We’ve Already Defunded the Police. But Only the Ones Policing the Rich.

This kind of thing blows my mind. If you're someone who benefits a lot from the status quo, you're a member of the ruling capitalist class, and you see that populist movements pose a threat to your power... Wouldn't you want to defang those movements by offering up as many of your ilk as sacrifice as possible? Wouldn't you want to be able to suggest that the real problem are those people breaking the rules, not the rules themselves that allow you to siphon off so much of society's wealth? Wouldn't you want to make a big deal over those prosecutions?

In order to believe that it's to their benefit to have this lack of enforcement, if you acknowledge that the super-rich have a lot of power, you really have to start to believe that even in a system where they write the rules, they're all breaking them. Even in a system where they can lobby the tax code into pretzels, they're still all cheating it.

Sometimes I think I'm not much of a leftist, somewhere in between the Vox readers and edgy podcasts of this world. But... oof.