As nitpicker draws our attention to today, this last week has provided us with quite an education about the true hierarchy of justice in the modern corporatocracy that is the United States of America.
A quick perusal of recent news stories offers us a wide range of examples of the systematic injustice our so-called "justice system" deals out.
Let's climb together up the pyramid of American injustice...
At the bottom of the pyramid, we have people of color, who may be stopped and frisked for any reason or no reason at all, even though "The United States Supreme Court has held that in order for police officers to stop someone, they must be able to articulate a reasonable suspicion of a crime. To frisk them, they must have a reasonable belief that the person is armed and dangerous."
Just above that level, we see working-class white people like Mitchell Frost of Bellevue, Ohio, who was sentenced to 30 months in prison (followed by three years' probation) and $50,000 in fines for perpetrating botnet Denial of Service attacks against Bill O'Reilly's web site, among others.
Above that level, we find local police officers like Johannes Mehserle, who was sentenced to a considerably shorter prison sentence than Mitchell Frost for shooting and killing a man who was handcuffed and lying face down on the floor of a train platform.
Then we can skip a level or two above ex-Officer Mehserle, where we find Martin Joel Erzinger, a Morgan Stanley Smith Barney employee managing a billion dollars in other peoples' money, who has entirely avoided felony prosecution for a hit-and-run rear-ending of bicyclist Dr. Steven Milo, because, as the District Attorney Mark Hurlbert importunes, “Given that he had a clean history, Mr. Erzinger would essentially have been able to write a check, and the case would then be dismissed," and "because financial rules would require Erzinger to notify his clients that he was charged with a felony."
Above wealthy Wall Street financiers, we come to CIA agents, who will face no prosecution for having destroyed videotapes of torture sessions conducted on Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in 2005.
But above all of these, at the top of the pyramid, we have ex-Presidents.
Even though he has repeatedly admitted to ordering the torture sessions of Zubaydah, al-Nashiri, even though he oversaw the operation of international CIA "black sites" where hundreds of others were tortured and killed, George W. Bush is touring the country, clearly believing that he is immune from prosecution for this and other war crimes, including the aggressive invasion of Iraq itself.
So whenever you wonder whether it's worth fighting against the growing power of soulless corporations and the sociopaths who run them, think of this Pyramid of Injustice, and of the multitude of cases of injustice you can place upon this same pyramid, and think of how much worse it will get if we all just turn our backs on this reality and pretend everything is okay.
It's very much not okay.