View Full Version : Oligarchical decay

12-31-2007, 06:55 PM
Here's an astute piece by Glenn Greenwald. Pretty much sums up the state of things as 2007 comes to a close. Sad but true.
Oligarchical decay

Increasingly, as our political establishment sees it, the law is only for the masses.
Glenn Greenwald

Dec. 30, 2007 | (updated below)




Shane and Mazetti previously reported (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/19/washington/19intel.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin) that "several administration and intelligence officials provided conflicting accounts as to whether anyone at the White House expressed support for the idea that the tapes should be destroyed." In that article, they quoted one senior intelligence official "with direct knowledge of the matter [who] said there had been 'vigorous sentiment' among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes." The White House has simply refused (http://edition.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/12/19/cia.tapes/index.html) to say whether they were behind the decision. Just consider how significant that question is, and how striking it is that it remains unanswered. By the time Addington and Gonzales were discussing this matter, it was well known -- obvious -- that those interrogations tapes were critically relevant to a number of judicial proceedings and government investigations, including The 9/11 Commission's (http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2007/12/22/911_panel_requested_cia_documents/). It is thus highly likely, to put it mildly, that any decision to destroy that evidence would constitute the crime of obstruction of justice, the same federal felony for which Lewis Libby has now (in a different matter) been convicted.



* * * * *


The instruments used to secure these prerogatives are numerous and growing. Slate's Dahlia Lithwick this week summarized (http://www.slate.com/id/2179934/) the Bush administration's 10 most egregious legal inventions to enable lawbreaking, including the "states secrets privilege" which has now "has ballooned into a doctrine of blanket immunity for any conduct the administration wishes to hide" and the claim that "everyone who has ever spoken to the president about anything is barred from congressional testimony by executive privilege." All of these developments have a common strain, a shared objective: ensuring that our highest political officials and our most powerful corporations are beyond the reach of the law.


This is the same pattern seen over and over: leakers reveal that Bush broke the law for years by spying on Americans without the warrants required by law, and every investigation -- legislative (http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=1698034&page=1) and judicial (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/07/washington/07nsa.html) -- is successfully blocked, and Congress then moves to legalize the lawbreaking. The top aide to Bush and Cheney, Lewis Libby, is found unanimously by a 12-person jury to have lied deliberately with the intent of blocking an FBI and Grand Jury investigation into illegal leaks and is sentenced by a conservative judge to prison, yet is protected from jail time by the President while our media and political establishment cheer almost unanimously.

Our largest telecommunication corporations reap huge profits by brazenly violating numerous, long-standing federal laws (http://www.eff.org/files/nsa/statutes.pdf) (.pdf) for years by enabling government access to our communications without any judicial approval, and our political establishment bands together to demand that they be protected from any consequences and that any efforts to uncover what happened be squelched. Our government implements a secret torture regime that violates numerous laws and treaties and Congress acts to legalize it and provide retroactive immunity to the lawbreakers. Congress subpoenas numerous officials to find out why 9 federal prosecutors were fired and, when the subpoenas are literally ignored, nothing happens.

And now, our government just destroys evidence crucial both to all sorts of court proceedings and a comprehensive investigation into the worst attack on U.S. soil in our history -- part and parcel of its general pattern (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/04/12/lost_documents/) of destroying or "losing" key evidence -- and the Honorable, Independent Attorney General tells both the legislative (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7145658.stm) and judicial (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22272157/) branches that they have no right even to investigate. And although we know for a fact that the top aides to both Bush and Cheney were involved in discussions of whether the tapes should be destroyed, we have no idea what they said and are unlikely ever to know, and even if we did find out, it's impossible to envision anything happening as a result.

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And thus we have a perfect oligarchical system in which, literally, our most powerful and well-connected elite are free to break the law with impunity, exempt from any consequences. While exempting themselves, these same figures impose increasingly Draconian "law and order" solutions on the masses to ensure that even small infractions of the law prompt vigorous prosecution and inflexible, lengthy prison terms (http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=MTIzNzRhMGY5NGI0MGFkYzlmMDFmZTI3OTE5NmRiZTc=).

