No, it’s not okay to just steal from the till, but the point is the business owner can call the cops on us if we do that, which results in our immediate arrest, yet conversely if they steal from our paychecks we have to take them to small claims court and we better have the receipts to prove it, and usually (except maybe places like California) all the business has to do is… pay back what they owe you. Nothing for damages or lost opportunities due to having less money. Nope, just pay back what they already owed you to begin with. What a joke of a slap on the wrist.
Theft is theft, should be the same penalties for either side and business owners shouldn’t get such free range to fuck over people with no consequences. Some of us would just like to see an equal playing field where wage theft meant I could call the fucking cops and have the asshat who stole my fucking legally owed money arrested.
Crime is ABSOLUTELY a social construct. Why was it legal several months ago to have an abortion across the US but now several states are criminalizing the same? Have abortions changed? No - politics did, I would argue spurred on by the desire for capitalists to keep a steady supply of low wage uneducated exploitable desperate workers.
Why is it suddenly criminal in the state of Georgia to give food and water to people lining up at polling stations? Because one class wants to make it uncomfortable and inconvenient for another class, and I would argue race, of people to vote.
At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Same as it ever was - criminalizing social classes to disempower them is the name of the game. If you aren’t wise to this you haven’t been paying attention.
Adding - it’s illegal in Japan for me to possess and consume cannabis but perfectly legal in Canada for me to do the same.
It would be illegal for me to walk around in certain countries without a headscarf, how is that not a social law?
It’s illegal in Russia to speak against the war, and people have been imprisoned for the softest infractions of this. In North America I have free speech in this regard.
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It’s not perfectly fine, but they’re weighing it against Wage Theft, which outweighs all other types of theft in the US based on sheer dollar-value of how much is stolen.
No, it’s not okay to just steal from the till, but the point is the business owner can call the cops on us if we do that, which results in our immediate arrest, yet conversely if they steal from our paychecks we have to take them to small claims court and we better have the receipts to prove it, and usually (except maybe places like California) all the business has to do is… pay back what they owe you. Nothing for damages or lost opportunities due to having less money. Nope, just pay back what they already owed you to begin with. What a joke of a slap on the wrist.
Theft is theft, should be the same penalties for either side and business owners shouldn’t get such free range to fuck over people with no consequences. Some of us would just like to see an equal playing field where wage theft meant I could call the fucking cops and have the asshat who stole my fucking legally owed money arrested.
Today I learned that wage theft actually refers to a crime, and is not just a word for paying people less than the value they create.
Crime is ABSOLUTELY a social construct. Why was it legal several months ago to have an abortion across the US but now several states are criminalizing the same? Have abortions changed? No - politics did, I would argue spurred on by the desire for capitalists to keep a steady supply of low wage uneducated exploitable desperate workers.
Why is it suddenly criminal in the state of Georgia to give food and water to people lining up at polling stations? Because one class wants to make it uncomfortable and inconvenient for another class, and I would argue race, of people to vote.
For more, from Harper’s Magazine “Legalize It All” (How to Win the War on Drugs):
Same as it ever was - criminalizing social classes to disempower them is the name of the game. If you aren’t wise to this you haven’t been paying attention.
Adding - it’s illegal in Japan for me to possess and consume cannabis but perfectly legal in Canada for me to do the same.
It would be illegal for me to walk around in certain countries without a headscarf, how is that not a social law?
It’s illegal in Russia to speak against the war, and people have been imprisoned for the softest infractions of this. In North America I have free speech in this regard.
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