In 1886, the great abolitionist and statesmen Frederick Douglass said, "The American people have this lesson to learn: That where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob, and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe." Now, here it is, 135 years later, and has anything really and fundamentally changed?
For instance, justice is denied each and every day, in so many ways, large and small, especially for all those that are not the favored people of those that are the rulers of such. That is to say, those that lack money and do not have consistent, nor have sustainable, nor have adequate compensation to make a fair living, are at the mercy of those that set and apply the rules against them. So that, in America, there are laws upon laws, that effectively criminalize those that are poor, ill-educated and typically cordoned off into the most undesirable and unsafe living conditions, so that they can be more easily monitored, controlled, arrested, and incarcerated. So too, in the richest nation of the world, there remains as reported by povertyusa.org as of 2016, a staggering "40.6 million people" living in poverty as defined by federal guidelines of that poverty threshold, which signifies that 12.7% of Americans live below that poverty threshold. Those that live in poverty seldom choose to do so, but are trapped within a construct in which their lack of opportunity, their ill-education, their disabilities, and the lack of decent infrastructure for them makes it a foregone conclusion that such poverty is inescapable for so many. So too, despite the Supreme Court decision of 1954, of Brown v. Board of Education, those that live in desirable areas, have schools that are safe, as well as teachers and curriculum that educate students, whereas those of the underclass while being permitted to attend schools, find that far too often those schools, are unsafe, and are institutions that do not provide a good or even fair environment for the proper education of those students. While, America prides itself on having a progressive income tax system which theoretically is structured in a manner in which those that earn more are taxed more; in actuality, the very richest of individuals as well as corporate entities, do not come close to ever being progressive taxed at a fair rate, but instead are gifted at finding loopholes, foundations, subsidies, and special as well as favorable tax breaks and tax treatments, so that, even Warren Buffet, one of the top three richest Americans ,recognizes this unfairness, by stating in 2011 that his taxes amounted to "only 17.4 percent of my taxable income…"
Quite clearly, America is unequal, unfair, and illiberal in its policies which is proven by the fact that America, is the industry leader in incarceration in comparison to all other western nations, in which, as reported by Wikipedia.com, the incarceration rate in America is 655 per 100,000 peoples, for a total prison population of 2,121,600. All of this leads us inexorably to the point that Frederick Douglass inveighed upon 135 years ago, which is that when a country makes it their principle to deny justice, to enforce poverty, as well as to ill-educate a significant portion of its population, and further demonstrates in its institutions that this is a country primarily of the very rich, by the very rich, and for the very rich, then those that are oppressed and exploited, are quite obviously going to act out in ways that are inimical to those that effectively run this country, and those impoverished people will be dealt with in a manner that resolves nothing, ameliorates nothing, but does it best to silence, and to effectively ignore them.