From today's NYT piece on the Robert's court 'steady move to the right':
In lower-profile cases, the court’s rulings continued to be good for business interests and bad for the Obama administration.
“We shouldn’t lose sight of the court cementing its legacy as the most pro-business court in the modern era,” said Lee Epstein, who teaches law and political science at the University of Southern California and helped write a recent study of the Roberts court’s business rulings.
The U. S. Chamber of Commerce had another successful year. The court cut back on class actions, favored arbitration and made it harder to sue the makers of dangerous drugs and employers accused of workplace discrimination.
“Anyone doubting that the most important story of the Roberts court is its business rulings has not been paying enough attention,” said Doug Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, a liberal group. “This term’s 5-4 rulings, all favoring the chamber, move the law sharply to the right and to the great detriment of consumers, employees, and other Americans trying to get their day in court.”
As American liberals rejoice about inevitable gains in the cultural sphere, they shrug about continuous losses in the economic sphere. I am amazed at how little attention Americans pay to the way power works in this country.
John Oliver on The Daily Show in reference to the Snowden leaks remarked last week that Snowden did not reveal any illegality or wrongdoing, and that was the most disturbing part--that it's all legal now. [But is it?] In the next ten years we will be finding that all kinds of injustices are perfectly legal, and that there is no recourse.
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Another word about Brazil. Also in today's NYT is an article about the amazing corruption among Brazil's politicians: about a third of the Brazilian congress is currently under indictment, but even when legislators are convicted, they only very rarely go to jail:
Almost 200 legislators, or a third of Brazil’s Congress, are facing charges in trials overseen by the Supreme Federal Tribunal, according to documents compiled by Congresso em Foco, a prominent watchdog group. The charges range from siphoning off public funds to far more serious claims of employing slave labor on a cattle estate or ordering the kidnapping of three Roman Catholic priests as part of a land dispute in the Amazon.
Scholars of Brazil’s judicial system say legislators in corruption scandals often avoid jail, in part because of the special judicial standing enjoyed by about 700 senior political figures in the country, including all 594 members of Congress and senior cabinet members.
The standing allows these people to be tried only in the Supreme Federal Tribunal, producing years of delays in an institution bogged down by many other pressing matters in Brazilian society. Until 2001, politicians could not even be tried without the authorization of Congress, a function of the deference traditionally paid to elected officials in the legal system.
But here's what the recent protests have wrought:
Just as surprising to many Brazilians, Congress is now scrambling to cobble together a response. This week, legislators approved a bill to use oil royalties for education and health care. The Senate, the upper house of Congress, gave its nod to stiffer penalties for corruption, and the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, shot down an attempt to rein in corruption investigators. Senators are elected for eight-year terms, while members of the Chamber of Deputies serve four-year terms.
Also, a powerful congressional committee approved a measure to lift the veil of secrecy when lawmakers vote on whether to strip fellow members of Congress of their seats.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Federal Tribunal ordered the immediate arrest of Natan Donadon, a congressman found guilty in 2010 of embezzlement — a rare attempt to try to imprison a sitting congressman. The last time the high court made a similar move was during the military dictatorship in 1974, when justices ordered a legislator arrested for opposing a visit by the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.
Still, the fury builds in one protest after another.
“These wolves, that trash over there, they rob the people, they feast on the meat of the people by stealing public money destined to do things for us,” said Caio Fabio de Oliveira, 45, a civil servant in the Health Ministry, who was among the demonstrators against Congress this week in the capital, Brasília. “It is shameful for the Brazilian people; I work for the government, and I’m ashamed every day.”
Only sustained public outrage gets anything done in the public interest. It's no different in the US than in Brazil. For Americans to become outraged, maybe the corruption and blatant injustice has to become as outrageous in the US as it is now in Brazil. If current trends hold, it will be there sooner than we think. The US government is already an publich embarrassment, just not yet an outrageous one.