Normie Outlaw Culture

“Ongoing myths about the law serve to camouflage or protect these truly dominant acts of power—that’s an important reason for the near nonexistence of regular compliance reports by regulatory agencies to Congress and the public. Such reports would not only show widespread noncompliance and minimal enforcement, they would also reveal just how little help the aggrieved classes receive from legal processes. And, of course, indentured enforcement agencies do not have much interest in publicizing widespread violations of such magnitude. Doing so might generate an appropriate level of outrage—which could spur a movement to change the system that powerful institutions are more interested in keeping the way it is.
"Why would government want to help diminish these zones of lawlessness? It, too, operates in one. Our uncontrollable national-security government has given us secret wars, secret law, secret courts, secret evidence, secret prisons, unauthorized secret budgets, unlawful surveillance of attorney-client communications, blatant snooping on all Americans, unauditable secret expenditures for quagmires abroad, and even redacted published judicial decisions. Though due process of law is arguably the greatest legal achievement of Western civilization, unlawful imprisonment (now euphemistically called “detention,” regardless of duration) of domestic persons and aliens are the stuff of media exposés that mostly go nowhere. Our government has too often shunted aside probable cause and upended habeas corpus and other bulwarks of due process. And U.S. courts contribute to the impunity through knee-jerk procedures blocking lawsuit challenges due to presumed “lack of standing” or by saying that a dispute is “political” and can only be resolved between the executive and legislative branches”

- Ralph Nader, Land of the Lawless, Laphams Quarterly