http://www.oftwominds.com/blogapril11/injustice-poison4-11.html
The Fundamental Injustice That Is Poisoning the Nation
(April 20, 2011)
The guilty are powerful and free, the innocent burdened and oppressed: that is injustice.
There is a fundamental injustice that is poisoning the soul of the nation, and if it is not openly addressed then the nation will face the explosive consequences of institutionalized injustice.
Simply put, it is this: those responsible for the nation's financial crisis and its catastrophic after-effects are not paying for the consequences of their actions--it is the innocent, those who were not responsible, who are paying the price.
You can call it whatever you want: the Anarchy of the Super-Rich (as per Paul Farrell), the Financial Power Elite, the financial Oligarchy, Plutocracy or Corporatocracy, or the unprecedented concentration of financial wealth and political power in a financialized post-industrial economy. Whatever you call it, we all know this class of financiers and its minions got away with high financial crimes.
Do the crime, do the time--unless it's "white-collar" financial crime on a vast scale. Then you might pay a wrist-slap fine (a few million dollars from your treasure of embezzled hundreds of millions) and then you're free to go on your merry way.
The after-effects are not just the losses which can be totalled on a calculator: the really catastrophic losses are to the foundations of democracy and the economy. Democracy has been subverted--oh please, spare us the happy-story propaganda about "reform" and "the system worked"--and the economy has been incentivized to favor poisonously addictive financialization and the shadow institutions of corruption, fraud, embezzlement, favoritism, collusion and misrepresentation of risk. This might be summarized as the protection of vested interests, engineered and overseen by the partnership of the ever more intrusive Central State and the nation's Financial Power Elite.
The Central State, designed to protect the citizenry from an oppressive monarchy or Elite, now protects this Elite from the citizenry. That is how thoroughly the injustice has been institutionalized.
There is a second part to this fundamental injustice:
(continued)
I have come to realize that men are not born to be free. Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men. -Napoleon