Aram Zucker-Scharff

“This is where the new despotism is hidden, in these thousands of arbitrary decisions that surround our otherwise transparent system of real jury trials and carefully enumerated suspects’ rights. This vast extrademocratic mechanism, it turns out, is made up of injustices big and small, from sweeping national concepts like Eric Holder’s Collateral Consequences plan, granting situational leniency to “systemically important” companies, to smaller, more localized outrages like New York City prosecutors subverting speedy trial rules in order to extract guilty pleas from poor defendants who can’t make bail.”

– The new despotism, from The Divide by Matt Taibbi.

coelasquid:

micdotcom:

Days after Michael Brown’s death, Ferguson looks like a war zone

A vigil held for Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager gunned down by Ferguson, Mo., police on Saturday in disputed circumstances, turned into what the media described as a riot on Monday evening.

But while national coverage has focused on the indisputably counterproductive violence and destruction committed by Ferguson residents during a moment of anguish, videos and photos taken from the scene show local police aggravating the situation as well.

Years of tension have reached a boiling point

This whole situation is really cementing the whole “dystopian Sci-Fi is just the shit that happens to everyone else happening to white people” saying, because every day this situation is looking more and more like something you’d expect to see in a Judge Dredd comic before a real modern American town.

The Death of Michael Brown and the Search for Justice in Black America:

Deaths like Michael Brown’s tell us we don’t belong here. What, then?