[News] The Supreme Court is about to NERF Unions

So unions have to argue for benefits for everyone but a bunch of conservative freeloaders can get all the benefits and pay for none of it? That sounds like a racket, and only a conservative would call that justice.

[Cons] Article 3, Section 1 (1 of 10) Actual Breakdown of the Text, General Thoughts

The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behaviour, and shall, at stated times, receive for their services, a compensation, which shall not be diminished during their continuance in office.

It is evidently clear from the creation of the document, both in the size of the article and the flexibility of interpretation, that of the three major branches, the authors of the constitution gave the least thought to the Supreme Court or to the law in general.  Why would they?  American Courts worked perfectly well in their eyes, and the English legal system was 'the envy of the world.'  While America had revolted against Monarchy and Kings, thus necessitating a new experiment in legislative and executive activities, courts were just, you know...COURTS.  Everyone knew how they worked.  They knew they wanted a supreme court that could decide federal cases, and they knew that it was a good idea to have lesser courts under that.

And they basically said, "Hey congress, you guys just handle this mess, OK?"  They put a few safeguards in that seemed obvious at the time, such as not being able to suddenly state that a judge was earning nothing so congress could destroy their lives, but that's about it really.  Nothing about how many people there were in the court, not about how many courts they should be, and that's about it.

In the other two articles (which I'll address later) they specified which cases were to go to the court, how they were supposed to be tried, and that political cases were specifically in the hands of the legislature...and they defined treason.  That's it.   

So is it any wonder then that our system is so messed up?  The amendment process does add some more guidelines, especially in the Bill of Rights.  At the time, many people thought we didn't need a bill of rights because they didn't want to 'lessen' our rights by defining them.  Can you imagine where we'd be now without it, in this second gilded age?

Due Process would be optional, unless the executive declared it classified and a state secret, oh wait, that was recently declared unconstitutional.  Good luck getting it enforced.  To quote Andrew "I like Genocide" Jackson, "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!" This is a serious problem in our court system as well.

But as I mentioned in the intro to this article, American justice is a farce.  So aside from the vast amounts of what is NOT written into Article III about how courts should work, is there anything wrong with what IS there?  Not really.  The court is very ill defined, so checks and balances against it are slim at best.  The court, thanks to English Common Law (enshrined into our constitution in the little known 7th amendment), has a tradition of doing things a certain way.  Why do people obey the court? In part because federal judges have tremendous power given them by congress by statute and also by tradition, but in part it is largely because people simply recognize the court as being the final arbiter of these kinds of decisions.

But even that has had to be taken by the court.  Marbury V Madison, in which the court basically said that it had the right to interpret the constitution is even now contested by psychopathic conservatives.  If it isn't written in the document, it isn't acceptable to them.  And really, who am I to disagree? Our courts require lofty standards of documentation and legalisms, which in turn require lofty standards of regulation and arguments, but is it viewed as fair?

The vast majority of the population do not believe so.  So if the court isn't viewed as fair, why do we put up with it? Partly inertia, and partly because we view the alternatives as far worse.  But as I have mentioned earlier, just because 'democracy is the worst form of government except all the others' doesn't mean you don't examine other methods.  Just because Article V strikes terror into the hearts of many for what it could do doesn't mean we timidly fail to explore an alternative to what is clearly a fundamentally unfair and utterly broken process.

And I aim to do just that.

[Cons] Article III, Section 0 - Not Justice

Before I start with Sections, I want to explain why I'm doing Article III before Article II.  Article II is about the executive, but the majority of the abuses by the executive, except some of the more recent and blatant abuses of power, Are taking place because of the very nature of our laws.  Look, remember that civilization is an illusion, and such one of the most important things that Government can do is maintain that illusion through the belief that there is Justice in the courts.

Yet no one really believes that, especially about the justice department of the American government.  The lists of abuses are endless, but I'll cite some of them here.

