Note: Deanna Aenead has set up a fundraising page where you can lend a hand to help those who have been arrested as a result of Stacy’s coerced police informant work. Because we should always be looking out for, and taking care of our own, I encourage you to donate whatever you can to assist in their defense. 

I don’t have a dog in this fight but I think it is important to flesh out the issues. William Gillis has a perfectly succinct synopsis to get you up to speed:

A prominent left market anarchist activist but dropped off the radar last year, just publicly admitted she got nabbed on some serious charges [dealing drugs] in September and collaborated with the state to bust several people on drug charges. Her account of fear and ignorance is harrowing, as they usually are, especially when people don’t have immediately accessible community and legal support (something we should really work on). She says she did what she did to minimize net damage to radicals by redirecting the feds. But snitching alters the landscape in an inescapably categorical way. You don’t get to be an activist after you snitch. You don’t get community support. Otherwise every single instance of collaboration would get hemmed and hawed over, leaving us even more riven with tension and divisiveness. …It’s infinitely easier and more efficient just to draw the obvious hard line. [She] is on her fucking own.

It’s all fun and games until you’re faced with the difficult proposition of martyring yourself for a cause… She made a conscious and calculated decision to get involved in the war on drugs the moment she decided to play Robin Hood (or the pot-dealing equivalent of Robin Hood whatever his name is…), which was an enormous tactical blunder.

As George Donnelly notes, “You can’t be a prominent and public anarchist activist and engage in illegal activities on a sustained and significant basis at the same time. The two roles just aren’t compatible in today’s political climate”  (you really should head over there and read the rest of George’s post).

Bad decisions have a way of compounding themselves

Ultimately it is this decision which allowed law enforcement to target her, apply leverage over her and turn her in to a tool for their own purposes.

Further, did she err, by not reaching out the broad network of likeminded individuals and fellow activists who may have been able to provide support (legal, financial, moral, or otherwise)? No question. Was she lied to and manipulated by law enforcement after she was nabbed? Absolutely. Under duress? You betcha, that is their MO. Was she given lousy legal advice by a barely competent attorney who was probably just looking to cash a retainer check for just-another-nobody who would never be any wiser? Almost without a doubt. Did she the sell out others in order to save her own ass? Yep.

It is disheartening to me that she made the bad decision of jeopardizing others’ lives in order to save her own ass. It is understandable even if not forgivable.  For the implications on others’ lives this would be the worst of it. But it’s not.

What saddens me the most is how she reationalizes this decision. Although she paints this as a matter of “survival”, it was in-fact only a matter of comfort. This wasn’t life-or-death and she did not have to roll over in order to “survive”. Perhaps this verbiage is a defense mechanism to assuage her own sense of guilt, or perhaps I have taken it somehow out of context but I read it like “This can’t happen to me because my life’s work is more important or more significant than others’” and/or “I can do more good for the cause/etc. if I am not stuck behind bars”, etc.

Of course, nobody is duty-bound to become a martyr, but it’s not like she didn’t know that, if she ever got caught, they’d apply leverage like this. There has to be some moral obligation not to drag other people down with you, otherwise we’ve already lost.

Although I am disappointed in some of her decisions, I appreciate her candor now. I am initially inclined to believe it was a lapse in judgment and hopefully not indicative of her character when she elected to throw others under the bus (although this point is contested by several close acquaintances, see Mike’s comment below, as well as Deana’s thorough synopsis). I am also in 100% agreement with Donnelly’s assessment: We all have a breaking point and it would not be very difficult for the long arm of the law to exercise similar leverage, with similar results, over most of us any time they want.

I want to also mention the vitriol I have seen in some comments, up to and including threats of physical violence. I get that, or at least I hope that, these reactions are simply the manifestation of disappointment, anger that one of “our own” could have been compromised in such a manner and that cooler heads will ultimately prevail. Although many are posturing moral superiority, I don’t think this is an appropriate response. I would of course prefer the course of events had taken a different turn, but we all have a breaking point; this is not a condemnation, a character assassination, or even moral judgment.

But what’s done can’t be undone, and so that’s why I also fully understand why others may have a very hard time putting their faith & trust in her again.

I can’t blame them.

Post Script

THIS is possibly the best piece I’ve read, to date, about why she was wrong to do what she did and remains wrong for trying to rationalize it and wronger still for blaming others for her terrible decision-making.

