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blue bits. red rocks.
Tuesday 23 February 2010

This oft-repeated notion — that prosecuting political officials and high-levels lawyers when they commit crimes in office is the hallmark of the “banana republics” of South and Central America — is exactly the opposite of reality. As leading political scientists have long documented, the actual hallmark of under-developed and backward nations is the immunity which political elites enjoy from the rule of law no matter how serious their crimes (Thomas Carruthers, Foreign Affairs, 1998: “Rule-of-law reform [in the Third World] will succeed only if it gets at the fundamental problem of leaders who refuse to be ruled by the law … . entrenched elites cede their traditional impunity and vested interests only under great pressure”). What makes a backward country backward is the confederation of elites insisting that investigations and prosecutions are only for the dirty people on the street corner, not for them. Glenn Greenwald

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