Source: http://www.scottstafne.com/lackofjustficefor9976-2/
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 20:10:36+00:00

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The only way slavery and genocide can exist openly in a society is with the participation of the government – and indirectly the people. In the United States the final check on tyranny was supposed to be the judicial department, composed of courts governed by judges whose judicial power was intended to be checked by juries of citizens.
But a predictable thing occurred when the judges nixed juries (by employing procedural technicalities to get around their constitutional authority) and mixed with the rich and powerful… The judges took sides; the wrong side — the side of the rich of powerful against providing justice for the people. See e.g. Dahlia Lathwick, “This Court Erred: The Supreme Court has almost always sided with the wealthy, the privileged, and the powerful, a new book argues” Slate (September 30, 2014) reviewing 2014 book by Constitutional Law Professor Erwin Chemerinsky, The Case Against the Supreme Court. See also “Do the “Haves” Come Out Ahead over Time? Applying Galanter’s Framework to Decisions of the U.S. Courts of Appeals, 1925-1988”, 33 Law & Soc’y Rev. 811 (1999); Galanter, Mark, “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change” (1994).
As my two previous articles on “the evolution of debt slavery in modern times” assert, american courts have consistently used their Article III judicial power to benefit the rich and powerful at the cost of providing justice for the people. In the Dred Scott v Sanford ruling the Supreme Court concluded the entire race of black people was not entitled to seek justice in american courts because they were merely property which was meant to be bought and sold by wealthy white americans.
And unfortunately american judges have typically had no clue about the difference between good and evil or right and wrong or justice and injustice because of their longstanding and unflinching loyalty to the rich and powerful.
One of the Supreme Court’s most recent cases perpetuating modern day debt slavery is its unanimous opinion in Henson v Santander Consumer USA Inc. In that case the Court held the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, which was enacted by Congress to prevent “debt collectors” from using unfair and unconscionable debt collection practices against the consumers, including homeowners, does not apply to debt buyers. Translation: Debt Buyers can use unfair and unconscionable practices to collect debts they have purchased for pennies on the dollar and cannot be held liable for those injuries such practices cause to the lives, liberties, property, and happiness of the people.
Santander is the modern day moral equivalent of Dred Scott in that it treats debtors as property the wealthy can abuse. Santander eschews any notions of justice or equity in order to motivate the sale of bad debt to unethical hedge funds who use every unconscionable trick in the book to attack and hurt american consumers to collect bad debt.
Congress’ goal in enacting the Fair Debt Collection Act was to prevent unscrupulous downstream debt buyers from bombarding Americans with bad faith debt collection practices and then the Supreme Court comes along and tells these creep companies and their soulless lawyers that they can mistreat the people in order to collect purported debts, which often are not owed.
How does Santander reflect justice or even good public policy?
The obvious answer is it does not. Santander, just like the Dred Scott case, starts from the dubious proposition that: “[i]t is not the province of the court to decide upon the justice or injustice…” and then misinterprets legislation to insure the continued redistribution of wealth to the 1%, which has always been its practice except for a brief period of time when FDR threatened to pack the Supreme Court in order to squelch this habit.
There is circumstantial evidence the Supreme Court sought to facilitate the impact the 2008 financial collapse. This collapse was utilized to transfer middle class wealth from this Nation’s people to its Wall Street sociopaths; a plan which the facts suggest has resulted in one of the one of the most massive genocides ever known. Cf. Miller, Pam, Church of the Gardens Press, El Abandonado, (2017); The Guardian,”Mortality rate for homeless youth in San Francisco is 10 times higher than peers” (April 14, 2016); “Homeless die 30 years younger than average (December 11, 2011). See also infra and bibliography, part IV.
The circumstantial evidence against the Supreme Court includes, among other things, an unusual (perhaps unlawful) change in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure which occurred in 2007.
28 USC §2072(a) provides the Supreme Court shall have the power to promulgate general rules of practice and procedure of the United States District Courts. But going through the judicial rule-making process would have taken more time than was needed to help the bankers.
