Volume 1 Number 3
Remember accountability? No? Actually, it’s gotten to be an anachronism like girdles, typewriters, record players, Green Stamps and paying in cash. All used to be popular years ago, but are no longer in vogue.
Let’s take a recent event, the sentence of Oscar Pistorius, to see what is wrong with accountability nowadays. He is the track star in South Africa who was sentenced to five years for shooting his girlfriend through the bathroom door because he thought she was an intruder. It was shown that he had been loose with guns before, and he claimed that he thought his girlfriend was in bed before he started blasting away. Going by Mr. Pistorius’ standards, my wife would be in danger of being shot two or three times a night.
This is a trial that went on for months and got worldwide coverage. After all that, it turns out he might only have to serve 10 months. “A pathetic slap on the wrist for taking a woman’s life,” according to one Twitter user. Hard to disagree with that. Where is the sense of proportionality? Is a young woman’s life only worth ten months in jail? What kind of a message does this send?
While this case happened in South Africa, it could just have well occurred in the United States. We have just witnessed our own examples of the lack of accountability in the killing of a African-American boy by a security man in Florida and another young man shot in Missouri by a policeman, both under the guise of self-protection. The first has already been acquitted and the second is likely to get off.
The sad part is that lack of accountability isn’t unusual in today’s society. It permeates every level, not only in crimes of violence, but in the military, business, the judiciary, politics and even religion.
Used to be if something went awry on your watch you were punished for it, “got the axe,” so to speak. Let’s look at the judicial system as an example. In the 20th century, the Supreme Court rendered some wonderful decisions that truly enriched our country. There were:
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1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka invalidated racial segregation in schools.
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1963 Gideon v. Wainwright guaranteed a defendant’s right to legal counsel.
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1964 New York Times v. Sullivan extended the protection offered the press by the First Amendment
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1966 Miranda v. Arizona was another case that helped define due process.
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1973 Roe v. Wade legalized abortion
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1976 Buckley v. Valeo upheld the limits on political contributions.
In each of these cases, society was being held accountable to the rights of the individual. So what has the Court done in the 21st century that makes one scratch his or her head about accountability of late?
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2012 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruled that the government cannot restrict spending of corporations for political campaign, meaning that every dollar can have a vote.
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2013 Shelby County v. Holder struck down a law whereby the government would supervise elections in states with a history of discrimination in voting rights. Source: Milestone Cases in Supreme Court History, Infoplease.com.
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2008 Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. ruled that Ms. Ledbetter was not entitled to be made good for underpayment in salary compared with male co-workers because she did not file suit 180 days from her first pay check– even though she did not know of the discrepancy at the time. Congress later amended that ruling by passing an appropriate law to protect employees in such a situation.
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2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. The Court ruled that religious rights were added to the human qualities of corporations in that they cannot be forced to give full contraceptive coverage to their employees if this defies their religious beliefs.
In each of these cases the Court protected the powerful and didn’t make them accountable to the rights of the individual.
Let’s take a look at some other arenas. During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln kept firing his generals–McClellan, Pope, Hooker and Burnside–because they weren’t defeating the Confederate Army. This went on until he finally got the right man for the job–Ulysses S. Grant.
Then at the start of World War II, there was a four star Admiral Edward Kimmel, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at the time of Pearl Harbor. Because of the lack of preparedness of the U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor, he got the hook. So did one of the most famous generals of all time–Douglas MacArthur. President Truman fired him for disobeying orders from his Commander-In-Chief.
Now let’s look at what happened to some of the leading figures in the botched second Iraq and Afghanistan wars. How were they punished? How were they made accountable for their failure? Why, President George W. Bush gave them the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian order he could bestow. That included retired General Tommy Franks who led the invasion and messed up the occupation, former CIA Director George Tenet who said the invasion was a “slam dunk”, and Paul Bremer, who presided over the grotesque Iraq reconstruction. That is 21st-century style accountability.
Remember the savings and loan scandals of the 1980’s? Over 1,000 Wall Street and bank executives went to jail for fraud in those cases. That’s right, over 1,000. Source: bill moyers.com; September 17, 2013.
What about the latest banking debacle of 2008, 70 times larger than the savings and loans misdeeds, which became the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history? How many of those top-level scoundrels have gone to the clinker? The answer is none, zip, zero. Quite a difference–more 21st-century accountability, or lack of it.
How about the Catholic Church? Going back to the Middle Ages, they knew how to deal with non-believers. They delivered accountability by giving suspected heretics the rack in the Inquisition, just to make sure they were guilty of wrongdoing. If a few innocents were tortured in the process, so be it, but they were hell-bent on accountability.
How about the modern-day Church? The Church hides known pedophiles by shunting them off to new parishes to cover up their iniquities, or retires them to monasteries, while the higher-ups fail to report these crimes to authorities. Once discovered, the Church pays millions in damages to victims from their coffers–that were enriched by modest parishioner donations.
Meanwhile Pope John Paul II is elevating Archbishop Bernard Law of Boston, who was known to have shielded pedophile priests, to a sweetheart promotion, heading up one of Rome’s major basilicas, where he is safe from extradition. Source: political archive by Michael Parenti, posted in 2010.
We like to say, “so it goes.” But it would be more appropriate to say, “so it went.” It is no more. No more taking responsibility for one’s actions and no more accountability. Notice that in just about every case of a major lack of accountability there is a common denominator. The recipients of society’s largess are the powerful and rich. The losers are the 99 percent of us that don’t crack the upper crust.
Is it any wonder that people today distrust the major institutions in the country, especially Congress? Look what a 2014 poll by Gallup showed about people’s trust in major institutions in our country. What a sad state of affairs.
Percent who receive a “Great Deal of Confidence”
Church 25%
Police 25
Medical System 17 Supreme Court 15
Presidency 14
Criminal Justice 12
Newspapers 12
Banks 10
TV News 10
Big Business 9
Congress 4
Maybe it’s true that we get the institutions we deserve; less than one third of us even bothered to vote in the 2014 elections. But how do we begin to make our institutions accountable? That is a hard one. It took many years for us to stumble and fall so far. It probably started with Vietnam and the Nixon Watergate fiasco where he got off with impeachment alone, for what was a criminal offense. It has all gone downhill from there. So if it took 40 years to reach this deplorable state, it is unlikely there is a quick fix. The best thing we can do as individuals is to make sure we are individually accountable for our actions and to call institutions to task for their actions.
What we can do is remember to vote, and not automatically re-elect politicians who fail us to Congress and the courts. We must become more active in grass-roots politics, and vote in primaries. We should become active in demanding that those who head up corporations be accountable, by boycotting appropriate products, and if we are shareholders, voting our stocks.
Maybe we can begin to make a difference and those Gallup poll numbers will look better. Because if we don’t, this accountability disease will put our whole democracy in danger. We are becoming like a corrupt Third World country. That is a far greater threat than Ebola or ISIS. Let’s begin the task.
