Stephan:   There was a time when the American legal system was considered the benchmark for the world. Those days are long gone. The American gulag today and the courts and law enforcement agencies that service it constitute an octopus of the state that could have been described by Kafka on acid.  In the United States if you are an ivy league graduate and work for the right financial institution you can weasel billions from fixed income grandmothers with no fear of being held accountable.  If you are Black or Hispanic, and particularly if you are poor, however, any touch by one of the suckers of the octopus, and you are doomed. We manufacture criminals in the United States. Like cars they are created in the factories of the prison system. And they are needed, like terrorists, because they justify the expenditure of billions upon billions, producing profits made by a tiny faction of the population. There is a reason we have five per cent of the world's population, but twenty five per cent of the world's prisoners.