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With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful
From "the most important voice to have entered the political discourse in years" (Bill Moyers), a scathing critique of the two-tiered system of justice that has emerged in America
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, and financial fraud.
Cogent, sharp, and urgent, this is a no-holds-barred indictment of a profoundly un-American system that sanctions immunity at the top and mercilessness for everyone else.
304 pages, Hardcover
First published August 16, 2011
About the author
Glenn Greenwald
16 books773 followersGlenn Greenwald is an American lawyer, columnist, blogger and author who worked as a constitutional and civil-rights litigator prior to becoming a contributor (columnist and blogger) to Salon.com, where he focuses on political and legal topics. He has also contributed to other newspapers and political news magazines, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The American Conservative, The National Interest, and In These Times.
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October 17, 2012
"The poorest laborer stands on equal ground with the wealthiest millionaire, and generally on a more favored one whenever their rights seem to jar." - Thomas Jefferson
The United States of America was intended to be a nation of laws, not of men. Liberty and justice for all. That was then.
In 1965 six large banks petitioned congress for retroactive immunity after an illegal merger. It was opposed by Senator Robert Kennedy and Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach said their proposal was "nothing more or less than a private relief bill for the banks". That was then.
“If the president does it, that means it's not illegal.” - Richard Nixon.
That's history. This is now.
"The people are dead but the money keeps talking." goes a line in a song ("The Fries") by rapper Mr. Lif. This line has said more to me than anything else I can think of. When people pretend that part of the same evil is "the lesser of two evils" I think of this. Government officials moving seamlessly between the public and private sector to set up legislation and self administered blow jobs I think of this. What are they gonna do? Take all of that money with them? The USA can't mean anything to them. I don't know what it means to me, either. I don't THINK it means Goldman Saks.
Let's look forward, rather than back. That's now. That's been then for a long time too. President Ford's reasoning for his pardon eerily comes up again and again when other politicians are let off the hook for their crimes. He's been punished enough. The Obama administration have used his "look forward" enough times. Like Obama, Clinton forgot about taking his predecessor to task after setting foot in the oval office (call me a cynic, but I think it was long before then).
Glenn Greenwald's book With Liberty and Justice For Some: How the Law is used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful is well stated look at our now two-tier governmental system. The have your cake and we'll eat it too tier with the private sector and the government as the happy couple on top. I don't know who wears the pants. I know they both write the checks. It isn't really anything that one wouldn't already know from news not going too far before the current generation's memory. Apologists don't try to deny that the Bush administration were rampant law breakers, or anything. They say that it doesn't matter. We the public are apparently okay with it (I'm not). I liked Greenwald's book because it's not going to tell me any lesser of two evils shit. You KNOW what the country was supposed to be all about. It's not about that and if you know it or not, it can't be said enough if that's what it takes to get out of a "This is just how it is" spoon-fed lie. Mariah Carey shows you one side of her cheek for the photo-ops depending on what the public wants on that polling day. It's the same ass (probably a butt double). Nothing changes, just this time the guy has the desired "D" by his name. Retroactive immunity for telecom companies who illegally spied on citizens (if you had nothing to hide...). Americans can be killed without suspicion if they say they thought you were a terrorist (comfortingly they are extending this to include gangs and drugs). Torture is illegal but it wasn't illegal when we did it. Look, Russia arrested people for what people get arrested for here. No need for congress. If you are one of the powerful then the rules do not apply to you. Bailouts, drones. That's what they call worker bees too. Blue dogs pay for cake too. It's that donkey's birthday party and he lost your tail. The devil and the sheep all have cloven hooves. The rich don't have to face the same laws as the rest of us. They should have been in prison. They should have been held accountable. They are not. This is now. Liberty and justice for SOME. The rich one percent. Who doesn't know that figure? There's a chart illustrating how almost everyone has stagnated at 1979. I was born in 1979. The richest one percent go into the future. Unemployment hasn't been this high since the 1940s. This is now. Greenwald's book covers the immunity, the too big to jail, immunity by presidential decree. You know it, you know now.
One out of one-hundred American citizens are in prison (and that's not including probation and parolees). Twenty-five percent of the world's prison population are incarcerated in the USA. Legislation laws that make big money for the people who made the mandatory sentencing laws (thereby tying a judge's hands to consider individual circumstances in a given case). Sentences are three times longer in the USA than they are in Canada. The government guys have been punished enough by getting their names in the paper. I was with Greenwald when he bitterly writes that the poor people must belong in prison. Why are they banking for harsh drug laws when the laws don't even apply to them? Oh yeah, it's money. They are making billions. Prisons for cash. There's big money in private prison contracts. More people in jail means more money for them. Greenwald's book lists examples of people who did not belong in prison. The list could be endless. One seventeen year old boy who had oral sex with his fifteen year old girlfriend went for ten years. A mom went for two years for throwing a soda into a car. The law couldn't see them as people but their guys are too good to face up to their own crimes?
Because the laws do not apply to them, because the laws serve to serve their own interests and not the interests of the people, the united states is fucked. That's the smart term for it. Or you could say "oligarchy" and "plutocracy". It's an empty suit filled with cash that no one is going to take with them. Sure, there will be more suits to fill the spots, forcing homeless citizens across the river styx. I wonder if they'll let them keep the coins over their eyes. Of course they won't. They write laws to serve their own purposes. They get even richer. Let's just look forward.
Indeed, those who abuse state power virtually always follow the same playbook. By initially targeting new abuses at groups that are sufficiently demonized, they guarantee that few will object. But abuses of power rarely, if ever, remain confined to these demonized groups. Rather, degraded principles of justice, once embraced in limited circumstances, in time inevitably come to be applied more broadly.
The town that I live in has at least twice been ranked as one of the top five in the country as the cruelest towards the homeless. I believe it (the homeless shelter is capped at I think 125 meals a day). We may have been yet higher for economic disparity in a single city (the community planners may have forgotten there is a poor side). Every day I see homeless people and I do not help them because I am terrified of being arrested. Every day I feel the weight in my soul and I don't do fuck all to help because I am scared of the law. The law doesn't mean anything to big brother. In the state of Florida if you give food or money to a homeless person they can arrest you if you don't have the proper permit (in Orlando a church group was recently arrested for helping without papers. It isn't looked over. After all, government funding goes to he who fulfills the most statistics). I'm not going to protest in front of a federal agent any time soon. I could probably protest in my bedroom. They don't have a permit requirement for me there yet. The media maintain that it is the public who are okay with this. Greenwald cites a USA Today poll if Rove should have been forced to testify. It was 71% yes to a 21% should not. What the regular people want doesn't matter.
This is something that Greenwald wrote in an article that I love:
The fact that a certain behavior is common does not negate its being corrupt. Indeed, as is true for government abuses generally, those in power rely on the willingness of citizens to be trained to view corrupt acts as so common that they become inured, numb, to its wrongfulness. Once a corrupt practice is sufficiently perceived as commonplace, then it is transformed in people's minds from something objectionable into something acceptable.
Indeed, many people believe it demonstrates their worldly sophistication to express indifference toward bad behavior by powerful actors on the ground that it is so prevalent. This cynicism – oh, don't be naive: this is done all the time – is precisely what enables such destructive behavior to thrive unchallenged.
I don't feel worldly. I feel scared and helpless. I see "The people are dead but the money keeps talking" facelessness with no reason other than more money for some statistic. I guess if they made everyone else into statistics of 25% of the world in prison then they are also just a number. I really don't want that. I like Glenn Greenwald. He wrote his book about all of this stuff that I knew was going on and looked at it not from some journalistic complacency place, a look at what they are doing place (I know people who seem to care only as a reason to get mad. I wonder if they really feel it affects them). He's a real person and, as powerful as they are, they are citizens too. It shouldn't be justified. They broke the law. Equality was supposed to mean something! It didn't then either. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't. I gotta wonder if the give up cynicism doesn't come out of a "Well, since no one else did it for me..." place. I'm confused but I feel less like laws and country don't mean anything when I have some kind of context. All of those people in prison who shouldn't be there! Kids killed with drones. Fill the suit. Look at what they are doing. It matters now. Don't believe the media when they tell you that everybody is okay with it. We're not. It still really, really sucks. They do what they want and no one is going to stop them. If they did, they'd just get a pardon.
Greenwald is a constitutional lawyer. He used to write a column for salon.com before moving over to (online and sometimes print editions) The Guardian in the uk (he also writes for papers where he lives in Brazil about their news).
The United States of America was intended to be a nation of laws, not of men. Liberty and justice for all. That was then.
In 1965 six large banks petitioned congress for retroactive immunity after an illegal merger. It was opposed by Senator Robert Kennedy and Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach said their proposal was "nothing more or less than a private relief bill for the banks". That was then.
“If the president does it, that means it's not illegal.” - Richard Nixon.
That's history. This is now.
"The people are dead but the money keeps talking." goes a line in a song ("The Fries") by rapper Mr. Lif. This line has said more to me than anything else I can think of. When people pretend that part of the same evil is "the lesser of two evils" I think of this. Government officials moving seamlessly between the public and private sector to set up legislation and self administered blow jobs I think of this. What are they gonna do? Take all of that money with them? The USA can't mean anything to them. I don't know what it means to me, either. I don't THINK it means Goldman Saks.
Let's look forward, rather than back. That's now. That's been then for a long time too. President Ford's reasoning for his pardon eerily comes up again and again when other politicians are let off the hook for their crimes. He's been punished enough. The Obama administration have used his "look forward" enough times. Like Obama, Clinton forgot about taking his predecessor to task after setting foot in the oval office (call me a cynic, but I think it was long before then).
