(2 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
The the tilt of the justice system that now favors the very elite took its sharpest turn with President Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon. That pardon cost Ford his own term in the Oval Office and paved the way for future presidents to ignore the laws. In 2006, Americans infuriated with the corruption and crimes of the Bush administration, overwhelmingly threw out the Republicans from both houses of Congress. The electorate wanted the Bush cabal reigned in even if it meant the impeachment if both George W. Bush and his puppet master, Dick Cheney. They wanted the restoration of the balance of powers, the rules of law and the Constitution. So what did the Democratic leadership under House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid, do? They took impeachment off the table and paved the way for even more abuse of power by the executive branch, trampling of protected freedoms, and disregard for the law. President Barack Obama has refused to investigate the Bush administration crimes and has bent over backwards to continue to cover them up by hiding the evidence under the guise of national security. The current attempt by Obama and his Justice Department to exempt the banking industry from being held responsible for the fraud that brought this country to its economic knees, is a violation of his oath of office. The fact that the Americans are now fed up with our political system that has perpetuated this is now evident across this country with Occupy Wall Street. Our elected officials need to start listening, the message is clear, hold the criminals responsible whether it be Wall St., the banks or our elected representatives.
Glenn Greenwald, contributing editor for Salon and author of the new book, “Liberty and Justice for Some”, talks with Rachel Maddow about how the justice system in the United States has become corrupted such that powerful people are not prosecuted for breaking the law.
As multiple episodes demonstrate, a belief that elite immunity is both necessary and justified became the prevailing ethos in the nation’s most influential circles. In countless instances over recent years, prominent political and media figures have insisted that serious crimes by the most powerful should be overlooked- either in the name of the common good, or in the name of a warped conception of fairness according to which those with the greatest power are the most entitled to deference and understanding.
This is what makes the contemporary form of American lawlessness new and unprecedented. It is now perfectly common, and perfectly acceptable, to openly advocate elite immunity. And this advocacy has had its intended effect: the United States has become a nation that does not apply the rule of law to its elite class, which is another way of saying that the United States does not apply the rule of law. . . .
If the threat of real punishment for criminality is removed, for many rational people there will be little incentive to abide by the law and much incentive to break it. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist 15, explained why.
“It is essential to the idea of a law, that it be attended with a sanction; or, in other words, a penalty or punishment for disobedience. If there be no penalty annexed to disobedience, the resolutions or commands which pretend to be laws will, in fact, amount to nothing more than advice or recommendation.”
For the nation’s most powerful elites, the law has indeed been whittled down to “nothing more than advice or recommendation.” Although there have been episodes of unpunished elite malfeasance throughout American history, the explicit, systematic embrace of the notion that such malfeasance should be shielded from legal consequences begins with the Watergate scandal- one of the clearest cases of widespread, deliberate criminality at the highest level of the U.S. government.
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