Forum Post: America’s two-tiered justice system exposed with a proven solution
Posted 12 years ago on Oct. 26, 2011, 4:31 p.m. EST by JoTerrence
(50)
from Palmdale, CA
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
The way political and financial elites are now vested with virtually absolute immunity from the rule of law even when they are caught committing egregious crimes, while ordinary Americans are subjected to the world’s largest and one of its harshest and most merciless penal states even for trivial offenses. As a result, law has been completely perverted from what it was intended to be – the guarantor of an equal playing field which would legitimize outcome inequalities – into its precise antithesis: a weapon used by the most powerful to protect their ill-gotten gains, strengthen their unearned prerogatives, and ensure ever-expanding opportunity inequality.
The law itself wields tremendous power. The legal system’s reach is unparalleled: it can deprive a person of property, liberty, even life. It may compel people to transfer their material goods to others, block them from engaging in planned actions, destroy their reputations, consign them to cages, or even inject lethal chemicals into their veins. Unequal application of the law is thus not merely unjust in theory but devastating in practice. When the law is wielded only against the powerless, it ceases to be a safeguard against injustice and becomes the primary tool of oppression.
The past decade has witnessed the most severe crimes imaginable by political and financial elites: the construction of a worldwide torture regime, domestic spying perpetrated jointly by the government and the telecom industry without the warrants required by the criminal law, an aggressive war waged on another country that killed hundreds of thousands of people, massive financial fraud that came close to collapsing the world economy and which destroyed the economic security of tens of millions, and systematic foreclosure fraud that, by design, bombarded courts with fraudulent documents in order to seize homes without legal entitlement.
These are not bad policies or mere immoral acts. They are plainly criminal, and yet – due to the precepts of elite immunity which were first explicitly embraced during Ford’s pardon of Nixon — none of those crimes has produced legal punishments.
By very stark contrast, ordinary Americans are imprisoned more easily, for longer periods of time, and in greater numbers than any nation on earth
This development isn’t just central to most of what I write. It is, I believe, driving the growing (and accurate) perception that our political institutions are wholly illegitimate. It is, as I wrote this morning at Tom Dispatch, this sense that outcome inequalities are now wholly illegitimate – as a result of this fundamental perversion of the rule of law – that is fueling the citizen anger inspirationally on display at the Occupy protests around the nation. Glen Greenwald.
What mandate alone of itself by the people can be given to that which is of, by and for us solve this broken system as well as our educational system, economic, pollution, energy, and protect peaceful demonstrators from tear gas and rubber bullets? The answer is the same mandate given by other 99ers in 25 OECD nations. They developed our Declaration of Independence where a New Guard is to be provided for our future security and gave that guard (Jason Bourne) broad powers to investigate corruption in all agencies, restoring the rule of law through indictments to the elite. We can no longer mandate our Gov. employees to indict the powerful. 39 governments have failed in this duty and are now operating through mandate of the people this New Guard system. To learn more go to my post What mandate did the 99ers of Scandinavia give when they were reduced