This is not about whether I think the actions she was nabbed for should be legal (I do, see here, here and here).

Further detail on this particular incident provided at the nominally anyonymous Drug War Victim blog.

How many times have you heard something like, “Those soldiers are fighting for your freedom of speech, show some respect!”? How many times have you probably repeated it? That’s what you’ve been told. That’s what they’ve been told, too. They believe they’re fighting and dying for “your freedom”, but are they?

I want to make it perfectly clear that I wish we lived in a world without war, so that young men don’t have to get their faces melted off by IEDs (like the subject of Nina Berman’s “Marine Wedding”, which kind of prompted this article), or so that entire families of Afghanis don’t get rape-murdered in their own houses, or so that Pakistani children don’t get bombed to oblivion by Predator drones.  But we don’t. So, until we do, I feel for anyone who has had to endure these (and countless other) horrors; particularly because most of them don’t understand why they’re fighting. 

Are they fighting for “your freedom”? No. Kissinger said it best:

Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.

It doesn’t matter if the soldiers believe they’re fighting for “your freedom” when in-fact they are being used and abused as pawns in someone else’s war, it doesn’t matter if you believe it, either; no matter how many people believe it, it is still a lie.

I feel like an asshole for suggesting that your son or daughter might have died for a lie. Or that your brother or sister was horribly wounded, paralyzed, brain damaged for a lie. But I shouldn’t because that’s the truth and it’s worth being called a treasonous asshole if I can get a few of you to wake up: despite what they and you and “everyone else” believes, like most soldiers in most conflicts in all of human history, they go to war and fight and kill and die for lies.

I mean no disrespect by all this, I simply refuse help perpetuate the lie; no soldier under any flag, went to war to fight for me, or for my way of life, or for my “freedoms” or on my behalf, despite whatever propaganda to the contrary they may believe.

Sanctioning this lie by pretending to owe them some gratitude for their “service”, or by pretending there’s some noble cause, or by draping the lie in a star-spangled banner and decorating it with a Purple Heart only makes it easier to weave the next lie, easier to persuade the next group of kid soldiers to go fight for it.

And as long as they’re fighting for lies, they’re going to keep dying for those lies.

I fear that this case will be spun by the anti-gun folks as further ammunition (no pun intended) for the argument that “civilians” should be further restricted or denied their right to own or carry firearms, and/or as evidence that communities are incapable of self-policing for fear of shoot-first-ask-questions-later vigilantism (an agument which conveniently ignores numerous examples of police misconduct which also falls under the “shoot first” umbrella).

What are overshadowed in these tragic cases are the multiple failures of the municipal police that lead to tragic outcomes like this.

In the Martin case, for example, the police’s previous failures to protect the community created a need for supplemental security which was in this case filled by George Zimmerman. Were police forces at at all capable of protecting the public from legitimate threats at reasonable costs, communities would have no need for supplemental security.  Another narrative is that the police failed to protect the community from George Zimmerman. And last but not least, the police failed to protect Trayvon Martin from Zimmerman by 1) not giving explicit instructions for Zimmerman to back down and/or 2) failing to respond quickly enough to diffuse the situation with (one hopes) a lesser amount of violence.

The Martin case, and others like it, need to be viewed as evidence that the municipal police forces are abject failures not only at a department-specific level (i.e., the “few bad apples” argument), but that the entire model is irrevocably and institutionally flawed.

Failure is built-in because municipal police forces are essentially monopolies of the worst sort: not only are competing defense/security agencies crowded out of the marketplace for such services, in some cases legally precluded, but consumers must pay for the services rendered, whether they like it or not, whether they are performing adequately, whether they are keeping anyone safe, etc. Furthermore, municipal police departments are generally not accountable to their victims (in the case of misconduct/negligence/wrongdoing) or to the members of the public if/when they fail to protect and serve.

Whatever the outcome of the Martin incident, one thing is absolutely certain: justice will not be served.

If someone were to steal all the bread, and then offer to sell it to us for $10/loaf, we would call that a crime. If a business were to steals only some of the bread, prevents a few other bread manufacturers from operating nearby, and offer to sell us a loaf for $5, would you defend the business’ “right” to sell you bread and your “right” to refuse on free market principles?

