“According to the Pentagon, there are approximately 865 US military bases abroad—over 1,000 if new bases in Iraq and Afghanistan are included. The cost? $102 billion annually—and that doesn’t include the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan bases.”
— Around the Globe, US Military Bases Generate Resentment, Not Security | The Nation
Colonisation is not satisfied merely with holding people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns the past of oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it
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| — | Frantz Fanon (via trinithinker) |
SC Johnson, the “family” company’s billionaire heir, Samuel Curtis Johnson III, who confessed to repeatedly sexually assaulting his teenage stepdaughter has received an outrageous prison sentence of only four months because the judge, Circuit Justice Eugene Gasiorkiewicz, feels that Johnson’s importance to the community is valued much higher than the dignity of his abused step-daughter.
You read that right. Affluenza, as it has been dubbed, has struck again. This billionaire has officially plead guilty to mere misdemeanor charges of fourth-degree sexual assault and disorderly conduct instead of receiving the maximum which is felony sexual assault on a minor child. These charges originally stem from 2011. Think Progress reported Johnson’s stepdaughter “initially told police Johnson was ‘a sex addict‘ and touched her inappropriately 15 to 20 times starting when she was 12 years old. She told her mother about the abuse in order to protect her younger sister, and Johnson confessed when the mother confronted him.” Because Johnson’s victim was unwilling to testify in the case, the prosecutors had to make a plea deal with Johnson and his legal team.
Johnson’s attorney, Michael F. Hart argued to Judge Gasiorkiewicz that the maximum prison term for his client was not fair and that is should be reserved for “maximum defendants,” people unlike his client (aka not billionaires with a prestigious name), who has no prior record and who leads a “productive life.” Again, the billionaire status and famous name apply to that “productive life.” He’s an heir, so remember folks, he’s inheriting this empire and inheriting this money. Very productive.
Add insult to injury, the judge made his decision based on other cases in which he has rarely gives first time offenders the maximum sentence. So instead the judge gave Johnson, a billionaire, a fine of $6,000. The judge ruled that he must serve at least 60 days of the sentence before he will be eligible for release.
Consider that in the decade preceding 2009 the bottom 99 percent of Americans shouldered approximately 63 percent of federal taxes, and that those taxes were allocated into the pockets of the top 1 percent, in part, through war and militarization. Also consider that the richest of the rich pay significantly lower tax rates than the working class. If we look at these facts rationally we come to understand the true meaning of the phrase “redistribution of wealth,” that it is not a picture of the rich giving disproportionally a piece of “their” pie to the working class for our sustenance, rather it is a picture of the rich taking the entire pie from working class tables and expecting thanks for the crumbs left.
