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In America, justice is only available to those who can afford it. If you can't afford months or years of lawyer's fees and don't have the ability to take time away from your job, family and other daily obligations, you're simply out of luck.
It is not quite this dire, there are very competent public prosecutors and defenders. The problem is we accept the wealthy can obtain better and more lawyers, and effectively buy more or better justice as they define it. It's a classist system where justice is treated as a product rather than exclusively as a right.
Justice doesn't just come in form of public defenders. I lived in Chicago and had my car improperly towed to the yards. Being a rich computer dork, I could take the time off when the yards were open to go retrieve it. It was only PoC for the entire 3 hours it took me to pay the fine and get my vehicle back, during the day, when anyone with a job would be required to pick up their vehicle.
My job says OK when I tell them I am taking the afternoon off. Most people's don't. Most people's job says, "you're fired!".
One lady lost her car because they found a worn out pot pipe under the driver's seat, while her son was driving the car. For fucks sake. They wanted 1700 to get the car back out of impound. They didn't charge anyone with a crime. But the car was gone.
I on the other hand, had the time to go give my evidence the magistrate and get my 390$ returned due to a improper impound. No working class PoC could have done what I did, on either side of that equation.
The whole time I wanted to scream my lungs out about the fucking level of utter bullshit we inflict on ourselves. I love Chicagoans, but shit, Chicago cops and Chicago justice need to get tossed in the trash.
Sounds like a culture that has embraced Stockholm syndrome. $1700 to get a car out of impound when there was no crime, and yet the people who are getting shot aren't the people who enabled and profit off such an obviously corrupt system.
"You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must."
(tl;dr: the Athenians took Melos, killed the adult males, sold the remaining Melians as slaves, repopulated the island. Eventually they made the Venus de Milo. And so it goes.)
It is pretty dire when you have a system that incentivized throwing the book at those near the poverty line, so that private prisons could continue to grow.
I'm against the idea of private run prisons, it seems like something that should be the purview of the state given the lack of legitimate competition, market fundamentals, and ethical considerations.
But that said, is there any real data to support this claim you're making that private prisons incentivizes harsher sentencing of poor people? Besides maybe one or two "bad eggs" stories about judges. ie, data showing a legitimate correlation between the two as a general pattern...
This gets thrown around a lot on Reddit and elsewhere online but I really don't see how private prisons could influence criminal justice system at the other end.
I may be parsing it incorrectly, but I take "private prisons" less literally since I know that private prisons are the vast minority. Instead of thinking about the prison itself, consider the "prison industrial complex" in a way that you might consider the "military industrial complex." There are a lot of people who make a lot of money off our prison system, and it includes everyone from food suppliers to lawyers.
Also, private companies now house nearly half of immigrant detainees including a $1 Billion facility the Obama administration purchased to hold Central American women and children seeking asylum in the US.
Specific examples of lobbying are easy enough to google. I might suggest starting with the "Kids for Cash" scandal where two judges got millions of dollars in kickbacks from for-profit juvenile detention centers for sending more kids to their facilities.
According to Pew Research, as of 2015, ~126,000 prisoners (state & federal) were held in private prisons[1]. As best I can tell, there are/were 2.2 million prisoners in the U.S. at the time. So about 5.7% of the prison population.
>Two judges, President Judge Mark Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael Conahan, were convicted of accepting money from Robert Mericle, builder of two private, for-profit youth centers for the detention of juveniles, in return for contracting with the facilities and imposing harsh adjudications on juveniles brought before their courts to increase the number of residents in the centers.
"Representatives" in the U.S. government no longer represent the citizens at all — they represent the lobbyists that pay for their votes.
Logically, this behavior should result in the representatives being voted out of office.
However, the two party system combined with the unbelievably high cost of running for office makes it nearly impossible for representatives who don't fall in line with the status quo to receive the campaign financing necessary to be elected.
It's a rotten system and won't go away until campaign finance laws are reformed.
Completely agree with you here. I also want to reinforce your conclusion.
I used to think the two party system was flawed because it is so hard to get anything done. I see now that is a feature and under the current administration we are lucky to be in such a slow moving system.
The solution here truly is in campaign finance and other forms of voting reform such as addressing gerrymandering. If we put the people back in charge of the government I think everything else will fall into place.
This is a wonderful comment, but I fear you still might be underestimating the problem. Even if you replaced the two-party system with any other number of parties, you'd still never have a party dedicated to each issue. Voters will always be choosing a candidate who supports the majority of their views, and small issues such as this one will almost never be the deciding factor between the available candidates.
Making it worse, these issue-specific lobbyists don't really care which individual (or party) wins the election, just that the votes on the few bills that their funders care about go in their desired direction. So they can simply make it known after the election that anyone who votes in their preferred direction can expect to receive a "donation" funding their reelection campaign.
But helping the candidate get reelected isn't the only way that lobbyists can help a candidate. Instead, they could donate to the candidate's nonprofit family foundation, give the candidate's family members well paying board seats, wait until their retirement and overpay the candidate for lectures. Once word gets out that candidates who vote in a particular direction are given future preference of any sort, the lobbyists are pretty assured of getting what they want regardless of what the campaign finance laws say.
Short of finding some hidden trove of non-corruptible and non-self-interested politicians, I don't think there are any easy fixes for this. Unless you can find a way that "representatives" are unable to derive personal benefit from their votes and are compelled to put their constituents interests above their own, the system will be vulnerable to being swayed those able to offer that benefit.