If so, you’re an idiot.

Yeah, I had a discussion with some of those misguided souls, you know the type of people who spin their wheels trying to rehabilitate the word “capitalism”, pro-”free market” except their pro-corporate blinders keep them from grapsing how badly the market is being brutalized by the government they purport to hate? Recently, there’s been a little splash because some employers are now asking candidates for their Facebook password, in order to see what’s behind their “privacy” wall. Of course, if government did this it would be atrocious because “government is coercive” but if businesses do this it’s OK because businesses are all “consensual”.

Although this was the genesis of the debate, ultimately it was more of a macro argument. I honestly think these jackasses were more pissed off about the fact that some people want to ask the (government) courts to weigh in on this practice, potentially barring it., but ultimately the discussion centered around their core position: corporations are comprised of individuals, individuals have rights, and therefore corporations have rights.

OK. I’ll play that game. But what about the powers that they exercise, either bestowed by or complicit with the government?

You don’t get to cherry-pick facts. Granting the idea that a corporation (as a collective of individuals) has certain rights transmuted from those individuals, you can’t ignore the exercises of illegitimate powers (things like administering the tax code/collection, or regulatory privilege, and barriers to entry which stifle competition), which are not the proper exercise of rights and therefore cannot be defended as the exercise thereof.

Even though they may act legitimately (by that loose collective rights definition) some of the time or even most of the time, sometimes they do not. As a result, they accrue benefits and privileges which they can (and do) lever against others further down the line, whereupon they ignore the privilege that brought them to the current advantageous position and appeal to the mystical rights argument: “Aha! but right now, you see, I am doing something that is perfectly within my rights…”

Like the bread example above, you must consider the body of work and not just the immediate “option” you’re being presented with. You cannot ignore the usurpation of the rights of others, the coercion which becomes an inseparable part of the whole.

Recognizing this coercion for what it is, you are within your rights to resist, even if that means — ahem — trying to sue them in a government court (really your only option, since the government has a monopoly on law and disorder and it’s the only venue that these corporations would recognize as legitimate anyways).

Yes, the sort of large transnationals, stock-market-indexed corporations are the most obvious examples of this sort of thing, but it’s silly to pretend that smaller businesses are immune from this process. Almost nobody is immune from the process, which is why it is important to understand that literally nothing exists at present which even comes close to the sort of free market corporation (and I use this term veryloosely) that would prevail absent the government’s coercion

Failure to make this distinction, and dogmatically believing in “the market” and the benevolence of corporations is what gives “free market” advocates a bad rap.  So keep the “free market” as an end in itself as your goal, and stop trying to twist logic to justify what is happening, accept that things would (and probably should) be very different, and imagine the possibilities of what could happen in their stead.

Unfortunately I was unable to, despite repeated attempts, get either to budge an inch towards accepting the even part of my argument:

• Free markets and capitalism are not the same thing, stop trying to salvage a word that was never yours,
• It’s unreasonable to invoke free market rhetoric in defense of business enterprises who do not operate in a free market and are not subject to the competitive forces that would otherwise prevail, and further
• It is not reasonable to invoke a “rights” argument when you’re engaged in violating other peoples’ rights.

It was an entertaining, if not futile discussion which reminded me why I don’t discuss these things anymore.

I hear a lot of people talking about how Mitt Romney would make a good president because he has been a successful businessman, because he knows how to make profit and turn things around, etc. For example, Pat Burke, a local self-employed entrepreneur says,

You need to vote for the most electable conservative. … We want someone new, someone who has business experience. It’s the economy, economy, economy.

A businessman doesn’t know how to run government. That’s a common fallacy. ”Electability” is a different topic, but let’s talk about that business acumen and whether it translates to politicking.

Mitt Romney: businessman or career politician?

The right-wing idea of making government “more efficient” or more business-like whatever is a canard. They romanticize “business” and then suppose that because a certain man is a businessman (whose business usualy bears no resemblance to the highly idealized caricature they extoll) that he will be able to bend the apparatus of government more to their liking, more businesslike. But because there is such a divergence between our ideas about government & business, and the reality of government and business, that’s never going to happen.

Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught. — Honore de Balzac

The sort of “successful” businessmen typically presented as political hopefuls are not necessarily savvy entrepreneurs, allocating scarce resources efficiently across a truly competitive freed-market economy. Instead, they are merely those most capable of navigating the spiders’ webs of laws and regulations which they use to browbeat their competition, and they are the most connected to politicians and the lobbyists who convince the politicianss to privilege some at the expense of others.

If businessmen like Romney become “successful” politicians, it has nothing to do with their “business” acumen, it will be because they already know politics. He is successful at business because he negotiates politics and he negotiates politics by fucking some portion of the population in order to appease the others. If they do this long enough, eventually they’ll get to come full circle, retire, get a 7-figure job on K-Street and write those laws.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Despite all economic theory, and despite all the empirical evidence that suggests prohibition is doomed to failure, let’s pretend that I don’t want to legalize all drugs. But let’s pretend that I’m like a great many people and I’m willing to concede that pot should at least be decriminalized.

Do you have any idea how much would be saved? You could cut the drug war budget by 50% if you just legalized pot, and save billions more from incarceration expenses no longer needed.

Do you have any idea how many (mostly brown, mostly poor – because rich white kids don’t go to jail for pot) lives would not be destroyed? You’d also— overnight — eliminate the profitability of criminal enterprise.

The important takeaway from this infographic is that the war on drugs they’re selling you is not the war on drugs you’re paying for. The violent criminal enterprises and organized crime and Frank Lucas style dealers in every hood is basically bullshit fearmongering. The reality is that 82% of the war on drugs is a war on possession, and 100% of the war on drugs is a war on personal freedom.

It is about control. It is always about control.

I wanna know what you expected to come out of all this Iowa nonsense.

Ron Paul addresses Supporters after Iowa defeat

Did you really think that a caucus win in Iowa was going to awaken the masses and inspire an electoral revolution? Revolutions are neither started, nor won, at the ballot box. Ideally, it does not come down to the ammo box. Remember that 70% of the electorate is so disenfranchised that they don’t ever bother to vote on anything. Ever.  The other 30% either believe that the system is actually designed to serve the public interest (it ain’t) or they are naive enough to believe that playing by the system’s rules can actually effect real change (it can’t).

Did you really think that the entrenched political interests would not have used such an “anomaly” as a Ron Paul victory to discredit the caucuses? Or that the mainstream media which has ignored Paul’s candidacy thus far would give a fair and balanced report?  They practically telegraphed this tactic the last few days, every major news outlet reading from the prepared script that a Ron Paul victory would be meaningless, and that it would only serve to undermine the importance/significance of the caucuses anyways (of course, when an establishment candidate wins, all of these arguments are left behind and the people are none-the-wiser, because they swallow everything the mainstream media forces down their collective gullets.

Did you really think this was going to change a damn thing? The system is so incredibly, indescribably, unimaginably corrupt that no amount of tinkering, no amount of swapping basically interchangeable cogs stamped with “R” or “D” but at the same time indicative of no real or measurable differences, up to and including the figurehead role of “President”.  And all this, of course, is to say nothing of how this system is per se illegitimate.

So tell me what you wanted out of this.

As far as politicians are concerned (fuck the whole lot of ‘em, in my opinion) he is certainly among the least-objectionable and although there are certainly issues I take with some of his positions, the Republican field is an absolute nightmare compared to Paul. I’m not saying I wasn’t pulling for the guy.

I just want to know what other people’s expectations were. Mine were not very high, although I’ll admit to feeling a little giddy when I saw some of the early polling results.

A century ago, the Federal government established armories throughout the country ostensibly for the purpose of “national security”, although it’s not abundantly clear what the real threat was at that time. These armories were probably most-often used to supply federal troops and private security brought in to put down popular movements like strikes and shutdowns. This was essentially a civil war, although it is never mentioned as such.

Today, we have the Department of Homeland Security doling out billions of dollars (a nice interactive map, here) to Everytown, USA, in order to supply them with battlefield-grade arms and armor, to fight hypothetical bogeymen and non-existent threats.

Just your ordinary small town police force, nothing to see here

Authorities in Fargo, ND (which has averaged 2 homicides per year over the last 5 years) spent $8 million buying state-of-the-art military grade weapons like the assault rifles which now come standard in every squad car, and the “$256,643 armored truck, complete with a rotating turret”.

Sadly, rather than being some unfortunate exception, Fargo is just another example in the trend to militarize local police departments (via Daily Beast).

