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Another aspect of the Prison Strike of 2018 was giving people an opportunity to show the world that they can learn to be better and get out of jail early! But that means working within the confines of the legal system, which is not particularly easy to navigate. If it were law school would be breeze and courtroom dramas would be boring as sin! Ice T wouldn’t have a career if law was written was the citizens! He would just have a lucrative rap career…
Most people don’t even trust lawyers. Most people think Lawyers are liars...sometimes including family members! If you’re encouraged spent hundreds and thousands of dollars on a degree that only makes you a professional liar then I think we should rethink the whole fuckin’ system. I mean Ice T would be so mad that he has to work with lyin’ snitches even if it is fictional! Have the lawyers even considered Ice T’s feelings!? That’s neither lawful or order...ful.
There might be one company that probably cares about Ice T’s feelings. He might be little lower on the list but the company, Namati is trying to put the law in the hands of people, using the idea of Barefoot Lawyers. Ok, everyone settle down, these aren’t actual barefooted lawyers. I’m pretty sure the courts have a ‘No Shirts, No Shoes, No Litigation' policy. It’s the only law that is applicable to whether you’re rich or poor.
But this is one of the principles that Namati works off of; there are 2 different justice systems. One for the rich and one for the poor. Now this shouldn’t come as a surprise to most Americans because that’s what this country was built on. Then it was covered up by using a racism as a decoy. Poor Whites whose rights are being stomped on are attacking the poor minorities who are having the same rights stomped on!
According Vivek Maru, the CEO of Namati, the law should be accessible to everyone and we should all be able to understand it. Look most of the laws are in English, which is a language that most English speaking countries don’t have a grasp of. And to make matters worse, the frivolous use of words like ‘thou’, ‘thee’ and even ‘Furthermore’ confuse more regular people. And these documents are hundreds of pages long. Most of us can’t read a pamphlet, let alone a legal document! Maybe the law should be written in cartoon form because this is neither accessible nor understandable.
As a side note, I’m so excited to find another Indian person in the states that doesn’t suck! With the spotlight on people like Bobby Jindal, Nikki Haley and Ajit Pai, who are actively ruining America and my soul, it’s nice to see more people that share progressive values like Kshama Sawant and Tulsi Gabbard. It warms the heart. Maybe now I’ll stop getting compared to Aziz Ansari...
Anyway, Namati uses community paralegals or barefoot lawyers to help people navigate the world of the law and understand it. This means that they break it down into simple terms and in a lot of cases into a non English language. Yes, there are other languages in the world. Yes, they’re just as grammatically fucked up. No I will not teach you how to curse in my language.
These lawyers go into communities where large corporations or entities are taking advantage of people and teach people the existence of certain laws and how to use administrative tools as a means to win. And this is huge because in a lot of countries injustice is the norm. So this gives these people a beacon of hope. And really this should be utilized more in America since it’s a whole country run by corporations.
This grassroots effort teaches people how to utilize health, environmental, citizenship and land laws. This has helped communities where farmers were given little no money from a corporation that took their land, or communities that didn’t know how to battle health insurance companies or communities whose land, air and water was being poisoned by the factories at their doorsteps.
Now Namati doesn’t win all it’s cases but they will do their best to help these people get the justice they deserve. As Vivek Maru puts it, in these sort of cases hope and despair are neck and neck. And this is a huge issue considering the UN estimates about 4 billion people don’t have access to basic justice! That’s half the world! So that means half the world is being oppressed by the 1% elites and the other 49% is doing their dirty work, because well the Elites haven’t seen dirt since the early 1800s. They do want to own dirt though.
This concept of basic justice comes from the idea of doing what’s logical, ethical and is going to keep us alive as a species. It should be the way the legal system works. If we all just get to a point where we realized that exploiting each other for profits, poisoning not just our planet but each other just to hoard wealth was immoral and counterproductive to basic survival, we wouldn’t need laws. These would “fuckin’ duh” moments! Redemption would be easier. BUT since that’s not the case we need programs like this in place to reinforce the idea that laws were written to hold up ethical and logical decisions not profit margins.
The work of Paralegals is overlooked most of the time, but it’s probably the most crucial. We’re surrounded by a world that looks at we the people as guilty before proven innocence. But the paralegals using grassroots efforts are working together with us to help understand a system that wasn’t written for us. It’s helping us fight back and put this world back into the hands of the people that built it rather than those that exploited it. I feel like Ice T would be happy to take a break from the courtroom dramas and let Vivek Maru solve a few cases for the sake real Law & Order.