So in 2007 (just before the 2008 financial collapse) the Supreme Court judicially interpreted Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 8 and 12(b) in such a way as to give judges almost absolute power to prevent homeowners’ cases from being decided pursuant to a trial by jury. See Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007), and Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S.554 (2009).
The Supreme Court determined in Iqbal and Twombly that to obtain a trial, including a trial by jury, a party must prepare a complaint which would be plausible to a federal judge. Prior to this time it was only necessary to establish a possible claim, not one a federal judge found plausible.
The concern over the Supreme Courts unusual change in the rules was palpable. Indeed, it was immediately criticized by many of this nations most well known and respected legal scholars. See Arthur R. Miller, From Conley to Twombly to Iqbal: A Double Play on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, 60 Duke L.J. 1 (October 2010); Stephen N. Subrin, Thoma O. Main, THE FOURTH ERA OF AMERICAN CIVIL PROCEDURE, 162 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1839 (June 2014) See also Bibliography below, section I. And many state court’s refused to fall in line because of the Supreme Court’s underhanded use of judicial decision making as a basis for changing the rules of procedure for district courts. See Hawkeye Foodservice Distrib. v. Iowa Educators Corp., 812 N.W.2d 600, 607-608 (2012). See also Bibliography below, section I.
The 2007 rule change had an extremely negative impact on the American people who owed debt, homeowners particularly.
Many of us believe the new rule was perpetrated by those who knew the result would likely be the genocide which is still ongoing today.
This is significant because even the Federal Judicial Center had to admit the effect of the instantaneous rule change on homeowners and others litigating financial instruments was devastating. See Id., page 14, Table 4 which substantiates that over 91% of claims filed by lawyers in these type of cases got dismissed under Iqbal/Twombly’s judge-centric plausibility standards.
America’s 21st century court system doesn’t even resemble the judicial department which our forefathers intended we should have.
But we certainly don’t have these rights any longer thanks to the Supreme Court, which has systematically usurped these rights to benefit the rich at the expense of the people.
Indeed, most people get so bludgeoned via abusive federal judicial processes that few can last long enough to ever obtain a trial. See Scott E. Stafne, scottstafne.com, Scorched Earth Litigation Model, September 15, 2015. It is no understatement to suggest america’s judicial system kills and/or injures those who are forced to encounter its abuse. See e.g., Caught.net & the Pro Se Way (last accessed October 10, 2017); Huffer, Karin,Legal Abuse Syndrome: 8 Steps for Avoiding the traumatic Stress Caused by the Justice System (2013).
In September of this year well respected Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, actually retired because of the unfair treatment other federal judges gave pro se litigants.
Pro se litigants include those people who can’t afford a lawyer to represent them and must therefore negotiate the byzantine, bizarre, and corrupt federal judicial gauntlet by themselves before staff attorneys and federal judges who do not like them very well.
According to Posner (and consistent with my observations over the last decade) “most judges regard [pro se litigants who can’t afford lawyers] as kind of trash not worth the time of a federal judge.” Because these arrogant judges believe pro se arguments are worthless their appeals are not decided by federal judges or law clerks, but staff attorneys. Posner reports the judges of the 7th Circuit simply rubber stamp the decisions of these “staff lawyers” who decide the pro se appeals.
Here is a copy of an interview with Judge Posner which describes his observations in his own words.
DL: As you’ve explained in several interviews — with the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, with me for these pages, and with Adam Liptak of the New York Times — you resigned in part because of your disagreements with colleagues about the Seventh Circuit’s treatment of pro se litigants. I know you discuss this in detail in your new book (affiliate link) — can you offer us a little preview?
RAP [Richard A. Posner]: Pro se litigants, by definition, don’t have a lawyer. This generally means they don’t have money to hire a lawyer. So they have to litigate for themselves. They’re handicapped by not having money and not having a lawyer, and they also tend to have limited education. About half of our appeals are by pro se’s, and about half of those are prison inmates.
