In his ground-breaking book With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful, Glenn Greenwald exhaustively documents the ways in which the nation's elites have come to enjoy immunity from legal consequences for even the most serious law-breaking. The justice system has always been two-tiered, in the sense that a defendent has always been entitled to the best defense he or she can afford, but in the last 25 years a new ethos has been established that exempts our most elite citizens from having to concern themselves with the justice system at all.
In America today ordinary citizens face harsh punishments even for crimes that are minor or victimless. Meanwhile, serious crimes committed by elites are not even investigated--even when the crimes are publicly boasted about by the perpetrators. Widely known instances include lying to Congress, destruction of official records to cover up law-breaking, illegally spying on Americans by secretly intercepting their electronic communications, kidnapping, unlawful detention, and torture. The deliberate lies that took the nation to war in Iraq have been excused. The massive and deliberate fraud of ordinary investors and home-buyers that brought about the worst economic crisis in 70 years--not to be investigated or punished. The multiple war crimes that are still being committed abroad, the violations of international treaties and conventions, and the extraordinary malfeasance that have been committed in the "War on Terror" are just not the legal system's concern. In the major media the fact that these crimes go not just unpunished but uninvestigated is met with editorial approval, explicitly on the grounds that the most elite members of society should be shielded from the legal consequences, even for serious crimes, that non-elite Americans face for any infraction.
Elites are not defined by how much power and money they have, but by how much more of these things they have than everybody else. The vast majority of Americans face a harsh truth: the wealth of their nation that they themselves built has been plundered, their government has turned on them, and their lives are poor, powerless, and without prospects.
(This article is excerpted from the author's book, The Good American: A Situation Report for Citizens, available now from the Institute for Economic Democracy, iedpress.com)
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