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2 Sep, 2012

Glenn Greenwald skewers US injustices in compelling latest book | The Electronic Intifada

Greenwald’s most recent book, With Justice and Liberty for Some, demonstrates structural injustice in the US: “how the law is used to destroy equality and protect the powerful,” as the book’s subtitle spells out. There is a dialectic relationship, Greenwald contends, between the private law enjoyed by the country’s most wealthy and politically powerful, and the burgeoning incarceration of the poor and powerless.

This “elite immunity,” as Greenwald calls it, dates back to the Nixon administration, when the disgraced president resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal, during which it became clear that “serious criminality had pervaded the upper reaches of government.” Instead of making sure criminals were held accountable, Nixon’s “hand-picked” successor Gerald Ford told the public that the nation must look forward, not backward — that applying the rule of law to those in high office would be the country’s undoing.

And as Greenwald demonstrates throughout his book, the rhetoric of “looking forwards, not backwards” has been used by every administration since to protect the shared interests of the ruling class.

via Glenn Greenwald skewers US injustices in compelling latest book | The Electronic Intifada.