Yeah. We have a fuckin’ moral crisis, but it’s not the PEOPLE being immoral. It’s a crisis of greedy piece of shit (generally local and state) governments using petty fines instead of taxes to raise revenue.
Set speed limits arbitrarily low. Go for a fishing expedition when people who are already poor are pulled over. Stick them with $2000 of fines which they can’t pay. Crack in the tail light? Cha-ching! Burned out headlight? Cha-ching!
Take their license. When they’re pulled over again, confiscate their car and jail them for a while. Congrats! They’ve just lost their job and are unable to get to work because public transportation stinks in the USA.
Show up at their house. Arrest them for having a run-down property. When they can’t pay the fine, stick them with contempt-of-court charges. When they turn to drugs to escape their shitty reality, bust them for felony possession, jail them, take their voting rights.
Case will never see a jury that could mitigate punishment, either — excessive sentences tend to be used by prosecutors to bully people into accepting “time served” and a felony record. I’d suspect that 90% of felons are made by the American system, not born with criminal tendencies.
When I look at what happened in places like Ferguson, MO, I think that the rioters didn’t go far enough. Their anger was justified and then some. Yellow vest protests combined with some public floggings would have been about right.
I don’t like Trump, but I see him as a catalyst. Make voters so angry that they elect more left/less authoritarian candidates on the local, state, and Congressional level who support things like sentencing reform, decriminalization of victimless crimes, and expanding the social/health safety net.
