Friendly scam artists

Everyone is (or should be) familiar with the infamous Nigerian 419 scam in which people write to you saying that there is this enormous fortune that needs to be taken out of some country and that if you are willing to assist, you will get a share of the proceeds. Everyone has received them would have noticed how poorly written these appeals are but as I explained earlier, that crudity is deliberate because the appeals have to be such as to not elicit a response from people who are likely to discover that it is bogus before they have parted with any money. Those people are a waste of the scammers’ time. The scammers want to only get responses from the really naïve.
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They are not ‘bug splats’

The drone operators who remotely order the missiles that blow up people in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and who knows where else the US is killing people refer to the victims of their airstrikes as ‘bug splats’, presumably because of the resemblance of the images they receive after the strike to what one sees on the wind shields of cars. This is part of the general dehumanizing that is adopted when you are killing people in cold blood from a distance.
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People who die due to lack of insurance

charlene dillI have written about the unbelievable cruelty shown by those states that refused to expand Medicaid so that those people who are too poor to be covered by the subsidies offered by the Affordable Care Act could obtain health insurance anyway. As a result, we have the predicable result that some people are now dying because they have no health insurance.

Bill Manes has written an excellent article about such cases, focusing on Charlene Dill, a 32-year old working mother of three small children. In the process, he also describes the complexities of life when one is poor.
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Too big to fail and too rich to jail

lady justiceIt has long been true that the rich and well-connected got better treatment from law enforcement and the justice system than the poor and powerless. But that brutal fact was usually hidden behind a façade that claimed that the system was impartial and fair. The image of the statue of a blindfolded Lady Justice holding evenly balanced scales (like the one on the right) is part of the architecture of the US Supreme Court building and is used to personify this idea that justice is dispensed without favor.
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