Written by Rob Carter   

I see a few problems in writer's wording of "Lets get this class War started" as assertions Chris Hedges is quite realistic in the main.

People often read such articles as gospel, but I read more the opposing economic and political, financial press and internet comments first, in the hope of finding some balance between left & right ideals and aims.

Now please enjoy, or detest and comment to me on my offering against Chris Hedges great article journalism to his audience tastes.

CH ~ Let’s Get This Class War Started
Common Dreams Published on Monday, October 21, 2013 ~ from TruthDig.com by Chris Hedges

Rob Carter NB: I have called this a Religion of Communism ~ Thus to review Marxism, a religion I see as equally flawed, as the others that Chris Hedges review claims to treat fairly.

CH ~ “The rich are different from us,” F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked to Ernest Hemingway, to which Hemingway allegedly replied, “Yes, they have more money.”

Rob Carter NB: I agree more with Hemingway but add "or power" usually either of which leads to their pairing in practical life, no matter the name or ideology they choose to prosecute as their vehicle for more of both, and further removal from the underclasses.

CH ~ The exchange, although it never actually took place, sums up a wisdom Fitzgerald had that eluded Hemingway. The rich are different.

Rob Carter NB: I can not agree with Fitzgerald at all, as QE II said of her "anus horriblis" they all shit in the mornings, they all eat, shit, and die, some remind us. It is the power that makes the difference and so when a poor communist gets the power he gathers the riches as a general rule then goes for more as his ideology slowly retreats and gets lost in his own luxuriating of the power and wealth thus acquired.

CH ~ The cocoon of wealth and privilege permits the rich to turn those around them into compliant workers, hangers-on, servants, flatterers and sycophants. Wealth breeds, as Fitzgerald illustrated in “The Great Gatsby” and his short story “The Rich Boy,” a class of people for whom human beings are disposable commodities.

Rob Carter NB: it also breeds power as with the former Australian Jew Rupert Murdoch's ability to become a USA citizen and then to command a Nation, a GOP Party, the Presidents of either persuasion and everyone about him and his media enterprise. Sure they do dominate with the power that wealth creates and in Marxism they gain the wealth that power creates for them.

CH ~ Colleagues, associates, employees, kitchen staff, servants, gardeners, tutors, personal trainers, even friends and family, bend to the whims of the wealthy or disappear. Once oligarchs achieve unchecked economic and political power...

Rob Carter NB: wrong thinking 99 it is likewise "once unchecked political power is mastered by the Ideologist, he too achieves the wealth to double the damage his power can reap".

CH ~ ...as they have in the United States, the citizens too become disposable.

Rob Carter NB: no less in all Marxist states have those rising to the top achieved exactly the same and usually with even less governance and policing than the sinful Yankee's reported here.

It appears to me that only when the ideology/religion masters are at the intermediate power place that their ideology can over-ride their oligarchic propensity to dominate with power to accumulate more power and/or wealth that they perform their promise. Some do hold true to their ideology be they rich/poor and/or powerful/powerless they are the very exceptional few and are almost always genuine simple emotional and brainwashed to such extent in youth that they remain true to their ideology & benevolent in general, no matter the power or wealth they collect along the way.

CH ~ The public face of the oligarchic class bears little resemblance to the private face.

Rob Carter NB: Likewise the ideologue when they gain the power and the wealth chases them to a same resulting private hypocrisy. Chris Hedges is simply blind to these realities as he claims...

CH ~ I, like Fitzgerald, was thrown into the embrace of the upper crust when young. I was shipped off as a scholarship student at the age of 10 to an exclusive New England boarding school. I had classmates whose fathers—fathers they rarely saw—arrived at the school in their limousines accompanied by personal photographers (and at times their mistresses), so the press could be fed images of rich and famous men playing the role of good fathers. I spent time in the homes of the ultra-rich and powerful, watching my classmates, who were children, callously order around men and women who worked as their chauffeurs, cooks, nannies and servants. When the sons and daughters of the rich get into serious trouble there are always lawyers, publicists and political personages to protect them—George W. Bush’s life is a case study in the insidious affirmative action for the rich. The rich have a snobbish disdain for the poor—despite well-publicized acts of philanthropy—and the middle class. These lower classes are viewed as uncouth parasites, annoyances that have to be endured, at times placated and always controlled in the quest to amass more power and money. My hatred of authority, along with my loathing for the pretensions, heartlessness and sense of entitlement of the rich, comes from living among the privileged.