• Dozens, perhaps hundreds of innocent men killed by bloodthirsty out of control prosecutors.
• Failure to prosecute Wall Street Bankers who stole trillions from America because they are 'Too Big to Jail.'
• The National Director of Intelligence LIED to congress, committed Perjury and has yet to be prosecuted despite claims that they are 'looking into it.'
• George W. Bush, war criminal and advocate for torture, has not been held to account by the Holder Justice department.
• Federal raids on peaceful medical marijuana dispensaries in direct contravention to the 10th amendment to the constitution AND their own given word.
• Recurring prosecution of whistle blowers trying to expose the festering rotten corruption in the US government whilst allowing other evils to flourish.  Attacking our own immune system of truth.
• A Supreme Court that has said that Imminent Domain can be used for the rich, that Corporations are people, that money is speech (and thus the rich are entitled to more rights than the rest of us), and so many, many, many abusive decisions in favor of insane police privilege. 
• Failure to prosecute the police who destroyed peaceful Occupy Protesters in a massive federally coordinated attack.  In fact, one of them was even given a fat check for 'trauma' he suffered from complaints filed against him.
• Minorities are singled out by law enforcement, not given proper representation, and executed at far higher rates.
• You have to be rich or go into debt or find a lawyer that likes you to take on the rich and powerful in the courts of justice.
• Your public defender is under paid, over worked and is likely working to make you plea for a bargain even if you did nothing wrong.
• Your prosecutor is looking out for their own career prospects in most cases, rather than than whether or not you are guilty if you happen to be the one the police pin it on.
• For profit private prisons rake in the money, in some cases bribing judges to set up little factories to send them prisoners. In other cases pressuring law makers to make tough crime penalties to get more prisoners for rural counties to increase their political clout.

The list goes on and on and on and on.  But one of the root causes of the problems, aside from lying sociopathic conservatives and libertarians, is the moderates who buy into the 'abusive government regulation' schtick the sociopaths spin, BECAUSE IT IS TRUE.  And why is our government filled with abusive regulations?

In large part because it must.  Our justice system uses English Common Law, which states that a prior judgement takes priority until a judge changes it in a new case.  The idea of a jury of one's peers is at the heart of American justice.

But lawyers get to lie to juries with half truths.  Judges lie to juries.  Juries are just little pairs of eyes, carefully selected for their stupidity.

In the adversarial system, the Prosecutor is supposed to represent Justice (ie US), the defending lawyer their client and the judge (US) or at most Justice.

Does anyone REALLY REALLY believe that these people represent us?  The thing is, when you meet a conservative face to face, they seem like nice people.  It is easy to forget that they believe things that will kill all life on earth, and that may very likely threaten the freedom of your children.  Abstractly, perhaps, you may be aware that conservatives are liars, but when you see someone's face, are you likely to call them a liar?

Hell, I'll admit I'm not.  I might believe my friends are liars when they are speaking AS a conservative, but I don't want to call them liars.  No one does.

So of course a prospective Jury, sitting in a box, being asked questions by a defense attorney or a prosecutor doesn't want to think that the entire thing is a farce, that the judge may be insane or abusive and totally unaccountable for their actions, that the prosecutor may have been hiding evidence from everyone and will NEVER be held accountable for it, and that the defense is trying every trick in the book to help their client, but that may involve taking a shady crooked deal for less time even though they are TOTALLY INNOCENT?!

The regulatory weight of our schools, our governments and our regulatory agencies are in large part based upon this system that carries greater and greater weight as the centuries pass, property law from the time when people thought people could be property echoes down upon us like a ton of bricks.  Laws passed by useless legislatures and regulations must withstand the connivance of corporate lawyers seeking to game the system to make a quick buck.

It cannot continue like this.

And before we speak of enforcing laws, we must discuss fixing the system that tries them.

More Evidence Congress and all Legislatures in General

Are bad and should be abolished.  At a minimum it is evidence the US Constitution needs to GO!

