Our Broken Justice System

Guest Post by David Erickson

Our justice system, both criminal and civil, is completely broken. The recent Roger Stone arrest illustrates some of the problems with the criminal justice system. If the PTB want to get someone, all they have to do is go fishing. Everyone commits crimes due to the sheer size and complexity of our criminal code. A person would need an army of lawyers to avoid committing any crimes. See for example the book “Three Felonies A Day”, by Harvey Silverglate. I haven’t read the book, but the book summary at Amazon says, in part:

“The average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day. Why? The answer lies in the very nature of modern federal criminal laws, which have exploded in number but also become impossibly broad and vague. In “Three Felonies a Day”, Harvey A. Silverglate reveals how federal criminal laws have become dangerously disconnected from the English common law tradition and how prosecutors can pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior. The volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books and into the morass of the Code of Federal Regulations, handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets.”

That pretty much sums up the whole problem right there. One additional thing I would add is that with their virtually unlimited resources, the PTB can indefinitely harass, and eventually bankrupt, anyone they want to, which gives them even more ammunition to bring down anyone they want to, even in those rare cases that they can’t find an actual law or regulation that was broken.

And that is precisely what the Feds have done to Roger Stone. I doubt that he broke any law that would be considered a just law in the English common law tradition, but it is an almost certainty that he violated some regulation technicality or obscure provision in some convoluted law. And regardless of whether or not that is the case, the Feds have certainly been draining him financially. Roger’s legal bills are already well over a million dollars for defending himself so far. He set up a legal defense fund a while back asking for donations. I didn’t donate to that fund, but I would have under one condition. I sent an e-mail to him in May of last year that said in part:

“If they can do this to high profile people with connections to the president of the U.S., what chance does the average Joe have if a prosecutor (or the FBI, IRS, etc.) sets his sights on him.  The current president, Donald Trump, who you know personally, should be championing a reform of this system. … Simultaneously, the president needs to be putting pressure on Congress to pass some meaningful judicial reform. … Since you know the president personally, you are a perfect candidate to provide this information to the president.  I know that even if the justice system is reformed at all, it will be too late to do you any good, but if you provide this to the president I will donate to your legal defense fund.  If you forward this to the president, and he replies to me indicating that he has read this e-mail, I will donate $500 to your legal defense fund.”

I sent the e-mail to him twice, and he didn’t reply, although after the second time I did get a reply from someone who was apparently an aide or friend of his that said “Thank you, David, for reaching out. We will pass the message on to Mr. Stone.”

And this brings me to the main reason I am writing this post. Most observant people already know that the justice system is broken. And I don’t even know for sure what the solution is, although I have some ideas. (I do however have a solution to fix the broken civil justice system that would virtually eliminate frivolous lawsuits, and guarantee reasonable awards in the case of those lawsuits that are justified, but there is exactly zero chance that it would ever be implemented, since it would take away all the ill-gotten money that the lawyers get from filing frivolous lawsuits.) And I also know there is almost no chance that we will ever get any meaningful reform of the criminal justice system. However, if we ever had any chance at all to get any meaningful reform, Donald Trump was probably it. I reached out to Roger Stone because I was grasping at straws to try to get something constructive done in Washington, and I was hoping Trump might help in some small fashion.

I voted for Trump in 2016. I usually vote for third party candidates in all races (not just for president), usually Libertarian Party or Constitution Party, because I refuse to vote for the lesser of two evils. But in the case of Trump, I didn’t consider him to be the lesser of two evils. He said a lot of things that I liked when he was campaigning, and I figured that since he wasn’t a career politician, he might be telling the truth a lot of the time, unlike most career politicians who are lying whenever their lips are moving. I also vehemently hated the thought of Hillary as president. So even though I knew the state I live in (California) would go to Clinton, I voted for Trump anyway.

However, literally on election night I began to suspect I would be disappointed with Trump. In his victory speech he said “Hillary has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country”. How had “lock her up” changed to “we owe her a major debt of gratitude” in just a few days? But I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he was just being nice until he took office, or maybe a speech writer had put that in there.

Well, I am not giving him the benefit of the doubt anymore. He has stumbled and fumbled his way from one disaster to another ever since he was inaugurated. In fact his scorecard is a perfect “F”. He hasn’t done a single thing that I would consider an accomplishment. There were a few brief signs of hope early on, such as when he picked Michael Flynn for his National Security Advisor, but he canned Flynn and threw him under the bus so fast that my head is still spinning. Other than that, he has just been filling up the swamp. Every other advisor and cabinet member that he has picked, without exception, was or is a disaster. Some of them were obvious disasters before he even selected them, such as John Bolton. Others, such as Jeff Sessions, might have initially seemed to be okay, but all of them (especially Sessions) quickly displayed obvious incompetence, and often outright hostility to Trump’s stated policies. But instead of firing them, he either praised them, or at least tolerated them. Sometimes he would send out confusing tweets that appeared to criticize them, only to turn around and praise them the next day.

