Forum Post: Dylan Ratigan on corruption and the Supreme Court

Excerpt:

Most people believe in common sense, that if you give someone money, or spend money on someone's behalf, you will have influence over them. Excessive influence over a politician leads to corruption. Yet the Supreme Court doesn't see it this way. How did the Court come to have such odd ideas on corruption?

This goes back to the subtlety of money in our politics, and in particular, the purchase of ideas. In the 1970s, a think tank called the John Olin Foundation began promoting something called law and economics, a school of thought started at the University of Chicago that linked the incentive-based thinking of economics to legal rule-making. At the time, the ideas that led to the massive deregulatory impulses of the next three decades were first taking shape; the law and economics school was simply the legal offshoot of this well-funded pro-corporate trend. This new legal theory asserted that traditional legal concepts like equity and fairness were not as important as efficiency and incentives. And it expanded its influence quickly over law schools and courts very quickly through, well, gobs of money. According to conservative journalist John Miller, "the foundation sank more than $68 million into law and economics, and because of this it had a big impact on legal scholarship, the training of lawyers, and judicial behavior."

Over the next four decades, the Supreme Court, and the judiciary in general, became far more amenable to analyses that left out concepts like fairness. And this was not simply due to the conservatives on the courts, though they led the charge. The Supreme Court helped get rid of usury caps for credit cards, and then struck down state laws capping penalty fees. These two significant decisions - the Marquette decision in 1978 and Smiley v. Citibank in 1996 - were unanimous. Bankruptcy filings have naturally spiraled upwards. It wasn't just Congress, the regulators, or the President that deregulated our financial system, it was the Supreme Court as well. And if you want to know why bankers haven't been prosecuted for the financial crisis, well just before the crisis, the court upheld a ruling that investment bankers who knowingly structured sham transactions they knew would be used to falsify Enron's financial statements hadn't committed fraud. Last year, the court ruled for Enron ex-CEO Jeff Skilling.

Today, this concept is so embedded in the judiciary that imposing rules to allow shareholders power over corporate management is now being struck down on the grounds that it would prevent "efficiency, competition, and capital formation." Law schools now churn out lawyers who understand and believe in law and economics, who can be the Supreme Court clerks and legal functionaries to embed these arguments in every nook and cranny of our legal system. Questions of justice are now becoming questions of how to make the law serve the interests of corporations, rather than fundamental issues of liberty. Powerful groups like investment bankers and CEOs can commit unethical acts with no consequence, but more than one in every hundred American men is now incarcerated, most for low level petty violations.

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Fundamentally, what we need is a new legal theory for the 99%, a new way of looking at corruption.

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http://www.readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/8256-bought-justice-and-the-supreme-court

More Chicago School hacks destroying democratic principles in the name of profit...