Rob Carter NB: Hedges difference that kept him straight was that he never had the wealth to create his own power base, and he never had the personal power base to create the wealth. He merely went along for the ride on his mates wealth and power. It was a deeply unpleasant experience. But it exposed me to their insatiable selfishness and hedonism. I learned, as a boy, who were my enemies.

Rob Carter NB: I see that as why Gerry and Rob are so happily linked as we are. We each have had our taste of mediocrity developed via education and hard work to a degree of wealth and power that leveled off timely to allow us to see the sins of 'too much power' and likewise 'too much wealth' each self generating by loss of moral ideology and consideration for our fellow human sufferers. Thus at times we compliment each other one holds power in a sphere the other lacks power in, each have a wealth and paucity in what the other stars in at a differing time and place. Likewise the wealth time and place. Each of us woke to the evil we would succumb to unless we ceased a direction progress timely enough to remain true to ourselves and our benevolent ideological standards. So we halted forward growth of power and/or wealth to maintain our integrity & philanthropy of power and wealth to maintain equilibrium.

This is much as most religious leaders do in their fields, it is the oligarch with no ideology and the ideologist with retained selfishness who decays under the pressure of wealth or power equally. This is where I must agree

CH ~ …"How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.” –Wendell Berry

Rob Carter NB: he is spot on I guess.

CH ~ The inability to grasp the pathology of our oligarchic rulers is one of our gravest faults.

Rob Carter NB: Idealist or oligarchic ruling elite are identical in time.

CH ~ We have been blinded to the depravity of our ruling elite by the relentless propaganda of public relations firms that work on behalf of corporations and the rich

Rob Carter NB: both Gerry and Rob have joined these crooks at one time, luckily woke in time and returned to our own ideological common ground timely..

CH ~ Compliant politicians, clueless entertainers and our vapid, corporate-funded popular culture, which holds up the rich as leaders to emulate and assures us that through diligence and hard work we can join them, keep us from seeing the truth.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy,” Fitzgerald wrote of the wealthy couple at the center of Gatsby’s life. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Rob Carter NB: Is that such a fault? Gerry leaves a mess in every house or room he occupies and retreats to his wealth, he pays others to cleanup and that is both benevolent and economically sound employment and sharing of wealth as money intent always was in fact [money was after all created to facilitate the transport of production more efficiently than sending farmers trees to carpenters to send their coffins to bakers who must send surplus coffins in time to millers for flour and who must in time send surplus coffins to farmers for wheat and in the end the farmer still has trees and too many coffins].

The real problem I see is when Rupert Murdoch cleans his own office, or Karl Marx becomes President Idi Amin or chairman Mao, when they justify leaving the messy environment for next gen to fix, and allm in the name of benevolent ideological advancement. Sure true that ...
CH ~ …….Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith and Karl Marx all began from the premise there is a natural antagonism between the rich and the masses. “Those who have too much of the goods of fortune, strength, wealth, friends, and the like, are neither willing nor able to submit to authority,” Aristotle wrote in “Politics.” “The evil begins at home; for when they are boys, by reason of the luxury in which they are brought up, they never learn, even at school, the habit of obedience.”

Rob Carter NB: One can say that of the GWB & Rupert Murdoch class but what of the Idi Amin opposite who gain power from a poverty, even orphan beginning and merely accumulate the wealth as the power falls on them, bribes and loss of their ideological basis is no less destructive in time. Murdoch's father was entrepreneurial, his Uncle Professor Sir Walter Murdoch an ideologist of sorts, but they both became powers in their fields one creating good the other evil and both fostered the evil Rupert. The generation earlier began from another religious Ideologue Rev. James Murdoch, minister of the Free Church of Scotland, and his wife Helen, née Garden, and he was the youngest of their 14 children. He spent his first decade at Rosehearty and in England and France, and Walter arrived with his family in Melbourne in 1884. He attended Camberwell Grammar School and Scotch College. At the University of Melbourne, as a member of Ormond College, he won first-class honours in logic and philosophy. Rupert on the other hand was son of Sir Keith Arthur Murdoch an Australian journalist. In turn was the son of a religious Ideologue born in Melbourne in 1885, to Rev. Patrick John Murdoch, who had married in 1882 and migrated from Cruden, Scotland to Victoria, Australia with Patrick's family in 1884. His paternal grandfather was a minister with the Free Church of Scotland, and his maternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister. The family moved from West Melbourne to the affluent suburb of Camberwell in 1887. Keith was educated at his uncle Walter's short-lived school, then at Camberwell Grammar School, where he became dux in 1903, despite extreme shyness and stammering.

