By Martin Armstrong
December 6, 2014
If anyone thinks that there is really justice, you should re-read Thraysmachus who debated Socrates. Socrates wishfully believed that in a democracy the people would always be just compared to a tyrant.
Thraysmachus disagreed. He warned that all forms of government act in the same identical manner because they only pursue their own self-interest. Hence, justice is merely the will of the stronger. This is precisely correct for this is also the explanation behind Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand. This is why Communism failed. It began to make all people equal, but ended elevating government over the people.
On Wednesday, a Staten Island grand jury decided not to return an indictment for the police officer who murdered Eric Garner, an unarmed black man, by placing him in a chokehold shortly before his death when the man was not resisting. Police are no longer the protectors of society, they have devolved into a military force with no ethics or rules who see everyone of us as merely a probable threat.
This incident illustrates how corrupt the grand jury system truly is and the judge refusing to show what the prosecutor did to ensure there would be no indictment. Lawyers for decades have said a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich because the system is outright corrupt beyond compare. That phase was actually coined by a New York State Judge named Sol Wachtler. Wachtler was the former chief judge of New York state who coined that term in a January 1985 in an interview with the New York Daily News‘ Marcia Kramer and Frank Lombardi.
The relevant portion:
In a bid to make prosecutors more accountable for their actions, Chief Judge Sol Wachtler has proposed that the state scrap the grand jury system of bringing criminal indictments.
Wachtler, who became the state’s top judge earlier this month, said district attorneys now have so much influence on grand juries that “by and large” they could get them to “indict a ham sandwich.”
A month later, the New York Times noted that Wachtler believed grand juries “operate more often as the prosecutor’s pawn than the citizen’s shield.” This belief—that prosecutors can get grand juries to do whatever they want them to do is really universal and if this is not seriously changed, we will see massive civil unrest tear the system apart limb from limb.
The “ham sandwich” term has been universally quoted among lawyers albeit the public perhaps did not hear it until Ferguson. Tom Wolfe included the saying in the 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities. “But mainly you used the grand jury to indict people,” Wolfe wrote, “and in the famous phrase of Sol Wachtler, chief judge of the State Court of Appeals, a grand jury would ‘indict a ham sandwich,’ if that’s what you wanted.”
If the government wants your ass it is theirs. I warned about Coxley who led the March on Washington, DC during the Panic of 1893 about unemployment. The Wizard of Oz was based on that march – we are off to see the wizard. Coxley was arrested for walking in the grass to break up that March. There are way too many laws so anyone can be imprisoned at any time for everyone commits at least 3 crimes per day and do not know about it – See Three Felonies a Day – How the Feds Target the Innocent
A different Staten Island grand jury indicted Ramsey Orta, the man who filmed the entire incident in August, less than a month after filming the fatal July 17 confrontation in which Daniel Pantaleo and other NYPD police officers murdered Garner in plain view for allegedly selling untaxed cigarettes. The prosecutors wanted to imprison the camera man so like Coxley, they find some other law to charge him with in retaliation for filming what the police did. The grand jury was manipulated into indicting Orta on weapons charges stemming from an arrest by undercover officers.
Police alleged that Orta had slipped a .25 caliber handgun into a teenage accomplice’s waistband outside a New York hotel. Orta testified that the charges were falsely mounted by police in retaliation for his role in documenting Garner’s death, but the grand jury indicted Orta with a single felony count of third-degree criminal weapon possession and criminal firearm possession.
This illustrates the abuse that people are suffering at the hands of the police. When I worked in the law library, I had to review countless indictments on people. I began to see the same police names constantly coming up. There was a young black kid who looked visibly retarded. I saw the same police names charging him with possession of a gun. There were witnesses who said the police searched him and found nothing. They searched him a second time and found nothing.
They took him to the police van and suddenly in a third search they miraculously found a gun in his pants. I advised the kid to go to trial, not just because of the witnesses, but because of his appearance. The court appointed lawyer who never win cases to get such jobs, tried to get the kid to plead guilty as always. I encouraged him to go to trial. He won. My own count appointed lawyer then asked me how did it feel that I helped a criminal back on the street. I went to court and demanded he be removed.
The system is so corrupt nobody would believe it. The public actually think government is there to protect them, but they have no such feeling of obligation. It is always about them. Nobody has any 20 year plan even for the economy. All they care about is making the next election. With self-interest the primary mover, its is impossible to reform anything.
Government
will never reform anything until the PUBLIC forces that change.
Unfortunately, this is why we will see a rise in civil unrest. There is no remorse in government because there is no check and balance. Nobody will make them comply with human rights or the law.
Most of mainstream press is corporate owned businesses vulnerable to various charges as well if they do not comply with government wishes.
Mainstream media have sealed their own fate for once they laid down the pen, they surrendered their rights as well. Mainstream media have sold their position of protecting the First Amendment long ago for self-preservation. There is nobody watching the government and this is why it will explode in everyone’s faces.
Government has abused their power to police and tax. They assume it will blow over and everything gets back to normal. That is true only up to a point. When the economy turns down very hard, the sparks will fly.
This is what our computer model is warning.
Everything is unfolding in a precise manner that leads to very serious problems.
Thomas Jefferson in theDeclaration of Independencewarned that the king was also protecting his agents for committing crimes against the people.
There the king created “mock trials” to protect his agents – history has repeated once again. All governments devolve to self-interest. Exercise your free speech and they will find something else to charge you with and pretend that is the reason you go to prison – never for what you said.
Reprinted from Armstrong Economics.
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