Burn the F****ng System to the Ground
by Clark
“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:
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.
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Republicans who oppose subsidies for exporters get slammed as “extremists” by the Economist magazine (and other Corporate Welfare outlets).
As for drugs – a massive Republican blind spot – perhaps they should listen to the President of Guatemala, no softy – an hardened veteran of the Civil War, who tries to explain the harm that prohibition (i.e. handing over vast sums of money to criminal gangs linked to terrorists) actually does in Latin America (and elsewhere). There is no Constitutional authority for the Federal government to have anything to do with this (the 18th Amendment was past to ban booze – it has been repealed, the “ban drugs” Amendment has never even been past, it is part of an “invisible constitution” that conservatives should denounce as much as libertarians do).
State level?
Glenn Beck is correct on this – only if the full consequences fall upon the drug user.
Presently the “liberal left” say “yes you can use drugs – and we will give you XYZ at the taxpayer expense”.
No.
If you choose to use drugs you get NOTHING. That should be the line.
You can beg (if you wish) but you get nothing as a “right”.
So if you can hold down a job – then fine.
If you can not hold down a job (and starve to death in the gutter because of your drug use) when then you had better hope a Church reaches out to help you, because the state should not. After all if you want to “burn the system” you can not expect benefits from it.
That is fair enough.
You have read the entire piece Paul–and all you write about is “drug use”?. Yes –some drug users are on a down-bound train just like some alcohol imbibers. And if a person is bent on self-destruction it is very hard therapeutic work to help them–if they can be helped at all. Often they can’t.
However –that is a side issue–the piece–correctly IMHO- indicates the state of the USA today and moreover why no reform is now possible. The Republicans are the same sort of cultural Marxist infused slime as the Democrats and nothing is going to change matters short of economic collapse. It is the same with the BluLabour crew over here. Vote them in because you are ecstatic to see the back of the shite that is ZaNuLab and in five years we are worse of than before. The economy is still up shit creek —legal aid is being dissolved so that if you are not very well off and run afoul off any of the ever more numerous and oppressive laws you are screwed. They now want to criminalise opinions they don’t like and….. It is nice to see that Obama was told to FO by the big Rep vote in the US but he has no reason to worry. He is set for life and the BluDems will do nothing to stop his programs.
Unlike Clark in the article above, and Bloodhound Gang in their song, I am not yet at the point of joining the chorus singing “We don’t need no water let the motherfucker burn …”
This is not to say that Clark’s criticisms of “the system” are not, for the most part, well taken.
My problem with this sort off anarcho-libertarian position is the question whether what comes next will be any better.
First, I doubt any would disagree with me that anarcho-libertarians are a bit thin on the ground. Throw in what I suspect is a larger number of minarchists and you still have a rather small segment of the population. .Even if you throw in some conservatives like me [Full disclosure – I was chairman of the Libertarian Party in Virginia for about a year in the mid-70s.] whose embrace of free markets does extend to things like drugs and I think you are still well short of a third of the people in any sizable constituency.
Second, social structures as complex as ours may creak, shudder and shake. But they don’t collapse unless the are pushed; as Firesign Theater taught us, “If you push anything hard enough, it will fall over.” More to Clark’s point, it won’t burn spontaneously, someone has to set a match to it and fan the flame; hence the name of the Russian revolutionary periodical Iskra – Spark.
So, if burning it down requires a spark, what happens when you light the fire? The system works very hard to put out the fire. So, success is a matter of fanning the flames faster than the system can extinguish it. To succeed, the burners must become overtly violent. We’re talking real civil war here – blood in the streets, people dying, no one truly allowed to be a non-combatant.
Here’s where my one-third of the constituency point comes in. Those who write about the American war for independence generally describe the population of the colonies as roughly divided in thirds – the third that wanted separation prevailed., but it was a close run thing and likely could not have happened without French assistance.
The Russian revolution was taken over by the Communists when they probably numbered no more than five percent. But those revolutionaries had a great advantage over their opponents – not just the monarchists, but the Constitutional Democrats and other factions. That advantage was a systematic ruthlessness that some might term psychopathic.
Getting a coalition of anarcho-libertarians, minarchists and conservatives willing to take up armed resistance is hard enough/ If they are not sufficient to overcome those willing to fight on the other side, their tactics must be more desperate. Can a small faction who are united by a belief in personal liberty be sufficiently ruthless to impose their view on a modern state? Would that revolutionary experience change them?
Until you can show me how something better can be expected to emerge from the ashes, I’ll keep my matches in my pocket. The Beatles said it in Revolution, “we all want to see the plan.”
Just as a general point, genuine revolutions rarely produce a better outcome. If we look at the true revolutions in history- France, Russia, Iran- they all resulted in a tyranny. Americans are often mistaken about this because they think they had a successful revolution. The problem is, they didn’t. The American “Revolution” was actually a secession. It was not the people overthrowing their ruling caste. It was the American ruling class seceding from English rule, and who remained intact after the secession, and it was pretty successful, but it was in no way akin to storming the Bastille or the Winter Palace or (um, whatever is iconic of the Iranian one).
Whether or not a society can run without any structure that “runs things”- the anarchist belief- I do not know. What seems to be the case is that revolution isn’t any way to try that out. You can’t simply pull the organised structures of society away without chaos, and thus something will move into the vacuum to replace them. The problem is that that something is almost certainly a bunch of nuts who were great at tearing the old system down but not very skilled at running it; and their primary (rational) objective will be the ruthless suppression of “counter-revolution” to keep themselves in power, and thus any tyranny displaced will be out-tyrannied by the new guys. The Tsar was bad, but the Communists worse. The Sun King was bad, but the Jacobins worse. The Shah was bad, but the Ayatollahs worse. And so on.
Can we put the State into reverse, therefore? Can we reverse the ratchet of power which takes rights from citizens and hands them to the ruling caste? I think in fact, though it is hard, that we can. But it will take the creation of a certain mood in the people, and that is where we have to do the work. Because, for reasons I just stated, I really don’t want a revolution.