Bush family resembles the ideologue to tyrant development I prescribe here. Some 5 generations from Samuel Prescot Bush rich industrialist son of son of religious ideologue Rev. James Smith Bush, an Episcopal priest at Grace Church in Orange. He grew up in New Jersey, San Francisco, and Staten Island, but spent the majority of his adult life in Columbus, Ohio. He married Flora Sheldon on June 20, 1894. They had five children: Prescott Bush, Robert (who died in childhood), Mary (Mrs. Frank) House, Margaret (Mrs. Stuart) Clement, and James.

CH ~ Oligarchs, these philosophers knew, are schooled in the mechanisms of manipulation, subtle and overt repression and exploitation to protect their wealth and power at our expense. Foremost among their mechanisms of control is the control of ideas. Ruling elites ensure that the established intellectual class is subservient to an ideology—in this case free market capitalism and globalization—that justifies their greed. “The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,” Marx wrote, “the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”

Rob Carter NB: Oh how correct but my example of Bush and Murdoch family development proves conclusively it is the PR rhetoricians in any power, ideological (Communism or Fascism) Religion (Both Bush and Murdoch family Christian Ministerial from Scotland), or wealth (numerous modern examples we might quote), or Political Power (Thousands of Idi Amin evolution's we could quote) the result is the same that generally "Power corrupts", not necessary the wealth or oligarchical factors.

The blanket dissemination of the ideology of free market capitalism through the media and the purging, especially in academia, of critical voices have permitted our oligarchs to orchestrate the largest income inequality gap in the industrialized world. The top 1 percent in the United States own 40 percent of the nation’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent own only 7 percent, as Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote in “The Price of Inequality.” For every dollar that the wealthiest 0.1 percent amassed in 1980 they had an additional $3 in yearly income in 2008, David Cay Johnston explained in the article “9 Things the Rich Don’t Want You to Know About Taxes.” The bottom 90 percent, Johnson said, in the same period added only one cent. Half of the country is now classified as poor or low-income. The real value of the minimum wage has fallen by $2.77 since 1968. Oligarchs do not believe in self-sacrifice for the common good. They never have. They never will. They are the cancer of democracy.

Rob Carter NB: These are all the things Rob has been decrying for decades now to no avail. As Hedges here says :-
CH ~ “We Americans are not usually thought to be a submissive people, but of course we are,” Wendell Berry writes. “Why else would we allow our country to be destroyed? Why else would we be rewarding its destroyers? Why else would we all—by proxies we have given to greedy corporations and corrupt politicians—be participating in its destruction? Most of us are still too sane to piss in our own cistern, but we allow others to do so and we reward them for it. We reward them so well, in fact, that those who piss in our cistern are wealthier than the rest of us. How do we submit? By not being radical enough. Or by not being thorough enough, which is the same thing.”

The rise of an oligarchic state offers a nation two routes, according to Aristotle. The impoverished masses either revolt to rectify the imbalance of wealth and power or the oligarchs establish a brutal tyranny to keep the masses forcibly enslaved. We have chosen the second of Aristotle’s options. The slow advances we made in the early 20th century through unions, government regulation, the New Deal, the courts, an alternative press and mass movements have been reversed. The oligarchs are turning us—as they did in the 19th century steel and textile factories—into disposable human beings. They are building the most pervasive security and surveillance apparatus in human history to keep us submissive.

