http://www.truthout.org/why-elite-class-protected-under-americas-justice-system/1319566022 Mark Karlin: Although your book, "With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful," is primarily on the increasingly adverse climate for civil liberties at the federal level, needless to say, your title seems made to order for what is happening with Occupy Wall Street. Protesters are getting arrested, while the elite perpetrators of Wall Street malfeasance and fraud go free. Is this a localized application of "how the law is used to destroy equality and protect the powerful"?
Glenn Greenwald: Actually, what is happening with the Occupy Wall Street protests is as perfect an illustration of the book's argument as anything I could have imagined. The book's central theme is that law is no longer what it was intended to be - a set of rules equally binding everyone to ensure that outcome inequalities are at least legitimate - and instead has become the opposite: a tool used by the politically and financially powerful to entrench their own power and control the society. That's how and why the law now destroys equality and protects the powerful.
What we see with the protests demonstrates exactly how that works. The police force - the instrument of law enforcement - is being used to protect powerful criminals who have suffered no consequences for their crimes. It is simultaneously used to coerce and punish the powerless: those who are protesting and who have done nothing wrong, yet are subjected to an array of punishment ranging from arrest to pepper spray and other forms of abuse.
That's what the two-tiered justice system is: elites are immunized for egregious crimes while ordinary Americans are subjected to merciless punishment for trivial transgressions.
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