Friday, April 24, 2015

Holder? I Just Met Her


A recent Matt Taibbi book, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap, was like one of those 3 or 4 short films under one title movies, the resonances of which often take hours, days, months to dawn.

Juxtaposed against the death spiral into debtors' prisons for outstanding warrant arrests and the trials of the migrants and their particular take on the Russian roulette of the revolving door (oh Rooooooo-bi-o: don't take your vote to work), is an exploration of the reasons no persons, save for a little tokenism here and there, did hard time for r*tfucking their own customers, nor for causing our bailout to a blackmail in plain sight.

Moreover, the companies where the almost 2nd Great Depression was fermented exited stage right with an expensable fine in the dead of night on a news dump Friday, in a brown paper sack.





There has been a shift in priorities which evidences itself in those puzzling developments: Wall St. crooks personally pay nothing and their corporations are forced to pry loose very little bottom line. Even the "journalist" app on your "device" could get around to that 5th "w."

Mr. Taibbi spells it out, laying it at the doorstep of "the Holder doctrine."

That establishment of priority for prosecution provides ample bulwark (the band names write themselves) to the crooks, asserting that there might be "collateral consequences" to jailing people with families or causing the loss of confidence in companies that lengthy trials would surely induce.

So some of the things I'll be watching for during the tenure of Loretta Lynch are pointed refutations to some of Eric Holder's less than stellar legacy at the Department of Justice.

Serving Hague papers (another great band name) is stupid low bar, but she needs to keep Holder's accomplishments, and they are many, and also go multiply.




But look over there, a bunny!
Excerpted from Taibbi's book: "We still have real jury trials, honest judges, and free elections, all the superficial characteristics of a functional, free democracy. But underneath that surface is a florid and malevolent bureaucracy that mostly (not absolutely, but mostly) keeps the rich and the poor separate through thousands of tiny, scarcely visible inequities. 

"For instance, while the trials may be free and fair, unfair calculations are clearly involved in who gets indicted for crimes, and who does not. Or: Which defendant gets put in jail, and which one gets away with a fine? Which offender ends up with a criminal record, and which one gets to settle with the state without admitting wrongdoing? Which thief will pay restitution out of his own pocket, and which one will be allowed to have the company he works for pay the tab? Which neighborhoods have thousands of police roaming the streets, and which ones don’t have any at all? 

"This is where the new despotism is hidden, in these thousands of arbitrary decisions that surround our otherwise transparent system of real jury trials and carefully enumerated suspects’ rights. This vast extrademocratic mechanism, it turns out, is made up of injustices big and small, from sweeping national concepts like Eric Holder’s Collateral Consequences plan, granting situational leniency to 'systemically important' companies, to smaller, more localized outrages like New York City prosecutors subverting speedy trial rules in order to extract guilty pleas from poor defendants who can’t make bail."




We are a government of laws, not men. 

Guinness nose douches notwithstanding. 

(Sorry for all the band names)