Don't forget women. They couldn't open bank accounts until when? In any case, I should have known better than to leave open the door to race baiting. Focusin

Don't forget women. They couldn't open bank accounts until when? In any case, I should have known better than to leave open the door to race baiting. Focusing on race or any other distinction among the peasants is categorically missing the point. This isn't about peasants vs peasants. It's about peasants and small groups of peasants vs big moneyed interests. Some small time tire shop gets fined into oblivion for letting chemicals go down their drain meanwhile Jiffy Lube does that all day and doesn't get picked on because their lawyers can craft a story about why it's fine. In the old days everyone or nobody could dump it down the drain. Some homeowner can't put up an ADU because "hurr durr wetlands" but some megacorp can buy his land and put up a solar farm in the same damn wetlands because they can put fancy stuff on fancy letterhead and put it in front of the regulators. 100yr ago either everyone could build there or nobody could. We've given our regulatory agencies massive, massive, discretionary power and insanely broad mandates. And what winds up happening is that they pick on the small and the weak because those targets are plentiful and easy. We created dragnet surveillance to "stop terrorists" (it was a crappy argument even then) and it gets used to round up brown people or chase down and bankrupt a random business because 1/20 of their trucks had a plate that was illegible to toll readers for years on end. We told the EPA to make the water clean and they go harass farmers for digging trenches. Don't get me started on the FDA and opium. NYPD couldn't get away with stop and frisk (well, they could and did for far too long but that's not the point) but law enforcement across the country can now stop damn near anyone for any BS pretext because a technological obfuscation layer gives them pretext (much like the fake bomb detectors we were selling to the Iraqis back in the day) and the scale and division of responsibility makes it hold up in court. If one person or a small group can't do a thing then a big group shouldn't either. And if a big group can do a thing then the small group. If it's ok for ICE to just stop brown people then it's ok for NYPD to do stop and frisk. And if that's not ok then adjust the law.