This post was co-authored by Nick Egnatz of the American Monetary Institute.
The claims of President Obama and Attorney General Holder that they seek justice in the death of unarmed teenager Michael Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, have a hollow ring. They would be almost laughable, if the consequences, of who they, while in office, have actually chosen to prosecute and who they have not prosecuted, were not so destructive to true justice.
This post isn't about the guilt or innocence of the police officer who shot Michael Brown, nor about the actions of Michael Brown that preceded the shooting. It's about why so many U.S. citizens have so little confidence in our justice system. The black citizens of Ferguson, MO have a lifetime of experiences living under white rule (political and police), despite numbering almost 70 percent of the population. They have a right to be suspicious when an armed white policeman shoots an unarmed black youth six times, killing him.
"I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards," declared President Obama when he took office and made the decision to not investigate and prosecute President Bush and his top aides for lying to the American public and taking us to war in Iraq -- a still unfolding disaster! But Obama's oath of office was not to keep us safe as he is so apt to say, but rather to protect and defend the Constitution and thus our laws. It is the Constitution and system of law that will protect us, but only if the Chief Executive investigates and prosecutes when the facts warrant it. In the case of Bush and Cheney their actions certainly have earned them their day in court. Unfortunately with that one utterance and no action, President Obama seriously harmed the rule of law.
Continuing their disregard for justice, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder have refused to prosecute the thousands of Wall Street bankers whose financial crimes were directly responsible for working class Americans losing trillions of dollars and over 9,000,000 homes foreclosed or in foreclosure!
AMI has written three Huffington Post blogs on how useless economists have been and that they must be held responsible for the wreckage, death and misery caused by their banker's and other "financiers" breaking our serious laws, leading to the crash! (See this.)
One good economist though actually did at least part of the job in written testimony to the Senate Subcommittee on Crime, Senate Judiciary Committee, May 4, 2010. Jamie Galbraith started by recognizing: "I write to you from a disgraced profession." Darn right they are disgraced! The son of the old John Galbraith, he is familiar with Congressional testimony, having worked for some years as a Congressional aide. In finishing his testimony he wrote powerfully:
"In this situation, let me suggest, the country faces an existential threat. Either the legal system must do its work. Or the market system cannot be restored. There must be a thorough, transparent, effective, radical cleaning of the financial sector and also of those public officials who failed the public trust. The financiers must be made to feel, in their bones, the power of the law. And the public, which lives by the law, must see very clearly and unambiguously that this is the case. Thank you."
If you ask, dear reader, "How does the survival of our civilization depend on this?"; the events of Fergison Missouri, may help us to understand why:
By not prosecuting ANY of the thousands of criminal bankers who destroyed our economy, President Obama and Attorney General Holder are nearly as responsible for the destruction of law in America as Bush and Cheney are for their lying and "anything goes" unelected administration.
What happens when the rule of law fails? I'm informed by a friend whose brother lives in a white section of Fergison that a nearby gun shop put up this sign a few days ago: "CLOSED - SOLD OUT."
Jamie Galbraith deserves much credit for his testimony. The other part would have been to advise the Senators of the necessity for monetary reform, for example as presented by Dennis Kucinich's N.E.E.D. Act (National Emergency Employment Defense Act) which strips the banks of their power to create what we use for money by ending fractional reserve banking. It nationalizes the Federal Reserve System into the U.S. Treasury (where people think it is now!); and then the government creates and spends new money on infrastructure, health care and education.
Galbraith is still young, and we are hopeful, but the AMI moves forward on monetary reform, with or without the help of economists!
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Nick Egnatz is a Vietnam veteran. He has been actively protesting our government's crimes of empire in both person and print for some years now and was named "Citizen of the Year" for Northwest Indiana in 2006 for his peace activism by the National Association of Social Workers.
Last year Egnatz wrote about the Obama Administration's War on Dissent and Whistleblowers. Contact Nick at OccupyNick@yahoo.com
Stephen Zarlenga is co-founder and Director of the American Monetary Institute. He is the author of The Lost Science of Money book, and sponsors the annual AMI Monetary Reform Conferences. See http://www.monetary.org. Contact Stephen at ami@taconic.net