Glenn Greenwald On the Rule of Law: With Liberty and Justice For Some

"Most of the events that we consider to be progress in American history were driven by the reverence for this concept that we are all equal under the law, that equality under the law is how we determine if we are perfecting the union...And what I think is radically different about today is not that the rule of law suddenly is not always being applied faithfully, because that has always been true. What is different about today, radically, is that we no longer bother to affirm that principle...

You can often, and I would say more often than not, in leading opinion-making elite circles, find an expressed renouncement or repudiation of that principle...All of these acts entail very aggressive and explicit arguments that the most powerful political and financial elites in our society should not be, and are not, subject to the rule of law because it is too disruptive, it is too divisive, it is more important that we should look forward, that we find ways to avoid repeating the problem...the rule of law is not that important of a value any longer...

The law is no respecter of persons, but the law is also a respecter of reality, meaning if it is too disruptive or divisive that it is actually in our common good, not the elite criminals, but in our common good, to exempt the most powerful from the consequences of their criminal acts, and that has become the template used in each of these instances."

Glenn Greenwald

I have been thinking along these lines for some time, that the rule of law in the West is becoming supplanted by a new kind of utilitarianism, relying on expediency in the service of power and the faux science of amoral economics, in order to excuse the massive frauds and criminal acts of the Anglo-American Empire that seems to be increasing.

Any concerns about the rule of law are roundly dismissed as a false concern with moral hazard as we saw so clearly in the great push for $700 Billion TARP based on a couple of handwritten sheets of paper, and a general amnesty for the perpetrators.

Sunday Viewing: Martin Luther King - 1965 - The Rhyme of History

This interview is interesting for several reasons.

First, it shows what a news discussion program looked like in 1965. One can compare that to the clash of the talking heads that often passes for news discussions today, especially on the mainstream media. It often seems to be a shameful spectacle of sophistry and cynicism.

Secondly, it reminds us of how great movements and protests, even the ones that later come to be viewed as historic, can initially be viewed as 'silly' and 'pointless.'

Thirdly, it is especially meaningful as a reminder that 'the good old days' that people may remember had a particularly ugly and seamy underside of violent repression and the abuse of the weak and the other.

The impulse to evil is not the domain of any particular people or time, but a recurrent problem that must be confronted by each generation, and each individual person, in their own way and calling.

There is always the temptation to look upon such gross injustices as insurmountable, and to simply conclude that things are going to hell in a handbasket, and turn away and to wash our hands of such troubles saying, What is the use of trying, and even further, 'what is truth?'

That is the way of those who who have ceased trying to be human, who have given themselves over to self-absorption, addictions, or despair, who are dying inside, and who when the time comes will make beasts of themselves, to escape the painful fragility of their own insubstantial being.




The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed on Sunday, September 15, 1963 as an act of racially motivated terrorism. The explosion at the African-American church, which killed four girls, marked a turning point in the U.S. 1960s Civil Rights Movement and contributed to support for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.



Martin Luther King Jr. broadened his support for civil rights to human rights, and spoke out forcefully against the US War in Vietnam in January of 1967. He gave a famous speech linking the civil rights and anti-war movements on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church.

He was assassinated one year to the day on April 4, 1968.

Robert F. Kennedy, another outspoken critic of the war who was running for President, was assassinated a little less than two months later in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968.

Richard M. Nixon was elected President. America finally left Vietnam five years later.

Nixon resigned the Presidency on August 9, 1974 upon facing formal impeachment charges of obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress.

A Tale of Two Cities: Holocaust of the Vanities

"They plunder, they slaughter, and they steal. This they falsely name Empire. And where they make a desert, they call it peace."

Tacitus, Agricola


"The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there. The time would come when blood, too, would be spilled on the streets, and many of the people would be stained with it.

And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a momentary gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the darkness of it was heavy—cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in waiting on the saintly presence—nobles of great power all of them; but, most especially the last. Samples of a people that had undergone a terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every corner, passed in and out at every doorway, looked from every window, fluttered in every vestige of a garment that the wind shook.

The mill which had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh, was the sigh, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless chimneys, and stared up from the filthy street that had no offal, among its refuse, of anything to eat."

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

I thought this was an exceptionally insightful article.  I excerpted the entire piece.

There are two nations in the US, growing more and more apart. 

The comfortable well-to-do are attempting to ignore the deepening plight of the majority of Americans, based on dodgy economic principles, pure unadulerated greed, self-serving rationalization, a false history of the widespread economic fraud, and a generally apathetic numbness towards the suffering of others that appears to be fully sociopathic.

The poor are merely a calculation in the struggle for the greatest share of the dwindling power and wealth of a declining Empire.  We are not quite there yet, but it will not take much to push things too far.   Austerity applied with a whip hand and a disdain for justice and genuine reform would do it.

This callous arrogance and brutality is nothing new to the one third of the world that has been repeatedly 'saved' by the Pax Americana in its benevolent self-delusions.

The blowback that is coming at home and abroad is going to blow like a hurricane.

