The more laws and restrictions there are, the poorer people become. The sharper men’s weapons, the more trouble in the land. The more ingenious and clever men are, the more strange things happen. The more rules and regulations, the more thieves and robbers. If a government is repressive, the people become treacherous.
Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching – chapters 57-58
Throughout the writing of my essays on this blog, I have often preferred my personal word constructions. I believe that I have helped explain the legal miasmas and historical crimes that all states, thrones and empires have birthed, nourished and proliferated against humanity throughout history. Sometimes though, I must rely on others for the perfect words describing a most horrific actuality.
But in this particular case, a religious mystic from the sixth century BCE in China, during the imperial reign of the Zhou, had spoken a more profound truth. How funny that only 2,500 years later, as a historian, I must quote from that same author. The genius of history always embraces the brute of absurdity.
The same old state and government criminals are at it again: fashioning more and more laws and thereby creating more felons, while managing more collection rackets – always constructing more prisons.
The old Zhou imperial leaders could not have imagined how a contemporary imperial state in Washington D.C. has now transformed itself through its own cracked mirrors – through the lens of its own so-called enemies. These legal thieves and robbers currently feed at the top of the pyramid scheme, and the vulture’s hunger has taken over their souls. It has led them into the obese feeding frenzy of the legal sociopath.
The stories of terror and horror even outpour into the corporate crap media. Government agents arrest and jail small farmers, and then steal their personal property over some petty little law that the local political hacks did not know existed some months previous. An unwary driver goes through a particular speed trap where local police bums confiscate the person’s hard-earned cash over an illegal search of the vehicle. A small business owner suffers a raid and confiscation of his property over a few curious cash deposits totaling under 10,000$. A homeowner loses her house of 40 years due to a missed payment of a ‘property tax.’ The list is so horrendous and long that this essay could not even do a minimum justice for the millions of those victims from such legal crimes.
Recently, I read about one of the more corrupt cities in the northeast United States, which now has a peculiar habit of stealing people’s homes due to finding their sons and daughters using illegal drugs inside of the same houses. What type of legal monster could fashion such an injustice, such outrages?
Throughout world history, laws have existed as the ‘other means’ of gaining power over the weaker parts of society. The other time honored method is simple warfare, inclusive of sanctions, invasion, mass murder, brutal reparation payments against the defeated, and occupation. Except for the Amerikan Empire, political elites throughout history have often used the latter method against the ‘foreign’ enemy.
Law is not, nor has it ever been, about justice. Law or the legal code is the most important tool within the apparatus of power. Through legal statutes, the powerful have the freedom to use whatever methods imaginable of legitimate-institutional violence against their weaker targets.
Legitimate violence has always implied the state, or any other elite faction that controls the political machinery within a particular society. For the elites, the laws represent justice because they maintain the things as they are, or the ‘social peace.’ For those under the Law, or that have to obey the enforcers of the Law, law is just another form of tyranny included with social customs, legal institutions, and commonly accepted ideologies or hegemonies.
Although the law is a brutal arbiter of legal violence, it also has the respect of the lower classes in society. The reason for this respect is that the law gives a voice to all accepted societal members. The law, in the face of the upper class judge, might not respect the voice of the unemployed beggar, but at least the beggar has a chance to speak, or plead his or her case.
The only classes of persons that the law has usually failed have been the slaves and the social outcasts. The slave loses all civil respect and legal privileges, and becomes a socially dead piece of property. The social outcast is a despised internal enemy that the general population fears, inclusive of both the elites and the poor.
This putrid legal-justice schema has been the functioning code of interpersonal disputes for hundreds of different cultures, and during thousands of years of world history.
But something has radically changed inside the recent Amerikan Empire in regards to the Law. The federal government, state governments and municipal governments have corrupted the law system into an attack mechanism that threatens, intimidates and harasses most of its citizen victims.
American citizens do have a Constitutional Bill of Rights to protect them, but the current practice of law has thrown out this same Bill of Rights through the dictatorship of ‘judicial precedent.’ In other words, the legal authorities can now twist and pervert the Law through their own political or prejudiced whims or legal judgments.
The laws do not exist for the lawgivers, but for the law takers – the unwary subjects. The lawmakers purposefully contrive and distort the laws, so that the weaker elements of the lower classes fall into various legal traps currently set up for them.
The legal traps include diverse nickel and diming mechanisms, such as the multiple fees to use the courts, and ticketing for the those that step over the movable legal boundaries. The authorities of course move and remove the boundaries constantly. Meanwhile, the lawmakers continually reward both themselves and their enforcers with legal immunities from such flexible legal traps.
