There is no question that the Occupy Wall Street movement alarmed the ruling classes because of its exposure of the class war being waged in this country by wealthy against the rest of us. The Daily Show talks about how the law enforcement and justice systems are tilted so heavily in favor of the oligarchy, a reflection of the entrenched nature of the class war being waged.
(This clip aired on May 6, 2014. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post. If the videos autoplay, please see here for a diagnosis and possible solutions.)
No sir, we aren’t law enforcement acting totally at the beck and call of Andrew Carnegie. Not at all! And we don’t have any problems of our own with violence and illegal behavior. You get what you deserve for being unAmerican.
The story of prison-state America is complex, some of the factors are simply ambitious careerism, apathy or ignorance on the part of the public, and go-along attitudes of people who know better.
Republicans of course carry everything to the worst extreme, but the fact is on the federal level the federal prosecutor (both at Main Justice task forces and the US Atty districts) is bipartisan, voracious and putative. And the federal judiciary cannot be counted on as a check.
I feel horrible for anyone who faces a federal indictment (few deserve such treatment).
Just read and reviewed a book from a former federal prosecutor out of Texas, Sidney Powell’s Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Dept of Justice. See http://licensedtolie.com/
I would like to recommend this work for your readers.
Powell was the youngest Assistant United States Attorney in the country when she was appointed, worked for some 10 years at the DoJ, and then moved to private practice.
What Powell, a disgusted and appalled whistleblower, describes at DoJ should be made into a movie.
If you read one book this summer, I rec reading Powell’s Licensed to Lie.
While this fact is old news, the tilt has reached absurd levels. From ‘afluenza’ to ‘corporations are people’, it’s more evidence of our slide into plutocracy. See theusconstitution.org/sites/default/files/briefs/Download%20Open%20for%20Business.pdf
“Open for Business: Tracking the Chamber of Commerce’s Supreme Court Success Rate from the Burger Court through the Rehnquist Court and into the Roberts Court” for more evidence. Short version, under the Burger Court, The Chamber of Commerce won 43% of cases it was involved in, under the Rehnquist Court 56%, and now under the Roberts Court, 68%. The, uh, long list of prosecutions for all the illegal financial shenanigans resulting in the 2008 meltdown is also quite telling. As is the DOJ’s use by the Obama Administration in going after whisleblowers and journalists. @Michael Leon, thanks for the recommendation, when I first saw the title, I was pretty excited. Anyone who pays the slightest attention should see corruption is at work. But, I did some research, and there isn’t nearly as much to find as I thought there would be. The cases discussed in the book seemed tilted toward the rich powerful getting misused. While it can be a good thing to show how even they can be railroaded, where is the far more massive abuses of ordinary folk? No mention of the DOJ in collusion with the DEA and the IRS in asset confiscation and the lengths they stretch the RICO act in going after drugs, to name a particularly pernicious and routine issue. I kept getting hints of a rightwing bias, what is your take on the focus of the book?