrogations of staffers to try to find out who leaked the report.
Twenty years ago I was a libertarian. I thought the system could be reformed. I thought that some parts of it "worked"… whatever that means. I thought that the goals were noble, even if not often achieved.
The older I get, the more I see, the more I read, the more clear it becomes to me that the entire game is rigged. The leftists and the rightists each see half of the fraud. The lefties correctly note that a poor kid caught with cocaine goes to jail, while a Bush can write it off as a youthful mistake (they somehow overlook the fact that their man Barrack hasn't granted clemency to any one of the people doing federal time for the same felonies he committed). The righties note that government subsidized windmills kill protected eagles with impunity while Joe Sixpack would be deep in the crap if he even picked up a dead eagle from the side of the road. The lefties note that no one was prosecuted over the financial meltdown. The righties note that the Obama administration rewrote bankruptcy law on the fly to loot value from GM stockholders and hand it to the unions. The lefties note that Republicans tweak export rules to give big corporations subsidies. Every now and then both sides join together to note that, hey! the government is spying on every one of us…or that, hey! the government stole a bunch of people's houses and gave them to Pfizer, because a privately owned for-profit corporation is apparently what the Constitution means by "public use".
What neither side seems to realize is that the system is not reformable. There are multiple classes of people, but it boils down to the connected, and the not connected. Just as in pre-Revolutionary France, there is a very strict class hierarchy, and the very idea that we are equal before the law is a laughable nonsequitr.
Jamal the $5 weed slinger, Shaneekwa the hair braider, and Loudmouth Bob in the 7-11 parking lot are at the bottom of the hierarchy. They can, literally, be killed with impunity … as long as the dash cam isn't running. And, hell, half the time they can be killed even if the dash cam is running. This isn't hyperbole, mother-fucker. This is literal. Question me and I'll throw 400 cites and 20 youtube clips at you.
Next up from Shaneekwa and Loudmouth Bob are us regular peons. We can have our balls squeezed at the airport, our rectums explored at the roadside, our cars searched because the cops got permission from a dog (I owe some Reason intern a drink for that one), our telephones tapped (because terrorism!), our bank accounts investigated (because FinCEN! and no expectation of privacy!). We don't own the house we live in, not if someone of a higher social class wants it. We don't own our own financial lives, because the education accreditation / student loan industry / legal triumvirate have declared that we can never escape – even through bankruptcy – our $200,000 debt that a bunch of adults convinced a can't-tell-his-ass-from-a-hole-in-the-ground 18 year old that (a) he was smart enough to make his own decisions, and (b) college is a time to explore your interests and broaden yourself). And if there's a "national security emergency" (defined as two idiots with a pressure cooker), then the constitution is suspended, martial law is declared, and people are hauled out of their homes.
Next up from the regular peons are the unionized, disciplined-voting-blocks. Not-much-brighter-than-a-box-of-crayolas teachers who work 180 days a year and get automatic raises. Firefighters who disproportionately retire on disability the very day they sub in for their bosses and get a paper cut.
A step up from the teachers and firefighters are the cops: all the same advantages of nobility of the previous group, but a few more in addition: the de facto power to murder someone as long as not too many cameras are rolling. The de facto power to confiscate cameras in case the murder wasn't well planned. A right to keep and bear arms that far exceeds that of the serf class: 50 state concealed carry for life, not just just for actual cops, but even for retired cops.
At the same level of privilege as cops, but slightly off to one side is different class of nobility: the judiciary and the prosecutors. Judges and prosecutors can't execute citizens in an alley, a parking lot, or their own homes ("he had a knife! …and I don't care what the lying video says."), but they can sentence people to decades in jail for things that any clear-minded reading of the Constitution and the 9th and 10th amendments make clear are not with in the purview of the government. They have effectively infinite resources. They orchestrate perp walks. They selectively leak information to shame defendants. They buy testimony from other defendants by promising them immunity. By exercising their discretion they make sure that the bad people are prosecuted while the good people (i.e. members of their own clan) are not.
Above the cops, the prosecutors, and the judiciary we have the true ruling class: the cabal of (most) politicians and (some) CEOs, conspiring both against their own competitors and the public at large. If the public is burdened with a $100 million debt to pay off a money losing stadium, that's a small price to pay if a politician gets reelected (and gets to hobnob with entertainers and sports heroes via free tickets and backstage passes). If new entrants into a market are hindered and the populace ends up overpaying for coffins, or Tesla cars, or wine that can't be mail ordered, then that's a small price to pay if a connected CEO can keep his firm profitable without doing any work to help the customer. If the Google founders want to agitate for Green laws that make Joe Sixpack's daily commute more expensive at the same time that they buy discount avgas for their private flying fuck palaces, then isn't that their right? They donated to Obama's campaign after all!
I could keep myself up all night and into tomorrow by listing different groups of royalty and the ways they scam the system.
…except "scam the system" is a misnomer. I am not listing defects in a perfectable system. I am describing the system.
It is corrupt, corrupt, corrupt. From Ted Kennedy who killed a woman and yet is toasted as a "lion of liberalism", to George Bush who did his share of party drugs (and my share, and your share, and your share…) while young yet let other youngsters rot in jail for the exact same excesses instead of waving his royal wand of pardoning, to thousand of well-paid NSA employees who put the Stasi to shame in their ruthless destruction of our rights, to the Silicon Valley CEOs who buy vacation houses with the money they make forging and selling chains to Fort Meade, to every single bastard at RSA who had a hand in taking the thirty pieces of silver, to the three star generals who routinely screw subordinates and get away with it (even as sergeants are given dishonorable discharges for the same thing), to the MIT cops and Massachusetts prosecutor who drove Aaron Swartz to suicide, to every drug court judge who sends 22 year olds to jail for pot…while high on Quaalude and vodka because she's got some fucking personal tragedy and no one understands her pain, to every cop who's anally raped a citizen under color of law, to every other cop who's intentionally triggered a "drug" dog because the guy looked guilty, to every politician who goes on moral crusades while barebacking prostitutes and money laundering the payments, to every teacher who retired at age 60 on 80% salary, to every cop who has 50 state concealed carry even while the serfs are disarmed, to every politician, judge, or editorial-writer who has ever used the phrase "first amendment zone" non-ironically: this is how the system is designed to work.
The system is not fixable because it is not broken. It is working, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, to give the insiders their royal prerogatives, and to shove the regulations, the laws, and the debt up the asses of everyone else.
Burn it to the ground.
Burn it to the ground.
Burn it to the ground.
Merry Christmas.