[Cons] Article I, Section 10 - How Not To Govern

So I got into a discussion recently with some friends on the new Common Core standards, and an interesting question came up about regulations.  I'm of two minds regarding regulations...

On the one hand, I am vehemently opposed to opposition to regulation for its own sake, in that having an anti government filter for everything is just stupid.  It is one thing to want small government, it is another thing to automatically be anti government about everything, always saying that government is the wrong solution or to say that government is always evil.  This way lays madness and compulsive lying to get what you want.  Lots of people rag on and on about the lady who sued McDonalds because her coffee was too hot.  Well guess what folks, that lady had a legitimate reason to sue, and it was primarily because the psychopaths at that restaurant kept their coffee so hot and so far above industry standard that the woman actually got third degree burns on her legs because of their insanity.

On the other hand, while individual regulations might be well intentioned, those that make and enforce the rules rarely consider the ripple effects that they will cause.  One example of this is included in the book Outliers, which explains about the curious fact that Hockey Players in Canada in the major leagues were almost all born in January, Febuary and March.  This was due to the tiered system of minor leagues and an arbitrary cut off date which put five year olds with much greater size and skill playing against kids of a much younger age.  This affected 75% of all players for the rest of their lives because someone thought it would be convenient to put an age cut off 'here.'  Another example of this was when I was getting my Scrum Master Certification and I mentioned my recently awful experience with the USPS IVR and how it clearly hadn't been tested with actual users...only to have one of my fellow students mentioned that they'd tried that with some pentagon software, and due to some insane White House directive, they initially couldn't and were only able to do so due to a desire of a third party to conduct research.

When a bureaucracy has to skirt its own rules just to be able to interact with its own end users, there is clearly something wrong with the world.  A former friend of mine (well I'm still his friend but he decided to become my ex friend when I took umbrage with the fact that maybe the NRA was awful and liars because they were AOK with mass murdered children being a cause for some soul reflection beyond saying 'EVEN MORE GUNS' without any thought whatsoever....) had a really good point in that he explained that it is the nature of an institution to try and do what it was designed to do...which is to say that a government regulatory agency is going to try and well...regulate.  It isn't just going to suddenly decide, 'you know what guys...we've got enough rules now'....it just doesn't happen.

Now, regulatory agencies have their own problems in that they can either be utterly coopted by the people they're regulating, or potentially be so archaic that they don't understand modern technology, or they could just become so overwhelmed that they become essentially lazy and non functional.   There are a lot of solutions to this...reform works from time to time...but let's look at some.

1) The CIA in the 1960's was the perfect definition of the Deep State, causing some of the most notorious abuses in the history of government.  In the 1970's some of their abuses were paired back, but by the time 9/11 rolled around, they were given cart blanche ability to do whatever was 'necessary to protect us' showing that the constitution and the bill of rights were utterly inadequate to protect us from their abuses as well as the rest of the Classified Community.  Now these rogue agencies don't even answer to Congress any more.  A commission is not enough to hold a rogue government agency in check.

2) The IRS was brought up in witch hunts by the 'special' conservative revolution class in the 1990's...most of this, like so many things conservatives do, was idiotic and stupid, but there were some very legitimate complaints against government power.  So congress passed some laws to reform it.  And what happened? The agency that took down Al Capone when no one else could has become so weakened that it barely has enough to do any audits at all any more.  And people wonder why there is a wealth gap in this country.  Even now, Oligarchy efforts to demonize the IRS are being carried out by their mass army of conservative collaborators.

3) The Department of Homeland Security coordinated a federal strike against peaceful protesters...and no one has been held accountable.

4) The Department of Justice has failed to go after bankers...and no one has been held accountable.

So simple reform isn't enough to do it.  Would eliminating the entire agency like what South Korea is doing to their coast guard work?  Not really, because there is still a need for regulation and so when an agency is dissolved, a new one must take its place, but because of the way most governments currently hire...guess who is the most likely group of people to be hired when you go looking for employees for the agency? Yup, you guessed it, the old employees of the one that was just dissolved.  That's exactly what happened with the hyper corrupt agency that regulated oil drilling right after the Deepwater Horizon incident.

