cool fact for people who have a problem with looting:
cops in america are legally allowed to take people’s property (including large sums of money) purely because they feel like it. it’s called civil forfeiture and there are literally thousands of cases of pigs taking people’s property. that is looting.
i watched this happen to my roommate after the cops kicked our doors in at 6 AM on a weekday for a no-knock raid that, surprise surprise, didn’t turn out anything. they opened his wallet in front of him, took out about $300 and told him that since they had no record of where it came from on premises, that they’d have to take it from him. they took this man’s rent money right in front of him while he was in cuffs and told him “too bad”.
there was also a friend’s car in our drive way that had broken down so they left it over night. the doors were locked and the windows were up, and since the owner wasn’t there, they decided it’d be cool to just bust in all the windows to perform another fruitless search.
In Philly it’s been a HUGE and MASSIVE problem with cops taking people’s bank accounts, cars, electronics and pretty much anything worth any amount of money under a law that lets the DA seize property they think is related to a crime. “Related’ is a vague term though. They once forced a women and her grandchildren out of her home to sell it at auction because her son was found by police with $20 worth of weed.
(Depending on the property in question it can go under Civil Property Seizure or Seize and Seal, they’re not the same law but they work the same)
They don’t have to prove it’s related to a crime before or after, and even if the person suspected of the crime is cleared at questioning or acquitted at trial, you have to go through a MONTHS long process of court appearances (you can’t miss one or be late or you lose, no rescheduling) in hopes that they MIGHT get their stuff back. Most don’t.
Most people don’t think it’s worth the expense of days missed at work and a lawyer to get back a couple hundred dollars or whatever else the police stole. The city makes MILLIONS of dollars each year off this, around $6-10 (The DA doesn’t provide figures)
but tell me more about “good cops.”
because i hate the civil forfeiture system, the NYPD civil forfeiture system keeps no tally of its forfeitures because it would crash their system to compute it, and there may be only one backup of the whole system. a system that seized (an assumed) $68 million in property just in 2013.
Thieves, rapists, racists, murderers, white supremacists, domestic abusers, law breaking with impunity, and things such as stop and frisk as power displays…
Wait, there’s supposed to be some good apples, right?
Republicans have no idea, nor do they give a f*ck, about net neutrality and how ISPs can control or throttle content to force you to but their services, or watch third party sites at slower speeds.
Not one consumer wants to end net neutrality. This is a corporate takeover of the FCC and Republicans in government.
The internet is a utility.
Imagine the phone company throttling your calls or picking which phone calls you can receive?
“Imagine the phone company throttling your calls or picking which phone calls you can receive?“
The fastest internet in the United States is not private. It is operated as a utility. Chattanooga. The city was updating the power grid and the people working on it realized that putting in the infrastructure for high speed internet at the same time would not be that much more expensive. So that’s what they did. And a bunch of ISPs sued the city to try to stop them. Because guess what? Despite all the rhetoric in favor of the “free market”, these companies don’t actually want real competition.
So now Chattanooga has the fastest internet speeds in the entire country. It also has some of the cheapest costs in the entire country because it is run like a utility and owned by the city.
The sad part about this is that those same ISPs that sued are trying to get cities and states to pass laws to make what Chattanooga did essentially illegal.
CNN did an article on it a few years back: http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/20/technology/innovation/chattanooga-internet/index.html
imo for every post you reblog abt ~cutting out toxic ppl~ you need to reblog another one abt, yknow, conflict resolution skills. im not going to behave like this isn’t part of a larger problem in a self-centered culture that exists outside of tumblr, bc it is, but the way these ideas are packaged on here sometimes is deceptive. & sometimes cutting people out is the answer! but i feel like it’s often treated as something to default to instead of, like, the fifth step in a process that actually requires some effort and communication
“When I was 26, I went to Indonesia and the Philippines to do research for my first book, No Logo. I had a simple goal: to meet the workers making the clothes and electronics that my friends and I purchased. And I did. I spent evenings on concrete floors in squalid dorm rooms where teenage girls—sweet and giggly—spent their scarce nonworking hours. Eight or even 10 to a room. They told me stories about not being able to leave their machines to pee. About bosses who hit. About not having enough money to buy dried fish to go with their rice.