Glenn Greenwald's book With Liberty and Justice For Some: How the Law is used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful is well stated look at our now two-tier governmental system. The have your cake and we'll eat it too tier with the private sector and the government as the happy couple on top. I don't know who wears the pants. I know they both write the checks. It isn't really anything that one wouldn't already know from news not going too far before the current generation's memory. Apologists don't try to deny that the Bush administration were rampant law breakers, or anything. They say that it doesn't matter. We the public are apparently okay with it (I'm not). I liked Greenwald's book because it's not going to tell me any lesser of two evils shit. You KNOW what the country was supposed to be all about. It's not about that and if you know it or not, it can't be said enough if that's what it takes to get out of a "This is just how it is" spoon-fed lie. Mariah Carey shows you one side of her cheek for the photo-ops depending on what the public wants on that polling day. It's the same ass (probably a butt double). Nothing changes, just this time the guy has the desired "D" by his name. Retroactive immunity for telecom companies who illegally spied on citizens (if you had nothing to hide...). Americans can be killed without suspicion if they say they thought you were a terrorist (comfortingly they are extending this to include gangs and drugs). Torture is illegal but it wasn't illegal when we did it. Look, Russia arrested people for what people get arrested for here. No need for congress. If you are one of the powerful then the rules do not apply to you. Bailouts, drones. That's what they call worker bees too. Blue dogs pay for cake too. It's that donkey's birthday party and he lost your tail. The devil and the sheep all have cloven hooves. The rich don't have to face the same laws as the rest of us. They should have been in prison. They should have been held accountable. They are not. This is now. Liberty and justice for SOME. The rich one percent. Who doesn't know that figure? There's a chart illustrating how almost everyone has stagnated at 1979. I was born in 1979. The richest one percent go into the future. Unemployment hasn't been this high since the 1940s. This is now. Greenwald's book covers the immunity, the too big to jail, immunity by presidential decree. You know it, you know now.
One out of one-hundred American citizens are in prison (and that's not including probation and parolees). Twenty-five percent of the world's prison population are incarcerated in the USA. Legislation laws that make big money for the people who made the mandatory sentencing laws (thereby tying a judge's hands to consider individual circumstances in a given case). Sentences are three times longer in the USA than they are in Canada. The government guys have been punished enough by getting their names in the paper. I was with Greenwald when he bitterly writes that the poor people must belong in prison. Why are they banking for harsh drug laws when the laws don't even apply to them? Oh yeah, it's money. They are making billions. Prisons for cash. There's big money in private prison contracts. More people in jail means more money for them. Greenwald's book lists examples of people who did not belong in prison. The list could be endless. One seventeen year old boy who had oral sex with his fifteen year old girlfriend went for ten years. A mom went for two years for throwing a soda into a car. The law couldn't see them as people but their guys are too good to face up to their own crimes?
Because the laws do not apply to them, because the laws serve to serve their own interests and not the interests of the people, the united states is fucked. That's the smart term for it. Or you could say "oligarchy" and "plutocracy". It's an empty suit filled with cash that no one is going to take with them. Sure, there will be more suits to fill the spots, forcing homeless citizens across the river styx. I wonder if they'll let them keep the coins over their eyes. Of course they won't. They write laws to serve their own purposes. They get even richer. Let's just look forward.
Indeed, those who abuse state power virtually always follow the same playbook. By initially targeting new abuses at groups that are sufficiently demonized, they guarantee that few will object. But abuses of power rarely, if ever, remain confined to these demonized groups. Rather, degraded principles of justice, once embraced in limited circumstances, in time inevitably come to be applied more broadly.
The town that I live in has at least twice been ranked as one of the top five in the country as the cruelest towards the homeless. I believe it (the homeless shelter is capped at I think 125 meals a day). We may have been yet higher for economic disparity in a single city (the community planners may have forgotten there is a poor side). Every day I see homeless people and I do not help them because I am terrified of being arrested. Every day I feel the weight in my soul and I don't do fuck all to help because I am scared of the law. The law doesn't mean anything to big brother. In the state of Florida if you give food or money to a homeless person they can arrest you if you don't have the proper permit (in Orlando a church group was recently arrested for helping without papers. It isn't looked over. After all, government funding goes to he who fulfills the most statistics). I'm not going to protest in front of a federal agent any time soon. I could probably protest in my bedroom. They don't have a permit requirement for me there yet. The media maintain that it is the public who are okay with this. Greenwald cites a USA Today poll if Rove should have been forced to testify. It was 71% yes to a 21% should not. What the regular people want doesn't matter.
This is something that Greenwald wrote in an article that I love:
The fact that a certain behavior is common does not negate its being corrupt. Indeed, as is true for government abuses generally, those in power rely on the willingness of citizens to be trained to view corrupt acts as so common that they become inured, numb, to its wrongfulness. Once a corrupt practice is sufficiently perceived as commonplace, then it is transformed in people's minds from something objectionable into something acceptable.
Indeed, many people believe it demonstrates their worldly sophistication to express indifference toward bad behavior by powerful actors on the ground that it is so prevalent. This cynicism – oh, don't be naive: this is done all the time – is precisely what enables such destructive behavior to thrive unchallenged.
I don't feel worldly. I feel scared and helpless. I see "The people are dead but the money keeps talking" facelessness with no reason other than more money for some statistic. I guess if they made everyone else into statistics of 25% of the world in prison then they are also just a number. I really don't want that. I like Glenn Greenwald. He wrote his book about all of this stuff that I knew was going on and looked at it not from some journalistic complacency place, a look at what they are doing place (I know people who seem to care only as a reason to get mad. I wonder if they really feel it affects them). He's a real person and, as powerful as they are, they are citizens too. It shouldn't be justified. They broke the law. Equality was supposed to mean something! It didn't then either. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't. I gotta wonder if the give up cynicism doesn't come out of a "Well, since no one else did it for me..." place. I'm confused but I feel less like laws and country don't mean anything when I have some kind of context. All of those people in prison who shouldn't be there! Kids killed with drones. Fill the suit. Look at what they are doing. It matters now. Don't believe the media when they tell you that everybody is okay with it. We're not. It still really, really sucks. They do what they want and no one is going to stop them. If they did, they'd just get a pardon.
Greenwald is a constitutional lawyer. He used to write a column for salon.com before moving over to (online and sometimes print editions) The Guardian in the uk (he also writes for papers where he lives in Brazil about their news).
November 6, 2011
On Face The Nation on October 9, 2011, Newt Gingrich said, to paraphrase, that the President of the United States could ignore Congress and the Courts if he or she feels they have become "dictatorial or arrogant." This breathtaking statement, akin to Nixon's famous statement that "If the president does it then it is not illegal" to Robert Frost, was reported widely by CBS, however all other news outlets just yawned at it.
This type of belief that the President and other political elites are above the law is the subject of this new Glenn Greenwald book. Greenwald systematically takes examples since Nixon's Watergate pardon through the Obama administration to convincingly make his point.
And, as we know, this immunity to prosecution isn't limited to government. Greenwald's book has been released at a time when thousands of people are on the streets protesting the fact that the justice system is doing nothing to correct the massive fraud that has happened in banking and mortgage industries. Greenwald, who obviously wasn't aware the OWS movement was on its way, covers this part of outrage as well. Its indictments of the Bush and Obama administrations refusal to uphold the rule of law along with its reasoned indictments of the fraud that we have knowingly lived with since 2008 bank crisis make this another great book to read if you do not understand why so many people are upset at the current state of justice in the U.S.
Another on my long list of books that certain people on the far right should read but won't.
This type of belief that the President and other political elites are above the law is the subject of this new Glenn Greenwald book. Greenwald systematically takes examples since Nixon's Watergate pardon through the Obama administration to convincingly make his point.
And, as we know, this immunity to prosecution isn't limited to government. Greenwald's book has been released at a time when thousands of people are on the streets protesting the fact that the justice system is doing nothing to correct the massive fraud that has happened in banking and mortgage industries. Greenwald, who obviously wasn't aware the OWS movement was on its way, covers this part of outrage as well. Its indictments of the Bush and Obama administrations refusal to uphold the rule of law along with its reasoned indictments of the fraud that we have knowingly lived with since 2008 bank crisis make this another great book to read if you do not understand why so many people are upset at the current state of justice in the U.S.
Another on my long list of books that certain people on the far right should read but won't.
February 13, 2012
This superb book is a powerful indictment of America's two-tiered system of "justice" and the perversion of American ideals by the American establishment (better understood as an oligarchy). It could serve as a manifesto of the Occupy movement, which, contrary to variously naive and opportunistic mischaracterizations, has no problem with people winning, and is opposed instead to systemic, institutionalized cheating.
If you think certain classes of people should be above the law, or that the law (including the Constitution) should be treated more as a kind of guideline, suggestion, or recommendation than as a binding authority equally applicable to all, you won't agree with the book's clear argument and you'll find a way to ignore its overwhelming evidence. But if you recognize that, as Thomas Paine said, in America it is the law that is king, you'll be grateful that Greenwald has written such a cogent appeal for Americans to live up to our ideals.
If you think certain classes of people should be above the law, or that the law (including the Constitution) should be treated more as a kind of guideline, suggestion, or recommendation than as a binding authority equally applicable to all, you won't agree with the book's clear argument and you'll find a way to ignore its overwhelming evidence. But if you recognize that, as Thomas Paine said, in America it is the law that is king, you'll be grateful that Greenwald has written such a cogent appeal for Americans to live up to our ideals.
November 20, 2011
Though the content of this book is similar to what Glenn Greenwald writes in his blog, it was nice to read something that allowed Greenwald the space to put forward an argument and build upon it.
Greenwald uses his book to provide ample evidence of how the law has been used to, as the title states, destroy equality and protect the powerful. From the bailout of Wall Street to the torture regime, Greenwald certainly isn't lacking in areas to write about. He begins his argument with the pardon of Richard Nixon and moves forward, showing how elite lawlessness has expanded since this time. He ends with the Obama Administration's efforts has stifling of any investigation into these activities.
If there is a slight gripe I have with the book, is that it doesn't spend a lot of time covering Greenwald's second major point, how the law is becoming increasingly heavy handed towards non-elites. In his defense, there are plenty of books that do exactly that, so this is but a minor quibble.
As with his blog, I'd highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys reading someone who has absolutely no issue with taking the political elite, no matter the party, to task and calling them out on their increasingly blatant hypocrisy.
Greenwald uses his book to provide ample evidence of how the law has been used to, as the title states, destroy equality and protect the powerful. From the bailout of Wall Street to the torture regime, Greenwald certainly isn't lacking in areas to write about. He begins his argument with the pardon of Richard Nixon and moves forward, showing how elite lawlessness has expanded since this time. He ends with the Obama Administration's efforts has stifling of any investigation into these activities.
If there is a slight gripe I have with the book, is that it doesn't spend a lot of time covering Greenwald's second major point, how the law is becoming increasingly heavy handed towards non-elites. In his defense, there are plenty of books that do exactly that, so this is but a minor quibble.
As with his blog, I'd highly recommend this to anyone who enjoys reading someone who has absolutely no issue with taking the political elite, no matter the party, to task and calling them out on their increasingly blatant hypocrisy.
January 24, 2012
This is an excellent and entirely depressing book about the political and financial elites' blanket immunity from the law.
I was a little put off by the introduction which goes on at great length about how the founders prized the rule of law above all else. In general I'm not a huge fan of the theory that says if the founders said/believed it, it must be right. (Especially when they themselves didn't apply an idea equally. Obviously African-Americans, women, and non-property owning whites were treated differently than property owning white men under the law). I prefer to rely on logical arguments that demonstrate why a principle is important today.
However, I did find it interesting (and relevant) that the founders thought it was natural that there should be some amount of inequality in all other aspects of life (income, politics, etc.) but that would be somewhat ameliorated by equality under the law.
In the first chapter, about political immunity, we are given several historical examples of those in power, including people in high levels within the presidential administration, being held to the rule of law. We have an example of a current administration investigating the crimes of the previous administration and lawbreakers were actually sent to jail.
Then we get to Ford's pardon of Nixon. Greenwald argues, persuasively, that Ford's pardon set the stage for future immunity for all political elites. The people who were involved in the Iran-Contra scandal were soon back in high level government positions, apparently suffering no consequences for their crimes, including lying to Congress.
The same insidious language is used over and over to give immunity to political elites, that we should be looking forward, not backward and not punishing previous crimes but ensuring it never happens again. It started with Ford's pardon and is employed every time immunity is granted (think of the number of times President Obama or his spokespeople used that language as a rationale for not investigating the crimes committed under the Bush Administration). As Greenwald points out, the law is always looking back. That's what the law does. And of course you cannot possibly ensure something never happens again if no one ever suffers any consequences for doing it in the first place.
Even "Scooter" Libbey never spent a single day in jail for outing Valerie Plame, his sentence was commuted by President Bush and much of the political elite was mad that he wasn't given an outright pardon. Nevermind that her career was destroyed and her some of her informants were brutally murdered.
One of the other things Greenwald points out is the complicity of the media. In one example, someone says of a political elite that he shouldn't go to jail because he's a real swell guy who even does his own shopping at the grocery store. (The book, of course, names names, but I don't have it in front of me). Well then! Can you imagine a regular person committing a crime and a reporter urging that he not be prosecuted because he's an ordinary guy who does his own grocery shopping?
Greenwald makes the case that one of the reasons the media is in no rush to investigate the torture regime under Bush is that the media was largely complicit in it. For the most part they didn't raise an objection at the time so they feel they can't do so now. Many Democrats have resisted investigations for the same reason. Those who knew about the torture, including Pelosi, are resistant to investigation because it may (should) come out exactly how much they knew and that they failed to act.
One the points that Greenwald makes over and over (and rightly so) is that by refusing to investigate torture under the Bush administration (to say nothing of continuing those policies) Obama is himself committing a crime. Under the Convention Against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, the failure to investigate torture is, in and of itself, a crime. The treaty specifically states that there is no excuse for doing so, including national security or terrorism.
Not only has the United States refused to investigate torture, but it has put tremendous pressure on other countries who try to do so. For example, when the horrific torture suffered by a British citizen (including cutting off his genitals) as an "enemy combatant" (he was later found innocent of any wrongdoing) was going to be made public as part of his trial in England (he sued the British government for their involvement in his detention and won), the United States, under President Obama, told the British government that if the paragraphs detailing his torture were made public, the United States would no longer share terrorist intelligence about any possible attacks on British soil with Britain. Think about that for a minute.
We've also applied tremendous pressure to the Spanish government after they arrested 21 CIA operatives in Spain.
Further, while Bush only threatened to try and dismiss entire lawsuits using the States Secrets law, the Obama DOJ has actually done it repeatedly.
And, of course, there's Obama's decision to assassinate US citizens without a trial far from the battlefield.
I don't know that Greenwald would necessarily say Obama's been the worst president since Ford in terms of violating the rule of law (he may say Bush deserves that honor, or someone else entirely) but I certainly feel that way. Bush may have been the one who started the torture, but it was Obama who gave Bush and his entire administration complete immunity. He didn't pardon them, of course, because he would have to admit that crimes were actually committed. But he certainly made it clear there would never be any investigations. No accountability.
ETA: I forgot to mention that Obama is also far more zealous in persecuting whistle blowers. As someone on Twitter recently snarked, if Bradly Manning had only committed war crimes instead of exposing them he'd be fine. The sad thing is, he's probably right. Although it's true some low level people are sometimes punished for their crimes. Never those at the top, of course, unless their "crime" is disrespect (General McChrystal).
Again, the rhetoric was "not to look to the past but to ensure it never happens again" while at the same time, ensuring it happens again because if there are no consequences for doing so, why should the next president refrain?
One of Obama's spokespeople (Holder?) outright said he wasn't investigating Bush because he thought it might set a precedent and he didn't want to be investigated for anything he might do (like, say, assassinating a US citizen without a trial).
He may have been a Constitutional scholar, but I can't think of anyone in recent memory who has so thoroughly violated the rule of law.
No prominent Republican is suggesting that Obama will be investigated for lawbreaking, of course, because that would require looking back at the Bush administration, too.
The second chapter largely revolved around the Telecoms and the retroactive immunity they were given for helping the government spy on American citizens without a warrant.
Greenwald makes the case that because of how closely the government is entwined with private enterprise (see One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing Of American Power And The Future Of Foreign Policy for more) there are essentially two divisions of the Telecoms, one public, one private.
Once again, one of the reasons to grant them immunity is so that the crimes of the government are never scrutinized.
The Telecoms, of course, mostly said they were "following orders." It took a while because there were protests, at first, but eventually, with the judicial application of major campaign contributions, the Telecom industry won the immunity it sought.
The third chapter is on the "Too Big to Fail" banks. Banks which have now become bigger than before they were deemed too big to fail.
Here, too, the revolving door between government officials, regulators, and the financial industry is part of the problem. The system is so porous that of course no one wants to investigate any of the crimes that were committed partly because the investigators or their friends would be implicated in breaking the law. Massive campaign donations also ensure that the record lawbreaking is never looked at. The fact that the financial collapsed devastated millions of ordinary people across the globe and the financial industry reaped massive profits is never considered a reason for real punishment.
Sure, there have been a few lawsuits, but it looks like once again the financial industry will get off not only scot-free but vastly enriched and the rest of us will get screwed.
The final chapter covers how the law is applied to the rest of us, particularly those least able to fend for themselves. The rise of "law and order" politics started in the 80's and it's simply astonishing what that has meant in terms of the increase in the number of Americans who have spent time in jail or prison.
One of the things that I hadn't appreciated before was how much of the money that used to fund the social safety net is now being used to imprison Americans for crimes that wouldn't warrant jail time in almost any other country. The privatization of prisons is also mentioned as having an influence, but Greenwald makes clear that this trend was going strong well before the private prison industry sprang up.
Mandatory minimums have a lot to do with it. There's no room for mercy in the courts, no way for judges to take circumstances into account. And even if they were, mercy has now become equated with weakness in the national lexicon of justice.
Lest you think this is all made-up by the writings of some Liberal, he includes a non-partisan objective study on justice where similar countries were compared in seven categories with over 700 variables. The US came in dead last in 4 of those categories, and 2nd to last in 2 others. The highest we ever scored was 3rd place and that was because the study did not count massive campaign contributions as "bribes" though I think the case could definitely be made that that's exactly what they are.
He also talks about how justice is denied for many low income people because they can't possibly afford lawyers, particularly in civil cases. Obama appointed someone to look into this, but almost immediately downgraded his position and vastly reduced the scope of his responsibility while also ensuring he had almost no authority to actually do anything.
When all is said and done, we're actually worse than some "Banana Republics" when it comes to the application of the rule of law.
We are a country in crisis. The rule of law no longer applies to the political or financial elites. No one has ever gone to jail for anything having to do with the financial meltdown. Dick Cheney feels free to openly confess that he ordered the torture of US prisoners because he's confident he'll never have the slightest repercussions for it. And he's right.
Greenwald doesn't end with a section on how to fix it, and for that, I'm grateful. He doesn't pretend that writing or calling your Congressmen will make the slightest bit of difference. Instead he ends with a warning. Whenever economic and judicial equality becomes to great, there's usually a violent revolution. (He does not in any way advocate for this, he just states historical fact).
One of the key points Greenwald makes over and over is that the elites no longer even pretend that there might be consequences for breaking the law. Why should they? Clearly they are immunized for even the most egregious lawbreaking while everyone else suffers increasingly harsh penalties for even the most minor of offenses.
This is America in 2012.
Recommended.
I was a little put off by the introduction which goes on at great length about how the founders prized the rule of law above all else. In general I'm not a huge fan of the theory that says if the founders said/believed it, it must be right. (Especially when they themselves didn't apply an idea equally. Obviously African-Americans, women, and non-property owning whites were treated differently than property owning white men under the law). I prefer to rely on logical arguments that demonstrate why a principle is important today.
However, I did find it interesting (and relevant) that the founders thought it was natural that there should be some amount of inequality in all other aspects of life (income, politics, etc.) but that would be somewhat ameliorated by equality under the law.
In the first chapter, about political immunity, we are given several historical examples of those in power, including people in high levels within the presidential administration, being held to the rule of law. We have an example of a current administration investigating the crimes of the previous administration and lawbreakers were actually sent to jail.
Then we get to Ford's pardon of Nixon. Greenwald argues, persuasively, that Ford's pardon set the stage for future immunity for all political elites. The people who were involved in the Iran-Contra scandal were soon back in high level government positions, apparently suffering no consequences for their crimes, including lying to Congress.
The same insidious language is used over and over to give immunity to political elites, that we should be looking forward, not backward and not punishing previous crimes but ensuring it never happens again. It started with Ford's pardon and is employed every time immunity is granted (think of the number of times President Obama or his spokespeople used that language as a rationale for not investigating the crimes committed under the Bush Administration). As Greenwald points out, the law is always looking back. That's what the law does. And of course you cannot possibly ensure something never happens again if no one ever suffers any consequences for doing it in the first place.
Even "Scooter" Libbey never spent a single day in jail for outing Valerie Plame, his sentence was commuted by President Bush and much of the political elite was mad that he wasn't given an outright pardon. Nevermind that her career was destroyed and her some of her informants were brutally murdered.
One of the other things Greenwald points out is the complicity of the media. In one example, someone says of a political elite that he shouldn't go to jail because he's a real swell guy who even does his own shopping at the grocery store. (The book, of course, names names, but I don't have it in front of me). Well then! Can you imagine a regular person committing a crime and a reporter urging that he not be prosecuted because he's an ordinary guy who does his own grocery shopping?
Greenwald makes the case that one of the reasons the media is in no rush to investigate the torture regime under Bush is that the media was largely complicit in it. For the most part they didn't raise an objection at the time so they feel they can't do so now. Many Democrats have resisted investigations for the same reason. Those who knew about the torture, including Pelosi, are resistant to investigation because it may (should) come out exactly how much they knew and that they failed to act.
One the points that Greenwald makes over and over (and rightly so) is that by refusing to investigate torture under the Bush administration (to say nothing of continuing those policies) Obama is himself committing a crime. Under the Convention Against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, the failure to investigate torture is, in and of itself, a crime. The treaty specifically states that there is no excuse for doing so, including national security or terrorism.
Not only has the United States refused to investigate torture, but it has put tremendous pressure on other countries who try to do so. For example, when the horrific torture suffered by a British citizen (including cutting off his genitals) as an "enemy combatant" (he was later found innocent of any wrongdoing) was going to be made public as part of his trial in England (he sued the British government for their involvement in his detention and won), the United States, under President Obama, told the British government that if the paragraphs detailing his torture were made public, the United States would no longer share terrorist intelligence about any possible attacks on British soil with Britain. Think about that for a minute.
We've also applied tremendous pressure to the Spanish government after they arrested 21 CIA operatives in Spain.
Further, while Bush only threatened to try and dismiss entire lawsuits using the States Secrets law, the Obama DOJ has actually done it repeatedly.
And, of course, there's Obama's decision to assassinate US citizens without a trial far from the battlefield.
I don't know that Greenwald would necessarily say Obama's been the worst president since Ford in terms of violating the rule of law (he may say Bush deserves that honor, or someone else entirely) but I certainly feel that way. Bush may have been the one who started the torture, but it was Obama who gave Bush and his entire administration complete immunity. He didn't pardon them, of course, because he would have to admit that crimes were actually committed. But he certainly made it clear there would never be any investigations. No accountability.
ETA: I forgot to mention that Obama is also far more zealous in persecuting whistle blowers. As someone on Twitter recently snarked, if Bradly Manning had only committed war crimes instead of exposing them he'd be fine. The sad thing is, he's probably right. Although it's true some low level people are sometimes punished for their crimes. Never those at the top, of course, unless their "crime" is disrespect (General McChrystal).
Again, the rhetoric was "not to look to the past but to ensure it never happens again" while at the same time, ensuring it happens again because if there are no consequences for doing so, why should the next president refrain?
One of Obama's spokespeople (Holder?) outright said he wasn't investigating Bush because he thought it might set a precedent and he didn't want to be investigated for anything he might do (like, say, assassinating a US citizen without a trial).
He may have been a Constitutional scholar, but I can't think of anyone in recent memory who has so thoroughly violated the rule of law.
No prominent Republican is suggesting that Obama will be investigated for lawbreaking, of course, because that would require looking back at the Bush administration, too.
The second chapter largely revolved around the Telecoms and the retroactive immunity they were given for helping the government spy on American citizens without a warrant.
Greenwald makes the case that because of how closely the government is entwined with private enterprise (see One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing Of American Power And The Future Of Foreign Policy for more) there are essentially two divisions of the Telecoms, one public, one private.
Once again, one of the reasons to grant them immunity is so that the crimes of the government are never scrutinized.
The Telecoms, of course, mostly said they were "following orders." It took a while because there were protests, at first, but eventually, with the judicial application of major campaign contributions, the Telecom industry won the immunity it sought.
The third chapter is on the "Too Big to Fail" banks. Banks which have now become bigger than before they were deemed too big to fail.
Here, too, the revolving door between government officials, regulators, and the financial industry is part of the problem. The system is so porous that of course no one wants to investigate any of the crimes that were committed partly because the investigators or their friends would be implicated in breaking the law. Massive campaign donations also ensure that the record lawbreaking is never looked at. The fact that the financial collapsed devastated millions of ordinary people across the globe and the financial industry reaped massive profits is never considered a reason for real punishment.
Sure, there have been a few lawsuits, but it looks like once again the financial industry will get off not only scot-free but vastly enriched and the rest of us will get screwed.
The final chapter covers how the law is applied to the rest of us, particularly those least able to fend for themselves. The rise of "law and order" politics started in the 80's and it's simply astonishing what that has meant in terms of the increase in the number of Americans who have spent time in jail or prison.
One of the things that I hadn't appreciated before was how much of the money that used to fund the social safety net is now being used to imprison Americans for crimes that wouldn't warrant jail time in almost any other country. The privatization of prisons is also mentioned as having an influence, but Greenwald makes clear that this trend was going strong well before the private prison industry sprang up.
Mandatory minimums have a lot to do with it. There's no room for mercy in the courts, no way for judges to take circumstances into account. And even if they were, mercy has now become equated with weakness in the national lexicon of justice.
Lest you think this is all made-up by the writings of some Liberal, he includes a non-partisan objective study on justice where similar countries were compared in seven categories with over 700 variables. The US came in dead last in 4 of those categories, and 2nd to last in 2 others. The highest we ever scored was 3rd place and that was because the study did not count massive campaign contributions as "bribes" though I think the case could definitely be made that that's exactly what they are.
He also talks about how justice is denied for many low income people because they can't possibly afford lawyers, particularly in civil cases. Obama appointed someone to look into this, but almost immediately downgraded his position and vastly reduced the scope of his responsibility while also ensuring he had almost no authority to actually do anything.
When all is said and done, we're actually worse than some "Banana Republics" when it comes to the application of the rule of law.
We are a country in crisis. The rule of law no longer applies to the political or financial elites. No one has ever gone to jail for anything having to do with the financial meltdown. Dick Cheney feels free to openly confess that he ordered the torture of US prisoners because he's confident he'll never have the slightest repercussions for it. And he's right.
Greenwald doesn't end with a section on how to fix it, and for that, I'm grateful. He doesn't pretend that writing or calling your Congressmen will make the slightest bit of difference. Instead he ends with a warning. Whenever economic and judicial equality becomes to great, there's usually a violent revolution. (He does not in any way advocate for this, he just states historical fact).
One of the key points Greenwald makes over and over is that the elites no longer even pretend that there might be consequences for breaking the law. Why should they? Clearly they are immunized for even the most egregious lawbreaking while everyone else suffers increasingly harsh penalties for even the most minor of offenses.
This is America in 2012.
Recommended.
January 4, 2022
All Americans should read this cautionary book that describes in detail and chronologically how our country has departed from the rule that John Adams proposed, that we be a nation of laws and not of men.
I've always been impressed with the move to impeach Richard Nixon that forced him to resign from office. That event was a high point in American history. As has been said, the strength of democracy is not in electing good people but in removing bad ones.
Much to the dismay of those who value the law, Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, promptly pardoned Nixon. This, in Greenwald's view, was the start of the descent into immunity from the law for the powerful culminating in President Obama outrageously saying that we must look forward, not backward, when he decided to ignore the criminal abuses of the Bush administration. This only confirmed Nixon's statement that "if the President does it, it's not illegal"
The Iran/Contra scandal of the Reagan years and letting "Scooter" Libby off the hook are further examples of justice avoided at the top.
Most worrying of all is the failure of the Department of Justice to act independently of the Executive branch as it was designed to do. We saw Attorney General Eric Holder starting out with a public listing of the unlawful activities of the Bush years and then dropping any attempt to hold anyone accountable at the behest of President Obama. The President now finds some lawyer at the DOJ or in the White House Office of Legal Counsel to interpret his activities as legal and, miraculously, they are!
This goes on even as the American citizens at the bottom of the economic ladder are hauled in and locked up for minor drug offenses. Plea bargaining coerces the poor to plead guilty regardless of actual guilt in order to expedite passage of cases through the judicial system. Please read the book Courtroom 302 for documentation of this process.
All of this goes on because of the apathy of the average American who says to him/herself, "it will never happen to me"
Read and then act upon what Greenwald so accurately describes. Write to your people in Congress and tell them you expect the law to be impartial and vigorously applied to the wealthy and powerful along with everyone else. Unless things change, America as conceptualized by the founders is history as we follow the practices of dictatorships that we hypocritically denounce.
You do wonder why there have been no criminal charges in the economic collapse, don't you? Have you considered how the scandal of Abu Ghraib resulted only in the punishment of those at the very bottom of the army? Occupy Wall Street is one way of showing resistance to the immunity of the 1%, but only action by millions of concerned Americans will bring change.
Greenwald was behind The Intercept, an online source of information for those interested in finding out what is taking place behind the scenes of power, but more recently he has his own blog on blogspot.
I've always been impressed with the move to impeach Richard Nixon that forced him to resign from office. That event was a high point in American history. As has been said, the strength of democracy is not in electing good people but in removing bad ones.
Much to the dismay of those who value the law, Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, promptly pardoned Nixon. This, in Greenwald's view, was the start of the descent into immunity from the law for the powerful culminating in President Obama outrageously saying that we must look forward, not backward, when he decided to ignore the criminal abuses of the Bush administration. This only confirmed Nixon's statement that "if the President does it, it's not illegal"
The Iran/Contra scandal of the Reagan years and letting "Scooter" Libby off the hook are further examples of justice avoided at the top.
Most worrying of all is the failure of the Department of Justice to act independently of the Executive branch as it was designed to do. We saw Attorney General Eric Holder starting out with a public listing of the unlawful activities of the Bush years and then dropping any attempt to hold anyone accountable at the behest of President Obama. The President now finds some lawyer at the DOJ or in the White House Office of Legal Counsel to interpret his activities as legal and, miraculously, they are!
This goes on even as the American citizens at the bottom of the economic ladder are hauled in and locked up for minor drug offenses. Plea bargaining coerces the poor to plead guilty regardless of actual guilt in order to expedite passage of cases through the judicial system. Please read the book Courtroom 302 for documentation of this process.
All of this goes on because of the apathy of the average American who says to him/herself, "it will never happen to me"
Read and then act upon what Greenwald so accurately describes. Write to your people in Congress and tell them you expect the law to be impartial and vigorously applied to the wealthy and powerful along with everyone else. Unless things change, America as conceptualized by the founders is history as we follow the practices of dictatorships that we hypocritically denounce.
You do wonder why there have been no criminal charges in the economic collapse, don't you? Have you considered how the scandal of Abu Ghraib resulted only in the punishment of those at the very bottom of the army? Occupy Wall Street is one way of showing resistance to the immunity of the 1%, but only action by millions of concerned Americans will bring change.
Greenwald was behind The Intercept, an online source of information for those interested in finding out what is taking place behind the scenes of power, but more recently he has his own blog on blogspot.
March 25, 2012
Glenn Greenwald is one of the preeminent writers on civil liberties, US foreign policy and the intersection of the two. As a former lawyer, Greenwald brings strong rhetorical arguments to readers every day on Salon.com. His success on the Internet and various publications led to his first book, a reaction to the Bush presidency and its damaging effects on the rule of law in our country. The second took a similar track while the third addressed the great hypocrisies of many conservative leaders.
The fourth book, With Liberty and Justice For Some, comes as our society might be reaching a tipping point of frustration and anger at growing inequalities. This inequality is usually cast in terms of wealth, but here Greenwald appropriately frames it as a widening justice gap between the rich/powerful and everyone else.
His first example is arguably the most famous in US history: Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon. Since then, Nixon allies and conservatives have argued that it saved the country from a divisive impeachment trial. Greenwald rightly points out that the same reasons for Nixon’s pardon are used after every attempt to hold high-level political officials responsible for their crimes. One was famously echoed by President Obama in deciding not to hold former Bush officials accountable by saying the country should “look forward, not backward.”
Indeed Greenwald does not just focus on Republicans or the right. The lack of prosecutions after the financial collapse of 2007-2008, the decision to give retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that broke eavesdropping laws and violations of the Geneva Convention Against Torture are examples that implicate both parties in our corroded political culture
If the book only focused on the most famous examples of the rich and powerful escaping justice, it would still be a valuable read on the inequalities of our legal system. But Greenwald goes further, explaining just how poorly those without connections and wealth suffer under our legal system. He gives both micro and macro displays of this depravity, such as the homeless man who turned himself in after stealing $100 and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison or the much stiffer penalties for possessing cocaine in crack form vs. the more affluent powder version.
The historic Occupy Wall Street protests were rightly directed at the failure to hold banks and the financial sector accountable for their crimes and the increasing influence of money in our democracy. With Liberty and Justice for Some amplifies the rationale for the 99% movement and expands it to the justice system. Not only do we need legislative reform, but a reform of a broken legal system used to protect the powerful.
The fourth book, With Liberty and Justice For Some, comes as our society might be reaching a tipping point of frustration and anger at growing inequalities. This inequality is usually cast in terms of wealth, but here Greenwald appropriately frames it as a widening justice gap between the rich/powerful and everyone else.
His first example is arguably the most famous in US history: Gerald Ford’s decision to pardon Richard Nixon. Since then, Nixon allies and conservatives have argued that it saved the country from a divisive impeachment trial. Greenwald rightly points out that the same reasons for Nixon’s pardon are used after every attempt to hold high-level political officials responsible for their crimes. One was famously echoed by President Obama in deciding not to hold former Bush officials accountable by saying the country should “look forward, not backward.”
Indeed Greenwald does not just focus on Republicans or the right. The lack of prosecutions after the financial collapse of 2007-2008, the decision to give retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that broke eavesdropping laws and violations of the Geneva Convention Against Torture are examples that implicate both parties in our corroded political culture
If the book only focused on the most famous examples of the rich and powerful escaping justice, it would still be a valuable read on the inequalities of our legal system. But Greenwald goes further, explaining just how poorly those without connections and wealth suffer under our legal system. He gives both micro and macro displays of this depravity, such as the homeless man who turned himself in after stealing $100 and was sentenced to fifteen years in prison or the much stiffer penalties for possessing cocaine in crack form vs. the more affluent powder version.
The historic Occupy Wall Street protests were rightly directed at the failure to hold banks and the financial sector accountable for their crimes and the increasing influence of money in our democracy. With Liberty and Justice for Some amplifies the rationale for the 99% movement and expands it to the justice system. Not only do we need legislative reform, but a reform of a broken legal system used to protect the powerful.
August 29, 2012
Greenwald has been writing about the two-tiered US justice system for several years on his blog at salon.com, so for his regular readers there's not much new in this book. But it's worth reading to get a sense of the way in which this system has developed in the past 40 years.
A capsule summary: Ford's pardon of Nixon; the nearly complete absence of penalties for the perpetrators of the Iran-Contra affair; Bush's pardon of Caspar Weinberger in 1992; Clinton's refusal to investigate the very serious allegations of Iraqgate; Bush Jr.'s commuting of Scooter Libby's sentence (a rare case in which a powerful figure was even brought to trial); the many war crimes committed by the Bush administration that Obama has steadfastly refused to investigate; the suppression by the US government of other governments' attempts to seek justice for those illegally detained and tortured by the US; the complete absence of any prosecution of the massive fraud and other illegal behavior that led to the 2008 financial crisis.
Through all of this the media elite have been willing partners in this two-tiered system, treating the idea of prosecuting the powerful as un-serious and harmful, while simultaneously advocating ever harsher punishments for ordinary citizens for ever more petty offenses.
And it's the uniformity of the elite response to elite law breaking, and not the law breaking itself, that makes the past few decades different than before. In decades past there was corruption and criminal behavior by the ruling elite, but the expectation was that, if caught, they would face legal penalties. That expectation no longer exists. Cheney and Bush have boasted in public and in print about how they knowingly violated the convention against torture and US federal statutes against torture. Bush admitted in 2005 that he had knowingly committed felonies by ordering warrantless wiretaps - felonies that carry a 5 year sentence and $10,000 fine per offense - in the certain knowledge that he would never be prosecuted for those crimes. Senior management at the big investment banks have surely lost no sleep worrying that they will be prosecuted for fraud, even for those cases where the evidence of fraud is overwhelming.
Meantime, the prison population for ordinary Americans has risen dramatically. With 5% of the world's population, the US has 25% of the world's prisoners - more prisoners in the US with its population of 300 million than in China with its population of 1.3 billion. The majority of those prisoners are in for non-violent offenses, some for many years because of mandatory minimum sentencing laws passed in the past few decades.
A capsule summary: Ford's pardon of Nixon; the nearly complete absence of penalties for the perpetrators of the Iran-Contra affair; Bush's pardon of Caspar Weinberger in 1992; Clinton's refusal to investigate the very serious allegations of Iraqgate; Bush Jr.'s commuting of Scooter Libby's sentence (a rare case in which a powerful figure was even brought to trial); the many war crimes committed by the Bush administration that Obama has steadfastly refused to investigate; the suppression by the US government of other governments' attempts to seek justice for those illegally detained and tortured by the US; the complete absence of any prosecution of the massive fraud and other illegal behavior that led to the 2008 financial crisis.
Through all of this the media elite have been willing partners in this two-tiered system, treating the idea of prosecuting the powerful as un-serious and harmful, while simultaneously advocating ever harsher punishments for ordinary citizens for ever more petty offenses.
And it's the uniformity of the elite response to elite law breaking, and not the law breaking itself, that makes the past few decades different than before. In decades past there was corruption and criminal behavior by the ruling elite, but the expectation was that, if caught, they would face legal penalties. That expectation no longer exists. Cheney and Bush have boasted in public and in print about how they knowingly violated the convention against torture and US federal statutes against torture. Bush admitted in 2005 that he had knowingly committed felonies by ordering warrantless wiretaps - felonies that carry a 5 year sentence and $10,000 fine per offense - in the certain knowledge that he would never be prosecuted for those crimes. Senior management at the big investment banks have surely lost no sleep worrying that they will be prosecuted for fraud, even for those cases where the evidence of fraud is overwhelming.
Meantime, the prison population for ordinary Americans has risen dramatically. With 5% of the world's population, the US has 25% of the world's prisoners - more prisoners in the US with its population of 300 million than in China with its population of 1.3 billion. The majority of those prisoners are in for non-violent offenses, some for many years because of mandatory minimum sentencing laws passed in the past few decades.
May 13, 2012
What a profoundly relevant and necessary book about the two tiered justice system in American politics.
Greenwald's take is that todays gross misconduct to protect the politically powerful started when President Ford pardoned President Nixon. He used the same line about looking forward not backwards that President Obama used to not only condone but retroactively immunize President Bush wiretapping , banking crisis, mortgage crisis and torture crimes and the Obama administrations own crimes. For make no mistake the waterboarding continues.
This chain of events eventually led to how the private banking sector as well as the telecoms received immunity.
The way the auto companies were given strict regulations for bailout money but the banking sector couldn't be stopped giving large bonuses. Why were the auto employees benefits taken then?
Greenwald makes a very strong case in his explanation with direct quotes from Eric Holder, the press and politicians WHY the political and financial elite escape with no attempt of justice. Apparently in the spirit of bipartisanship you don't want the next political office to investigate your own administration.
The hypocrisy doesn't end there as the not looking back but forward doesn't hold true for other nations who give their powerful immunity.
Then you can't move forward without charging criminals.
Greenwald also covers America's vast prison state and increasingly harsher sentencing that is "bipartisan" and the financial sector who runs the prisons which has a hand in shaping our drug laws.
Last but not least the vast disparity in the Obama administration to go after whistleblowers but never the criminals themselves.
If you follow his blog at all you'll be familar with this topic but despite some criticisms that he repeats himself people need to read this. Too many people actually aren't aware of torture convention and really do think torture of non prisoners of war is legal because of the Geneva convention.
I recommend this book to everyone. I'm a regular follower of Greenwald's column at salon.com. He's fair, well researched and never gives over to hyperbole. America never had a problem with a rich class but when the laws don't apply to them and they write the laws with an agenda to lengthen prison sentences then we are no longer a country of laws but rule of man.
Greenwald's take is that todays gross misconduct to protect the politically powerful started when President Ford pardoned President Nixon. He used the same line about looking forward not backwards that President Obama used to not only condone but retroactively immunize President Bush wiretapping , banking crisis, mortgage crisis and torture crimes and the Obama administrations own crimes. For make no mistake the waterboarding continues.
This chain of events eventually led to how the private banking sector as well as the telecoms received immunity.
The way the auto companies were given strict regulations for bailout money but the banking sector couldn't be stopped giving large bonuses. Why were the auto employees benefits taken then?
Greenwald makes a very strong case in his explanation with direct quotes from Eric Holder, the press and politicians WHY the political and financial elite escape with no attempt of justice. Apparently in the spirit of bipartisanship you don't want the next political office to investigate your own administration.
The hypocrisy doesn't end there as the not looking back but forward doesn't hold true for other nations who give their powerful immunity.
Then you can't move forward without charging criminals.
Greenwald also covers America's vast prison state and increasingly harsher sentencing that is "bipartisan" and the financial sector who runs the prisons which has a hand in shaping our drug laws.
Last but not least the vast disparity in the Obama administration to go after whistleblowers but never the criminals themselves.
If you follow his blog at all you'll be familar with this topic but despite some criticisms that he repeats himself people need to read this. Too many people actually aren't aware of torture convention and really do think torture of non prisoners of war is legal because of the Geneva convention.
I recommend this book to everyone. I'm a regular follower of Greenwald's column at salon.com. He's fair, well researched and never gives over to hyperbole. America never had a problem with a rich class but when the laws don't apply to them and they write the laws with an agenda to lengthen prison sentences then we are no longer a country of laws but rule of man.
August 15, 2012
Excellent. Brief and clearly written. The title exactly describes the subject of the book. 274pp
The Introduction begins, "As a litigator who practiced for more than a decade in federal and state courts across the country, I've long been aware of the inequities that pervade the American justice system....only when I began regularly writing about politics [Greenwald is a contributor to Salon] did I realize that the problem extends beyond...inequities....Those with political influence and financial clout are routinely allowed to break the law with no legal repercussions whatsoever."
In the summer of 2012 we can think of the big banks and bankers, the very very rich who pay almost no taxes, and the national security state that is completely unaccountable and secret - spying on citizens, punishing whistleblowers, locking up even citizens without trial or recourse etc.
Then there are our privately run prisons that use financial muscle and political power to advocate for laws and punishments that keep the prisoners coming, staying longer and filling private coffers.
Etc.
The Introduction begins, "As a litigator who practiced for more than a decade in federal and state courts across the country, I've long been aware of the inequities that pervade the American justice system....only when I began regularly writing about politics [Greenwald is a contributor to Salon] did I realize that the problem extends beyond...inequities....Those with political influence and financial clout are routinely allowed to break the law with no legal repercussions whatsoever."
In the summer of 2012 we can think of the big banks and bankers, the very very rich who pay almost no taxes, and the national security state that is completely unaccountable and secret - spying on citizens, punishing whistleblowers, locking up even citizens without trial or recourse etc.
Then there are our privately run prisons that use financial muscle and political power to advocate for laws and punishments that keep the prisoners coming, staying longer and filling private coffers.
Etc.
January 22, 2012
A very good but depressing account of the state of the rule of law in the US: Non-existent. While the wealthy basically now trade a system of favors for never being held accountable for their crimes (starting with the Nixon pardon, going on and accelerating today under the Obama-administration for the banks), the poorer ranks of the US are locked up in a prison system so strict and large it's in a league of its own in the world. This started in the 60s, when after the civil rights movement the language shifted from racism to being "tough on crime", which of course does not work but is a main pillar of any political campaign today. But - don't fret - with alleged terrorist who aren't even persons anymore, a new bottom layer has been founded and is defended by the Obama administration. The US are a plutocracy, a police state and an oligarchy now - Gleen Greenwald makes the succint case why, and also shows that the media happily cojoin in the process.
October 4, 2016
Greenwald does an excellent and convincing job of laying out his case that the justice system is anything but just. He is organized in his arguments and uses plenty of examples. However, his tendency to overstate things ("But as always happens...", the law was applied more equally in the past [the exception for women and slaves and immigrants is an afterthought to this argument], etc.) makes it harder to swallow his arguments even though I want to believe him. And there are a lot of facts and figures thrown out without citations, which is frustrating if you want to actually use those facts and figures later on. Despite these flaws in delivery, the importance of the subject matter makes this an important read.
March 11, 2012
I am stunned. Most of what this book is about I already knew but, reading about it all together in a book has made me shudder. Greenwald has enlightened me regarding just how unconscionable the crimes of our politicians and financial institutions and other corporations really are in America. Spring is coming and I am the 99%!
January 9, 2012
Hopefully there aren't that many people out there who don't recognize that there is currently a lot, and I mean a LOT, of unrest and unhappiness in the general US population. Unfortunately, it seems that a lot of that unrest is misunderstood, misattributed, misapplied, or even willfully mischaracterized. The Tea Party may have had some noble goals in the beginning, but those were quickly overshadowed by birthers, extreme libertarians, and loonies who couldn't spell anything on their picket signs correctly. Similarly, the Occupy movement has some very legitimate grievances, IF you can dig through the piles of BS that the mainstream media, the mega-rich, and our elected officials have said about OWS. And, to be fair, even a lot of people within Occupy don't seem to really understand why things are shitty, and who's really responsible. They just know that it hurts a lot when they try to sit down, and somebody out there is responsible.
I propose that anyone still wondering should read two books for starters: Griftopia by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and With Liberty and Justice for Some by Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald. These seem to me a solid baseline for understanding what all the public outrage is about.
There are two parts to the disease that afflicts us; the first part is the crimes committed by those in power, and the second part is the lack of justice meted out to those in power. Griftopia is the emotion-fueled rant that lays out all the conscienceless ways that the "One Percent" have taken advantage of us time and time again, while With Liberty and Justice For Some is the air-tight, theory-of-law-based clincher that details how those perpetrators never see justice for their crimes and what that means for us as a society.
IF we truly believe in Greenwald's opening chapter arguments about the rule of law, the necessity of law, and the necessity of law being universally distributed for it to mean anything at all, everything that follows in the book should make every US citizen sick to his or her stomach. Our country is not ours, our government is not ours, justice is not ours. Starting with Ford's pardon of Nixon for the Watergate scandal, Washington has developed a rich tradition of pardoning political officials for crimes they have committed, for covering up or ignoring those crimes, and, as of late, for extending this same indemnity to the country's business and financial elite.
This transcends partisan politics; indeed, it is why partisan politics will never do us much of any good, because both major parties are wholly compromised by disregard for the rule of law and a resultant "I'll rub your back, you rub mine" mindset that ensures neither party will ever seek to undo the damage of the other or hold anyone accountable for that damage, no matter how many times the two parties swap control of the White House.
If you read Griftopia, you'll be left wondering "why on earth doesn't anyone in power DO anything about this!?" When you then read With Liberty..., you'll understand exactly why nobody in power ever does anything. Real Estate magnate Leona Helmsley is infamous for stating that "only the little people pay taxes" after being accused of tax fraud. Since then, it is apparent that our entire political construct, and all of their friends in business and finance, have adopted the motto "only the little people pay for their crimes."
I propose that anyone still wondering should read two books for starters: Griftopia by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and With Liberty and Justice for Some by Salon.com's Glenn Greenwald. These seem to me a solid baseline for understanding what all the public outrage is about.
There are two parts to the disease that afflicts us; the first part is the crimes committed by those in power, and the second part is the lack of justice meted out to those in power. Griftopia is the emotion-fueled rant that lays out all the conscienceless ways that the "One Percent" have taken advantage of us time and time again, while With Liberty and Justice For Some is the air-tight, theory-of-law-based clincher that details how those perpetrators never see justice for their crimes and what that means for us as a society.
IF we truly believe in Greenwald's opening chapter arguments about the rule of law, the necessity of law, and the necessity of law being universally distributed for it to mean anything at all, everything that follows in the book should make every US citizen sick to his or her stomach. Our country is not ours, our government is not ours, justice is not ours. Starting with Ford's pardon of Nixon for the Watergate scandal, Washington has developed a rich tradition of pardoning political officials for crimes they have committed, for covering up or ignoring those crimes, and, as of late, for extending this same indemnity to the country's business and financial elite.
This transcends partisan politics; indeed, it is why partisan politics will never do us much of any good, because both major parties are wholly compromised by disregard for the rule of law and a resultant "I'll rub your back, you rub mine" mindset that ensures neither party will ever seek to undo the damage of the other or hold anyone accountable for that damage, no matter how many times the two parties swap control of the White House.
If you read Griftopia, you'll be left wondering "why on earth doesn't anyone in power DO anything about this!?" When you then read With Liberty..., you'll understand exactly why nobody in power ever does anything. Real Estate magnate Leona Helmsley is infamous for stating that "only the little people pay taxes" after being accused of tax fraud. Since then, it is apparent that our entire political construct, and all of their friends in business and finance, have adopted the motto "only the little people pay for their crimes."
Shelved as 'did-not-finish'
August 5, 2015Note to self: stop reading Glenn Greenwald.
The two blurbs on the back were from Michael Moore and Rachel Maddow. I should have known from that...
I think Greenwald is one of those radical, paranoid liberty nuts who sees inequality around every corner and any government law as intrusion.
Except he's liberal, so apparently he's accepted by the media.
Yes we know that the media, politicians and people turned a blind eye to Bush's idiocy that was EVERY DAMN THING HE DID. We understand that celebrities and millionaires get off with stuff other people wouldn't. You don't need to rant politely for 300 pages about it.
If you really, honestly cared about stopping it, you would do more than write a book (that you profit from) about it. You would start a PAC, contribute to a group, RUN FOR OFFICE.
Oh wait those things take money, and you don't like money.
EDIT
Apparently I didn't get to the part when he idealized our great American past. Oh come on.
Of all the Founding Fathers, how many of them owned slaves? Of all our Presidents, how many did not come from well-off families? (And before everybody starts wailing LINCOLN, I never said all.) Of every name we learn from history textbooks, how many of them were well-off enough to be white collar/one-percenters?
Our country, as with every other country in the world, has been dominated by the well-off and wealthy since its conception. There is no getting around that; ignoring it is worthless.
A one-sided argument can never hold.
EDIT
A friend of mine came up with a word for what Greenwald was doing: IDEAFY (v) to glorify the past to the point of religious fervor; a combination of the words idealize and deify.
The two blurbs on the back were from Michael Moore and Rachel Maddow. I should have known from that...
I think Greenwald is one of those radical, paranoid liberty nuts who sees inequality around every corner and any government law as intrusion.
Except he's liberal, so apparently he's accepted by the media.
Yes we know that the media, politicians and people turned a blind eye to Bush's idiocy that was EVERY DAMN THING HE DID. We understand that celebrities and millionaires get off with stuff other people wouldn't. You don't need to rant politely for 300 pages about it.
If you really, honestly cared about stopping it, you would do more than write a book (that you profit from) about it. You would start a PAC, contribute to a group, RUN FOR OFFICE.
Oh wait those things take money, and you don't like money.
EDIT
Apparently I didn't get to the part when he idealized our great American past. Oh come on.
Of all the Founding Fathers, how many of them owned slaves? Of all our Presidents, how many did not come from well-off families? (And before everybody starts wailing LINCOLN, I never said all.) Of every name we learn from history textbooks, how many of them were well-off enough to be white collar/one-percenters?
Our country, as with every other country in the world, has been dominated by the well-off and wealthy since its conception. There is no getting around that; ignoring it is worthless.
A one-sided argument can never hold.
EDIT
A friend of mine came up with a word for what Greenwald was doing: IDEAFY (v) to glorify the past to the point of religious fervor; a combination of the words idealize and deify.
December 18, 2012
Like all of Greenwald's books I have read to this point, this is well researched, and well-written. His premise is that justice is only available in the United States for a certain chosen few – – the elite, the politicians, and the wealthy.
He spends many chapters relating how various presidents and people on their staffs have avoided prosecution, even though they committed countless felonies.
As did many of us, Greenwald had high hopes that Pres. Obama would follow through with his pre-2008 election promise to prosecute president GW Bush, VP Cheney, and other criminal members of that administration.
Sadly, even before he was inaugurated (but after he had won the election), he had already begun to walk back on his promise, and came right out and said there would be no investigation, no prosecution, nothing.
This is no different than what Pres. Gerald Ford did when he absolved Pres. Nixon of all of his crimes – – no different than what happened when the first Pres.Clinton totally ignored all of the crimes committed in the Reagan Administration. They have all done it. And the problem is getting worse.
Meanwhile, our prisons are overly full of nonviolent "criminals" who are locked up and the key thrown away – –and the lower you are on the socioeconomic scale, the more likely it is that you will be imprisoned for the most ridiculous "crimes" based on the flimsiest evidence.
I highly recommend this book. It will make you mad, but perhaps will be the impetus that you need to start taking some action.
He spends many chapters relating how various presidents and people on their staffs have avoided prosecution, even though they committed countless felonies.
As did many of us, Greenwald had high hopes that Pres. Obama would follow through with his pre-2008 election promise to prosecute president GW Bush, VP Cheney, and other criminal members of that administration.
Sadly, even before he was inaugurated (but after he had won the election), he had already begun to walk back on his promise, and came right out and said there would be no investigation, no prosecution, nothing.
This is no different than what Pres. Gerald Ford did when he absolved Pres. Nixon of all of his crimes – – no different than what happened when the first Pres.Clinton totally ignored all of the crimes committed in the Reagan Administration. They have all done it. And the problem is getting worse.
Meanwhile, our prisons are overly full of nonviolent "criminals" who are locked up and the key thrown away – –and the lower you are on the socioeconomic scale, the more likely it is that you will be imprisoned for the most ridiculous "crimes" based on the flimsiest evidence.
I highly recommend this book. It will make you mad, but perhaps will be the impetus that you need to start taking some action.
October 10, 2014
We're supposedly (because we're supposed to be) a nation of laws and not men. But that's not really true, as Greenwald more than adequately portrays in this, his latest, book.
It's one thing to understand that fair and equitable treatment within the criminal justice system is not perfect, After all, nothing is. But there is a huge difference between occasional miscarriages of justice and institutional favoritism which quite often gives the rich and powerful very little punishment, if any punishment at all, while ordinary citizens are subjected to increasingly harsh and long sentences for violations of relatively modest transgressions of the law.
This book is a must read for anyone who's interested in knowing the disparity between the high-sounding American ideals our leaders espouse in public and how our legal system actually works in reality.
Highest recommendation.
It's one thing to understand that fair and equitable treatment within the criminal justice system is not perfect, After all, nothing is. But there is a huge difference between occasional miscarriages of justice and institutional favoritism which quite often gives the rich and powerful very little punishment, if any punishment at all, while ordinary citizens are subjected to increasingly harsh and long sentences for violations of relatively modest transgressions of the law.
This book is a must read for anyone who's interested in knowing the disparity between the high-sounding American ideals our leaders espouse in public and how our legal system actually works in reality.
Highest recommendation.
January 3, 2012
When you tire of the mindless talking heads on television, start here and then read Glenn's daily column on Salon.com. He is the only journalist I can trust to present the facts independent of partisan shills on both sides of the aisles. He equally rebukes Bush and Obama, as well as their predecessors, for their disregard of our rights for which our ancestors died. This is the book that defines the modern independent who does not wish to choose the lesser of two evils.
March 24, 2012
This is a book that everyone should read. It outlines the past 2 administrations' policies that are blatantly illegal and how the "rule of law" that was established by our forefathers is being violated to provide one set of laws for the 1% and another for the 99%. The ability of the individual to challenge the law is now met with censorship and prison. It's truly frightening and yet it validates what we have been seeing and why.
April 3, 2012
This book is recommended for all citizens to understand how the system of law is being eroded and only works to often times shield those who are the biggest perpetrators. It is an unsettling read that makes start to ask bigger questions of how we (the world) has gotten to such a point. One can see why Occupy movements are calling for a change in the system - this book explains why the system is broken. The question now is how to change the system?
November 26, 2014
If you have ever wondered if our justice system is fair in this country then wonder no more. The book will show you how are justice system has come completely unraveled over the last 40 years or so. A must read for a better understanding of how the powerful have taken over this country and turned the government into an oligarchy and our economy into a plutocracy.
December 21, 2011
No surprises here for followers of Greenwald's Salon.com column, or indeed anyone paying attention. Written in his characteristically direct and unabashedly non-partisan style, Greenwald gives a blow by blow commentary of the decaying accountability for this nation's elites.
March 6, 2013
Illuminating, disturbing. Nothing of which I was unaware, but Mr. Greenwald packages the information in a neat little, scathing package. We Americans have no right to the arrogance we display; our system of justice is broken.
December 27, 2011
Very good! Very infuriating! Obama does not fare well.
December 18, 2011
Devastating attack on the oligarchy that runs this country with impunity. Glenn Greenwald is brilliant and dangerous.
January 1, 2012
Well written, informative and INFURIATING.
March 28, 2012
Please read this book.
July 11, 2012
Absolutely a must read.
November 25, 2013
Loved it! Can't wait for the Greenwald/Scahill/Poitras journalistic project. Will be nice to see/read the truth in the news.
November 11, 2011
I am still fairly young, and because of that, and because I have had internet access for ages, I (as a Dutch national who has always been somewhat interested by the US) would say that I have grown up with the idea that the US has a class justice system. The first trial I really heard much about was OJ's, and most of the movies I saw about the US legal system were movies that had (usually) black people being treated extremely badly by the police as well as the courts, and who invariably lost their court cases because they couldn't afford a lawyer, while the public defender did nothing for them. (Incidentally, this is why I dislike US detective series so much: they always make it seem as though police abuse is a fringe issue. It's odd how movies tend to emphasize the negative side of the justice system, while TV series largely ignore it.) And while I am very much aware of the fact that those movies were strictly speaking "fiction," I never really got the impression that they were overstating the case.
Because of this, I have to confess that I already started out as being rather skeptical of Greenwald's fundamental claims -- that the US is under the 'rule of law', and that being under a 'the rule of law' rather than a 'rule of men' is necessary for societal stability and legitimacy. Having said that, I was curious to see what kind of arguments Greenwald would present in order to make his case. Having finished, though, I have to say that although I don't really disagree with any of the points Greenwald makes with regards to elite immunity, I am far from convinced that the changes he describes are as game-changing as Greenwald takes them to be.
The focus of the book is the rise of elite immunity, and in particular on the changes in the way elites view themselves -- namely, as deserving of their position above the law -- and on the changes in the way elite immunity is 'sold' to the courts and to the public -- namely, by defenses that explicitly invoke their elite status when defending why they should not be punished for their actions. Now, I certainly agree with him that these are important changes, and important indicators of the US turning into a 'banana republic'. And I think that it is a good thing that Greenwald is trying to make more people aware of this, and of the perversity of this way of reasoning. That said, it seems to me that Greenwald rather underplays the fact that this is basically the only thing that has changed for the elites, since they have always been able to get away with far more than ordinary Americans (primarily because they have access to better lawyers, but also because judges treat them more deferentially, and because DAs are often sympathetic to them). Similarly, he largely ignores the question how broadly his thesis applies: the examples he discusses are about members of the political (and financial) elites getting away with things, not about more 'ordinary' elites doing so.
Another related point that bothered me when reading the book, was that Greenwald says very little about the question how the non-elites view the system, and how it works. Because while he does discuss the question of how the members of the 'second tier' are treated, this discussion is relegated to chapter five. And there, he does little more than to invoke a few polls, and to talk about the macro consequences of the War on Drugs and three-strikes/minimum sentencing. (Though to be fair, he does reference a number of decent books that spend more time on this issue.) Unlike the advocates of the elites, he never lets them speak for themselves, and he never really asks the question what the changes he describes have meant for the way they experience living in the US. In other words, the mistreatment of the "second tier" is largely taken for granted, and their suffering is largely treated instrumentally, in order to make a point, rather than as being important in itself. As such, I did not really get the impression that Greenwald thought their treatment to be as relevant to worry about as the other side of the question, and this struck me as rather a shame. (I have no idea whether or not this would yield insights that readily lend themselves for analysis -- or if that should be a requirement. One problem, I suspect, is that it probably wouldn't have sold, as people are far more likely to accept the idea that the poor are deserving of mistreatment than they are of the idea that the elites are allowed to abuse power.)
Having said that, I do find the book to be something of a disappointment, even while I am unable to say why, since I don't really know what I was expecting to find. What I can say, is that I found it interesting (if depressing) to notice how little in this book managed to rile me up or surprise me. As I read it, I kept alternating between irritation (because I knew nothing would be done about these trends, let alone to punish the people mentioned) and frustration (ditto). And while it may not be quite fair to blame Greenwald for that, it does seem to me that, if anything is to be done about these issues, what is needed is not a simple shift in rhetoric and law away from allowing such outrageous defenses of elite privilege, but a far broader overhaul of the way the judiciary functions. As such, it seems to me that the perspective Greenwald offers on the history of the past 40 years is rather limited, because he takes the judicial system to be both far more important in creating inequality than I would say it is, and far more independent from the rest of society than it really is.
That is, there seems to be a weird imbalance at work in the story he presents. Because while he spends oodles of time on the issue of elite corruption in the executive (and legislative) branches of government, he says next to nothing about the question why the judiciary accepts these arguments. Now, certainly, in the case of presidential decrees or legislative changes, there is fairly little that it can do, but I am hesitant to believe that they are the largely-passive third party that he implicitly presents them to be. In fact, I would argue that ideological judges are a huge part of this, if perhaps not in the specific examples Greenwald has chosen to discuss. He seems to be convinced of the importance of the role the judiciary has played in creating more 'social justice.' Yet with the exception of the Warren court, it seems to me that pretty much all Supreme Courts have been conservative at best, and reactionary at worst. And while I don't know much about what judges are like at the levels below SCOTUS, I imagine it isn't all that different. So why does he ignore this, other than because it would force him to revise his suggestion that the "rule of law" is as procedurally fair as he assumes/presents it to be?
In sum, I would venture that he draws a far stronger separation between the legal, political and social domains than is warranted, and than is helpful when trying to understand the problems facing the US. So while I would recommend this book to people for the discussion on the problem of elite immunity, and what it says about the US legal system, I feel a bit let down otherwise. Because while the emphasis just on the rule of law, legislation and media corruption is fine when he is writing on his blog, its limits become rather more obvious when presented in longer form.
Because of this, I have to confess that I already started out as being rather skeptical of Greenwald's fundamental claims -- that the US is under the 'rule of law', and that being under a 'the rule of law' rather than a 'rule of men' is necessary for societal stability and legitimacy. Having said that, I was curious to see what kind of arguments Greenwald would present in order to make his case. Having finished, though, I have to say that although I don't really disagree with any of the points Greenwald makes with regards to elite immunity, I am far from convinced that the changes he describes are as game-changing as Greenwald takes them to be.
The focus of the book is the rise of elite immunity, and in particular on the changes in the way elites view themselves -- namely, as deserving of their position above the law -- and on the changes in the way elite immunity is 'sold' to the courts and to the public -- namely, by defenses that explicitly invoke their elite status when defending why they should not be punished for their actions. Now, I certainly agree with him that these are important changes, and important indicators of the US turning into a 'banana republic'. And I think that it is a good thing that Greenwald is trying to make more people aware of this, and of the perversity of this way of reasoning. That said, it seems to me that Greenwald rather underplays the fact that this is basically the only thing that has changed for the elites, since they have always been able to get away with far more than ordinary Americans (primarily because they have access to better lawyers, but also because judges treat them more deferentially, and because DAs are often sympathetic to them). Similarly, he largely ignores the question how broadly his thesis applies: the examples he discusses are about members of the political (and financial) elites getting away with things, not about more 'ordinary' elites doing so.
Another related point that bothered me when reading the book, was that Greenwald says very little about the question how the non-elites view the system, and how it works. Because while he does discuss the question of how the members of the 'second tier' are treated, this discussion is relegated to chapter five. And there, he does little more than to invoke a few polls, and to talk about the macro consequences of the War on Drugs and three-strikes/minimum sentencing. (Though to be fair, he does reference a number of decent books that spend more time on this issue.) Unlike the advocates of the elites, he never lets them speak for themselves, and he never really asks the question what the changes he describes have meant for the way they experience living in the US. In other words, the mistreatment of the "second tier" is largely taken for granted, and their suffering is largely treated instrumentally, in order to make a point, rather than as being important in itself. As such, I did not really get the impression that Greenwald thought their treatment to be as relevant to worry about as the other side of the question, and this struck me as rather a shame. (I have no idea whether or not this would yield insights that readily lend themselves for analysis -- or if that should be a requirement. One problem, I suspect, is that it probably wouldn't have sold, as people are far more likely to accept the idea that the poor are deserving of mistreatment than they are of the idea that the elites are allowed to abuse power.)
Having said that, I do find the book to be something of a disappointment, even while I am unable to say why, since I don't really know what I was expecting to find. What I can say, is that I found it interesting (if depressing) to notice how little in this book managed to rile me up or surprise me. As I read it, I kept alternating between irritation (because I knew nothing would be done about these trends, let alone to punish the people mentioned) and frustration (ditto). And while it may not be quite fair to blame Greenwald for that, it does seem to me that, if anything is to be done about these issues, what is needed is not a simple shift in rhetoric and law away from allowing such outrageous defenses of elite privilege, but a far broader overhaul of the way the judiciary functions. As such, it seems to me that the perspective Greenwald offers on the history of the past 40 years is rather limited, because he takes the judicial system to be both far more important in creating inequality than I would say it is, and far more independent from the rest of society than it really is.
That is, there seems to be a weird imbalance at work in the story he presents. Because while he spends oodles of time on the issue of elite corruption in the executive (and legislative) branches of government, he says next to nothing about the question why the judiciary accepts these arguments. Now, certainly, in the case of presidential decrees or legislative changes, there is fairly little that it can do, but I am hesitant to believe that they are the largely-passive third party that he implicitly presents them to be. In fact, I would argue that ideological judges are a huge part of this, if perhaps not in the specific examples Greenwald has chosen to discuss. He seems to be convinced of the importance of the role the judiciary has played in creating more 'social justice.' Yet with the exception of the Warren court, it seems to me that pretty much all Supreme Courts have been conservative at best, and reactionary at worst. And while I don't know much about what judges are like at the levels below SCOTUS, I imagine it isn't all that different. So why does he ignore this, other than because it would force him to revise his suggestion that the "rule of law" is as procedurally fair as he assumes/presents it to be?
In sum, I would venture that he draws a far stronger separation between the legal, political and social domains than is warranted, and than is helpful when trying to understand the problems facing the US. So while I would recommend this book to people for the discussion on the problem of elite immunity, and what it says about the US legal system, I feel a bit let down otherwise. Because while the emphasis just on the rule of law, legislation and media corruption is fine when he is writing on his blog, its limits become rather more obvious when presented in longer form.
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