This imbalance would not have disturbed most of our Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers, largely wealthy slaveholders, feared direct democracy. They rigged our political process to thwart popular rule and protect the property rights of the native aristocracy. The masses were to be kept at bay. The Electoral College, the original power of the states to appoint senators, the disenfranchisement of women, Native Americans, African-Americans and men without property locked most people out of the democratic process at the beginning of the republic. We had to fight for our voice. Hundreds of workers were killed and thousands were wounded in our labor wars. The violence dwarfed the labor battles in any other industrialized nation. The democratic openings we achieved were fought for and paid for with the blood of abolitionists, African-Americans, suffragists, workers and those in the anti-war and civil rights movements. Our radical movements, repressed and ruthlessly dismantled in the name of anti-communism, were the real engines of equality and social justice. The squalor and suffering inflicted on workers by the oligarchic class in the 19th century is mirrored in the present, now that we have been stripped of protection. Dissent is once again a criminal act. The Mellons, Rockefellers and Carnegies at the turn of the last century sought to create a nation of masters and serfs. The modern corporate incarnation of this 19th century oligarchic elite has created a worldwide neo-feudalism, where workers across the planet toil in misery while corporate oligarchs amass hundreds of millions in personal wealth.

There is no way within the system to defy the demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry or war profiteers. The only route left to us, as Aristotle knew, is revolt.

Class struggle defines most of human history. Marx got this right. The sooner we realize that we are locked in deadly warfare with our ruling, corporate elite, the sooner we will realize that these elites must be overthrown. The corporate oligarchs have now seized all institutional systems of power in the United States. Electoral politics, internal security, the judiciary, our universities, the arts and finance, along with nearly all forms of communication, are in corporate hands. Our democracy, with faux debates between two corporate parties, is meaningless political theater. There is no way within the system to defy the demands of Wall Street, the fossil fuel industry or war profiteers. The only route left to us, as Aristotle knew, is revolt.

It is not a new story. The rich, throughout history, have found ways to subjugate and re-subjugate the masses. And the masses, throughout history, have cyclically awoken to throw off their chains. The ceaseless fight in human societies between the despotic power of the rich and the struggle for justice and equality lies at the heart of Fitzgerald’s novel, which uses the story of Gatsby to carry out a fierce indictment of capitalism. Fitzgerald was reading Oswald Spengler’s “The Decline of the West” as he was writing “The Great Gatsby.” Spengler predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs” would replace the traditional political elites. Spengler was right about that.

“There are only two or three human stories,” Willa Cather wrote, “and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.”

The seesaw of history has thrust the oligarchs once again into the sky. We sit humiliated and broken on the ground. It is an old battle. It has been fought over and over in human history. We never seem to learn. It is time to grab our pitchforks.
© 2013 TruthDig.com

