Index

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Who watches the watchmen?  An age-old question, but one that has become increasingly urgent as our so-called “law enforcement” has become less and less enforcement and more and more repression.

First, let us start with the front lines:  the police, in all their various guises.  The street cops are some of the least law-abiding citizens in existence.  When was the last time you saw a cop car doing the speed limit?  Right, as they slowed down in your rearview mirror to give you a speeding ticket.  No one gives them tickets, after all.

They constantly flaunt minor details like speed limits and red lights (and their own unenforced regulations that require them to obey traffic laws.)  There is no one else in our society that can get away with beating someone in plain sight in broad daylight for the crime of existing - the rest of us would find a cop’s nightstick shoved up our ass for trying it, but it is a real and constant danger and a regular experience for the homeless in our society.

If you aren’t white-skinned, you carry the additional burden of automatic police hostility and the very real and constant danger of racial profiling, whatever the current crop of apologists want to call it.  Hispanics are the most frequent victims where I live - even though the cops have been forced to learn some small amount of Spanish, they still prefer to let their guns and nightsticks do the talking.  God help you if you are Brazilian…

A lot of society lives in fear of the cops - they are a random danger, making their own rules rather than enforcing real laws.  Only the rich - that famous 1% - don’t fear them - they can buy their way out, swiftly and surely.  The rest of us just dodge their random violence and live on hope.

The various federal agencies are worse, if such a thing is possible.  The FBI raids senior citizen’s homes in full body armor, using nastier weapons than most of the world’s standing armies, and nobody calls them to task for it - they blatantly ignore the unfavorable publicity,  claim they were justified, and that is the end of it.  No brakes on it, even.

Then there is the DEA - when they visit, they don’t want you alive.  Bodies can’t fight back when they are accused of whatever “crimes” the DEA wants to claim, and the dead don’t get in the way of their expropriation of property (theft by another name) that some freaks in Congress made legal and nobody has ever had the balls to correct.  Doesn’t matter if you are guilty or not, your property is theirs, and your life is close behind - or is it the other way around?  Whatever…

Finally, there is this matter of guilt and the court system that produces the obscene “verdicts” that allow the above groups to continue their reigns of terror.  Our court system still acts out charades developed in the 17th or 18th century, when they were just rubber stamps for the monarchies they served; this is entirely appropriate given the quality of “justice” dispensed.  The fact is that unless you have lots of money, the court system is just a rubber stamp on the actions of the above terrorists.

The “presumption of innocence” is a law-school fantasy that quickly goes the way of the dodo once reality kicks in, so should you ever find yourself accused in a courtroom, you have approximately the same chance as a snowflake in hell of getting a reasonable verdict.  If you were rich enough, you wouldn’t be there in the first place; a couple of phone calls and you would have been done.  There is no such thing as justice once you are in the clutches of the “justice” system.

The case of Aaron Swartz is a fresh example of just how bad things can get.  The prosecutors decided that whatever else they did, Mr. Swartz was not going to be allowed a normal life, and they succeeded to the point that a brilliant, sensitive person was forced to suicide.  This is just the latest in a string of such things, but those that get targeted by the NSA are not allowed to talk about it, they only have to live through the hell (or not - it would appear that the government would rather they saved the government the trouble.)

As an obvious aside, how can a “justice” system pretend there is no grey area, only guilt, when almost nothing in reality is anywhere that clear cut?  I suppose when you have some guy dead to rights for armed robbery and murder, then you can claim guilt with some sort of certainty, but enough to warrant killing them?  Surely we have learned enough as a society to realize that there is no possible claim of a level of certainly high enough to justify putting someone to death - the number of people being released from death row because of prosecutorial and police misconduct alone should make that obvious, not to mention those released because of evidence based on newer technologies.

We have had a lot of exposure recently to the cavalier attitude of the NSA towards the general concept of human rights, and specifically our rights as citizens of the United States of America under our Constitution - how can we not look around and realize that the rest of the law enforcement apparatus has gone the same way?  I suppose I should know better, but I still believe in concepts like innocent until proven guilty, like the Constitution and its Amendments, like the concept that all human beings have a basic right to exist free of fear and harassment by authority,  I guess I am living in a fantasy world, because that is not the society I live in.

Pardon me, I hear someone banging on the front door and yelling…