So what solutions actually work?  Well one that is working pretty good so far is to set up competing agencies, like the Consumer Financial Protection agency initially chaired and advocated by Elizabeth Warren...you KNOW it is working because of how much it is making the bankers squirm, but the problem is, all societies have conservative administrations sooner or later, and the next is likely to eviscerate it and fill it with conservative psychopaths.  It might be effective for NOW, but give it a couple of Romneys, Bushes, Reagans or McCains and they'll likely suck more than anyone else and be bogged down in nonsense or, like most Oligarchy agencies, stop answering to the common folk at large.

So what will actually WORK?

My solution starts with the Brundlestaag, which has the potential to shift the arbiter of a government solution from federal to local, local to federal or either to NOT GOVERNMENT every fifty years.  This solution might seem extreme, but it kept the Roman Empire alive for another THOUSAND YEARS when they shifted their capital to Byzantium.

There are other solutions as well, such as I think allowing election or at least popular rejection of pretty much everyone currently confirmed by the US Senate.  Special care will have to be taken to prevent conservatives from destroying government or killing everyone, but there are ways to achieve this.

But back to my solution of 'not government.'  How does that work?  What happens if people put, say, Health Care, in not local and not government but still want something better for their society than the psychotically stupid 'Get Well or Die Quickly' American health care system pre ACA?

I look at that coolest of nations, Switzerland.  No country is perfect, but as a direct democracy (or closer to it than most countries) they have prevented some pretty stupid things and pretty awful corruption by allowing a popular vote.  The way the Swiss handle their health care is to allow for a wide variety of not for profit institutions to act as insurance agencies but since they are not for profit, their stake holders are their policy holders rather than Oligarchy Stock Holders.

And it works pretty well.  The government only has to set some minimum standards about how they can't basically be conservative lie factories that don't really provide insurance.  Now, a lot of libertarians have provided this exact same solution and I think its a good idea.  The problem is, that you cannot allow people who hate civilization or any form of regulation (and even if you know that one rational libertarian who isn't against all regulation, you know the rest are really pretty much anarchists organized enough to try to destroy everything but the military and contract law) to actually implement government or be in charge of anything.

But its actually a GOOD idea.  The Red Cross, long before FEMA, did fantastic things in disaster relief for the better part of a century.  Sure they weren't perfect, but they did a really great job and, not being part of the government, were able to a lot because they didn't have to fill forms out in triplicate, use government procurement rules etc.

In the Scrum class I attended, at one point the instructor asked, "Why does government have to hold itself to those standards? Who set them? Government."  Usually congress, because some legislator has to make a name for himself.  Government doesn't work, not because government is part of the problem, but because some of the basic assumptions we make about it: 'blind' procurement, meritocracy based testing, supreme documentation etc, are all based on reforms that took place in the 19th century that helped out a lot but were put into place before current technology.  We need to rethink how we do regulation and government at a fundamental level, but before we do that, I want to swap out the order I take things because Article III talks about the courts and Article II talks about the executive.

All problems with our regulatory system come down to how we administer our courts and our laws, which needs to be fixed (at a constitutional level) before we do anything else.

But I want to mention one more idea in this area, which is basically the constitution saying 'the legislature can't do this'...which it has routinely ignored.  Telling government and congress what it can't do piecemeal has often been ignored, in large part because the constitution is simply too hard to change and too inflexible to adjust to the times.  Conservatives love it...but let's look at who is defending it.  You know...conservatives...the same group who think that having their Oligarchy Masters tell them what to watch and what to think is a swell thing.