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.  His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
more Chris Hedges

~~~~~~~~~~~~~Want More Evidence? ~ Cop this then:~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Rob Carter NB: Communist or Democratic are still Capitalists as "Power corrupts"

But calling their System Republics, really is as some say Money Corrupts to dictate power. Most recognize the fact is that any "Power corrupts". As power creates opportunity for bribe & money schemes & that creates more money to corrupt more as the money makes "Power" of it's own, and that corrupts ideology, be it Socialist, or Capitalist, it is not Democratic fairness that emerges.

It is Now Official that New York is Drowning in Bribes and Corruption
Counterpunch ~ WEEKEND EDITION OCTOBER 18-20, 2013 ~ by PAM MARTENS (PM)~ for www.WallStreetOnParade.com. ~

PM ~ The insidious greed and public looting that Wall Street has nurtured to an art form in New York City is metastasizing like a virulent tumor strain throughout the state, fraying the social fabric and crushing people caught in its grip like bugs.

On Tuesday evening, September 17, 2013, Seema Kalia was scheduled to give testimony before the first public hearing of the New York State Moreland Commission on Public Corruption.  But according to Michelle Duffy, a spokesperson for the Commission, when Kalia’s name was called that evening, there was no response. Kalia could not respond because she was abruptly arrested in the foyer of a courtroom on the very morning she was set to give testimony, ostensibly for contacting her ex husband, a portfolio manager on Wall Street, seeking back support payments.

Kalia is being charged with violating a court order barring her from contact with her husband because she is alleged to have thrown one of his own men’s shoes at him in 2012 – a device characterized by the District Attorney’s office as a “weapon.” Typically, a misdemeanor charge of this nature would not result in jail time. In Kalia’s case, however, she has been jailed at Rikers Island since September 17 and when she went before a Judge on October 4, she was sent back to jail for another 33 days after she declined to plead guilty to attempting to do bodily harm with a “weapon.” Her bond was doubled from $7,500 to $15,000. The earliest she might be released is November 7, her next court date.

Kalia alleges that the Manhattan District Attorney’s office has stalled her case for almost a year by getting the court to agree to repeated adjournments. Two separate phone requests to the DA’s office yielded no response to clarify the allegation. (A faxed letter of inquiry to Cyrus Vance Jr., the Manhattan DA, and Jocelyn Samuels at the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department have also failed to elicit a response.)

The Moreland Commission testimony that did occur on September 17 at Pace University, in a room ridiculously too small to handle the mushrooming numbers of victims of the crime wave that New York is experiencing, mirrored the kinds of charges that Kalia has been making since 2011.  (The overflow of people wanting to testify, who were left outside on the sidewalk, staged protests.)

Preet Bharara, representing the U.S. Department of Justice as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, the district that has failed to rein in the serial crimes by Wall Street’s biggest firms, said that “Public corruption, based on all the evidence, appears rampant ~ the ranks of those convicted in office swelled to absolutely unacceptable levels.” Bharara said that his office has had to prosecute “State Senators as well as State Assemblymen; elected officials as well as party leaders; city council members as well as town mayors; Democrats as well as Republicans.” It was likely little comfort to the audience that it’s a bipartisan crime wave.

Rob Carter NB: This I have constantly written on as critics target Communist States for crimes much worse in the West but unpublished & rarely prosecuted. That's the normal reality in either system ~ the Power corrupts & the money merely facilitates power to grow & becomes exponentially worse, all the time and under either system, the Ideologies soon wane to insignificance in all but a few.

PM ~ The U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Loretta Lynch, testified that there is a “pervasive problem of corruption by elected and appointed officials” in New York, citing former State Senate Majority Leader Pedro Espada who was convicted of stealing funds from Soundview Health Clinic, a federally funded clinic he operated in the Bronx. Lynch also called out former State Senator Shirley Huntley, who was sent to prison for her role in stealing funds from Parents Information Network, a non-profit organization she established to assist parents of New York City public schoolchildren.
Dick Dadey, Executive Director of Citizens Union, testified that “there is a crime wave of corruption” and it has been increasing over the past 12 years.

When it came time for the general public to testify about public corruption, it wasn’t legislative leaders the witnesses railed against, it was corrupt judges. Multiple witnesses testified to having real estate property stolen through corrupt court proceedings. One witness, Dale Javino, said he was cheated out of his life savings in bankruptcy court and what happened to him “is like what happens in Nazi Germany…”

Leon Koziol testified that the retribution he sustained after reporting unethical judges to authorities “reads like a John Grisham novel…” Echoing the testimony of others, Koziol said a series of complaints over the years to the Committee on Judicial Conduct failed to reach the investigative threshold, “leading the common citizen to logically conclude that such commissions are a mere window dressing, which does more to facilitate misconduct than it does to rectify it.” Koziol concluded by saying it is one thing to ignore public corruption but quite another to target and punish the whistleblower.
Ellen Oxman said “I believe the topic that you all wanted to hear was the unethical conduct by elected public officials – they would be the judges of the courts of this state.” Oxman went on to say that “If you can have litigation in this state, in this country, with a judge who accepts forged documents, by lawyers who are not admitted into the case, and you don’t even know the litigation has come to pass, then we don’t have a democracy.”

