Everybody’s talking about how the president pardoned his son. That’s corruption, sure, but it’s completely understandable corruption. Any of us might have made the same choice, in that position. Please give me a break with the “but he promised not to, he’s a liar” bullshit. Of course he’s a liar, he’s a politician. How many other campaign trail promises has he, and every politician in history, broken? If you claim to be appalled by a politician’s lie, you’re either lying yourself, or fucking stupid.
I’m a lot more appalled by the systemic corruption wherein dozens of wealthy fraudsters were pardoned by an administration that is just as bought and paid for as every other one we’ve had in decades. And please, before you start the predictable, “That’s a MAGAt lie, you have no proof! He was just giving victims of the drug war justice!” bleating which I’m quite sure is on it’s way, understand that I’m fully against the drug war (and the existence of the DEA and BATFE), believe every non-violent ‘drug offender’ everywhere should be immediately freed and pardoned, and support full legalization of all recreational drug use, so I’m not talking about the blanket commutation. No I’m talking about the freeing of rich people convicted of the kind of rich people crimes that destroyed the lives (and in many cases caused the death of) thousands of people, but whose wealth buys them access:
- https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/13/politics/joe-biden-commutations-pennsylvania-illinois/index.html
- https://www.post-gazette.com/news/crime-courts/2024/12/15/biden-podlucky-le-nature-latrobe-clemency-pardon/stories/202412150146
- https://www.yahoo.com/news/bidens-clemency-pardon-list-includes-223259951.html
- https://www.freep.com/story/news/politics/2024/12/13/biden-commutations-include-some-three-dozen-michigan-criminals/76947912007/
- https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/bidens-clemency-pardon-list-includes-former-elected-official-lawyers-m-rcna184032
- https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/biden-commutes-sentence-albany-financial-19976068.php
These people are the worst people in our society. Privileged assholes who see themselves as superior, as nobility, and anyone who isn’t rich as sub-human peasants whose lives and livelihoods are resources to be used, plundered, and dumped as trash. They destroy lives as a rule. Most of the time, their crimes are legal, because they’ve bought legislation that makes so much financial piracy acceptable to our legal system, but when they do come up against actual limits, they continue past them without a thought. They’ve already destroyed or killed so many people that a couple of potential legal charges for their actions is a signal that’s lost in the noise.
On rare occasions, one of them is allowed to be prosecuted as a sacrificial goat to appease the rabble, knowing full well that their wealth will buy them special treatment in the penal system, shockingly easy ‘time’, and access to the corrupt politicians who will give them literal Get Out Of Jail Free Cards. That tiny tip of the iceberg is what we’re seeing here.
This isn’t a Democrat/Republican thing, they all do this. The politicians of either of the major parties who actually rise to high office long ago sold their souls to the devils of our society. They are bought and paid for minions of the moneyed class that owns this nation. They go to war so the government can give the weapons nobility taxpayers’ money. They ‘help’ poor people get health insurance (which isn’t actually insurance and denies the services the government supposedly got for them anyway) by forcing millions of people to give up what coverage they had and buy into a new bullshit system built and controlled by the ‘healthcare’ nobility. They ‘protect’ workers and consumers by instituting regulations written by the largest moneyed interests in the industries regulated, regulations which inevitably have loopholes that let the industrial nobility do whatever they want while making entry into industries too expensive for new competitors to emerge. They praise the empowerment of labor unions while ensuring that the nobility are immune from their ‘power’.
The worst part is, we all know this! Say something about these or any of the other hundreds of corruptions to anyone on the street, and they’ll say, “Oh yeah, that’s how the system works, alright.” Republican, Democrat, Green, Libertarian, Independent, it doesn’t matter. Ask anyone whose personal wealth is below the level that guarantees nobility, and they’ll tell you their stories of how the system fucked them over while enriching the rich. Doctors have these stories. Plumbers have these stories. Lawyers have these stories. Even used car salesmen have these stories, for fuck’s sake!
We all know it, but somehow, most of the 90-95 percent of us who aren’t able to use the system to steal and murder our way to ‘profitability’ have bought into a series of made-up divisions over comparatively trivial issues that allow the nobility to let us fight each other, instead of them. ‘Conservatives’ want to ban abortions, despite the regular evidence that they are as likely to avail themselves of them as anyone else. ‘Liberals’ want to end corporate welfare, despite their electing representatives who take hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign ‘donations’ from corporate interests and never seem to be able to stop the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars handed over to the nobility’s corporations every year from increasing. We fight over gun control while workplace hazards alone kill four times as many of us as all gun violence, gun suicides, and gun accidents combined. And don’t even get me started on the ‘culture war’ smoke-screen…
Meanwhile, markets have never been less free. Our citizens have never been less free. Corporations, (government created monsters legally required to ‘maximize shareholder value’ by any means that can be painted to look legal, no matter how many of their customers, employees, or anyone who stands in their way get robbed blind, hurt, or killed) flourish as never before. Privacy is nearly unattainable for the average person. We are tracked every moment of our lives. Our personal preferences are bought and sold so that we can be better manipulated and used as sources of revenue. Laws restrict our supposedly ‘free’ speech. Supposedly illegal monopolies are allowed to form daily, so we can better be fleeced. These monopolies control all of our modern means of communication and publication, censoring us to their hearts’ content under the guise of “you don’t have to use our products”, even though your only alternative is to abandon engagement in modern society.
I’m not against getting rich! I’m a libertarian. I like money and commerce just fine. I want free market competition. The problem isn’t money, it’s a system that is designed to make wealth the deciding factor in all major arenas. This system was designed and built by rich people, for rich people, and against us.
The rich declared war on those who actually work for a living long ago. And they win every battle. Because we let them…
