It is interesting that everyone seems to see this the same way - nothing more than a bribe.
I have just finished a little light summer reading - a book entitled "The Divide - American injustice in the age of the wealth gap." The book details in exquisite detail how the American justice system, so called, has switched at the highest levels, that being Attorney General Eric Holder himself, from a mechanism that seeks to punish criminal behavior with traditional criminal penalties like serving time in jail to simply collecting fines which are usually a mere shadow of the ill gotten gains from the criminal enterprise.
Referring to the great financail meltdown of 2008, during which trillions were siphoned off into the pockets of a small group of top executives, the Justice Department trumpeted that it had recovered record fines for such wrong doing. Those fines, large as they were, still represented less than 5% of the money stolen.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, the poor have been subjected to a stepped up campaign of police harassment leading to draconian judicial punishments out of all proportion to the purported crimes committed. It reminds me of the good old days when the dregs of English society were deported to Australia for the sin of stealing a crust of bread or eating a pear hanging from a tree in the royal forest.
In other words, society has once again found a way to make us all little more than feudal era vassals who are expected to bend the knee of obeissance to our masters. The only difference is that now those masters are not monarchs but rather faceless corporate entities that operate on a global basis unchecked by virtually any legal restraints whatsoever.
Welcome to the new MIddle Ages. Are we on our way to the new Dark Ages as well?
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