Farces of Law and Order

The rule of law has broken down in the United States. From the implementation and then ex post facto rationalization of, for example, rendition and torture of those deemed to be hostile foreign non combatants, to the wide array of criminal machinations aided and abetted by officialdom in the financial sphere, (machinations that, upon being discovered as such, have gone with almost no indictments or censure of any kind) the astonishing lack of adherence to legal strictures is hard to overestimate both in its scope and meaning.

This lawlessness, essentially fascistic in nature, is one path to, not just a loss of confidence in government, but ultimately to a critical erosion in the people's (increasingly shaky) belief in government's very legitimacy. I expect that in the United States the latter condition will manifest more strongly in time, even though the vast majority of citizens (and non citizens alike) are generally too ignorant and/or distracted to notice or respond appropriately to the transformation of their nominal Democracy to one that really doesn't even bother to pretend that it is no longer a Constitutional Republic.

In the meantime, we must stand by and watch as governments in the west desperately try to maintain their various social, economic, and political constructs from utterly disintegrating. They will all fail, mostly because the very basis for their creations are unsustainable. It doesn't help matters going forward that more borrowed money is being thrown at sinkholes created by unserviceable debt, but that is the only palatable response for a western political class which, first and foremost, enacts most or all of its counterproductive and desperate measures as a means to save itself.

So, Greece, and presumably, in time, Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Portugal (and who else?) will be extended more credit/debt deals, and the process of extend and pretend will persist until such time as it can't. At least in Europe one doesn't get the sense that, however misguided and parlous the condition of the E. U., that the rule of law, however watered down or provisional it may be in practice, has not been completely eviscerated.

After all, no leader in Europe would dare, whatever they might believe privately, to have opined that bonuses paid to CEOs of gangster finance companies such as Goldman Sachs, or J.P. Morgan, were simply the well deserved spoils of savvy businessmen.