When pro se litigants appeal, their appeal papers are given to a staff attorney. We have about 20 staff attorneys who are appointed for two years, and a few supervisors. The staff attorneys tend to be good students from good schools, hired right after they graduate. Despite their good credentials, they tend to be hostile to the pro se’s. It’s not their own feelings; it’s that they sense — correctly — that the judges don’t really care much about the pro se’s, find them nuisances, and are not interested in them. So that percolates down to the staff attorneys, and they have a tendency to go against the pro se appeals even when they have apparent merit.
I didn’t think the pro se litigants were getting a fair break. I made various suggestions, all of which were rejected. I wasn’t making progress in helping the pro se’s. And I didn’t have good relations anymore with the other judges — not really on a personal level, but we just didn’t see eye to eye on the pro ses.
So I stepped down from the bench and published my newest book, which is now out: Reforming the Federal Judiciary: My Former Court Needs to Overhaul Its Staff Attorney Program and Begin Televising Its Oral Arguments (affiliate link).
Judge Posner, who took the time to review some of these staff attorney’s decisions, correctly discerned that delegating judicial power to “baby lawyers”, without any meaningful supervision by active Article III judges, was improper. To me, this is rather obvious!!!
It is important to understand Judge Posner did not resign until after all the other judges on the Seventh Circuit refused to require (or even allow) these baby “staff lawyers” decisions regarding pro se appeals to be meaningfully reviewed by active Article III judges, as I believe is required by the Constitution.
“First, while [Judge Posner] is certainly entitled to his own views about such matters as our Staff Attorney’s Office and the accommodations we make for pro se litigants, it is worth noting that his views about that office are not shared by the other judges on the court, and his assumptions about the attitudes of the other judges toward pro selitigants are nothing more than that—assumptions.
Merely saying that the judges who are the subject of Posner’s allegations “don’t share Posner’s views” about their alleged wrongdoing does nothing to reassure the public that the 7th Circuit’s attitude toward pro se litigants is as frivolous as Posner has alleged.
It is a major red flag when judges aren’t even willing to follow the rules of their own court, and that certainly does appear to be the case with the judges in the 7th Circuit. Systematic discrimination by judges against a class of people, pro se litigants in this case, is wrong and against the law. Wood’s public response is not good enough. A grand jury should be empanelled and the judges and staff attorneys and law clerks should be required to testify under oath so that a factual determination may be made as to whether or not the judges on the 7th Circuit are systematically discriminating against the pro se litigants.
This admission has staggering repercussions when one realizes most court cases today involve pro se litigants. See e.g. ABA Law Journal, “86 percent of low-income Americans’ civil legal issues get inadequate or no legal help, study says” (June 14, 2017); Legal Services Corporation, The Justice Gap: measuring the Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-income Americans (June 2017); Lawyerist.com, “Measuring the Access-to-Justice Gap: Nearly 70% of All Civil Defendants Aren’t Represented” (2016) ; ABA Journal, “Can the access-to-justice gap be closed” (2016).
The reality that our courts more often than not decide cases where only one side is able to effectively present their side to a judge or jury is at odds with those basic tenets of justice the Revolutionary war was fought to achieve. Clearly, constitutional history establishes that the people who ratified the Constitution were led to believe the Constitution was designed so judges would not become judicial tyrants, unchecked by juries and the Congress. See Federalist Paper No. 78.
Yet, that is exactly what has happened.
And scholars the world over who observe the American judicial system quickly appreciate america’s courts and judges have little, if anything, to do with justice or fairness.
The “honest to God” truth is America’s Article III judicial department has dismantled those basic constitutional checks on its power which were established to prevent it from devolving into the tyrannical judocracy it has become. Looks at the facts. The facts dispute virtually all the myths our courts perpetuate to make us believe our judicial branch performs its constitutional duties.
MYTH: “Only the United States makes routine use of jury trials in a wide variety of non-criminal cases.” SeeWikipedia.
TRUTH: Less than 5% of cases filed ever get to trial let alone a trial by jury.
