Justice, where?

In America, to be a celebrity is to be an entitled citizen, with privileges the rest of us do not enjoy. Being a celebrity means that you can abuse yourself and other people seemingly endlessly, and get yet another chance. To be extremely wealthy is, in essence, to be a celebrity, because wealth puts you above the crowd, and often, above the law. We the poor ordinary masses seem to put the wealthy on a level above ourselves. People of a certain age will never forget, for instance, that Senator Edward M. Kennedy got drunk and drove his car into a pond, which resulted in the death of a young attractive woman to whom he claimed he was innocently giving a ride home. After this incident he went straight ahead with his senatorial career, without missing a beat, and only eleven years later made an impressive run at the white house, even though his own democratic party already controlled it.

Guilt and innocence are strange things in America. If you are black, and deal drugs, and get caught, you go to prison. If you are white,  you get probation. If you are white and wealthy, you get even less punishment, or none at all.

If you are a wealthy executive for a major financial institution, and have defrauded customers of billions of dollars, and your corporation is facing bankruptcy through mismanagement, you might get billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout money without ever having to pay it back.

But heaven help you if you are black, live in an inner city ghetto, and resort to selling marijuana because there are no jobs available and you have a family to support. In that case, you go to jail, often for a very long time. It has been pointed out by more than one writer that the United States locks up young African-American males at an astonishing rate, in what almost appears to be a modern form of enslavement. Bernie Madoff made one huge mistake: he defrauded the very wealthy. Had he confined himself to stealing from the poor, he might very well be out and around today. The lesson: if you're gonna cheat people, cheat the poor, for they have nobody to represent them.