• In Montgomery County, Texas, the sheriff’s department owns a $300,000 pilotless surveillance drone, like those used to hunt down al Qaeda terrorists in the remote tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
• In Augusta, Maine, with fewer than 20,000 people and where an officer hasn’t died from gunfire in the line of duty in more than 125 years, police bought eight $1,500 tactical vests.
• Police in Des Moines, Iowa, bought two $180,000 bomb-disarming robots
• An Arizona sheriff is now the proud owner of a surplus Army tank.

To understand this trend, you have to understand a little bit about government appropriations. Generally the money is on the table and you have to use it or lose it. The logic is almost always that if you don’t spend the money, if you don’t pretend you need it, then you can get by with less, so they cut your budget. And government agencies are always in the business of preserving their power, whether it is just looking out for No. 1, or something more Machiavellian like amassing your own little fiefdom or mercenary force, the incentive structure in government always works the same way. Use it or lose it.

Also, follow the money:

One beneficiary of Homeland’s largesse are military contractors, who have found a new market for their wares

Warfare is big business and government contracts are essentially guaranteed profit. So the companies involved in this business can afford to spend lots of money (given to them in fulfillment of government contracts) lobbying the government to give them even more budget for larger contracts next year. It is a sick cycle that shows no signs of abating any time soon.

The article highlights some moral hazard of the hyper-militarization, which I would liken to “Field of Dreams”. If you build it, they will come. Well, if you give it to them, they will find a way to use it.

“With local law enforcement, their mission is to solve crimes after they’ve happened, and to ensure that people’s constitutional rights are protected in the process,” says Jesselyn McCurdy, senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “The military obviously has a mission where they are fighting an enemy. When you use military tactics in the context of law enforcement, the missions don’t match, and that’s when you see trouble with the overmilitarization of police.”

When the only tool you have is a hammer, sooner or later, everything starts to look like a nail. When you arm officers to the teeth, when you train them for war, when you hire a disproportionate amount of ex-soldiers, and when you bombard their psyche with warrior mentality training it is not really a surprise when they start putting that training in to practice, no matter if its warranted or not.  Over the last decade we’ve seen an increasing number of SWAT teams raiding teenage rave parties or serving routine drug warrants on non-violent offenders, creating volatility and chaos where there would never have been any had the police taken a more conventional approach and we are even seeing incidents of police tasering and pepper-spraying children.

Riot police attacking protestors

What will be the longer-term ramifications of increased militarization, especially in light of NDAA and the PATRIOT Act? I fear that these weapons will one day be turned on the people of this country. I fear that it is a matter of “when”, not “if”. We’re already seeing some of it in the deplorable way that local cops have handled several situations in the Occupy Movement, still in its infancy.

As government institutions always seek to preserve and expand their power even at the expense of their constituents’ liberties and livelihoods, there doesn’t need to be any evil villain, plotting and scheming, no Illuminati/New World Order tin-foil hat bullshit. All of the pieces are already falling in to place, the product of human action, not of human design. In other words, it doesn’t matter if they’re explicitly preparing for a civil war, everything they’re doing is inadvertently preparing for one, anyways.

A century ago, the Federal government’s armories were turned against its citizens, used to put down popular movements and general strikes.

Today, they’re shipping the munitions directly to what will eventually be the front lines.

If someone can “own” a word, or a particular series of words, and if they are able to slap lawsuits and cease-and-desist letters from high-priced attorneys on anyone who even approximates their protected verbiage, then in the long run we are all screwed. A friend of mine comments, “Soon, no one will be able to use any words without paying royalties…” in response to this.

Mickey Mouse & Bobby Cox (AP)

The Atlanta Braves are spending lots of money “policing” their trademark (even though they do not have any trademark on the singular “Brave”) and Disney will be forced to spend lots of money countering what is by any reasonable interpretation, a frivolous assertion on behalf of the Atlanta Braves, who are spending lots of money objecting to the title of a forthcoming Disney movie called “Brave”.

Stitch Kingdom notes that “companies must actively police and enforce their trademarks and take all reasonable action to protect them otherwise the trademark may be considered abandoned and thrown into the public domain.” So perhaps this is just a case of due diligence and the Braves’ legal guys aiming to bill a few more hours. (more info…)

All of this money is 100% wasteful, and these costs, among others more-or-less frivolous and ridiculous, are ultimately built in to the prices you pay as a consumer. And this is just a silly Disney movie and a silly bunch of overpaid, politically privileged monopolists in the MLB duking it out over something inconsequential.

