Politics in the Zeros

Apparently youth of today are amusing themselves by snorting condoms and licking eyeballs.

While I certainly support the right of youth to act bizarrely, back in the day when I did such things it was with a demonstrable purpose, which was to get high.

Credit: koin.com

A neighborhood in Oregon is posting fliers warning potential criminals ‘This is a Glock Block. We don’t call 911.” What do you do when budget cutbacks have reduced the size of police forces so drastically they no longer respond to “minor” calls or, in a city like Detroit, might not respond at all. The wealthy can afford private security. The rest of us can’t.

The root cause of this is the hollowing out of our governments, with companies and people now having to provide what the government once did. And of course, much of the hollowing out is due to deliberate looting of the system by the already wealthy.

This is hilarious.

The story from Burlington VT, of all places, is breathtakingly simple: the elected city council, in a bi-partisan vote, has decided to keep its law-making process secret, rather than openly address the question of whether a draconian no-trespass law it passed last winter is patently unconstitutional.

“Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.”  — Jeremy Bentham

That’s right, rather than explain why the law it passed is constitutional, the Burlington City Council is hiding behind lawyer-client privilege as if it—the council were some private corporation rather than a democratically-elected local government.

The ordinance in question, the “Church Street Marketplace District Trespass Authority,” passed the City Council unanimously in February 2013.  The council vote followed seven public hearings at which some concerns were raised and addressed, but no controversy arose.   The ordinance allows the immediate and arbitrary banishment of people from public streets with no due process of law and no effective appeal process.

In part, councilors with doubts about this ordinance had them assuaged by an analysis of the proposed law written by Assistant City Attorney Greg Meyer in mid-2012, assuring the council that it was within its constitutional rights to ban people from public streets and without authority to do so from the state legislature.  That City Attorney’s office analysis was, and is, secret from the public.

“Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show it can bear discussion and publicity.”  — Lord Acton

Burlington City Attorney Eileen Blackwood argues, according to Seven Days, that her office’s legal analysis is protected by attorney-client privilege, in a construct where both the attorney and the “client” work for the City of Burlington.   Protected by privilege, she has asserted, the legal analysis “must thus be treated as confidential.”

Since the law went onto effect in March, Progressive Party members of the city council began to have misgivings about its constitutionality.  They requested – and received – permission from the City Attorney to show the secret legal analysis to an outside counsel, John Franco, who served as a Burlington Assistant City Attorney from 1982 to 1989, when the Mayor was Bernie Sanders, now Vermont’s junior U.S. Senator.

Attorney Franco produced a five-page, single-spaced analysis dated June 4, in which he concluded that “this ordinance is neither lawful nor constitutional.”  He has reinforced this conclusion with a three-page supplemental analysis

“Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there’s no need for secrecy.”  — Donna Tartt 

Based on Franco’s analysis of the ordinance, the five Progressive Party members introduced a resolution at the June 10 council meeting seeking to make the secret city attorney’s office memo public.

Democrats fought the motion fiercely.  Democrat Norm Blais, an attorney, made it personal, speculating irrelevantly that the resolution derived from “politicians’ remorse.”  Blais went on to argue that “this is not a question of transparency,…  [there are] sound reasons for having privileged communications with an attorney.”

While attorney-client privilege is widely recognized in law, Blais made no effort to explain how it applied to this governmental situation, where Democratic Mayer Miro Weinberger had made a campaign promise of greater governmental transparency.

Council member Chip Mason, also a Democrat and a lawyer, chaired the committee that held three non-controversial public hearing on the ordinance.  At the council meeting he defended the “sanctity” of attorney-client privilege, calling it “not something we should be waiving.”

In response to an inquiry to explain how an elected government body could be the legal equivalent of a private corporate client, Mason wrote only that: “there is no dispute that it is protected by the attorney client privilege.  The City Council is the client for whom the memorandum was prepared.”

“The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them.”  — Patrick Henry 

The Progressives’ resolution to make the secret memo public lost in an 8-5 vote, with the majority comprising all six of the council’s Democrats, its only Republican, and its only independent.   The council then unanimously referred the issue to committee.

After the vote, City Attorney Blackwood offered to prepare a new legal analysis of the ordinance for public consumption.  She did not explain why releasing the secret analysis wouldn’t conserve public resources and be just as useful.

There is as yet no rebuttal by the city council or the city attorney’s office to Attorney Franco’s assessment.  As it stands, unchallenged, his critique is devastating, finding that the city has acted in violation of both the Vermont Constitution and the U.S. Constitution.

“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.”  — Niels Bohr 

Some of Franco’s arguments, all of which he supports with case law citations, include:

*  Vermont law requires municipalities to have authorizing legislation from the state legislature before enacting a law such as the no trespass ordinance.  Burlington has no such authorization, leaving the ordinance without legal authority.

