May 1, 2008

Dear Justice Cooperman:

Well, at least we still have the Right to Revolution. The Declaration of Independence is clear on this. A close paraphrase: "Whenever ANY government evinces a design to reduce us under its despotism by abusing our Right to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness, it is the Right and the Duty of the People to alter or abolish that government and start a new one." Or to put it more directly, we have the Right to violently overthrow illegitimate government and replace it with a democratic one that actually achieves its Constitutional mandate to provide for the Justice and general welfare of our Nation without regard to economic station. The rules of Revolution expressed by the Founding Fathers state grounds for such action that are not light and transient but that fulfill the stated object of the Declaration to reveal to a candid world the Reason for the action. The Declaration states specifically and without ambiguity that this Right comes from God and cannot be rescinded by man.

As it stands The Constitution is the bulwark that protects Natural Law and allows the flowering and prosperity of our Democracy and there is nothing wrong with the shape and powers of an uncorrupted government. America is absolutely unique in the history of this planet in that our government explicitly grants the People the Right to overthrow it should the need arise AND that it provides the MEANS to accomplish that, the Second Amendment. No other government has ever recognized the Right and trusted its People to that extent. That is the genius of America.

But now the walls of authoritarianism are closing in. Political power that identifies more with European aristocracy than with American equality has been systematically subverting our democratic ideals and institutions for its own benefit, making alliances with the ruling classes of foreign nations to the detriment of the well being of the American People. (This process began in the 1830s, the time of the formation of the Corporate State. America has always been a capitalist country but our capitalism is no longer based on the type of capitalism that the Founders enjoyed in 1776, also the year of publication of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations." Smith did not even conceive of the idea of the Corporate State much less promote it in his work: his ideal was "a nation of shopkeepers." American capitalism was known as "Jeffersonian Democracy" and that lasted some years past the deaths of both Smith and Jefferson but in the 1830s the moneyed interests, working in concert with European economic powers, legislated into existence the Corporate State and our freedom and independence has been in decline ever since. Gone after 1776 were the Lords and Dukes and Barons of Britain only to finally be replaced by the new Lords: the CEOs, executive vice presidents and Directors of the Corporate State. New names, same undemocratic effects.)

The police state has been imposed on us to protect the interests of the Corporate State.

We the People need to win our freedom back. Black robed political appointees in high places give ever more power to the Corporate/Police State while smirking and sneering that "We are the political appointee justices and we alone decide what the Constitution means." Thus the dead hand of Nixon continues its malignant influence, through the agency of Justice Rehnquist who got his original appointment as a reward for being Nixon's faithful hatchet man in the Justice Department and who gathered enough chits along the way that he was able to ordain his successor. The grim determination of most of the current Republican appointees to ever expand the power of law enforcement at any and all costs to the Bill of Rights has thrown democracy out of whack. The Justices have given us such "King Georgian" gems as the Rico Act which allows law enforcement to punish a KNOWN innocent person for someone else's crime such as occurs when someone's property is used in a crime by another person. They insist that sending a person to prison for LIFE for stealing a slice of pizza or a few video tapes is NOT cruel or unusual punishment. And they have legalized perjury by fiat with the Patriot Act so that someone who has received a "National Security Letter" can deny it when directly asked about it under oath in a Court proceeding. Outrages like these are direct, un-American assaults on our Rights, ideals and traditional values. They are obviously designed to reduce us under the despotism of a new, alien law.

This should not be so. In a free country the law needs to be respected in order to be effective and fair, but despotism uses the law to instill fear in the People so we won't oppose its tyranny. We the People thus need to instill fear in the despots. We the People have the Right to Revolution as well as the means to protect our freedom by bearing arms against our oppressors.

Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg have extended this un-American assault on Reason with their abuse of "quality of life" laws that are merely an excuse to soak from the poor and middle class their hard earned dollars to stock the city treasury and to instill in them a fear of law enforcement to keep them in line. After World War II we learned: "In Germany they first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me and by that time no-one was left to speak up." Today's Corporate/Police State operates the same way trying to confuse us, frighten us and divide us so we won't unite because if we ever unite it would be against THEM.

There is a theory of law enforcement called the "broken window theory" that holds that if police officers are permitted to get away with little crimes they will be emboldened to commit ever larger and more serious crimes. And with decent people being herded and harassed and intimidated every which way we are being deprived of even the most basic rights that once were central to American freedom. Giuliani and Bloomberg have warped and twisted, on behalf of the Corporate State, the very ideas that used to protect We the People from tyranny and that gave us the trust and confidence that the legal system would protect US from THEM. But no longer. We the People must protect We the People from THEM the oppressor.

