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Comment by dls2016 | Hacker News Reader

dls2016

Let’s say it again, friends: the justice system is designed to protect capital.

And as usual for HN you are being unhelpfully reductive to up push the "capital bad boo hoo, something something".

Just like with the soviet destruction of Aral sea to produce cash crops, in turn sacrificing 14% of its fish stock, it's usually short sight political decisions.

The politician needs to look successful today and no one will pin the consequences on them in 10 to 15 years time.

There are systemic issues and most of comes from these politicians that are driven primarily by their own ambition rather than the corporation of all concerned to bring quality outcomes.

> unhelpfully reductive

I can see an argument for this in any particular case. But then I think about the makeup of the US prison population and realize that I'm correct. You only go to jail for certain crimes in this country (not that I think we need to increase our prison population). You don't get peppered sprayed, tasered or shot for environmental crimes. Protesting environmental crimes? Absolutely!

> Just like with the soviet destruction of Aral sea to produce cash crops, in turn sacrificing 14% of its fish stock, it's usually short sight political decisions.

I would agree that short-sighted political decisions maintain the lack of enforcement of certain crimes. "Broken windows" justice is waaay easier. But the article and my comments were about the US, where capital rules. And you have to take the history of the justice system into account, and in the US you find it's intertwined with the plantation system, slavery, destroying labor unions, "protecting" against Native Americans and, more recently, the Post WWII corporate boom (contributing to corporate power). I'm not familiar enough Soviet history to say if any of this is relevant to your example.

The system is built to protect the system. It only protects capital so much as the state has a vested interest in the stability of any particular grouping of capital.

Agreed, but there's been a major project since 1968 to ensure that capital generally is big enough that it's more important to protect its interests than poor people's. That's the entire purpose of the Federalist Society and fusionism. That's why Donald Trump was actually in a way the most establishment candidate in 2016, he was the first to recognize that traditional fusionism is dead with declining religiosity in the US, now instead of the religious right/libertarian fusion you have the white grievance/nationalist/libertarian fusion instead. Unfortunately, the new fusion is essentially proto-fascism.

I will drink to that.

Then how would you describe the justice system of communist countries?

Except for hundreds of federal and state agencies designed to protect people, ecology, wetlands, water, roads, schools, fraud, crime, murder, and.... well, pretty much everything.

Except you know the whole we've known for decades that it's there and done nothing.

Beyond that we have 1344 superfund sites, most created by private industry, now the government responsibility only very little is being done with that either...

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