Tuesday, July 17, 2018

America has a nobility problem that lets leaders escape consequences

America has a nobility problem that lets leaders escape consequences:
"Politicians and bureaucrats are America's ruling class and they should start paying a price for failure. Accountability isn't just for little guys.
...After all, nobody’s squiring about the United States, sporting titles like Duke of Pennsylvania or Earl of Internal Revenue.
But now I’m wondering if we don’t have a problem. 
See the source image...in practice, America absolutely does have a ruling class, and a permanent political class, and they seem to be increasingly one and the same. 
(As Angelo Codevilla writes:  “Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust.”) 
And like any ruling class, they claim, and possess, privileges and immunities not available to ordinary citizens.
...this privilege extends not only to the titled, but to their retainers, in this case police and other government bureaucrats.
In America, if you misunderstand the law, or simply are ignorant of it, you will nonetheless be liable to go to jail or be sued — if you are an ordinary citizen. 
If you are a government official, you can generally avoid liability in a lawsuit by pleading “qualified immunity,” meaning, in essence, that you misunderstood the law or were ignorant of it, but acted in good faith, a defense that is not available to ordinary citizens...
...And government officials almost never face criminal prosecution for their official acts, and on the rare occasions that they do, they are almost never convicted.

  • When the EPA poisoned the Animas River in Colorado, it rejected claims for damages, and nobody from the EPA went to jail.  

A private company under similar circumstances would have faced ruinous losses, and the executives would have risked criminal prosecution. 
Then-EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy skated.
Accountability is for the little people

  • When the IRS’s Lois Lerner deliberately targeted conservative groups — something the IRS admitted and apologized for — she retired with her pension and faced no charges. 
  • When Chinese hackers stole a vast database of secret military and intelligence personnel information, a blow some experts called a “cyber-Pearl Harbor,” nobody lost their job or went to jail. Accountability, it seems, is for the rest of us, the little people.

As a character in the movie "The Verdict" said, “You guys... you guys are all the same! The doctors at the hospital, you... it's always what I'm going to do for you. And then you screw up, and it's, ‘Ah, we did the best that we could, I'm dreadfully sorry.’ And people like us live with your mistakes the rest of our lives.”
Freedom from consequences:  
It’s the defining consequence of our modern titles of nobility..."
Read all.

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