If We Were An Honest Country We'd Erase That "Equal Justice" Line Over The Supreme Court Steps And Put "Unillegal Graft" There

The subject of my first post today reminded me of the infamous quote from the gilded age gangster J. P. Morgan,  

"I don't hire lawyers to tell me what I can't do, I hire them to tell me how to do what I want them to do."  

Which to anyone familiar with Morgan and his fellow gilded gangsters will mean how to commit crimes while giving them a slant that some lying dishonest judge will pretend means they're not illegal.  What the great contemporaneous American author, O Henry described when engaged in by one of his shifty minor cheats  called "unillegal graft".   Only unlike "Jeff" who didn't steal from widows and orphans, nevermind steal babies and put them in cages to attract the approval of racists, the truly successful American gangsters would steal from the poorest as readily as they might the merely less rich who had bought fewer lawyers and judges and politicians.  

I found a footnote from a book that says the sleazy lawyer he told that to,  Elbert Henry Gary, in 1927, gave the Saturday Evening Post a line of bilge in which he claimed that, land sake, his employer hadn't intended to break the law, no he merely wanted to be told how to do things legally.   You may note that Gary, who was the lawyer who brought together a number of the most successful gangsters of that first gilded era to form United Steel, was often called "Judge Gary" he having for a time been a lower court judge, no doubt sworn to uphold the law and whatever else he had sworn to to get that appointment.   He retained the title in later life even as he was one of the gilded era's more successful and influential thieves and legal council to thieves.  

He was allowed to do that under the Progressive Era reforms of Theodore Roosevelt, under the kind of "gentleman's agreement" which routinely under American law and the judiciary and politics has allowed some of the most serious of crime to have happened, known and unpunished, the kind of thing that Trump and Barr thrive on as well as their associated scum like Mnuchin and the rest of his appointments.   

I mention this because this description of that T. Roosevelt era legal cutsiness is typical of the kind of unillegal crime that flourishes under our legal system, under the Constitution as interpreted by courts and Supreme Courts who have no intention of delivering equal justice under law.

But through the bureau, the president did enter into a series of gentlemen's agreements with Morgan interests. Companies such as United States Steel and International Harvester (organized in 1903) agreed to open records to the bureau's investigators, on the condition—which Roosevelt accepted—that the president would use such information only as backgrounding for his recommendations of policy to Congress and that nothing would be made public except with the consent of the corporations themselves. To make these arrangements, Roosevelt permitted Commerce and Justice department officials to confer with representatives of Morgan interests such as George W. Perkins, E. H. Gary, and Henry Clay Frick. The meetings gave the Morgan men a chance to debate the legality of their actions and to avoid prosecution by agreeing to correct any "technical" violations of the law in cases where they could not persuade the government otherwise. In spite of Roosevelt's autobiographical boasting, then, Morgan's men were meeting with the president's men to arrange matters.

In 1907, Morgan's men would meet with the president himself to arrange a steel merger that virtually handed the United States Steel Corporation nearly complete domination of the industry. The bankers' panic that year occasioned the conference. Among the feared casualties of the panic was the Trust Company of America (TCA), a major New York City financial institution whose collapse might have deepened the crisis. As it happened, the principal owners of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (TCIC) owed the TCA a lot of money. Morgan men Frick and Gary went to the president with a proposition. If they could be assured that there would be no antitrust prosecutions, the Morgan people would buy out the TCIC, thereby allowing its owners to pay off their debt to the TCA and keep the TCA solvent. Roosevelt may or may not have known the degree to which United States Steel's acquisition of the TCIC's steel plants, as well as its resources of coal and iron in Alabama, would substantially reduce competition in the industry. But he did see the virtue of averting a prolonged economic collapse (especially since the financial community was already whining loudly about how the crisis was all the fault of Roosevelt's "radical" attacks on the trusts). Roosevelt gave the green light to the merger. Whether he did so by explicitly approving Morgan's proposal or merely by leaving the matter as a tacit understanding, Roosevelt vigorously defended his role in the merger when he testified about it in 1911—after the Taft administration sued United States Steel for violation of the antitrust laws.

Roosevelt did not have to be apologetic about the steel merger, because he had not concealed his skepticism about the antitrust laws. Addressing Congress in 1907, he argued that the Sherman Act "should be . . . so amended as to forbid only the kind of combination which does harm to the general public." How should it be determined what kinds do harm? "Reasonable agreements between, or combinations of, corporations should be permitted provided they are submitted to and approved by some appropriate Government body." Instead of corporations testing legal limits in the courts by acting and then awaiting retaliatory action from the government or by private litigants, the new order would require the large interstate corporations to consult first with federal agencies established to pass on the acceptability of proposed moves. In the United States Steel case, Morgan had consulted with the president.

They didn't just hire lawyers to let them get away with crime, they had a president in their pocket, one peddled as a "progressive" reformer.  

I will note that that most addled brained hero of American liberals,  Oliver Wendell Holmes was an even more ruthless fan of unbridled gangster capitalism. 

All his life Holmes held to the survival of the strong, and did not disguise his view that the Sherman Act was a humbug, based on economic ignorance and incompetence, and that the Interstate Commerce Commission was not a fit body to be entrusted with rate making. However, as he said to Pollock, he was so skeptical about our knowledge of the goodness or badness of laws that he had no practical criticism except what the crowd wants. Personally he would bet that the crowd if it knew more wouldn't want what it does.

That was from a lecture that Holmes' private secretary and personal friend, the later Judge Francis Biddle, who presided over the Nuremberg trials, described him.  I should go look up to see if his private writings have been published because those are said to show that this great figure in American law really was, in his private beliefs, a rather obvious fascist.   From what I've read of those who knew him personally,  I have every reason to believe that is true.  It makes you wonder how the present Republican members would express their true political ideology if they had to.  

No, the American judicary has had some great figures but the majority of them are gangster lawyers and hacks when they aren't Darwinian fascists and old line slave-power racists.  I don't buy the PBS made-for-TV amber gelled camera images and elegiac movie music bullshit image of them.  They're gangsters.