Two of the chief agents of the police state in NYC are the District Attorneys of Queens and Manhattan. As it happens, they are each stonewalling serious complaints about police and prosecutorial misconduct. I am a direct eyewitness to these instances. I know there are many victims. My understanding is that there are at least 87 convictions in Queens alone that have been overturned due to the misconduct of prosecutors. But when I tried to alert Richard A Brown that one officer, a P.O. Waters from the 102 bragged to me, while falsely arresting me, that he does this every night, I was laughed out of his office by an assistant prosecutor who told me they would "never" go after him to reverse all the injustice he has meted out in his lunatic quest to gain revenue for the city. Hundreds of people, mostly Hispanic, have been railroaded much as he tried to railroad me:

In June 2006 Officer Waters, in uniform but driving an unmarked car arrested me and several others in the parking lot of the Bandshell in Forest Park, just off Woodhaven Blvd. He conducted these arrests on an assembly line basis. I am from Woodhaven originally and used to hang out at this place. This place is just a few hundred yards up the hill from the station where my father, a 20 year Fire Department veteran, last worked before retirement. Waters arrested us for trespassing in the park after closing hours. It was 9:15pm. When I pointed out to him that a sign within eyesight says that the park closes at 1am he informed me that the sign was wrong and that he arrests people for trespassing there every night after 9pm. He refused to even go over and look at the sign. He informed me that I could just plead guilty and pay a fine and that doing so would result in a misdemeanor on my record. When this cochon (pardon my French) filled out the arrest ticket he willfully and materially put in the wrong information as to the time and location of the event, which in doing so is a crime in itself. Even though he arrested me at 9:15 he put the time as 9:50 when he actually processed me. (Others, who were arrested at around the same time but were not processed until after 10pm have the wrong time used against them, as I will soon explain.) He also put the location at the corner of Forest Park Drive and Park Lane South, nearly a mile drive from the Bandshell parking lot where it actually occurred. Even IF the 1am sign was wrong it was (and continues) to be there, and people did (and continue to) rely on it. I spoke with Mr. Lamyre who runs the park and he told me that there is a sign in the parking lot that says it closes at 10pm. It turns out the sign was missing (and still is.) If someone were arrested at 9:45pm but not processed until after 10 Waters would put the processing time on the ticket and not the actual time of the "offense." So a person in the lot at a legal time would be listed at the illegal time. Mr. Lamyre wrote a letter for me stating the fact that the lot closed at 10pm and I hired a lawyer and went to trial and Judge Bianchi dismissed the charges, but only for me. Most of the others just pled guilty, paid the fine and got it on their record. This can hardly be fair. Most of the people who live there now are Hispanic and they are very polite and don't like to rock any boats so they become willing, but uninformed, victims of this predator with a badge and gun as he tries to fill his quota as if he were some revenue agent for the city and not the protector of the peace that should be his real job.

When I sent a formal complaint to Brown about this injustice I found out about the nature of "Justice" in Queens: He couldn't care less; he assigned the case to an assistant named Jim Liander who is Chief of the Integrity Bureau, (LOL) who then did his best to stonewall and discourage me. When I interviewed local lawyers to handle my trial I was sternly warned that if I actually moved against the police I would find myself harasses or framed with drugs or weapons in retaliation. The subsequent actions of Liander have done nothing to disabuse me from believing this warning. He does not want to go ahead with investigating my complaint and has proven so as I will now relate:

My original complaint was acknowledged on July 11, 2007.
After waiting for news I inquired on October 29, 2007. No reply.
After another inquiry on November 13, 2007 Liander told me my case was sealed and I had to sign a form to get the investigation going.
On December 12, 2007 I inquired about when the form would arrive. No reply.
On January 23, 2008 I again inquired, more forcefully. It finally came a week later.

As you can see I got the run around for seven months after my original complaint. This does not augur well for this person's sincerity, credibility and integrity. He knew about the release from the beginning so perhaps he was trying to run out the clock. Another three months have now elapsed with no sign of either justice or information. What do I need to do to get thing going and help those innocent victims who were led to plead guilty? Can you order Brown to do the right thing? They're not going to do it on their own, that's for sure. Brown's office is obviously arrogant, dictatorial and incompetent to the point of criminality. That's why they've had 87 dismissals and that's why they blew the Sean Bell case, if, in fact, they didn't actually sabotage it. Prosecutors have a close working relationship with the police and should be denied the opportunity to use their office to cover-up police misconduct or do a "secret" service for them by letting unanswered cats out of the bag.

