My Alien Visitor

Everyone who guessed that I have to make periodic detailed reports about you guys to my alien masters, raise your hand.

Every so often a mental timer goes off in my head, and I stop everything to try to explain what I was just doing to an imaginary visitor from another planet—someone who just showed up with no working knowledge of anything we take for granted. Sometimes to make it easier on myself I assume my visitor is someone from Earth, but maybe from (merely) a few thousand years ago or from a few thousand years in the future. This cuts down on most of that tedious “first contact, establish a language, yadda yadda” stuff.

There are maybe ten people on Earth who like all that first contact stuff, and they’re all linguists and/or fringe cognitive scientists. Probably French. No hate, but sometimes I’d prefer to try to write for a potential audience of at least twice that.

No reason for an awkward silence here. I try to keep a realistic perspective despite the impact to my mental health.

Anyway, sometimes my alien visitor—MAV--and I watch or read the news together and then we have to hit pause while I explain some things. It doesn’t help that much of the news lately is about goings-on in the legal system in the Unites States, which is kind of a huge mess.

The first thing I have to explain to MAV is that everything is working as designed.

Wealthy and influential people do not get arrested as frequently for crimes compared to those who are less wealthy or to minorities. This is usually because the people authorizing warrants or performing arrests are less wealthy or powerful than those potentially being arrested and are hoping for the benefits of gratitude, either now or later, for the exercise of discretion and restraint. Most of these hoped-for benefits are illegal in these circumstances, but we’re already talking about how many things aren’t as illegal for certain sets of people. Wealthy and influential people are fine with this, however, and they use their wealth and influence to make sure this practice is encouraged and even legalized when possible.

Even when they do get arrested, wealthy and influential people face different consequences for crimes than people with less money or minorities. Same reasons as above.

If the penalty for illegal or unethical behavior is a fine, this means that the misbehavior merely has a price, and that the consequence is not an impediment to those who are wealthy enough that the price is inconsequential.

Once arrested, wealthy people can pay money to not sit in jail until their trial. The money is given back when they show up for their trial. Poor people might be able to get a loan for a non-refundable fee of about a tenth of the value assigned by the judge at the preliminary hearing. Maybe, maybe not. Cash bail has been experimentally outlawed in some places as an obviously unfair practice. As a test to see if we can really do without it.

Corporations establish budgets to pay for fines. Corporations even buy insurance policies to cover fines and penalties. It’s called Errors and Omissions Insurance, or an E&O policy. Very handy if you can afford it. A typical policy might not cover the most egregious offenses, but, well, if you have money….

I don’t know that a lot of wealthy individuals buy E&O insurance for themselves, but what would be the point, really? Incorporation paperwork is cheap and easy for the wealthy, and the whole point of it is to shield the owner(s) of the corporation from a whole range of different liabilities. It’s like wearing a puppet on your hand that you can say said things or did things instead of yourself. It doesn’t work for every offense, but it’s cheap armor for most white-collar crime.

The biggest difference between wealthy people and poor people in a court is the quality of lawyer you can afford. You only get issued a free one in a criminal case, and the free ones are overworked, underpaid, and usually disillusioned to the point of near terminal burnout. If you get arrested and don’t have an expensive lawyer, the police will abuse you at their whim without any fear of consequences—not that cops suffer consequences very often for anything. Cop unions have excellent lawyers. Something called “Qualified Immunity” allows them to stomp on your basic human and civil rights without fear of consequences. And cops are not above taking out their frustrations—usually caused by wealthy people wriggling out of their grasp or seeing that the cops get punished for shitty behavior—on poor people with no defenses.

If you are embroiled in a civil suit, it’s an old-fashioned trial by combat where the champions for each side are the amount of liquid assets they can afford to wager on the contest. This can be the case for criminal trials as well, with the wealth of the defendant (corporate or individual) pitted against the resources of the district attorney.

Somewhere at the bottom of it all are laws and rules and judges, but the system has so many weak points that can be influenced by manipulating the process itself—changing venues, expensive delaying tactics, unending waves of motions and appeals, jury selection, hiring of expert witnesses, wrangling over admissible evidence and tormenting witnesses, settlement offers, post-judgment appeals, leaks to the press, etc.—the actual trial itself is frequently less than 10% of what’s going on.

If you have money.

It’s a matter of statistical fact that poor people and minorities are sentenced to jail more often and for longer sentences, and sentenced to death more often where that’s still allowed, than wealthy people.

And then there are the prisons.

It is illegal in the United States to enslave anyone but the incarcerated. Prisons are businesses., however. Only a smallish percentage are privately operated, but all of them have operating budgets, and those budgets are set against income from renting enslaved prisoners. It might seem a bit off, but the whole point of a prison is to suspend most civil rights and as many basic human rights as possible, largely to keep costs down.

Even state prisons give bonuses to administrators proportional to the amount of money saved on keeping prisoners housed and fed and alive. So the administrators have every encouragement to keep their prisoners as close to death as possible for as long as possible—and to extract as much uncompensated labor from them as possible in the meanwhile.

And of course the system doesn’t work as well unless the prisons are stuffed-to-bursting. The administrators are given budgets to manage that are calculated per person incarcerated, after all. If you have fewer prisoners, you get less money to administer, less implied power, lower bonuses for not spending all of it. Fewer prisoners mean less savings in economies of scale, too. So anyone with any influence makes sure prisons get full and stay full—especially where the imprisonment of people with poor or foreign backgrounds and darker skin is concerned.