But one good idea, executed horribly, that the conservatives had was the idea of competing institutions for government.  That is to say, that one way you could make a regulatory agency behave was to threaten to replace them with something else if they suck.  But you can't make it another government agency.  Where conservatives (as usual) got it wrong was their magical Market Fairy thinking that assumed a business could do it better.  What does a business do? It makes money for the people who own it (usually the Oligarchy).  It isn't going to work for the greater good of society. In theory, a B corp could do that, but probably never in the American Oligarchy Capital society.

However, threatening to replace it with a NON PROFIT granted monopoly power or even better, several non profits could work wonders.  Note....this also only works if you can keep religion out of it, because while not all religions are about money, telling the ones that are in it for the money vs the ones that are in it for the good of Man is essentially impossible.

My Witness Against the Corrupt FCC and Obama Administration

I do not believe my comment will be heard. I believe this because we, the people, have spoken again and again on this matter. TWICE we elected a man as president who promised a free and open internet (truly free, not the garbage 'free' the current chairman claims to support). We campaigned against SOPA, and PIPA and the TPP and numerous attempts, COUNTLESS attempts to put a fence around the internet and put up toll ways and basically take away the medium of freedom of the people. It is now scientifically proven that this is an oligarchy. Obama put a man who is a known lobbyist for the corrupt and hated broadband industry in charge of the regulatory body and the first major thing he does is turn around and say that he wants to do what broadband wants. Give him two or three years and then he'll leave for a nice well paid job that pays millions of dollars as a reward for his brazenly selfish actions. It appears we can't stop you this time around. Obama AND the republicans are bought and sold, but since Rule of Law is important to the illusion of freedom we have this will be kept as public record, so for future generations know that we did not let this corruption go unnoticed. We did not take to the streets because of visible evidence that federally coordinated strikes on peaceful protestors go entirely unpunished and have reason to fear for our lives. We have made our wishes known countless times, and they are still ignored. Let this be witness and evidence to the corruption of the Republic of the United States of America, never perfect but at one time much more moral than it is now.

http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/comment/confirm?confirmation=2014516188817

Comment yourself if you want: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/upload/display?z=w969v

[Cons] Article 1, Section 9 - Titles of Nobility (4 of 4)

Sir Paul McCartney?  Sir Alec Guinness?

England has this wonderful opportunity to grant brilliance in a field with a title of nobility.

Yet our constitution forbids it, primarily to get away from the European tradition of Monarchy.  You see the monarchies were often tyrannical entities that took away the rights of the colonists that fought for independence to get away from them.

Really? Well, it's true that I'm free to write this blog, but god forbid we protest in the streets because we'd be beaten to death, and the people doing that beating would never suffer the consequences for it.  

But really?  How about the idea that we should basically just Carthage the concept of a Republic.   Why? Because we've had some evil dictators and evil organizations in history....Pol Pot, Hitler, Stalin, Ida Amin, Ghengis Khan, but NONE of them....not one of them have ever tried to deliberately wipe all life on earth just to make a quick buck.

All a Republic is is a country ruled by 'the people' instead of a king.  What's so great about having the Head of State in the hands of the Presidency anyway?  Every single one of our presidents to Carter have been, as near as I can tell, Immoral in one way or another...and Carter?  Yeah, not Immoral so much as Paralyzed at a time of critical crisis...then Ford who pardoned Nixon, Nixon, LBJ....

Hardly moral pillars even if all did good and bad things.  But why NOT elect a moral bedrock as our king?

A monarchy does not mean a HEREDITARY monarchy.  Why not elect the king every ten years?  Or Queen?

We don't need a house of Lords, but we could have a moral foundation of individuals recognized by society to have great worth and performance.  They should have ZERO power...and of course it could be abused...but if they did, then a democratic society can take the institution away or remove the title from those who espouse evil views.

And really...explain to me what moral superiority men who said that it was OK to own people have over anyone else anyway? If they didn't want titles of nobility maybe we should take a second look.

Note: Giving them actual LAND or power, would be absolutely stupid nonsense of course.  Our own house of Lords, the Senate, is also corrupt and evil.