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More and more, we seem to now be living in times and circumstances that our Founders warned us about. In 1792 Congress first established one of the principles of our judiciary system: in order to guarantee the public’s trust in the courts and the impartiality of judges, no one should be a judge of his or her own cause.
As Shakespeare said of Caesar’s wife, judges should be above suspicion; if involved in a case where there is even a whiff of impropriety, an ethical judge should recuse him- or herself.
Alas, that was then and this is now. The Wall St. Journal, on 30 September, reported on its own investigation which revealed that, between 2010 and 2018, 131 federal judges (129 federal district judges and 2 federal appellate judges) had broken the law by failing to recuse themselves from 685 lawsuits involving companies in which they or their families had financial interests.
The judges had been appointed by every president from Lyndon Johnson to Donald Trump.
The investigation uncovered 61 judges or their families who not only held stocks in companies appearing before the judge but who also traded those stocks while the cases were active. This comes on the heels of revelations of similar conflicts of interest at the Federal Reserve; see “FED ETHICS? FU!” (21 Sep 2021).
The judges offered an assortment of excuses. Some blamed court clerks or search engine software that failed to adequately screen for conflicts. One judge who ruled on a trademark case involving Ford Motor Co. claimed she hadn’t realized that her husband possessing Ford stock in his retirement account should have disqualified her. Her comment? “I regret my misunderstanding, but I assure you it was an honest one.”
In another case, a Colorado couple asked a judge to block a Comcast subsidiary from accessing their property to lay fiber-optic cable, claiming that company workers had bullied and threatened them, terrorized their children and even injured their dog. The judge acceded to Comcast’s wishes and sent the case back to state court. When it was revealed that he or his family owned Comcast stock and that he should have recused himself, the judge said, “I dropped the ball. Thank you for helping me stay on my toes the way I’m supposed to.”
The Judicial Conference of the U.S. is the federal courts’ policy-making body; its Committee on Codes of Conduct wrote a letter reminding one judge that the ethics code for federal judges “requires recusal when a judge has a financial conflict, regardless of the substance of the judge’s actual involvement in the case.”
TREND FORECAST: The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, however, actually seemed to bristle at the WSJ’s revelations, saying the WSJ’s report “on incidents where conflicts inadvertently were not identified before a case was resolved or transferred is troubling, and the Administrative Office is carefully reviewing the matter.”
The entire government system is rife with unethical criminality. We have been reporting on Federal Reserve presidents making mulita-million dollar bets, knowing before anyone else the next Fed moves that will direct the markets.
On Sunday, from millions of leaked documents, the Pandora’s Papers reported how politicians, public officials, Banksters, celebrities, power brokers, big business tycoons, etc., have been raking in hundreds of millions, buying mansions across the globe and paying no taxes. This, at a time when We the Little People have been declared “unessential” and hundreds of millions— if not billions—of lives and livelihoods destroyed to fight the COVID War.
And to further illustrate the levels of corruption, last week we ran these two articles, “AMERICA’S RICHEST 400 FAMILIES PAY A TINY PERCENT OF FEDERAL INCOME TAX COMPARED TO THE WORKING CLASS” and “WORLD’S LARGEST ADVERTISING GROUP A CRIME GROUP.”
Thus, our “OFF WITH THEIR HEADS 2.0” trend from December 2019, forecasting the global rise in anger directed at the 1 percent, was already spreading globally prior to the 2020 COVID War.
The great wealth gap followed by the destruction of small businesses by politicians who launched the COVID War while allowing the Bigs to get bigger will be a key platform in the formation of new political parties across the globe. As the gap between the rich and poor widens, so, too, will the animosity between the “haves” and “have nots.”
Gated communities will increase in popularity and more private security will be hired by the haves who will be gangland targets.