White privilege, in the original French meaning of "private law", is real. Class privilege is too. http://t.co/ch1juiWhwG
— Noah Smith (@Noahpinion) August 28, 2014
From Quartz, “These seven charts explain how Ferguson—and many other US cities—wring revenue from black people and the poor“:
… Ferguson’s economy steadily withered over the last decade, as did its population. Yet even as the number of adult residents fell 11% between 2010 and 2013, fines collected by the city’s court system surged 85%, hitting $2.6 million last year…
In fact, arresting people for minor violations is exactly the point, as Brendan Roediger, professor at the Saint Louis University School of Law and supervisor of a local civil advocacy clinic, told Governing magazine. “They don’t want to actually incarcerate people because it costs money, so they fine them,” Roediger said, adding that Ferguson’s court sometimes hears as many as 300 cases per hour…
Davis X. Machina’s Law:
“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of who will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”
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Now that we’re all in the right frame of mind, what’s on the agenda for the evening?