Color of Law: The Unbridled Free Market Suffocates Democracy

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The evidence of this crisis abounds:

One of the main points of Michael Moore’s film, Sicko, is that the collusion between politicians and the healthcare industry is a barrier to having a free and universal health system. Moore’s exposé on the crisis of health insurance in America is an indictment of the healthcare corporations that deny medical treatment to the ill, and allow people to die, all for the sake of profits.

That unpopular war has been promulgated by an administration with more than tenuous ties to the oil and defense industries, and war profiteers such as Halliburton. The president, an oil man in tune with the financial interests of that business, repudiated the Kyoto Protocol and the scientific realities of global warming, and allowed the clock to tick on climate change.

During the Jim Crow era, a collusion of lawmakers, law enforcement and industry resulted in the convict lease system. Unjust and arbitrary laws resulted in incarceration and forced labor for poor former slaves, and profits for industry. Similarly, today’s special interests favor draconian get-tough-on-crime drug policies that target and warehouse African Americans and Latinos. These policies fail to address rehabilitation and the root causes of society’s ills, but fuel the burgeoning $60 billion a year prison engine.

Something is wrong in the self-described land of opportunity. Although Americans are the hardest working people on the planet, the American Dream, it appears, is elusive. As the Pew Charitable Trusts recently reported, there is far less economic mobility in the United States than was previously thought. In fact, America is less economically mobile than many other nations, including Canada, France, the Scandinavian countries, and Germany. As the United States is experiencing the most dramatic shift in wealth in the nation’s history, exacerbated and hastened by Bush’s regressive policies, never have so few owned so much. And never has an administration manipulated the apparatus of government to such an extent for its own financial and political gain.