Because nothing happened when wall street bankrupted the country by gambling and needed to be bailed out in 2008, and then paid themselves huge bonuses.
Very few people actually got punished, but a lot changed since 2008. Executives were forced to step down. Several major players went bankrupt and many more lost 95%+ of their valuations. Anecdotally, I hear that companies are taking compliance much more seriously. HN would call the surveillance at banks today Orwellian if they were more knowledgable about it.
I think it's generally because most Americans would be looking at ridiculously long prison sentences for common actions if they got caught (like possession) and because the US's general view is that there isn't anything in the world that can't be cured by throwing more prison time at it.
Not if you were black and used crack. And pretty much any prison for posession and use is rediculous, if its a problem for the user it is a mental health issue and prison is the wrong treatment. And of course the limits on what determines if you're a dealer is set low enough, and carrier laws meant that many users were getting prosecuted like dealers. And what defines a "dealer" since someone doing a group buy for three friends is significantly less socially problematic than someone trafficking drugs across the border.
Afaik there is a recording of Nixon saying that they want to use drug penalties to go after black people and hippies. A lot of times those racially biased outcomes are the product of many unrelated parts of a big and complicated system, but in this case the top of executive government seemed pretty deliberate about this.
There is no such recording. A reporter who interviewed an aide of Nixon for his autobiography claimed that that aide said that (but he only claimed so after the aide had died).
I don't know about blacks or hippies, but Last Week Tonight played an Oval Office tape of Nixon wanting to target marijuana laws because those in favor (of legalization) were Jewish.
There is indeed no such recording - but calling the official an "aide" is a bit inaccurate, the official in question was the domestic policy chief[1] - rather than a random secretary that claims to have overheard something.
That all said, for all of the negative PR Nixon has received over the years he was a rather progressive and surprisingly egalitarian executive who has been praised by Indian Country Today[2] and appears to have stuck pretty close to his quaker upbringings. I think a lot of people conflate Nixon and Regan - which is pretty ridiculous when you look at the policies those two presidents actually pursued during their terms... And even more folks are getting second hand vibes from Nixon's infamous presidential debate[3] which pitted a rather uncharismatic man against JFK and led to a pretty obvious outcome.
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9cdRpE4KKc Just FYI - if you've never seen this I'd suggest giving it a go sometime. Given recent politics it's almost fantastical to listen to two folks come into a debate focused on the issues and minimizing the ways they attacked each other.
I of course agree. It is ridiculous. I also grew up in one of the cities that was the center of the so-called "crime epidemic." We've definitely improved on sentencing since 30 years ago.
I just don't think it is accurate to say that people are getting super long sentences for possession anymore and I don't think it is right to use that as justification for longer sentences for other people.
Because nothing ever happens to the rich when all you do is take a bit of their money away. They have so much that they will get it back merely for being wealthy, and as we just saw with the recent pardons, they won't even serve their entire sentence even when they're stealing the life savings of hundreds.
Apparently in America there are huge prisons owned by private companies, traded on stock market of course.
With this scenario one can quite easily imagine that incarcerating more and more inmates for maximally long periods of time could be something that is wanted and desired.
These people are leveraging everything in their power to fuck over millions to save themselves money. We put them away for 5 years and they still come out billionaires in the end, why wouldn't they do it?
A jail sentence for such a well positioned white collar criminal is probably comparable to a retreat lodge. Such an institution certainly doesn't have prison bars and a fenced perimeter because it is low security and has a special privilege.
So what - somehow somewhere someone will have the power to jail these white collar criminals for their entire life, but they don't have the power to make a 5 year jail sentence more uncomfortable?
I spent my childhood around kids from broken families, most of whom had parents in prison on long sentences for nonviolent drug charges. I saw lots of my friends lose their houses in the 00s. I entered a job market that treats just about everyone as disposable; unworthy of training, investment, benefits, time off, bathroom breaks, ppe, or a livable wage.
Wall sts focus on the short term has been like napalm on these issues and made fixing them political suicide. I don't say this lightly; wall st has enslaved America for profit.
>The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% [1]
The proletariat is showing their heads and nipping at the ankles of everyone. Some are misguided, but beating a hedge fund at their own game, trying to convince boomers that black lives matter enough to not be executed by police, or Medicare for All or forgiving student loan debt are all extremely well studied solutions to systemic issues in America that will not be meaningfully addressed until the root problems are addressed: money in politics, racism, trickle down economics, class inequality, asset inflation, health care, employee rights, war on drugs, etc, etc, etc.
This specific incident was a fluke of luck that required ridiculously overpaid bros in cushy hedge fund jobs to count past 100% while shorting gme/nok/AMC which is playing with the lives and livelihood of the people that work in each of those companies. Needless to say, but watching billionaires repeat '08 with gamestop, amc, and Nokia ruffled a lot of feathers. Gme especially brought out some whales with money to burn in the chase of infinite gains.
Maybe this was an elaborate psyop to manipulate people into doing things they wouldn't. If so, great job, if not, well maybe the fat cats on wall st and in Congress should come around my hood and experience the hopelessness for themselves, that's an open invitation for as long as this account is active for any billionaires or US politicians not already arguing against the same issues I am to come and walk in my shoes.
Hopefully this incident spurs some change in wall st and the culture there. Congress certainly doesn't have the courage to.