It's still a two-tiered system, where the rich get off and the poor get screwed.
Take the case of Lenise Lloyd Martin III, 36 and unemployed, who thought he could make a few bucks by joining the latest fad of posting a Facebook video of oneself licking a carton of ice cream in a store and then putting it back inside the freezer compartment. No matter that Martin was just desperately trying to cash in on the whole postmodern Fake News Franchise, and that he then honestly purchased the carton of ice cream, even producing the receipt to prove it.
The sheriff of Assumption County, Louisiana assumed the worst anyway, and he arrested The Licker, mainly to issue a stern warning to all the other incipient Lickers lurking in the supermarkets of America. Big Brother is watching you, and he's not the benign fraternal duo known Ben and Jerry of Vermont, either. Not even close.
This is especially true if you, like Martin, go grocery shopping while black. The young white woman who started the whole fad simply got a tongue-lashing from the authorities. Martin got thrown in jail.
The public health menaces who are attacking the nation's ice cream supply are real Sicko Lickos, as Rupert Murdoch's New York Post puts it, and they must be stopped before we all die. It seems never to have occurred to the professionally disgusted media and law enforcement personnel in need of a new enemy to hate and a new fear to monger that the ice cream makers should simply add those hard-to-remove plastic collars around the lids to prevent undue licking and the need to throw out hundreds of potentially tainted containers
The cops were especially miffed because when confronted, Martin actually had the gall to claim that he hadn't done anything wrong by licking before buying. In fact, he was very cavalier about his heinous crime, said Lonny Cavalier, the sheriff's spokesman. He acted so downright disrespectful and dangerous that he's been rotting in jail since the Fourth of July - four more days than flight risk Jeffrey Epstein has been rotting in jail for running a massive child sex trafficking pyramid scheme for the past dozen or so years in the full brazen view of the entire two-tiered complicit criminal justice system and the plutocrats who own it.
As the New York Times reported in an article buried deep beneath a virtual avalanche of Epstein coverage,
Mr. Martin was charged with criminal mischief for tampering with a product before he had purchased it, and with “unlawful posting of criminal activity for notoriety and publicity,” a rarely-used Louisiana law that makes distributing a video of oneself breaking the law punishable as an additional crime.
Mr. Martin will spend at least four nights in jail awaiting his bail hearing. In Louisiana, the authorities have 72 hours to bring suspects before a judge, but because of the July 4 holiday, the clock did not start ticking until Monday. The earliest that he will be able to post bail is Wednesday.
Franz Borghardt, a defense lawyer, said that the authorities appeared to be trying to make an example out of Mr. Martin in an effort to put a stop to the flurry of ice cream licking incidents.In other Constitution news, a federal court has just ruled that Donald Trump acted very cavalierly and illegally when he blocked millions of critics from his Twitter account. But unlike his pal Jeff Epstein, he is still very much immune from legal accountability. Just ask his other pal, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“This is a highly aggressive arrest based on a seldom-used statute that is constitutionally questionable,” Mr. Borghardt said.
Even a constitutional amendment making it a crime not to do one's official congressional duty and impeach a criminal president probably would not sway her. After all, nobody paid much attention to that other constitutional amendment which banned liquor back in the day. And why would they? Ignoring the law made a lot of organized criminals very rich during the Depression, just as ignoring the law makes organized criminals very rich today. Congress itself is a virtual Speakeasy, operating in broad daylight. It's not a crime when drunk-on-power oligarchs do it.
Or at least, not usually. Every once in awhile, the Powerful Club does sacrifice one of its own, to give the restive populace the idea that nobody is above the law, not even Jeff Epstein.
But ask yourselves this: would Bill Clinton pal Epstein have been arrested if Hillary Clinton were the one sitting in the Oval Office today and if Donald Trump's corrupt labor secretary hadn't been the one who'd given Epstein his original slap on the wrist?
And another thing: having been rightly castigated for their abject failure to protect the caged children in the southern border's concentration camps, the Democrats are desperate for another virtue-signaling hook by which to "resist" Trump. With Epstein's belated indictment, politicians and pundits are falling all over themselves as they scramble to defend the scores of sex-trafficked young girls whose continuing victimization by Epstein had been an open secret for years. It gives them a much-needed break from pretending to care about the imprisoned and abused refugees.
And just in case championing Epstein's victims isn't enough, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer are taking the brave stance of inviting the champion US women's soccer team to drop by their Speakeasy for a splashy photo-op. If they couldn't put any distance between themselves and Trump on their mutual persecution of the imprisoned immigrant children, they can at least brag about what good sports they are about sports. In lieu of introducing any actual legislation mandating equal pay for equal work and a living wage for all women and for all people, they're making a bit of a self-serving stink about how professional women athletes should make at least as many millions of dollars as their male counterparts do. Those fashion spreads in Vogue and those lucrative product endorsement deals just don't cut it.
You go, girls! And stay away from the ice cream, unless it's the Opulence Sundae kind with the real gold leaf embellishments and the side of caviar that you pay $1,000 for. That's about $100 per lick, at least. The freedom to consume in freedom is the greatest freedom that the Neoliberal World has ever invented for those precious few who can afford it.
Meanwhile, enough with the political bickering. Let's all join together and celebrate more bipartisan cuts to the food stamp program as we celebrate Jeffrey Epstein's great legal reckoning. We will feel replete just knowing that the Ruling Class is on our side, as is God.
4 comments:
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits."
-- Author unknown
Several characters mentioned in these accounts appear to have been victims of their own stupidity or the stupidity of their alleged minders.
As for Jeffrey Epstein, I would hope a goodly number of his shanghaied innocents, clueless groupies, teen models, apprentice masseuses and budding sex workers come forward to sue him down to his last shoelace. Hopefully his Caribbean fun island, Little St James, is big enough to serve as Guantanamo 2.0 for all the big shots and celebrities who tagged along again and again on his private jet.
Any thoughts on then U.S. Attorney/current Labor Secretary Alex Acosta's reported excuse for letting Epstein slip prosecution a decade ago: "I was told Epstein ' belonged to intelligence' and to leave it alone..."?
When I think of the two-tiered justice system, I immediately think of Lanny Breuer, then in Eric Holder's Justice Department, appearing on camera with the most painfully sincere expression, explaining why it was just so incredibly hard to prosecute bankers for fraud and other crimes. He was such a good actor that he is now back at Covington & Burling, raking in the bucks.
@stranger,
It would be no surprise if Epstein turned out to be either a willing or unwilling "intelligence asset" - like Noriega before him, perhaps he has finally outlived his usefulness to global organized crime, aka the political-media-military complex, aka the Deep State, etc.
This seems more plausible the more I read about his shadowy financial history. Nobody seems to know where he made all his money. He also, it is now said, not even a billionaire despite his ownership of jets, mansions, islands. Deutsche Bank suddenly dropped him like a hot potato a few months ago, perhaps having received an inside tip he was going down. I think the bank might be at the heart of a money laundering scheme, blackmail/extortion ring, or whatever Sopranos-like subplot you can dream up.
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