The campaign finance laws won't change until the GOP loses control of the congress and presidency and/or the balance on the Supreme Court shifts (which is why stealing Garland's seat was a top priority despite all of Grassley et al.'s long history of sanctimonious pronouncements about the proud traditions of the Senate and blah blah; Gorsuch is even to the right of Scalia on all of these topics). There has been a decades-long effort on the right to shift power to moneyed corporate interests and away from the public (defanging regulators, opposing anti-trust action and promoting corporate consolidation across many industries, supporting binding arbitration, allowing unlimited anonymous political spending, privatizing public institutions and selling public assets, encouraging various kinds of tax dodges, taking the corporate side when ambiguous fine print in contracts borders on outright fraud, ...), tracking soaring levels of wealth/power inequality, and the party is all-in on it from top to bottom.
I think his point was that democracy is the responsibility of the people being governed, so if you don't like it then it becomes your responsibility to do something about it. (Although I could be mis-interpreting.)
Except that "representatives" of one of the two parties is explicitly trying to help people here and the other isn't. So pushing the narrative of the two-party system being the problem doesn't apply here.
There's been one election cycle since the current administration took office and that party was punished for its hostility to citizens and failure to deliver on its promises. So while the system has severe flaws, it's working as intended in this aspect.
Even if manufacturers behave nicely, there is still the possibility that the devices are eventually somehow compromised by bad actors and used nefariously.
Why bother attempting to patch on layers on top of BTC when it's already centralized with ASIC farms?
Start fresh.
Early adopters of BTC are trying to con new users into buying coins produced for minimal capital/computational work. The flaw in BTC is inherent to the malicious minting algorithm designed to harm new users.
There's other cryptocurrencies who are far out pacing the BTC core team.
Ethereum (which definitely has its own fair share of issues) recently hit its all time high in daily transactions, which incidentally is more transactions than all other existing decentralized blockchains put together--a set containing Bitcoin.
I agree: we need a faster settlement layer independent of how much the currency itself is worth; but let’s say we have have that network? How do taxes work? Everytime you transfer or pay for anything? That’s not going to work.
Lightning ultimately has to come into contact with Bitcoin at some point, unfortunately. Even if you just have one Bitcoin transaction a month, I'm paying $20/month at the current tx prices just to be able to use Bitcoin. $240/year. Does that sound anywhere near reasonable to you?
The goal is that there will be fewer BTC transactions once LN becomes widespread, especially if people or institutions open long-lived channels between each other (active for months, years, or even indefinitely). Then you'd only have to hit the BTC blockchain a few times a year, at most, and that's a level of transactions which the BTC blockchain can easily handle, even if the whole world population uses it for everyday trading.
However I also expect that fees will go down once this craze is over (in a few days hopefully). They have tripled in the past three days (see https://fork.lol/tx/fee).
Let's say "a few times a year" is once every two and a half months. Everyone who wanted to use Bitcoin would then have to pay about $100 a year to use it at today's rates. That's still ridiculous. And fees have increased mostly because the price increased. If people actually started using Bitcoin, the price would skyrocket and fees would rise even higher.
Some premium credit cards come with annual fees and benefits. $100 a year for the ability to use a censorship resistant, semi-anonymous payment system doesn't sound like a bad deal.
The fees have also increased because of the large number of unconfirmed transactions (we currently have over 160k transactions in the mempool). Once that decreases to more reasonable levels the tx cost will decrease, too.
An uneducated society is easy to manipulate — easy to convince that climate change isn't real, that evolution is a conspiracy against religion, that creating a social safety net and investing in public education, health care and modern infrastructure is a bad thing.
I hate to turn social issues into black and white, partisan debates. But anti-intellectualism and the denigration of education is a uniquely right-wing phenomenon in the U.S. It's used often by the Republican party here to criticize "elites" and is employed by a long list of other power-hungry demagogues throughout world history [1].
Isaac Asimov wrote a column in January 1980 in Newsweek that describes this phenomenon in the U.S.:
> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
This is nonsense. There’s no Illuminati out to make the population dumber. There _is_ a bunch of identity politics ignoramouses out the gut colleges that “corrupt our values” and it’s an easy thing to point to as a win when your base (who keep you in power) are mouth breathing retards who see higher education (and intelligence in general) as nuisances.
Make no mistake: their goal is more money for companies, and this is merely a way to keep their base happy so they can keep their shareholders happy.
Opposing the state of American universities isn’t necessarily anti-intellectualism any more than opposing the state of the Roman Catholic Church is necessarily atheism.
Perhaps it's not the biggest factor, but it is likely to reduce employee benefits like education stipends, relocation stipends and dependent care FSAs.
Now that these benefits are much more expensive, you can except these benefits to reduced or eliminated, and the remaining costs to be take from your future salary.
An alternative view is that those people will no longer receive tax free benefits that the rest of us aren't getting.
I'm hoping they take things a step further and one day eliminate the health insurance deduction for corporations and count the cost as income for the employee. It's nonsense that a corporation can deduct it as an expense but an individual getting their own insurance can't. Sure you can set up a pass through entity but why should you have to?
I understand and agree with the sentiment, but not the conclusion. What happens when they can no longer deduct it, won't employees' health plans become even worse?
Yes, but those benefits should be paid for in a lower overall corporate tax rate. There's many flaws in the tax bill, but eliminating special interest tax deductions in favor of lower taxes for everyone who isn't a special interest isn't one of them. Unfortunately the tax bill includes many new special deductions for special interests like craft breweries, and people passing on multi-million dollar estates to their children.
Corporations are enjoying record profits for years but wages have been stagnant since the 90s. The idea that when corporations receive more money they pass on a proportional value of benefits to their employees or customers is a laughable fiction. In fact, they will proudly say that this is a good thing, as their only responsibility is to the shareholder.