And the elite in America will recoil with horror and surprise, and will not understand it.  Or at least,  will pretend not to understand it, once again.  And will blame it on envy, and try to hold on even harder to the status quo in a battle that, in their childish lack of real world perspective, they think they can win.  After all, they are 'winners.'  And they are just itching for yet another war.

There may be blood.  Quite a bit of it. But there will almost certainly be a holocaust of the vanities.

New York Magazine
Why Washington Accepts Mass Unemployment
By Jonathan Chait
3 August 2012

In the years since the collapse of 2008, the existence of mass unemployment has stopped being something the economic powers that be even pretend to regard as a crisis. To those directly impacted, the economic crisis is an emergency, a life-altering disaster the damage from which will endure for years. But most of those in a position to address it simply have not seen it in such terms. History will record that the economic elite has viewed the economic crisis from a perspective of detached complacency.

Two events from the last week have underscored this disturbing reality. The most widely covered was the Federal Reserve’s announcement that, despite a weakening economy, it still would not take steps to stimulate growth. The Fed may not like mass unemployment, but it dislikes inflation even more, and in its calculus, the hypothetical prospect of the latter outweighs the immediate reality of the former.

Here’s a second case, smaller but even more telling. The Obama administration has tried to prevail upon Edward DeMarco, the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, to offer lower mortgage rates to underwater home owners through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which he controls. What interests me is not the proposal itself, nor even DeMarco’s obstinate refusal, but an editorial in the Washington Post applauding DeMarco for refusing to implement the program.

The Post is the voice of the Washington centrist establishment, and the logic of the editorial is a telling signpost. The Obama administration had argued to DeMarco that the mortgage relief was a pure win-win. Not only would the lower mortgage rates provide relief to Americans desperate to keep their homes, and secondarily to give them more purchasing power for other things that would provide a small economic stimulus, it would save the government money: with lower mortgage rates, fewer would default on their government-owned mortgages. DeMarco replied that he believed the taxpayers would end up spending money on the deal: not much, but some.

The Post’s thumbs-up editorial of DeMarco endorsed the reasoning that only a relief program that could be assured to cost the taxpayers nothing was worthwhile. It concluded, “with signs multiplying that the housing market may be finally bottoming out without this additional stimulus, perpetuating this particular battle does not strike us as the best use of the secretary’s time.”

There are signs we’ve hit bottom. Nothing to worry about here. Why risk the possibility of a small outlay merely to provide relief to hundreds of thousands of desperate people? This is such a perfect statement of the way the American elite has approached the economic crisis. They concede that it is a problem. But there are other problems, you know.

It’s important to respond to arguments on intellectual terms and not merely to analyze their motives. Yet it is impossible to understand these positions without putting them in socioeconomic context. Here are a few salient facts: The political scientist Larry Bartels has found (and measured) that members of Congress respond much more strongly to the preferences of their affluent constituents than their poor ones. And for affluent people, there is essentially no recession. Unemployment for workers with a bachelors degree is 4 percent — boom times. Unemployment is also unusually low in the Washington, D.C., area, owing to our economy’s reliance on federal spending, which has not had to impose the punishing austerity of so many state and local governments.

I live in a Washington neighborhood almost entirely filled with college-educated professionals, and it occurred to me not long ago that, when my children grow up, they’ll have no personal memory of having lived through the greatest economic crisis in eighty years. It is more akin to a famine in Africa. For millions and millions of Americans, the economic crisis is the worst event of their lives. They have lost jobs, homes, health insurance, opportunities for their children, seen their skills deteriorate, and lost their sense of self-worth. But from the perspective of those in a position to alleviate their suffering, the crisis is merely a sad and distant tragedy.

Read the original article here.

I think you all know how I feel about all these things. Without serious reform, no amount of stimulus will correct the problems that are plaguing America. The parasites of Wall Street will pounce on any additional liquidity supplied by the Fed.

But I think there is a legitimate case to be made that the Fed has done everything it can for the Banks, but is relatively indifferent to the plight of the real economy. As a regulator the Fed is a colossal hypocrite and failure.

The trillions that have been spent bailing out the wealthy and subsidizing their greed are a scandal of the first order. And yet all they can say is 'more.'

The callous ugliness of many in this nation is of concern. They are encouraged to say outrageous things, and feel justified in taking outageously harsh, anti-human positions. And they are proud of it, having given themselves over completely to greed and hate and pride.

And they will be called to account. God will not be tolerant of such arrogance.

"And those who are rich should boast that God has humbled them. They will fade away like a little flower in the field.

The hot sun rises and the grass withers; the flower droops and falls, and its beauty fades away. In the same way, the rich will fade away with all of their worldly things." James 1:10-11


“We can believe what we choose. We are answerable for what we choose to believe.”

John Henry Newman

Gold Daily and Silver Weekly Charts - Phony Market Action Cycle

The wiseguys would like to take the equity markets up a little higher in order to short them. The problem they are facing is that most of the non-professionals are sitting this action out.

The metals markets are meaningless in the short term, given the corruption in the trade that pushes prices around the plate without any respect to genuine price discovery.

Today's 'rally' after Wednesday's 'decline' is a perfect example of the action in these markets that is more phony than prescient.

Don't feed the sharks. 

Your most powerful weapon is your refusal to participate in this sham.