As Matt Stoller recently noted (http://openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2924) in an excellent post on the bipartisan orthodoxies that are untouchable in political debates (http://openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2933), "there are 1 million people put in jail for doing what Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George Bush have done" (buying and consuming illegal drugs) and "2 million people are in prison in America, by far the highest total of any other country in the world." It's almost impossible for the non-rich to defend themselves effectively against government accusations of criminality, and judges have increasingly less sentencing discretion to avoid imposing harsh jail terms. Punishment for crimes is for the masses only, not for members in good standing of our political and corporate establishment.

Where our political elite break the law, our leading media stars and pundits fulfill their central purpose by dutifully arguing that establishment figures who have broken the law have done nothing wrong (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/07/AR2006020701262.html) and deserve protection (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/07/03/libby/), even our gratitude (http://www.time.com/time/columnist/klein/article/0,9565,1147137,00.html), when they do so. In the view of our establishment (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/31/rockefeller/), even mere civil liability -- never mind criminal punishment -- is deeply unfair (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/28/AR2007092801332.html) when imposed on lawbreaking corporations (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/26/AR2007102602329.html), as we see in the "debate" over telecom immunity.

This same warped principle is also expressed in how our establishment scorns the work John Edwards did in representing maimed or dead individuals against the corporations which, through recklessness or negligence, destroyed their lives. From a letter (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/opinion/l30wealth.html?ref=opinion) from Theodore Frank of the American Enterprise Institute to the New York Times today (h/t Jay Diamond):

Anything that results in accountability for our largest corporations is inherently bad, even when they're found under our legal system to have broken the law or acted recklessly. Thus, John Edwards' self-made wealth is deeply dishonorable and shameful because it came at the expense of our largest corporations and on behalf of the poor and dirty masses, while Mitt Romeny's wealth, spawned by his CEO-father's connections (http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5j4pAdVTN_vtnpkvZuxtKy0WRORjwD8THDPOG0), is to be honored and praised because it benefited our establishment and was on behalf of our glorious elite. Naturally, our establishment sees itself as Good, and thus, whatever their most powerful leaders do -- even when illegal -- is never really bad. It can't be, because they do it. Hence, George Bush's and Lewis Libby's felonies aren't really like the felonies of the "drug dealers" and the other street dirt (http://openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2926). Neither the Law nor Jail are for the clean, good, upstanding establishment members, so sayeth Jay Rockefeller and Fred Hiatt and Joe Klein and David Ignatius and the rest.

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Digby yesterday analyzed (http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/bipartisan-zombies-by-digby-it-was.html) the sudden emergence of the Bipartisan Centrism fetishists -- the David Borens and Sam Nunns and David Broders and other old System Guardians who are threatening to back the third-party candidacy of Michael Bloomberg unless they quickly see more "bipartisanship." As Digby notes -- and one should read her whole post -- these Harmony Mavens were nowhere to be found during the last six years when our government was fully controlled by a one-party machine that did what it wanted without the slightest consequence.



UPDATE: On a not unrelated note, the annual survey of worldwide privacy rights conducted by Privacy International and EPIC has been released for 2007 (http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-559597), and the U.S. has been downgraded from "Extensive Surveillance Society" to "Endemic Surveillance Society," the worst possible category there is for privacy protections, the category also occupied by countries such as China, Russia, Singapore and Malaysia. The survey uses a variety of objective factors (http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-559597#criteria) to determine the extent of privacy protections citizens enjoy from their government, and the U.S. now finishes at the bottom for obvious reasons (http://www.privacyinternational.org/article.shtml?cmd%5B347%5D=x-347-559478).

Evidence that we are becoming a lawless surveillance state (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/12/16/telecoms/) is abundant. But let's forget all of that and figure out how we can best micro-manage the internal affairs of Pakistan and Iraq and Russia and Iran so that we can preserve Freedom and Democracy for the world.

12-31-2007, 07:53 PM
Good article.

12-31-2007, 10:57 PM
I have to give the media some of their credibility back for this one.

01-01-2008, 02:25 AM
It must have taken quite a while to put all those links in there.

01-01-2008, 11:43 AM
Pffff. Jon puts in WAYYY more than that...

01-01-2008, 12:43 PM

Actually, I just copied the "print" page from Salon.com. No effort on my part to include links.

01-01-2008, 07:54 PM
Oh, if you copy and past yahoo articles with those links, you get a giant mess.

But yeah, Gold does a lot of work with his links.