Book Review: With Liberty and Justice for Some

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful, by Glenn Greenwald (2011, Metropolitan Books, New York) reports the news: powerful people have attacked a founding principle of the United States, equality under law. These people, politicians and corporate interests, have reached a point where they dismiss Federal laws and international agreements openly, even boastfully. Greenwald provides in-text sources for the modern-day events and quotes the Founding Fathers or gives Constitutional sources for his background references. However, he does not give footnotes or endnotes should a reader wish to check the references.

Greenwald’s communication strength rests on his passion. He does very well at saying, “This happened, here’s proof it happened, and it’s wrong because it’s against the Constitution and the intentions of the Founding Fathers!” He makes this statement in reference to equality under the law very thoroughly, focusing on events from the President Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon to President Obama’s refusal to investigate or prosecute either Bush Administration torturers or Wall Street’s grand-scale fraudsters.

Greenwald spares neither parties nor personalities; liberals, conservatives, and moderates will each find some discomfort here. He also removes the illusions of those who still see the media as eager to expose wrongdoing. Greenwald concludes with a contrasting chapter on the lot of the less powerful, pointing out that the US prison population is huge and tends to be minorities and poor people. He points out that this growing prison population, largely non-violent drug users, does not correlate to either lower crime rates or reductions in drug use. In this chapter, he gives a good background to suggest why this continues despite its inability to achieve the stated results.

The flaws in Greenwald’s communication derive from his failure to go beyond passion. Except in the last chapter, he gives little background for his characters or their times. For example, why would Nixon do something as desperate as the Watergate break-in when he was leading in the polls and very likely to be re-elected without that? Why do people who make millions of dollars annually seek to make more millions by violating the law?

More importantly, he only cries foul; he does not suggest changes to make or even consequences of the current course. This negates his passion. Moving people to strong feelings without asking them to do something brings them depression and frustration, not understanding and satisfaction.

In short, With Liberty and Justice for Some gives a clear and impassioned picture of the decay of equality under law in the United States, but does little to help one understand why this is happening or what to do about it.

Supreme Court Enables Corporate Corruption

The Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS), in its alleged wisdom, has decided that corporations may use essentially unlimited money to influence candidates' elections under the First Amendment of the US Constitution.

The legal issue here is that US law treats corporations as if they were individual people. This is ludicrous. People create corporations as devices to make money. For-profit corporations, by law, serve the sole purpose of increasing the wealth of shareholders. They cannot have any sort of moral values above greed. None. Thus, treating a corporate entity as if it should have concern for its customers, neighbors or environment, as most individual people do, makes no sense. Such concern, carried out in action, could bring about shareholder lawsuits.

Corporations differ from persons in another important way. Most corporations have money, and thus power, that only an elite few individuals can even imagine. They can invest in politicians freely, and the return on those investments far exceeds any honest way of making a living. It is the sole duty of corporations to make money, and using politicians is the easiest way of doing so in many cases. A wealthy individual might invest in politicians in order to benefit the town where he lives, to forward a personal cause he favors or for the feeling of power. Corporations do it strictly for the money.

Two appropriate responses to this decision come to mind. The first and the more obvious, lies in making the status of corporations better fitted to their function. We need to recognize that companies cannot be responsible for their own ethical behavior; too many conficting factors inhibit that. Regulation obviously fits the bill here, but with additions such as a "death penalty" (dissolution) for those corporate entities that repeatedly violate the laws affecting them. Another good idea is to hold directors and/or executives criminally responsible for the behavior of the corporate entities they control.

The more important response to the Supreme Court decision is to change our election financing system. In this, we already lag behind most of the developed world. Put simply, the politicians will respond to the people only to the degree that the people hold the power over their election. So long as elections are financed by corporations and wealthy donors, the odds of that remain as slim under the Democrats as they were under the Republicans. The chances of third parties gaining power under the current system and being able to change it are even smaller. Implementing one form or another of public financing will result in major government budget savings as contributors lose the power to buy pork barrel projects worth orders of magnitude more than the contributions, to block reforms aimed at making them pay taxes and to commit various other acts of greed. Other special interests would also find themselves less favored by the politicians they currently elect. For one example, a variety of conservative Christian organizations recieved $206 for providing "abstinence-only" sex education in 2006. They would probably would have to recognize the abundant evidence that their product does not serve any of its stated purposes. They would lose that money unless they can produce believable progress. Results would begin to count. All in all, public election financing is both cheaper and a far better investment than bridges to nowhere, oil industry subsidies or "abstinence only" sex education ever have been.