Multiply by infinity and you’ll have some idea of the true costs of “intellectual property” in aggregate.

Ultimately, my friend’s comment sounds perhaps a bit hyperbolic, but if you follow the intellectual property argument to its logical conclusion (to say nothing of the the practical issues about so-called “intellectual property”, the completely batshit insane arbitrary nature thereof, etc.), his concern is warranted.

I read an article at Bloomberg today which at first I mistook for some satire piece from The Onion. But then I realized that it wasn’t funny. It seems the nation’s billionaires are joining forces to gripe about their perceived persecution by the “imbecilic” Occupy movement. I’ve responded to some choice quotes below the fold.

Jamie Dimon, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

The 1% Create Jobs

The official unemployment rate is still hovering around 9% which is double what is ordinarily considered healthy, and I’m pretty sure the actual unemployment rate is more like 15% or higher.  Even with these facts in the headlines every day, some of the 1% have the audacity to play the “job creation” card.

“It’s simply a fact that pretty much all the private- sector jobs in America are created by the decisions of ‘the 1 percent’ to hire and invest.” — Robert Rosenkranz, CEO of Wilmington, Delaware-based Delphi Financial Group Inc.

In other words, “We are responsible for the fate of the economy. Don’t villainize us for the economy’s fate. We are responsible for the fate of the economy!” And thus the ridiculosity of Orwellian newspeak reaches a new zenith.  If the 1% create jobs, and as we all know they are making something like 6 to 6,000 times the national median income, then there really is no excuse for a 15% unemployment rate? Why aren’t they creating more jobs?

Blame the Rich!

Wealth doesn’t make you a bad person. I’m not going to object to that. But still, it is virtually impossible for a good person to make 1% fuck-you-money on merit alone. You’ve got to be willing to lie, cheat and steal to “succeed” in this game because those are the rules.

“Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it.” — Jamie Dimon (the highest-paid chief executive officer among the heads of the six biggest U.S. banks)

“Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive.” —John A. Allison IV, a director of BB&T Corp

As members of the most politically privilged oligopoly in the history of mankind, a private banking cartel which creates nothing but debt, and which profits from indenture, inflation, and seignorage, you are not rich you’re filthy rich from stolen money. It is quite likely that you have never “created” anything in your adult life, and even those products of others’ labor for which you may claim responsibility (as a financier), for each of those ventures you “enabled” or made possible with Monopoly Money, there were dozens more which were excluded from the system of privilege.

Tax the Rich!

But it seems there is some infighting going on, though, as others like that hypocrite Warren Buffet, or Nick Hanauer who’s $6B nest egg was enabled by Microsoft’s patent and intellectual property trolls, argue that,

“Rich businesspeople … don’t create jobs.” Instead, Hanaur says, “Let’s tax the rich like we once did and use that money to spur growth.”

Except that there is not one shred of evidence that backs up this ludicrous claim. The baby-boom era’s “productivity”, about which many wax nostalgic, was made possible only by exploiting the third world in order to make up for 50 years of total warfare that ravaged most of the world. This is the Broken Window Fallacy (link to a summary, but I do encourage you to read the full text) on an existential scale, but the lesson is the same: You know what would be better than re-building a bridge? NOT BLOWING IT UP IN THE FIRST PLACE.

And this does not even attempt to account for the value of the ~200 million (or more) human lives expended during last century’s conflicts which can never be replaced.

Skin in the Game

The idea that lower-income households, who pay no Federal income tax, have no “skin in the game” is absurd. The only reason I mention it is because it is so wrong that I can’t ignore it.

“You have to have skin in the game, I’m not saying how much people should [pay in federal income taxes]. But we should all be part of the system.” — Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Blackstone Group LP , when asked about lower-income U.S. households who pay no income taxes.

This is simply blaming the victim for his plight, like the argument that the poor are lazy and un-industrious, not motivated, dumb, or incompetent. In other words, it is not bad enough that the system has utterly failed these people, no, they should have to contribute their “fair share” as well.

There is an entire movement of people who hate you.  Wake the fuck up.