America was founded by lawyers--we may be angry at lawyers but they keep us from shooting and stabbing each other when we are in conflict with each other. We need to be grateful for Anglo/American jurisprudence--it was the essential framework that helped us, for better or worse, build the greatest society in history (not the nicest, mind you). We rely on rule of law to maintain a healthy balance. Never too much law and never too little--yes, it favors the rich, generally, but human society always gives the powerful power.
Personally, I believe the economic problems we face today are directly attributable to a breakdown in law and order. I don't mean street crime which is manageable where draconian measures have gotten some results. Mind you, I think incarcerating people is not the most efficient anti-poverty program we could have but, frankly, that's what the American people want and the politicians were glad to provide them with a nice hefty bill for prisons whose job 1 is to degrade human beings. The current crime wave is centered on the crimes of the elites who can rob, steal, assault, defraud, run every manner of con known to man and not be brought to justice--unless, of course those crimes have other elites as victims then it's another story. Of course, occasionally honest prosecutors will indict these criminals but they are the exception not the rule.
Joseph Stigliz is one of the best economists in the world and understands the real world better than any other economist I know of including Krugman.
The legal system is supposed to be the codification of our norms and beliefs, things that we need to make our system work. If the legal system is seen as exploitative, then confidence in our whole system starts eroding. And that’s really the problem that’s going on.
Even if corporate gangsters are caught and prosecuted their fines and penalties are seldom in line with the cost to society or a serious deterrent to other criminals--it just becomes a cost of doing business. If you're made a billion dollars in a con you don't mind paying ten million in fines.
Some years back we had stories of pallets full of hundred dollar bills--did anything come out of it? This story was reported in several news outlets and the following is from a Patrick Cockburn story in February of 2009 for the London Independent.
In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff's notorious Ponzi scheme.
"I believe the real looting of Iraq after the invasion was by US officials and contractors, and not by people from the slums of Baghdad," said one US businessman active in Iraq since 2003.
There are many many stories about Iraq and massive corruption by contractors which we all know about but what happened to this story? Well, the MSM is only, in my view, a propaganda organ so that whoever got the money is powerful enough to keep justice at bay.
But, of course, the banking and mortgage fraud system was the really big heist and it was, without a doubt, a massive criminal enterprise organized by the Finance and Real Estate industries. We shoul have thousands of people facing trial today if there were such a thing as justice. There isn't. And here's the important thing to understand. The Obama administration has done next to nothing about it and the people at DKOS are still cheerleading the Democrats who have no interest in the fundamental building block of our society--without it we perish and I want to assure any of you here we will perish as a society within the next decade or two. Everyone will start breaking the law if they can get away with it. We'll have to have a police state to stop it or anarchy and chaos. Do we continue to support corporate Democrats? Do we continue to support the criminals in the major banks? That's what we do when we support this administration--we're saying yes to the real princes of darkness that make Richard Perle look like the Dalai Lama.