MYTH: America has an adversarial system of justice where both sides are competently represented before a neutral judge and jury.
TRUTH: Over half the cases presented to these supposedly neutral judges (who apparently don’t like or respect 99% of us) are handled by non-lawyers who have no experience with the mostly counter intuitive archaic rules of procedure and evidence which make litigation more a game than a search for truth. See Bibliography, Past IV.
MYTH: the United States judicial system is based on the common law.
TRUTH : The common law system of precedent has not existed in America for sometime. Compare e.g. Anastasof v. United States, 223 F.3d 898 (8th Cir. 2000) (Courts are required to make and follow precedent) with Hart v. Massanari, 266 F.3d 1155 (9th Cir. 2001)(Judges can decide when they want and if they want to create precedent) with Judge Posner’s observations that today courts need not even explain their reasons for their decisions by simply stating “Appeal Dismissed”. See supra.
In case No. 3 of the Nuremberg Trials 16 defendants who were former German judges, prosecutors or officials in the Reich Ministry of Justice, were found guilty of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The tribunal found, in effect, that while on paper the rights established by the Weimar Constitution were retained by the Nazis, there was a progressive degeneration of the judicial system under Nazi rule and that substantially every principle of justice enumerated by prior German law was violated by the Hitler regime.
The same can be said about about the United States judicial system. Our courts have attacked our constitutionally protected jury system to the point where it is for all practical purposes now extinct. The common law is no longer predictable because judges no longer believe their rulings must be anchored to precedent. Far too many judges act as despots who can berate, belittle, and harm those who appear in their ostentatious court rooms.
Obviously, if as James Madison postulated justice is the goal of government, our courts and the other two branches of our government have failed us. We need good competent judges who are paid to ferret out the truth in a pragmatic way; not baby or senile lawyers awed by their power and the courtesan legal cabals which seek their favor. If our constitutional system is now dead let’s move on to one that actually attempts to provide justice for a free people.
Ever wonder how many millions of people the american courts have caused to be evicted since the Supreme Court made it so easy for them to do so in 2007? Me too.
The scale of this entire foreclosure migration is deceptively large. The 10 million households that lost their homes dwarf the number that left the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl (that was about 2.5 million people). In fact, it is larger than the 6 million blacks who moved north during the Great Migration — a movement that spanned decades.
Emily Badger, “How the Housing Crisis Left Us More Racially Segregated,” Washington Post, May 8, 2015.
Next question. What happens to the people our courts force onto the streets? Just as you would expect, there are very few recent studies on this as well.
However, way back in 2011 when courts were accelerating foreclosures and homelessness, virtually everyone knew the banks had rigged the system and were blatantly using forged documents to take people’s homes. (see e.g. 2011 60 Minutes programs and Congressional Hearings). Turns out the courts didn’t care about either the forgeries or the health crises, including deaths, such injustice was causing the people. See Bibliography, Part V.
NHS choices; your health, your choices “Homeless die 30 years younger than average (December 11, 2011).
But no one wants to have to care about their lost neighbors because then we all become complicit in these crimes by the united states against this nation’s own people.
In United States of America v. Alstötter, et al. (“The Jurists’ Trial”), 3 T.W.C. 1 (1948), 6 L.R.T.W.C. 1 (1948), 14 Ann. Dig. 278 (1948) the Court well stated the gravity of judges relying on false evidence when imposing death and/or severe sentences on citizens, who have been robbed of their freedom.
He [the judge defendant] formed his opinions from dubious records submitted to him before trial. By his manner and methods he made his court an instrumentality of terror and won the fear and hatred of the population. From the evidence of his closest associates as well as his victims, we find that Oswald Rothaug represented in Germany the personification of the secret Nazi intrigue and cruelty. He was and is a sadistic and evil man. Under any civilized judicial system he could have been impeached and removed from office or convicted of malfeasance in office on account of the scheming malevolence with which he administered injustice.
