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Controlling the Purchased
Virtue is 90% of Treason/Ethics are What the Other Side Uses

 

America chose Trump for his pragmatism.  It hoped his ability to make market decisions about policy and his unilateral, executive management style could return us to 1968.  But what about belief?  Every executive initiative is not about market behavior.  What about non-utilitarian notions of right and wrong?  What about ethical and moral identities which precede policy and call for stability?

If one looks at the legal system, provoking questions sometimes seem to be….."Well, what about them?"……."So what?"…….. "What are you lookin’ at?"

It’s an ancient problem of human character.  What is the cost of doing right?  What if the person who controls professional tenure demands that a government employee do the wrong thing?  What if the conditions of entering employment include an advance agreement to participate in criminal arrangements?  What are the group consequences of exposing a colleague who has done wrong?  The FBI raided Cleveland in 2008 because the prevailing ethos among the police, judiciary, and prosecutors included criminal conspiracy.  The silence of the local judges, prosecutors, county executives, and attorneys with respect to defect was palpable and complicit.  It extended from the lowest municipal level courts to the northern Ohio federal jurisdiction.

Large scale social and economic conditions can also add to the accumulated risks of relying on a legal system.  In times of the shrinking middle class and a more tenuous relation between work and wealth, the cost of moral principle becomes too high.  Humane agendas and notions of individual rights become secondary to the pragmatisms of income, tenure, and professional status.  The legal system not only lacks the structures to insulate its constitutional pledge of principle from self interest; its design ensures that it won’t be accountable to its failures.  Have you ever tried to fire a public employee?

There are three elements to this design failure.  The first involves the way judges are chosen, the second involves the way they are administered, and the third involves the fact that there is no market competitor in the judicial business.  Unlike the medical profession, which not only has a self-checking protocol (if a doctor cuts out the wrong organ, the patient dies) but also has insurance companies and attorneys forcing standards upon it, the judiciary is accountable to no one.  Attorneys are subordinate to it and won’t criticize judges for fear of angering the people who provide judgments in their favor or who could levy sanctions against them.

Failure in the legal system has now become banal, and it’s worse in the jurisdictions where judges are elected.

It never stops.  One would think after the massive federal raids on Cleveland, Ohio, prominent actors in a legal system would be on the defensive.  On June 19 of this year, the president of the Washington State Bar Association was arrested for felony theft.  Robin Haynes resigned on June 19, 2017, the day after her arrest on charges for amounts in excess of ten thousand dollars.

 

The Books: Stack the Legal Odds in Your Favor (T. Scott — S. Naheedy, Esq.)
Bad Minds, High Places, The FBI Raids on Cleveland OH and America’s Archipelago of Legal Failure (R. Grundstein Esq.)

Bad Minds, High Places describes the means by which bad judiciaries have judges that are appointed and the abysmal level at which they fail.  Stack the Legal Odds describes how they function as a monopoly on the business of ethics without any market competitors. Bad Minds describes a political failure, while Stack the Legal Odds describes a market failure.

Legal systems are only accountable unto themselves.  Unlike the medical field, which has to contend with an economic competitor (predator) by way of private attorneys, legal systems are politicized, and exposing the failures of a colleague are career death.  In Cleveland, the Democratic party controlled the selection of candidates to run for election, the elections themselves, and decisions concerning tenure.  The only way to publicly expose a colleague for incompetence or dishonesty without fear of reprisal is to retire or move to another state.

Another problem of controlling judiciaries is the absence of an available database reporting on them.  Lay people don’t know how to judge a judge, and there is no ongoing means to accumulate data and measure it pertinent to a judge’s performance.  Periodic public reviews could be made based on these accumulations, and judges who fail review would be subject to correction and/or sanction.

A person is not going to abandon an advantage, especially not in an institutionalized and county/state-wide geographic base.  A politicized judiciary is not going to promote the means to expose its defects.

We live in dangerous times.  The problems with our legal system are not only systemic, but also indicate a failure of character.  What used to be a republic is showing signs of conversion to an empire.  Perhaps America is Rome in 200 A.D.