Much of the focus was on judges said to have been corrupted by the more powerful party in divorce or custody matters. Nora Renzulli, reading from a previous complaint letter she had written, explained to the Commission that “Just as in the Catholic Church hierarchy’s longstanding tolerance for sexual abuse of children by priests, there is a broader scandal brewing in New York Court System’s tolerance for legally sanctioned judicial misconduct when judges reward an aggressive and litigious parent with custody and child support, who then excludes the other parent from relationship with the children.” This was a refrain that would be heard over and over again that night.

Janice Schacter, a retired attorney, said that the Thomas Street location of the New York State Supreme Court “is pay to play; orders are not enforced, laws are not applied, domestic violence is treated with derision and conflicts of interest are ignored. Deference and preferential treatment are given to wealthy spouses and lawyers of prestigious firms.” Schacter also testified that the judge involved in her case attempted to censor her contact with the press by threatening to send her to jail at Rikers Island for 20 days. She said she was still having nightmares about it.

William Galison explained how he has spent years providing testimony “regarding egregious corruption in the nomination and confirmation” of Jonathan Lippman, Chief Judge of the State of New York and Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals, only to have his evidence ignored by investigatory bodies. After citing a litany of conflicts of interest in the confirmation process, Galison played a tape recording of a voice mail message left on his answering machine by a member of the Judicial Nomination Commission telling him that his evidence against the judge was going to be shredded.

A woman who stated at the outset that she would attempt to get through her testimony without breaking down, Margarita Walter, said her family had fled communist Cuba in 1959 seeking freedom and human rights in the United States. Instead, over the past 12 years, Walter said she has been subjected to “cruel and retaliatory tactics for exposing egregious misconduct and racketeering” in the Westchester courts, a wealthy suburb on the outskirts of New York City.

Walter’s allegations parallel those of Seema Kalia, the woman arrested on the same day she was to present testimony before the Moreland Commission. Both women have been denied access to seeing their children. Both have been stripped of their assets. Both believe their court cases were rigged. Both have filed complaints with U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara and the Commission on Judicial Conduct, to no avail.

The one thing that sets the two apart is that Seema Kalia is behind bars in Rikers Island over a misdemeanor charge which is incorrectly listed as a Class D Felony at the New York City Department of Correction inmate lookup web site. I provided the correct information to the Department of Correction, showing that the shoe-throwing incident had previously been reduced to a misdemeanor by the District Attorney’s office, and asking if someone might have provided phony documents to incarcerate Ms. Kalia. A response was promised by my deadline. None was forthcoming.

The idea that judges could be bribed or have quid pro quo arrangements with high powered lawyers is not charting new ground in New York City. In 2007, New York State Supreme Court Judge Gerald P. Garson was convicted of accepting bribes from divorce attorney Paul Siminovsky. During an eight-month investigation by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office, a video camera secretly placed in Garson’s chambers captured Siminovsky plying Garson with expensive cigars and cash. In court proceedings, Siminovsky testified that he entertained the judge with drinks and meals in exchange for favorable courtroom treatment. Siminovsky pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year in jail.

A Brooklyn rabbi, Ezra Zifrani and his daughter, Esther Weitzner, pleaded guilty to giving $5,000 to an intermediary who “clearly implied he was going to bribe Judge Gerald Garson” in November 2002. Garson, at the time, was the judge hearing a child custody dispute between Weitzner and her ex-husband.

To get around the random computer selection of judges to hear cases, court employees were brought into the conspiracy and given bribes to steer cases to Garson, according to the District Attorney’s office. After years of appeals, Garson, who had heard over 1,100 divorce cases, served only 2 ½ years in prison before being paroled on December 23, 2009. His maximum term could have been as much as 15 years at the time of sentencing but he received a sentence of 3 to 10 years. His early release set off protests with signs saying “Crime Pays In New York City” and “Justice for Sale.”

At the time all of this was playing out, Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn District Attorney, said judgeships were for sale in New York. Wayne Barrett, writing for The Village Voice, published an in-depth investigative report on January 9, 2007, writing: “It wasn’t just that a case could be fixed. The darker secret was that the bench itself had been bought, that its polyester black robes were on a perpetual special-sale rack, that smarmy party bosses, ensconced at 16 Court Street across from the supreme court they ruled, demanded cash tribute to ‘make’ a judge. The district attorney, Joe Hynes, who first heard the rumor 36 years ago when he was a young prosecutor running the office’s rackets bureau, said in 2003 that he’d have to be ‘naive to think it didn’t happen,’ that it was ‘common street talk that this has been going on for eons.’ ”

For years, myself and others warned that Wall Street was destined to collapse under the weight of its own corruption. It did. Now civic minded members of the public are blowing the whistle on a systemically corrupt court system desperately in need of a Federal investigation, not a state-run commission investigating fellow cronies.

If one needs the ultimate proof that New York cannot heal itself, consider the amount of the bail bond that was set prior to sentencing after Judge Garson was convicted of accepting bribes while seated as a New York State Supreme Court Judge. His bond was set at $15,000.  That’s the amount set in Seema Kalia’s case for a misdemeanor charge stemming from throwing a man’s shoe.