“In a well-functioning judicial system, negotiated resolutions of litigated disputes should reflect not only the interests of the disputants but also a reasonable approximation of the factual and legal merits of claims.” Brooke D. Coleman, “THE EFFICIENCY NORM” 56 B.C. L. Rev 1777 (2015) Just as this observation did not apply in the Dred Scott case it does not apply to the vast majority of those of us who find ourselves trapped in court proceedings today. This is because our government views those of us who cannot shell out cash for a court’s favorable ruling as something less than the free people our Constitution intended would be entitled to justice.
I. WAS IQBAL PLANNED BY THE COURTS TO FACILITATE FORECLOSURES?
Clermont, Kevin M. and Yeazell, Stephen C., “Inventing Tests, Destabilizing Systems” (2010). Cornell Law Faculty Publications. Paper 201.
Lisa Eichhorn, A Sense of Disentitlement: Frame-Shifting and Metaphor in Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 62 Fla. L. Rev. 951 (2010).
Robert G. Bone, Plausibility Pleading Revisited and Revised: A Comment on Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 85 Notre Dame L. Rev. 849, 849 (2010) This article can be downloaded from link.
Hawkeye Foodservice Distrib. v. Iowa Educators Corp., 812 N.W.2d 600, 607-608 (2012).
“For the most part, state high courts have declined to adopt the new standard announced in Twombly and Iqbal. See Cent.Mortg. Co. v. Morgan Stanley Mortg. Capital Holdings LLC, 27 A.3d 531, 537 (Del. 2011); Webb v. Nashville Area Habitat for Humanity, Inc., 346 S.W.3d 422, 424 (Tenn. 2011); McCurry v. Chevy Chase Bank, FSB, 169 Wn.2d 96, 233 P.3d 861, 863-64 (Wash. 2010); Roth v. DeFeliceCare, Inc., 226 W. Va. 214, 700 S.E.2d 183, 189 n.4 (W. Va. 2010). But see Doe v. Bd. of Regents, 280 Neb. 492, 788 N.W.2d 264, 278 (Neb. 2010). These courts have given a variety of reasons for refusing to incorporate the new federal standard in their state rules. For example, the Washington court concluded that the plausibility factor adds a determination of the likelihood of success on the merits, so that a trial judge can dismiss a claim, even where the law does provide a remedy . . ., if that judge does not believe it is plausible the claim will ultimately succeed.
Kenneth S. Klein, Ashcroft v. Iqbal Crashes Rule 8 Pleading Standards onto Unconstitutional Shores, 88 NEB. L. REV. 261 (2009).
Kenneth Klein, Is Ashcroft v. Iqbal the Death (Finally) of the “Historical Test” for Interpreting the Seventh Amendment?, 88 Neb. L. Rev. 467, 471–72 (2010).
Joe. S. Cecil, Federal Judicial Center, “Of Waves and Water: A Response to Comments on FJC Study Motions to Dismiss for Failure to State a Claim after Iqbal,” Draft Posted March 19, 2012. Paper can be downloaded from link.
II. IQBAL/TWOMBLY BENEFITS CORPORATIONS AND THE WEALTHY AT THE EXPENSE OF THE PEOPLE.
Stein, Alex and Parchomovsky, Gideon, “Empowering Individual Plaintiffs” (2017).
Alexandra D. Lahav, ARTICLE & ESSAY: THE ROLES OF LITIGATION IN AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, 65 Emory L.J. 1657(2016) paper can be downloaded from link.
Professor Alexander Reinart interviews Professor Brooke Coleman of Seattle Law about her her article “One percent Procedure” at Cardozo School of Law civil procedure workshop. Link is to recording of that interview.
Sarah Staszak, SYMPOSIUM: “Procedural Change in the First Ten Years of the Roberts Court”. Cardozo Law Review 38.2 (2016). Web.
The degeneration of the american empire’s legal system has been accompanied by litigation models which rely on the disparity of resources between the parties (not the facts or law of any specific case) as the primary basis for resolving cases.
