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Legal Reform – Learning From the Mistakes of the Past

January 31, 2016

Legal Reform – Learning From the Mistakes of the Past

Kings_Bench_(1808)

Typically, the first thing society addresses which sparks a revolution is the abuse of justice. Shakespeare’s famous quote about the first thing we do is kill all the lawyers is not actually about lawyers. You have to understand the context. Private individuals were not allowed to have lawyers in those days – only the king. It was not until the American Revolution that the Constitution gave you a right to counsel, which the Supreme Court has effectively taken away giving you court appointed counsel working for the court who have achieved a near perfect conviction rate of 99%. Court appointed lawyers are a joke to put it mildly. They are paid $90 and hour generally compared to $600-$1,000 for private lawyers. Shakespeare’s famous quote comes from a rebellion:

DICK: The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

Cade: Nay, that I mean to do.

Henry The Sixth, Part 2 Act 4, scene 2, 71–78

Therefore, Shakespeare’s phase had nothing to do with killing general lawyers, it was the king’s PROSECUTORS who were corrupt. Jake Cade led the second Tax Revolt in England after the Black Death and the king’s “lawyers” (prosecutors) were the ones aggressively seizing homes and prosecuting people wrongly at that time. Hence, history repeats and all the Constitutional precautions have been eliminated by the Supreme Court.

Otis-James

The legal case which became the seminal beginning of the American Revolution was Entick v. Carrington and Three Other King’s Messengers, reported at length in 19 Howell’s State Trials 1029, was the start of the American Revolution also based upon abuse of the king’s agents. The action, dated November 1762, was for trespassing and interfering with the plaintiff’s dwelling by breaking open his desks and boxes and searching and examining his papers.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“It’s Over For Me” Matt Drudge Warns Public “You’re A Pawn In The ‘Ghetto-isation'” Of The Web

October 10, 2015

“It’s Over For Me” Matt Drudge Warns Public “You’re A Pawn In The ‘Ghetto-isation'” Of The Web

The very foundation of the free Internet is under severe threat from copyright laws that could ban independent media outlets, according to Matt Drudge. “I had a Supreme Court Justice tell me it’s over for me,” said Drudge, warning web users that they were being pushed “pawn-like” into the cyber “ghettos” of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

“Reclusive” Drudge says he has not had a photo taken in 8 years

As DCClothesline.com reports,

During an appearance on the Alex Jones Show, Drudge asserted that copyright laws which prevent websites from even linking to news stories were being advanced.

“I had a Supreme Court Justice tell me it’s over for me,” said Drudge. “They’ve got the votes now to enforce copyright law, you’re out of there. They’re going to make it so you can’t even use headlines.”

“To have a Supreme Court Justice say to me it’s over, they’ve got the votes, which means time is limited,” he added, noting that a day was coming when simply operating an independent website could be outlawed.

“That will end (it) for me – fine – I’ve had a hell of a run,” said Drudge, adding that web users were being pushed into the cyber “ghettos” of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

“This is ghetto, this is corporate, they’re taking your energy and you’re getting nothing in return – nothing!”

Watch the full interview below…

Drudge warned that social media giants like Twitter and Facebook were swallowing up content and strangling the organic growth of independent Internet news platforms. Automated news aggregators like Google News also came under fire.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

The Trans-Pacific Free-Trade Charade

October 3, 2015

The Trans-Pacific Free-Trade Charade

As negotiators and ministers from the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries meet in Atlanta in an effort to finalize the details of the sweeping new Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), some sober analysis is warranted. The biggest regional trade and investment agreement in history is not what it seems.

You will hear much about the importance of the TPP for “free trade.” The reality is that this is an agreement to manage its members’ trade and investment relations – and to do so on behalf of each country’s most powerful business lobbies. Make no mistake: It is evident from the main outstanding issues, over which negotiators are still haggling, that the TPP is not about “free” trade.

New Zealand has threatened to walk away from the agreement over the way Canada and the US manage trade in dairy products. Australia is not happy with how the US and Mexico manage trade in sugar. And the US is not happy with how Japan manages trade in rice. These industries are backed by significant voting blocs in their respective countries. And they represent just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the TPP would advance an agenda that actually runs counter to free trade.

For starters, consider what the agreement would do to expand intellectual property rights for big pharmaceutical companies, as we learned from leaked versions of the negotiating text. Economic research clearly shows the argument that such intellectual property rights promote research to be weak at best. In fact, there is evidence to the contrary: When the Supreme Court invalidated Myriad’s patent on the BRCA gene, it led to a burst of innovation that resulted in better tests at lower costs. Indeed, provisions in the TPP would restrain open competition and raise prices for consumers in the US and around the world – anathema to free trade.