This is all taking place in the same economy that would experience measurable growth if these prisoners were rehabilitated and were earning income that could be taxed and fuel consumer behaviors instead of housing them like livestock in battery farms and selling their labor as chattel. But imprisoning people and selling their labor is an industry, and as an industry it has a lobby that bribes legislators to preserve the jobs of the administrators and their contracted suppliers of food and services, and fatten all of their compensation packages, and it works because fattened compensation packages are where the bribes come from.

I call them bribes because that’s what they are, but the legislators have instituted laws and guidelines that make these bribes and election campaign donations perfectly legal. More on that in a bit.

This system creates an artificial perpetual and self-renewing “criminal” class from the unluckiest and most desperate of the darker-skinned minorities, and since the imprisoned are at a disadvantage for accruing generational wealth, this “imprisonable” class becomes hereditary. And the existence of this class serves the purpose of giving the poorest and unluckiest of the non-minority folks someone to look down on and blame for their ills—which works out great for the people with wealth and power and influence who are to blame for the problems of everyone at the low end of the spectrum. It delays the inevitable advance of the guillotines.

It’s weird how everyone in the United States recognizes, however reluctantly, these statements as established facts. It’s weird how most of the citizenry just shrugs, as if to say, “What can anyone do? It’s just how things are.” But then, some of them are actually in favor of things remaining this lopsided. Particularly those who think their majority group memberships (race, religion, political affiliation) protect them from the worst.

And these are just issues with the legal system. The economy is also extremely broken. Education is priced out of the range of anyone who needs it. The housing market is destroyed. Worker protections are nonexistent. Medicine is generally unavailable. Air and water are being poisoned industrially everywhere. The climate has been wrecked. Food is rapidly becoming unavailable. Every last bit of it is slanted to make things even more difficult for minorities, immigrants, and nonconformers. All in the name of profits for those who are already so wealthy it is literally impossible to spend all of their money before they die.

So how can it all be fixed? Can voters fix anything by voting for legislators who actually want to improve the situation?

Well, not really.

Political parties choose candidates for ballots based on which candidates will attract more/larger donations to the party’s coffers. Corporate donors sponsor the candidates who will most benefit them with their legislation. Candidates who will benefit ordinary voters, based on issues, aren’t allowed anywhere near a ballot because they would almost certainly enact laws to reduce corporate influence. That is why, as the seats to vote on wield more and more power at the state and national levels, there are increasingly only corporate toadies and populist idiots on the ballots. The way things are now, the allowed candidates will only ever represent the interests of wealthy individual and corporate donors.

We used to minimize domination by wealthy individuals and corporate influence by allowing campaign donations only from flesh-and-blood human beings, verified to reside in the areas served by the position on the ballot, each donation capped at a reasonable amount that might be affordable to typical wage earners. That scheme is 100% what we need to enact again in order to get the money out of politics. It would effectively restore democracy. But since it would require legislation to be written and voted on by sitting legislators who have been purchased by wealthy individuals and corporate donors, there is no path to this solution that involves the normal process of selecting a candidate who will vote for such a thing, putting them on the ballot, and voting them into office.

From here, the only thing that might help would be protests. Organized protests at party conventions where candidates are selected. Withdrawal of memberships from existing parties to form new ones. Organized protests at the homes and offices of the worst of the corrupt officials. Organized protests to stop business at the sites of massive corporate donors. Organized protests at the homes of billionaires. Organized protests that disrupt commerce nationwide in order to show that the money supply can actually be interrupted. Organized protests at the embassies of countries whose oligarchs flood our politics with outside money.

Voting no longer works, except perhaps to vote for whichever candidates would be less likely to restrict the rights of citizenry to gather and protest.

When voting no longer works, democracy is dead. The next step is protests. And protests had better work, because the only thing left after that is revolt.

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Lately, these are the things I tell my news-watching Alien Visitor—who is, let me tell you, sick to the teeth of hearing it.

As are you guys by now, I’m sure.

Why do I do all of this? Why do I explain things to My Alien Visitor? It’s simple. It keeps me embedded and paying attention to what I’m doing and to how I’m choosing to spend my limited time here on Earth. It keeps me aware of the pointless absurdity of literally everything we fill our waking hours with beyond the tasks and duties hammered into us by millions of years on the anvil in evolution’s forge.

We weren’t designed for any of this. Every last scrap of 21^st Century civilization has ridden in past our emotional and mental immune systems’ defenses via vulnerabilities in our family and tribal drives, via vulnerabilities in our responses to fear and confusion and insecurity, via a huge abuse of language itself to crowbar open these security holes, and, of course, by the ability of those who were lucky enough to have already fed their greed to compel others with promises of food or sex or secure housing or belonging—or promises of violence from those they’ve already bought.

All of it. Everything that makes us different from Tarzan. All of it is a twisted kind of infection, straining to be at least a little symbiotic so we don’t give up on it altogether.

Recognition of the absurdity of it all, recognition of the arbitrariness of any of the details, recognition of the evolutionary shape of the beasts at the heart of all of our ills—the same kind of shaping force that gives us trees and fish and crabs that look alike but are phylogenetically unrelated to each other—that reveals the true and utterly predictable nature of these beasts. This recognition is critical to my continued survival and any attempts I might make to improve my chances of survival on my own terms, improve my chances of picking a path through the mire. Improve my chances of causing significant long-term damage to the parts that most offend my values.

And this is me, explaining to you, My Alien Visitor, why I explain things to My Alien Visitor.

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