Most Americans realize that there wasn’t just economic—poor decisions that precipitated the financial crisis, but massive, system- and industry-wide fraud on the part of Wall Street and the banking industry. And yet, there has been virtually no criminal investigations of any kind, let alone prosecutions or accountability.
At the same time, the United States is the largest prison state in the world. We imprison more of our citizens than any country on earth, including China and India and other countries with many more times the people that we have, for even trivial infractions, things that no other country in the Western world imprisons people for. And this chasm between how we treat ordinary Americans in the justice system, imprisoning them for petty and trivial offenses, versus how we treat the world’s most powerful and wealthiest individuals, who can commit the kind of fraud on the massive scale that we saw in 2008 with no accountability, pure impunity, is really what drove me to write the book and I think is what is driving so much citizen anger.
The legal immunity for the elite classes, and at the same time—because the period coincides exactly, four decades. From 1972 to 2007, imprisonment rates in the U.S. increased fivefold, from 93 per 100,000 to 491 per 100,000.
one of the illustrative ironies is that Richard Nixon, of course, is—what I argue in the book, the pardon of Richard Nixon was the template that created how elite immunity is now justified and how it seeped into the private sector. And of course, Richard Nixon’s career, throughout the 1960s and then into the early 1970s, was made as a law-and-order Republican, demanding no leniency for criminals, harsher and harsher sentences for people who commit crimes. And this is the divergence between how the elite class treats itself when it commits crimes and how they treat ordinary Americans, what Occupy Wall Street calls the 99 percent, that has really destroyed the rule of law, because the rule of law ultimately was intended to be the sole anchor guaranteeing equal opportunity and equal treatment that would then legitimize outcome inequality, and we no longer have that.
Dick Cheney was accused of all sorts of crimes, and so if you’re Dick Cheney, what do you want to do besides venerate this idea implemented by his former boss, Gerald Ford, that elites, political elites, should not be held accountable for crimes committed in office? And one of the things that Gerald Ford did—and what’s interesting is there’s evidence from Seymour Hersh and others that he was actually appointed as vice president because he was expected to pardon Richard Nixon. How corrupt of an arrangement can you get? But one of the things that Ford said, and he was very shifty-eyed and uncomfortable as he announced it, if you watch the video, was that he said the rule of law is “no respecter of persons,” which is the basic premise of the American political system. And then he added, but it’s also “a respecter of reality,” and then went on to justify why Richard Nixon had suffered enough and why it was good for the country—not for Richard Nixon, but for the country—to immunize him from consequences.
I don’t think there’s any doubt that Richard Nixon committed a whole slew of felonies, from lying to the FBI and to Congress, to withholding evidence that he was compelled to produce, to ordering a break-in or being part of the ordering of a break-in at the Democratic National Committee, and then covering up, through a whole series of acts of obstruction of justice for which numerous people were imprisoned, those crimes. And, of course, the Congress was ready to find that he committed those crimes through impeachment. And the pardon itself is a recognition that he indeed did commit felonies, but that the president is excusing him from consequences.
And what’s interesting is, there were people at the time, including Gerald Ford’s own press secretary—30 days after he was appointed, Jerald terHorst, who said, “I’m resigning because in good conscience I can’t watch you immunize the most powerful people from political consequence while, for example, we prosecute conscientious objectors of the Vietnam War. How do we explain this dual treatment for ordinary citizens versus our most powerful?” And he was very prescient, because that’s exactly what this precedent ended up spawning.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been critical of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. He recently said the protests were unproductive, since the biggest tax base for New York City was in fact Wall Street.
this is the propagandistic template that has been used to try and persuade Americans that it’s not only something they should accept, but cheer for, when the wealthiest in our society are permitted to prosper without constraints. It was the Ronald Reagan cliché of “a rising tide lifts all boats,” meaning the richer the rich get, the better off you are. And, of course, it’s in Michael Bloomberg’s interest to propagate this mentality, as well. And I think, for a while, Americans believed that. And yet, what they’re seeing now is that that’s actually completely untrue, that the richer the rich get, nothing trickles down. Inequality starts to explode, and their opportunities start to become destroyed, because the richest are able to use the power that accompanies that wealth, the political power, to ensure that the system doesn’t work create equal opportunity, but works only to entrench and shield their own ill-gotten gains. So this kind of—these platitudes that Michael Bloomberg is spewing are no longer working, because people compare their own experience to what they’re teaching and see that it’s false.
In the beginning, people were criticizing Occupy Wall Street, including people who might otherwise be sympathetic, on the grounds that they didn’t have any policy platforms, they didn’t have PowerPoint presentations of the legislation they wanted. And I wrote very early on in defense of them repeatedly, because I think that what this movement is about is more important than specific legislative demands. It is exactly what you just said, which is expressing dissent to the system itself. It is not a Democratic Party organ. It is not about demanding that President Obama’s single bill pass or anything along those lines. It is saying that we believe the system itself is radically corrupted, and we no longer are willing to tolerate it. And that’s infinitely more important than specific legislative or political demands.
there’s clearly an effort on the part of the Democratic Party to co-opt the energy that is behind the Occupy movement and to reinject the Obama campaign with the enthusiasm that it had in 2008, and which it now lacks obviously. And the reason why that’s so destined to fail is because, although President Obama was funded overwhelmingly by Wall Street in 2008, that fact was not very extensively reported or appreciated. And yet, now people have seen him in office shielding Wall Street from investigations. There is an excellent attorney general in the state of New York, Eric Schneiderman, who is trying to investigate Wall Street and is being very aggressively pressured by the Obama White House.
They need him and all attorneys general to sign on to a deal that would allow Wall Street banks essentially to immunize themselves forever from all damages from the mortgage fraud that they systematically perpetrated on the country in the court for what is essentially a woefully inadequate check of cost of doing business. And Schneiderman, and actually now Beau Biden in Delaware, refuse to sign on to this legislation and insist on continuing their investigation. And the Obama White House and administration are aggressively pressuring them. And they want, as well, to raise funds, and are raising funds, from the securities and banking industry as a way of funding the President’s re-election campaign. So that idea that Occupy Wall Street will simultaneously occupy Wall Street and work to keep in power their most lavishly funded politician, I think, is a pipe dream of the Democratic Party and the Obama White House. But it shows the desperation, I think, that they’re feeling in terms of reinjecting some citizen enthusiasm into their campaign.
U.S. troop withdrawal is really one of the more misleading storylines that we’ve seen in some time, this idea that President Obama has heroically ended the war in Iraq as promised. First of all, as the Obama White House itself is continuously pointing out, because they want to immunize themselves from criticism, the agreement with which they’re complying is a Status of Forces Agreement that was actually negotiated and put in place and ratified by the Bush administration before Obama took office. That’s what set the end of 2011 date, because the Iraqi government was forced by its own political pressures to demand that. More incredibly and more significantly, the Obama administration has spent the last six months doing everything possible to persuade and convince and cajole and bully the Iraqi government into waiving this deadline and allowing it to keep more forces in Iraq beyond the 2011 deadline, and failed to do that because the condition that they were demanding, which is full legal immunity for our troops—just, you know, we don’t subject ourselves to the rule of law—is something that they couldn’t accept. And even with the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, we are keeping what McClatchy called a small army of private contractors and others under the control of the State Department. So the Obama administration tried to keep troops in Iraq and failed, and now is claiming credit for withdrawing them.
Discussion with Glenn Greenwald.
Glenn Greenwald, political and legal blogger for Salon.com. His new book is called With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful.
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