* Under the law, Burlington does not “own” its streets, nor does it control them except as such control is delegated by the state.  The streets quite literally belong to the people and no government may legally banish people from the streets without stringent adherence to constitutional standards.

*  As Franco writes, “Our ordinance allows Burlington officials to issue what effectively are prior restraints on the exercise of an otherwise lawful fundamental constitutional right, and to discriminate among ‘offenders’ with broad and virtually unfettered discretion to banish some, but not all, offenders and for varying lengths of time. “

*  The city ordinance fails to set any standards for guidance in it’s application, enforcement, or appeal.

*  The ordinance violates the U.S. Constitution’s requirement of due process of law – “Due process requires notice of the proposed action, notice of the City’s the factual basis therefore, and an opportunity to be heard before it takes effect. Our ordinance provides none of that.”

*  The ordinance offers no effective judicial review.  It contradicts and pre-empts several state laws.  And the disposition of its penalties is left in the hands of a panel of untrained non-lawyers from whom there is no provision for further appeal.

“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths, and to secret proceedings.”  — John F. Kennedy  

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

This is not satire.

GOP lawmaker: Extreme abortion ban justified because of masturbating fetuses

Rep. Michael Burgess (R-TX) said on Monday that he supports the proposed federal ban on abortion at 20 weeks because he has personally witnessed male fetuses with their hands “between their legs” pleasuring themselves at 15 weeks.

Bonnie Foreshaw, a woman who has been in prison far too long serving a sentence she never should have gotten, has been granted a clemency hearing in Connecticut after investigative reporting by Andy Thibault uncovered damning evidence of malpractice.

The new information was a blistering five-page memo written by Superior Court Judge Jon Blue 24 years ago when he was a public defender.

In the memo, to then Chief of Legal Services Joette Katz, Judge Blue excoriated fellow public defender Dennis O’Toole for “disturbing” and “shocking malpractice” taking “a number of forms” in the Foreshaw case.

Andy is a contributor to Polizeros. Well done, Andy, well done.

Freedomfest is a gathering of conservatives concerned with the fate of our country. I agree with their premise that there are troubling parallels between the US now and ancient Rome. A bellicose nation gets overextended, the currency falters, leaders become corrupt and brutal, and the infrastructure of the society crumbles.

What I don’t see in the list of speakers is anything how to organize and prevent this from happening. Instead their focus is mostly about protecting what you have, an understandable motive to be sure. But if the walls really do come crashing down then we all stand or fall together. Maybe that’s the primary difference in viewpoints between left and right. The left assumes that social and political change comes via mass organization, with social justice being a core value. And “an injury to one is an injury to all.”

However, the people at Freedomfest are genuinely concerned about what is happening to this country. Maybe together we can figure out solutions.

Many historians have warned that the West is going the way of Rome. Rome was the #1 superpower 2000 years ago, and then collapsed. When the British historian Edward Gibbon wrote about “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”in 1776, the British worried that Britain, the #1 Superpower, would lose its dominance in the world…..and it did within a century.

Now many experts fear that the United States (and the West in general) are on a road to decline and financial collapse. In 1947, Pulitzer-prize winner H. J. Haskill wrote a book called “New Deal in Old Rome,” making apt comparisons between Rome and the welfare state. Harold Bloom, the famed literary critic at Yale, recently warned, “Twenty-first-century America is in a state of decline. It is scary to reread the final volume of Gibbon these days because the fate of the Roman Empire seems to continue even now. We have approached bankruptcy, foreign wars we cannot pay for, and defrauded our urban and rural poor. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us.”

Hundreds of thousands took to the streets in Brazil tonight protesting corruption, police violence, and a government that funds massive stadiums and ignores public services.

Gosh, conditions in Brazil sound quite a lot like here in the US, don’t they? Maybe it’s time we took to the streets too.

Putin warns British PM about siding with cannibals in Syria (and he’s right!)

But we’ll be arming them anyway… “Scope and scale’ of aid to Syrian rebels will increase, says White House.

Poor people too often can’t afford nutritious food and tend to buy high carbohydrate, high fat food, which inexorably leads to weight gain. This is worsened by them working multiple jobs and eating at fast food chains because they don’t have time to go home and eat a good meal.Thus, obesity is a class issue.

Americans consume 25% more calories today than in the 70s, so it’s easy to dismiss obesity as a disease of luxury, but this isn’t true. Academic Earth explains obesity as a class issue enabled by American food policies.

According to Dr. James Hill, director of the Center of Human Nutrition at Colorado Health Sciences University, “Genes don’t make us obese. They allow us to be obese.” If our genes aren’t to blame for this rise in obesity, what is? Recent research suggests that socioeconomic class can impact our bodies as much as genetics, and may be a more accurate predictor for a variety of future health issues, including obesity. Check out this video to learn more about how American policies, like food subsidies, have had a direct role in driving our current obesity crisis.

Created by AcademicEarth.org