WITH LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR SOME: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful

[Luminous Animal]

If you haven't read this Greenwald book published in 2011, now, with the torture report in the news, may be a good time to read it.

From the nation's beginnings, the law was to be the great equalizer in American life, the guarantor of a common set of rules for all. But over the past four decades, the principle of equality before the law has been effectively abolished. Instead, a two-tiered system of justice ensures that the country's political and financial class is virtually immune from prosecution, licensed to act without restraint, while the politically powerless are imprisoned with greater ease and in greater numbers than in any other country in the world.

Starting with Watergate, continuing on through the Iran-Contra scandal, and culminating with Obama's shielding of Bush-era officials from prosecution, Glenn Greenwald lays bare the mechanisms that have come to shield the elite from accountability. He shows how the media, both political parties, and the courts have abetted a process that has produced torture, war crimes, domestic spying by the NSA, and financial fraud.

http://us.macmillan.com/withlibertyandjusticeforsome/glenngreenwald

[Octafish]

1. Ford pardoned his boss, the star Richard Tricky Dick Nixon...

...making it possible for the supporting cast of characters to perform another day in Iran-Contra.



Unpunished Treason. The slippery Poppy Doc Bush pardoned his co-stars. Their supporting cast, including sons and cronies, came back to perform another day in Selection 2000....

[msanthrope]

2. Right. Because a Wall Street lawyer would know what about equality? I mean, seriously?

Did he devote any part of the book discussing how the Center for Constitutional Rights kicked his ass in court in Illinois?

[BainsBane]

3. The premise of law as the great equalizer from the outset is wrong

the author is creating an ideal past to compare current injustice to. The fact is the law was never an equalizer and has always reflected the interests of elites who make laws. The fact that most Americans existed outside legal protection and were in fact legally subordinated, with some constituting property, demonstrates as much.

This collection of essays is about how law fortified class dominance in England, but the conceptual ideas apply to law more generally.
http://www.amazon.com/Albions-Fatal-Tree-Society-Eighteenth-Century/dp/0394730852

[Luminous Animal]

4. Greenwald didn't write the blurb and he has stated that he doesn't agree with it.

[BainsBane]

5. Ah, ok.

Thanks for that info.

[Luminous Animal]

6. You are welcome, BainsBane!

[msanthrope]

8. I've assigned Albion's. Excellent material. nt

[msanthrope]

9. If he doesn't agree with the blurb, why is it being used? nt

[woo me with science]

7. Thanks for this post. nt

[Tsiyu]

10. Heard an interview about this.

Let us not forget the for=profit prison lobbyists, who donate to hundreds of our politicians so that we get draconian drug laws and no immigration reform.

Our lawmakers are demons.

Here's another: