Tags
Bush, Clinton, ford, Glenn Greenwald, justice, nixon, Obama, Reagan, rule of law, Wall Street
The book below, by Glenn Greenwald, is highly recommended. Greenwald was already one of my favorite bloggers, so I was looking forward to reading it. In it, he presents a lucid and concise account of what the founding fathers’ principles were regarding the rule of law, and how those principles have been trampled upon by political and business elites for the past 40 years, starting with Nixon and Ford’s pardon of him. He presents a compelling argument that while the elites have been granted more and more immunity from the law, poor people are rounded up at increasing rates and more harshly penalized for breaking petty laws. This has created a two-tier system of justice that is used as a truncheon to keep the poor and powerless in their place.
Hopefully you all rush out and buy this book anyway, but here is a long snippet that sums up a big chunk of the book from pages 232-233:
Here’s another way to think of all this history. The man who initially enshrined law and order as the foundation of the nation’s federal justice system–Richard Nixon–committed serious felonies but did not spend a day in prison. The man who most popularized the no-mercy mentality–Ronald Reagan–not only spared from prison Mark Felt, an FBI official convicted of illegally spying on Americans, but himself presided over a criminal effort to fund Nicaraguan terrorists. That all ended satisfactorily for Reagan: virtually all of his top aides, and therefore Reagan himself, were shielded from accountability by his handpicked successor, George H. W. Bush, who pardoned six key conspirators who were either about to go on trail or who had already pleaded guilty or been convicted.
The man who converted the tough-on-crime crusade into bipartisan orthodoxy–Bill Clinton–abandoned his call for investigations into past political crimes as soon as he was safely elected president. In addition, of course, Clinton admitted to lying under oath during a deposition in a civil suit but was never prosecuted. He was followed by the equally tough-on-crime George W. Bush, whose entire presidency was a spree of law-breaking. And Bush was succeeded by Barack Obama, who has engaged in Herculean efforts to shield Bush and his top aides from any investigation, and has done the same for plundering, fraud-perpetrating Wall Street elites.
