A genuine British Lord is being tried in Chicago and the selection of the jury is in the news. Media giant Lord Conrad Black is being tried for stealing millions when he already has billions, but this is not the issue being discussed right now. Lord Black believes that the jury will not fairly judge him because they are not his peers. To Lord Black being human is not enough, he is a man of wealth and privilege, and nobody being considered for his jury lives in a mansion, has more than one home, rides in a limousine with a chauffeur, is titled like he is, nor has billions in the bank as he has. A man who abhors health care for all, a right to housing, and all such amenities, Black thought America was a Field of Dreams because according to the media (which his friends own), we worship our rich, we are not like the Canadians who are more socialized or Europeans who view the rich with jaundiced eye.
Naomi Klein nails it in her article on Common Dreams:
"...So, if Black was going to get a sympathetic jury anywhere, it should have been in the United States, where regular people worship the wealthy because they are convinced they could be the next to strike it rich (unlike those envious, over-taxed and -regulated Europeans and Canadians). Perhaps in 2000, at the height of the stock market bubble, Black would have faced a jury made up of such supportive folks, ones who would have looked at his uncanny ability to divert Hollinger profits into his own accounts and said, “More power to you.” But in 2007 Black came face to face with the casualties of the boom’s collapse and of the ideological revolution he so aggressively globalized. As the judge questioned a pool of 140 prospective jurors in order to whittle the group down to twelve, plus eight alternates, she found men and women who had “lost every dime” in the WorldCom collapse, whose pensions had evaporated on the stock market, who had been fired thanks to outsourcing and who’d had their finances ravaged by identity theft..."
Instead Black's 140 + field of prospective jurors were not so generous to Conrad or to any of the rich. Naomi Klien writes further:
"...Many appeared to regard North America’s ultrarich the way Russians see their oligarchs–even if the way they amassed their fortunes was legal, it shouldn’t have been. “I just don’t think anyone should get that amount of money from any company, example Enron and WorldCom,” one juror wrote. Others said, “I feel that there is corruption everywhere”; anyone paid as much as Black “probably stole it”; “I am sure this goes on all the time and I hope they get caught.” John Tien, a 40-year-old accountant at Boeing, launched into such an elaborate lecture about the accounting scams endemic in corporate America that Black’s lawyers asked the judge to question him in private, to prevent his views from influencing the other potential jurors...."
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/03/23/38/Ain't it funny when the media believes its own lies? Ain't it sad this man believes he should have more rights than everyone else and that he is better and not all people are created equal in the eyes of God and this country? Isn't it time these people get the hint they are no different than we are and do not deserve to be treated better than we are?
Cat In Seattle
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