Read more at https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/trans-pacific-partnership-charade-by-joseph-e–stiglitz-and-adam-s–hersh-2015-10#J3RyoruABgKITiZc.99

Concentrated Wealth + Widespread Stupidity = End Of Democracy

July 20, 2015

Concentrated Wealth + Widespread Stupidity = End Of Democracy

Today’s America is not a democracy:

That terrific investigative news report by Paul Blumenthal at Huffington Post, on 9 November 2013,penetrated beyond what the U.S. oligarchy — or more traditionally called aristocracy — requires its dark-money groups to disclose to the Federal Election Commission; and so Blumenthal researched also into what dark-money groups are required to report to the IRS (America’s tax-authorities). 

This way, Blumenthal was able to discover, for example, that a “dark-money shell game allowed the Wisconsin Club for Growth to influence the elections with both its own ads and those of seemingly unrelated conservative groups with different public agendas. … The trail of cash moving from dark money nonprofit to dark money nonprofit can be traced, in part, through public records of the groups contributing it,” but only by accessing both FEC and IRS public records. And, even then, the picture was incomplete, because the 5-Republican bare majority, on the infamous pro-aristocracy 2010 U.S. Supreme Court Citizens United decision, by five traitors to the U.S. Constitution (which all judges are sworn to protect), prohibits public access to a complete picture of how (like in that Wisconsin election) a few psychopathic billionaires, plus millions of faith-driven fools they sucker with myth-affirming lies, can destroy government of the people, by the people, for the people, and turn it instead into government of the people, by the aristocracy, for the aristocracy. Blumenthal also showed the same billionaires+suckers system replacing democracy in other states. (Today’s Greece is a more extreme case of the same thing. Perhaps what’s today in Greece will betomorrow in America.)

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Will Appeals Court Ruling Really Stop NSA Bulk Phone Data Collection?

May 9, 2015

Will Appeals Court Ruling Really Stop NSA Bulk Phone Data Collection?

Don’t Crack Open the Champagne Bottle Just Yet

While congress ponders the merits of the USA Freedom Act of 2015, a bill which revises the business records provisions of the Patriot Act, a panel of judges in a federal appeals court has just thrown a clump of sand into the gears of the global panopticon. Overturning an earlier ruling, where federal judges dismissed a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has ruled that the NSA’s bulk collection of telephone metadata is illegal.

The Good News

In their ruling the judges focused heavily on the scope of the NSA’s phone record collection program. Specifically, the written judgement describes the government’s own justification for hoovering up all of our telephone metadata (page 67):

“The government effectively argues that there is only one enormous ‘anti‐terrorism’ investigation, and that any records that might ever be of use in developing any aspect of that investigation are relevant to the overall counterterrorism effort.”

The ruling responds to this argument by noting that (page 75):

“To allow the government to collect phone records only because they may become relevant to a possible authorized investigation in the future fails even the permissive ‘relevance’ test.”

Skipping to the end, the punchline (page 82):

“We hold that the text of § 215 cannot bear the weight the government asks us to assign to it, and that it does not authorize the telephone metadata program.”

In other words, the judges view Section 215 of the Patriot Act as applying to narrow inquiries that target specific people. According to the court, the bulk phone record collection currently being conducted by the government is, well, criminal.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

NSA’s Bulk Collection of Phone Records is Illegal, Appeals Court Says

May 8, 2015

NSA’S BULK COLLECTION OF PHONE RECORDS IS ILLEGAL, APPEALS COURT SAYS

A federal appeals court panel ruled on Thursday that the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata of phone calls to and from Americans is not authorized by Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, throwing out the government’s legal justification for the surveillance program exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden nearly two years ago.

Judge Gerard E. Lynch, writing the opinion for the unanimous three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, described as “unprecedented and unwarranted” the government’s argument that the all-encompassing collection of phone records was allowed because it was “relevant” to an authorized investigation.

The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, and ACLU attorney Alex Abdo told The Intercept, “This ruling should make clear, once and for all, that the NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records is unlawful. And it should cast into doubt the unknown number of other mass surveillance operations of the NSA that rely on a similarly flawed interpretation of the law.”

As Lynch wrote in the court’s opinion: “To obtain a § 215 order, the government must provide the FISC [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] with ‘a statement of facts showing that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the tangible things sought are relevant to an authorized investigation (other than a threat assessment).’”

Lynch continued:

 

The government emphasizes that “relevance” is an extremely generous standard, particularly in the context of the grand jury investigations to which the statute analogizes orders under § 215. Appellants argue that relevance is not an unlimited concept, and that the government’s own use (or non-use) of the records obtained demonstrates that most of the records sought are not relevant to any particular investigation.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

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