It is my observation that the “Scorched Earth” litigation model, named after General Sherman’s infamous military campaign, is used in virtually 100% of all foreclosure litigation. This model is based on the business premise that banks and servicers should spend whatever money is necessary to win so as to deter homeowners (and any potential lawyers who might be inclined to represent them) from challenging any foreclosure judicially.
I have personally seen this multi-billion dollar industry spend more in litigation costs than the worth of the houses they are foreclosing on. I have been told by servicers’ lawyers that their clients do not factor in defense costs for purposes of settling with homeowners (even where the homeowner has obtained a summary judgment of liability against the servicer) because they want homeowners and their lawyers to know that they will spend whatever it takes to win in court.
The point they are making is one Americans should contemplate: Are we now living in a totalitarian society where the courts are rigged and judicial decisions are decided not by the merits, but the money the parties are willing and/or can afford for litigation?
III. JURY TRIALS ARE VIRTUALLY EXTINCT IN THE UNITED STATES NOTWITHSTANDING THEY ARE GUARANTEED BY THE CONSTITUTION.
Honorable William G. Young, “A Lament for What Was and Can Yet Be.” 32 Boston College International and Compararive law Review (2009).
Drew A. Swank, The Pro Se Phenomenon, 19 BYU J. Pub. L. 373 (2005).
In America, the judiciary has increasingly had to grapple with the question of how far a judge can go in guiding or assisting an SRL in such a way as to avoid the possibly harsh or unjust consequences resulting from their lack of familiarity with the judicial process? Despite calls for clarification of the judge’s role in these circumstances, the current reluctance of the U.S. judiciary to assist SRLs is fostered by both the traditionally passive role of the adversarial trial judge, and by the general rule of non-assistance in U.S. case law. Yet most U.S. trial judges have realized that they must assist SRLs to some extent to avoid the harsh results that can occur when SRLs lacking sufficient legal knowledge represent themselves in court.
Gillian K. Hadfield, ”Higher Demand, Lower Supply? A Comparative Assessment of the Legal Resource Landscape for Ordinary Americans”, 37 Fordham Urb. L.J. 129 (2009) Article can be obtained from link.
Jessica Dixon Weaver, Overstepping Ethical Boundaries? Limitations on State Efforts To Provide Access to Justice in Family Courts, 82 Fordham L. Rev. 2705 (2014).
ARTICLE: Adversary Breakdown and Judicial Role Confusion in “Small Case” Civil Justice, 2016 B.Y.U.L. Rev. 899 (2016) This article can be downloaded from link.
ABA Journal, “Can the access-to-justice gap be closed” (2016).
ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services.
The Commission presents this compendium of scholarly papers on the future of legal services. With the generosity of the University of South Carolina Law Review and its faculty advisors and members, the papers of leading academicians have been gathered.
WHAT WE KNOW AND NEED TO KNOW ABOUT LEGAL STARTUPS – Daniel W. Linna Jr.
Paul R Tremblay. “Surrogate Lawyering: Legal Guidance, sans Lawyers.” Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics, Forthcoming (2017).
VI. DATA REGARDING NUMBER OF FORECLOSURES IN U.S.
VII.THE BASIS FOR CREATING A PRIVATE JUSTICE SYSTEM IN LIEU OF ARTICLE III COURTS.
Andrew D. Bradt “A RADICAL PROPOSAL”: THE MULTIDISTRICT LITIGATION ACT OF 1968,” 165 U.Pa. Rev. 831 (March 2917)(hypothesizing that federal judges knew there was about to be a mass tort explosion and accordingly developed and lobbied for the passage of of a statute to concentrate power in the hands of the federal judiciary. This much like the th conduct I hypothesize occurred when the Supreme Court changed the Federal Rules by abrogating the seminal case of Conley v Gibson.
Judith Resnik, Diffusing Disputes: The Public in the Private of Arbitration, the Private in Courts, and the Erasure of Rights, 124 Yale L.J. 2804 (2015).
Tagged 99%, corrupt, crisis in the U.S., judicial system, justice, lack of justice.

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