In our “News To Make You Furious” column this month, we told you about the recent HSBC settlement and a FrontLine documentary on why no one has been criminally prosecuted in the Wall Street crash. We also said we have a two-tiered justice system in America now, and that justice for some means justice for none. That’s a fairly damning statement and the two stories we presented in “Furious” certainly don’t prove it by themselves. Unfortunately, they don’t stand alone. Glen Greenwald has done the hard work and extensive research necessary to, if not prove it, at least give more evidence. This month we’d like to shine our Book Spotlight on…
“With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful” by Glen Greenwald
From the nation’s beginnings, the law was to be the great equalizer in American life, the
guarantor of a common set of rules for all. But over the past four decades, the principle of equality before the law has been effectively abolished. Instead, a two-tiered system of justice ensures that the country’s political and financial class is virtually immune from prosecution, licensed to act without restraint, while the politically powerless are imprisoned with greater ease and in greater numbers than in any other country in the world.
Starting with Watergate, continuing on through the Iran-Contra scandal, and culminating with Obama’s shielding of Bush-era officials from prosecution, Glenn Greenwald lays bare the mechanisms that have come to shield the elite from accountability while the politically powerless are imprisoned with greater ease and in greater numbers than in any other country in the world. He shows how the media, both political parties, and the courts have abetted a process that has produced torture, war crimes, domestic spying, and financial fraud.
With Liberty and Justice for Some exposes a new and profoundly un-American justice system that incentivizes elite criminality, protects an oligarchical political culture, and sanctions immunity at the top and unyielding mercilessness for everyone else.
Cogent, sharp, and urgent, this is a no-holds-barred indictment of a profoundly un-American system that sanctions immunity at the top and mercilessness for everyone else.
GLENN GREENWALD is the author of The New York Times bestsellers How Would a Patriot Act? and A Tragic Legacy. Recently proclaimed one of the “Twenty-Five Most Influential Liberals in U.S. Media” by Forbes, Greenwald is a former constitutional law and civil rights attorney and a contributing writer at Salon. He lives in Brazil and New York City.