They knew they were being badly exploited—that the garments they were making were being sold for more than they would make in a month. One 17-year-old said to me: “We make computers, but we don’t know how to use them.”
So one thing I found slightly jarring was that some of these same workers wore clothing festooned with knockoff trademarks of the very multinationals that were responsible for these conditions: Disney characters or Nike check marks. At one point, I asked a local labor organizer about this. Wasn’t it strange—a contradiction?
It took a very long time for him to understand the question. When he finally did, he looked at me like I was nuts. You see, for him and his colleagues, individual consumption wasn’t considered to be in the realm of politics at all. Power rested not in what you did as one person, but what you did as many people, as one part of a large, organized, and focused movement. For him, this meant organizing workers to go on strike for better conditions, and eventually it meant winning the right to unionize. What you ate for lunch or happened to be wearing was of absolutely no concern whatsoever.
This was striking to me, because it was the mirror opposite of my culture back home in Canada. Where I came from, you expressed your political beliefs—firstly and very often lastly—through personal lifestyle choices. By loudly proclaiming your vegetarianism. By shopping fair trade and local and boycotting big, evil brands.
These very different understandings of social change came up again and again a couple of years later, once my book came out. I would give talks about the need for international protections for the right to unionize. About the need to change our global trading system so it didn’t encourage a race to the bottom. And yet at the end of those talks, the first question from the audience was: “What kind of sneakers are OK to buy?” “What brands are ethical?” “Where do you buy your clothes?” “What can I do, as an individual, to change the world?”
Fifteen years after I published No Logo, I still find myself facing very similar questions. These days, I give talks about how the same economic model that superpowered multinationals to seek out cheap labor in Indonesia and China also supercharged global greenhouse-gas emissions. And, invariably, the hand goes up: “Tell me what I can do as an individual.” Or maybe “as a business owner.”
The hard truth is that the answer to the question “What can I, as an individual, do to stop climate change?” is: nothing. You can’t do anything. In fact, the very idea that we—as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals—could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system, or changing the global economy, is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together. As part of a massive and organized global movement.
The irony is that people with relatively little power tend to understand this far better than those with a great deal more power. The workers I met in Indonesia and the Philippines knew all too well that governments and corporations did not value their voice or even their lives as individuals. And because of this, they were driven to act not only together, but to act on a rather large political canvas. To try to change the policies in factories that employ thousands of workers, or in export zones that employ tens of thousands. Or the labor laws in an entire country of millions. Their sense of individual powerlessness pushed them to be politically ambitious, to demand structural changes.
In contrast, here in wealthy countries, we are told how powerful we are as individuals all the time. As consumers. Even individual activists. And the result is that, despite our power and privilege, we often end up acting on canvases that are unnecessarily small—the canvas of our own lifestyle, or maybe our neighborhood or town. Meanwhile, we abandon the structural changes—the policy and legal work— to others.”
Before you get mad at your partner for not doing what you expect them to do, Stop and ask yourself “have I ever communicated to them that I have this expectation?” If you have not, it’s unfair to expect them to read your mind.
So many arguments are saved by just opening your mouth and saying “hey hun, in the future can you….” Whether its articulating how you like to be loved, supported, or communicated with, you have to open your mouth. Your soul mate (IMO) isn’t the person that just always knows what you need when you need it without you telling them. Your soul mate is the person who hears your needs and thinks “I have no problem doing that because I love this person with my whole heart”
So check your attitude and open your mouth. Closed mouths don’t get fed.
This remarkable line of questioning from Congresswoman Suzan DelBene demonstrates just a few of the ways that the GOP tax plan treats corporations better than people.
Under the Republican plan, corporations are still allowed to deduct state and local taxes. Workers are not. Corporations are still allowed to deduct business expenses. Teachers are not.
Corporations are still allowed to deduct more than $10,000 in property taxes. Homeowners are not. Corporations are still allowed to deduct moving expenses. Families are not.
And this is on top of a $1.5 trillion corporate tax cut.
Let’s be clear, this is not a “middle-class tax cut.” Working families get the crumbs and the super-wealthy get everything else.
cornbreadfans