In some states, such as California, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey, the legal codes, or ‘revised statutes,’ now encompass volumes upon volumes of contradictory and outrageous decrees that have even surpassed the old Jewish Law found in the Torah, or the Five Books of Moses, from Genesis to Deuteronomy.
Even the Roman Empire would periodically tear away bad laws made by bad rulers. In the actual Amerikan Empire they do none of this. Once enacted, bad laws and even criminal laws stay on the books forever, and this explains why the state attorneys always try to keep the innocent behind bars, because if all the innocent prisoners rotting in the Amerikan gulag had their freedom, then most Americans would realize the total criminality of the legal system.
The Amerikan two-tied Legal System has turned into a legal miasma, creating the monster of Judge Political Hack fed through the criminality of creating more laws for the sake of instituting more laws. All of this legal madness receives its grease through the machinations of the Politician Sociopath.
This total political scam entails supporting a supposed just law, first through the entrails of the corporate media. ‘The Public’ seems to support the proposal. But then in closed chambers, the politicians and their lawyer minions build an excrescence of twined injustice. Even some judges have gasped in outrage at the results. Most criminal defense attorneys stand aghast with outright disgust.
Now across our Amerikan nightmare of dictatorship and monopoly capitalism, former crimes now exist as lawful practices of the state. The Domestic Secret Police, or the FBI, legally use the criminal system of entrapment against America’s Muslim population. There are now hundreds of Muslims rotting for life in prison due to not committing any crimes.
First they came for the despised minorities, but they are currently using entrapment on anybody and anywhere across this sickly empire. All state enforcers regularly use disreputable snitches, narcs and turncoats that have had their lies stamped with the legal seal of approval.
Police departments in collusion with state or district attorneys have increased the criminal practice and scope of civil forfeiture, where they arbitrarily rob regular citizens’ properties stating that their properties were some how connected to ‘criminality.’ If the robbed citizens want their properties returned, then they have to go through a very expensive legal system that will eventually break them economically.
State police forces, or any state enforcers, including jailers and prison officials have regularly used cruel and unusual punishments against prisoners for any minor infraction against the ‘prison rules.’ They have forced sick inmates to die cruelly in cells without receiving their medicines. They have even flayed off the skin of prisoners through flushing burning water on their bodies. Other sociopathic punishments have included forced feedings, denying decent medical care for the dying, forced drugging, pile ons of prison guards, and policemen that often suffocate the victims. Other tortures have been excessive beatings where four or more guards beat the prisoner to death or leave them paralyzed, or leaving the prisoner to rot in the solitary hole, so the prisoner becomes permanently brain-damaged. All of the state murderers have received some form of legal immunity.
The state thugs now recognize the criminal practice of forced or beaten confessions as reliable evidence.
The crooked politicians have increased the felony loads as the prisoner population has also increased substantially. Now living and enjoying life has become a felony. If a poor person wants to escape the misery of urban poverty through taking a hard drug escape, driving a vehicle fast without a license around town, or setting up a spontaneous street party with lots of drinking – these acts could land that person in prison as a felon, and destroy his or her chances of ever getting a job.
The right to trial by jury has been lost for most Americans. Now the district attorneys simply pile on the felony counts before sentencing. The overworked defense attorney then has to recommend his or her client to do the plea bargain flim flam game. The accused will have to do some prison time over a lesser crime that he or she did not even commit.
In many parts of the US, we still have the freedom to buy guns, yet we lack the rights in using them. Even in self-defense cases, we will still have to undergo some type of criminal or civil trial. How many Americans have 20,000$ in capital reserves for all the necessary legal fees?
We supposedly have the freedom to travel too. But as we drive on the highways and byways in this land, the state and local police gangs wait furtively off the sides of the roads in order to trap us for speeding or other minor moving violations, such as passing without using signals, or suddenly swerving over the shoulder line. Near the border areas, the federal police stop all vehicles and ask intrusive questions. Most states have regular police checkpoints for DUIs, license and registration checks, safety checks, seat belt checks, insurance checks and even drug dog searches.
And yet with all this repression and lack of any real freedom, the state crooks regularly nickel and dime us through periodically raising the sales taxes, marriage taxes, death taxes, service taxes, utility taxes, property taxes and annual state revenue taxes. And there are more taxes and fees that the madmen and women dream up. We continue to pay them as extortion rackets because if we stopped paying them, then the full fury of the Law would fall mercilessly upon us
The Amerikan imperial state has bound us within the black widow spider webs of legal miasma. But we are even worse off than this terrible actuality. Those holding power honestly believe that their legal crimes entail legal justice. We are now at the mercy of unrelenting and pitiless monsters. Hollywood horror movies have referred to them as sociopaths. The terrible reality is that it will only get worse.
Thankfully, an ancient Chinese seer could point to such a ghastly future.
Guns and Anarchy 