Even the “accomplishments” that are usually touted by his (remaining) supporters are not actually accomplishments. When he was campaigning, he correctly pointed out numerous economic problems such as the fact that the high stock market was just a bubble and the unemployment statistics were phony. But then after taking office he did a 180 and not only said that the high stock market showed that we had a healthy economy, but he actually took credit for the high stock market. And his touted tax cuts are not an accomplishment. If he had also cut spending the tax cuts would have been a good thing, but he increased spending at the same time he cut taxes. If you decrease your income and increase your spending and don’t have any savings then you are going to have to borrow money to make up the difference. (Or in the case of the federal government, it can have the Federal Reserve print more money, but the economic consequences are roughly the same in either case – either more debt, or devalued money.)

Virtually the only redeeming feature of his presidency (other than the fact that he kept Hillary out of the office) is the entertainment value of watching the left constantly melting down over every action, utterance, and tweet of his, and hearing them proclaim “the walls are closing in” after every nondevelopment in the Russiagate nothingburger. However they are melting down about all the wrong things. The things they should be melting down about, such as when he attacked Syria with missiles in response to a “chemical gas attack” that anyone paying attention should have been able to tell was either a false flag attack or completely staged (in that case it turned out to be staged), they actually praised him. Many leftists, and especially the MSM, gushed over that. That is what constitutes praise-worthy presidential behavior nowadays: bombing countries and killing people because of obviously fake intelligence. (Of course, there is nothing new about that. There was certainly a lot of that going on during the G. W. Bush years and Obama years also.)

And now he is fixated on the wall. The amount of political capital he has expended on his fight for the wall is enormous. If he had expended that much capital on trying to fix our broken justice system, which is what I hoping for when I e-mailed Roger Stone, or draining the swamp, or trying to fix the ongoing election fraud problems, or getting a real 9/11 investigation going (which he hinted at during his candidacy), or some other worthwhile achievement, then his presidency would not be a complete failure. But instead he is fixated on the wall, which is a bad solution to our immigration problems. If it ever gets built (which it probably won’t), it will not solve any problems, but will certainly create some (see here).

And now Trump’s long-time friend and ally has been arrested. (And not only arrested, but raided in a pre-dawn raid with a SWAT team, and the media was tipped off beforehand. That right there tells you a lot about our justice system.) But even though Roger has been treated very badly, I don’t especially feel sorry for him. Most of his judicial problems are because he is defending a president who won’t try to fix the problems with our justice system and who has thrown him under the bus. Stone should do what Mueller wants him to do, which is make up lies about Trump. (This illustrates yet another problem with our criminal justice system, which I didn’t mention earlier. Prosecutors will often use their immense plea bargaining powers to get witnesses to “testify” (i.e., lie) about the big fish that they are actually trying to catch, which in this case is Trump.)

So there is no way our problems are ever going to get fixed. Our federal government is a complete hopeless disaster, and just keeps creating more and more problems all the time. People on the left hate those on the right, and vice versa. The constant complaining, bickering and insults on blogs and social media are just that – complaining, bickering and insults. No problems are being solved. No one is being convinced to change their mind. No one at Townhall is going to post a column that says they like Hillary Clinton and we should socialize healthcare. No one at Vox is going to post a column that says they like Donald Trump and we should cut welfare spending. So one or more of the following things is going to happen:

The right will get routed. That will happen when Trump’s successor takes office (whether it happens in 2021 or 2025) because his successor will be a Democrat. And by that time the Democrats will have the House and Senate locked up permanently also. We will never have another Republican president, other than possibly a RINO like Mitt Romney. If the right thinks they have reasons to complain about the left now, they haven’t seen anything yet.

Our economic problems will reach the point where we can’t kick the can down the road any farther. That point will be when (not if, but when) either the dollar loses its status as the world reserve currency, or when interest rates climb back to some place close to their historic range of approximately 6-8%, or when we finally reach the tipping point for our unfunded liabilities of Social Security, Medicare, pensions, etc. If all three of those things happen at about the same time, Zimbabwe and Venezuela will be economic paradises compared to here.

We will end up in a real war, as opposed to our current regime changes and proxy wars, with someone who can actually fight back, like Russia or China (or both). With the constant demonization of Russia by the leftists and neocons, it appears that that is their objective. I don’t know if they are doing it deliberately, or if they are just too stupid to know what they are doing, but they are certainly playing with fire.

We will end up in an actual civil war, as opposed to just a constant war of words.

So, in other words, we are doomed. However, the most frustrating aspect of all this is that there is actually a fairly good solution to a lot of our current problems. It is not an ideal solution (there is no ideal solution), and it would take a little bit of cooperation between the left and right to implement it, but if it could be implemented it would solve or at least alleviate many of our current problems, including some of the problems with our justice system. And the icing on the cake is that it would irrefutably settle the dispute once and for all as to which political philosophy is the best. I am certain that it would show that socialism/communism is just as big a failure here as it has been everywhere else in history, and would show that liberty and free markets (not our current crony capitalism that is often confused with free markets) produces the best outcome. However, in the 1/100,000 chance that I am wrong, at least I would finally find out which is correct, as would everyone else. And whichever side is wrong, that side would only destroy itself without destroying the entire country. And if that side figured out that it was on the road to destruction soon enough, it could reverse course and reconcile with the other side and we would all be one big happy family again. However there is nearly zero probability that we will ever be able to avail ourselves of this solution. There probably aren’t enough people who will ever recognize this solution as being a good one, not to mention the fact that the corrupt Deep State desires our current situation as a way to divide and conquer, and will pull out all the stops to ensure that we continue fighting amongst ourselves. But if anyone is interested, it is here.

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