View Single Post

Re: Occupy Wallstreet
Old 11-25-2011, 04:53 PM   #55
KillerGremlin
No Pants
 
KillerGremlin's Avatar
 
KillerGremlin is offline
Location: Friggin In The Riggin
Now Playing: my ding-a-ling
Posts: 4,566
Default Re: Occupy Wallstreet

I'm very much enjoying this discussion, so I'm merely dropping in some random facts/thoughts/tangents as a partial observer. I don't want to break up this discussion, but there's some stuff worth thinking about below.


Examples of laws/policy that have failed because the law came before human rights:

-Prohibition and the War on Drugs, really
-Sex offender laws and statutory rape
-Anything slavery and civil rights, duh

Examples of current laws that undermine basic Constitutional Rights:

-namely the Patriot Act and all the warrant-less wiretapping.
-a number of people have been arrested/detained without the fair right to a trial, which is also supposed to be protected by the Constitution
-you could argue that the TSA impedes certain rights, but flying is a private industry and flying isn't a right, it's a privilege; so gray area

The US Prison population, which far exceeds everyone else, is padded by silly drug laws and laws that really don't consider the basic rights of humans:

Quote:
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world's population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners.

Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.

Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.

The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King's College London.

China, which is four times more populous than the United States, is a distant second, with 1.6 million people in prison. (That number excludes hundreds of thousands of people held in administrative detention, most of them in China's extrajudicial system of re-education through labor, which often singles out political activists who have not committed crimes.)

San Marino, with a population of about 30,000, is at the end of the long list of 218 countries compiled by the center. It has a single prisoner.

The United States comes in first, too, on a more meaningful list from the prison studies center, the one ranked in order of the incarceration rates. It has 751 people in prison or jail for every 100,000 in population. (If you count only adults, one in 100 Americans is locked up.)

The only other major industrialized nation that even comes close is Russia, with 627 prisoners for every 100,000 people. The others have much lower rates. England's rate is 151; Germany's is 88; and Japan's is 63.

The median among all nations is about 125, roughly a sixth of the American rate.

There is little question that the high incarceration rate here has helped drive down crime, though there is debate about how much.

Criminologists and legal experts here and abroad point to a tangle of factors to explain America's extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges — many of whom are elected, another American anomaly — yield to populist demands for tough justice.

Whatever the reason, the gap between American justice and that of the rest of the world is enormous and growing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/23/w...pagewanted=all

These are mostly social issues, I'm less familiar with the financial sectors. The current SOPA act is on par with the Patriot Act, only for your Internet. If SOPA passes, for all we know this very forum could be blacklisted. America will be the next China. Many of the pro-SOPA folks are getting big kickbacks and funding from the RIAA and other large corporations.

I don't think we need to argue that the RIAA is more interested in money than anyone's rights.

At any rate, no one has really touched on why corporations are allowed to lobby, why running for President costs almost a billion dollars, or things like that. I'm curious what everyone thinks.

Relative to the rest of the world, I'm pretty sure the US spends waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more on campaigning. And I'm 100% okay with politicians being required to publicly air out who they get money from. You oppose healthcare for everyone, do you? Oh, you're getting a couple million dollars from Big Pharma every year! Well, fuck you!
  Reply With Quote