And Robert Morganthau is even worse. Last July I wrote to him and confessed to having committed perjury some years earlier in order to wrongfully convict a Puerto Rican man for a crime he didn't commit. I had been suborned into this perjury by the young prosecutor who told me "I really want to put this guy away." A Mr. Izquidero was assigned the case and has done even worse than Liander claiming that not only are there no records of the arrest and prosecution of the defendant (a Louis H Roman of Manhattan, born in San Juan) but there are no records of the name of the prosecutor. I have a good memory and remembered the month and year of the occurrence. I also visited the NYC Archives to look it up and discovered the records had been rifled before microfilming. Each year's roll of microfilm is arranged Jan-Dec with each month's arrestees alphabetized A-Z. All the months were in order except July's in which the arrest records are correctly alphabetized up until the "R"s at the point of the defendant's name. The various Romans that are there are mixed up alphabetically as if someone had gone through them as they were enroute to the microfilm and put them back in the wrong order. The rest of the microfilm is fine. The prosecutor instructed me how to testify after getting me to commit perjury on the complaint affidavit but the defendant pled guilty ans was sentenced to a term in prison. The sentence came down that autumn. Since the crime was child molestation my fear is that Mr. Roman, having been convicted for something he didn't do, was harmed or killed in prison as sometimes happens to child molesters. My theory is when the prosecutor heard this happened he covered his tracks and deleted arrest and prosecution records. When I insisted to Mr. Izquidero that records MUST exist somewhere, that I had the correct date, and that Mr. Roman was a karate instructor who must have been licensed, he completely ignored me and now refuses to answer my inquiries. Can you explain to me how the Manhattan District Attorney's office could lose all records of its own employees? The only reason I can think of is a deliberate attempt to protect the prosecutor, who might be an important person now.

I know he was a close contemporary of Michael Mukasey in the Manhattan DA's office and my complaint came in shortly before that man's nomination to the Justice post. If it turns out that my crooked prosecutor is also a friend of Mukasey's it looks like a big time cover-up is going on. The two are almost the same age, and given Mukasey's yen to be an apologist for torture, my guess is the two teamed up on some cases and cut some corners and did other criminal acts in order to wrongfully convict people and get brownie point to aid their careers. I want to know who this person is who suborned perjury from a minor, and I think the public has a right to know as well. Maybe he has left a lengthy wake of broken lives and unjust convictions to feed his ambition. In his mid to late sixties he could be an important person, a judge perhaps, like Mukasey, or a politician or one of those corrupt officials in the Bush/Gonzales Justice Department who use that office for politically inspired persecutions such as the witch-hunt against Governor Siegelman in Alabama.

I don't know if your purview extends to Manhattan, but if it doesn't could you please recommend an honest judge there who can force Morganthau to reveal the facts. It has always been my impression that judges can do such things, in the interest of justice.

When it comes to trying to achieve justice through people who lack the courage and integrity to go after cops who blatantly falsely arrest hundreds of innocent people or who believe the well being of their former colleagues is sufficient reason to ignore evidence and complaints of their crimes. We the People discover that they system is corrupt through and through and should no longer be trusted. Blacks in New York City have smelled the coffee plenty so now is the time to awaken Hispanics so that if they don't want to be treated like the blacks and gunned down with impunity by corrupt and unaccountable armed officials that THESE are the times to fight back. If justice cannot be achieved in the Courts then it MUST be achieved in the streets or else America is done for.

One of the main problems is the militarization of the police, today a quite popular endeavor, even though many experts believe it leads to hair trigger mentalities with all the tough and thorough military training and combat consciousness becoming so deeply embedded in those young minds that when they switch to police work they see everyone as an enemy and tend to shoot first and repeatedly and make excuses later. Those who promote this concept of militarization always cite violence, drug related violence, as the reason why such tactics are needed and they are willfully ignorant of the lessons of history because their true motive is the establishment of a police state.

Everyone knows what happened during Prohibition with its perverse capitalist profit motive leading the Al Capones to outgun the police to maximize their power and profits by fulfilling public desires. Like fools we ignored the lessons of history, partly from sheer stupidity and partly for racial reasons, to keep the newly empowered blacks in their place.

The violence inherent in the drug trade is based on money (and greed) factors but it can be eliminated, virtually overnight, if we were to merely apply capitalistic methods that are tried and true and that are far, far less expensive and deadly. This does not mean legalization. It means using our $ to simply corner the market in drugs, cocaine, for example, with a policy of buying up the ENTIRE crop, paying the farmers five or six times as much for their product as the traffickers do and doing so year after year. Give the farmers a decent living and they will grow it and sell it to us to destroy. The little that gets through will be so hugely expensive it will only be affordable to Wall Streeters. Most of what is now spend fighting the drug was all over the country can then be diverted to better purposes, violence will end, the prison population will drop and we'll all be less fearful, just as happened with Repeal. However, the Corporate/Police State will oppose this, tooth and nail, because they will lose the true purpose of the drug war; to oppress the people, especially minorities, and lose the votes of those benighted Americans who have been convinced by Corporate State propaganda that the militarization of the police is necessary to protect the People from all the drug violence. When the drug corrupted ruling class of Columbia gets hit with this surprise it will squeal like a stuck puerco (pardon my Spanish) and fall from grace with the Freedom Fighters finally and justly triumphant. This last point is also very threatening to the Corporate/Police State's globalization strategy and it will unleash a torrent of lies in opposition. I am sure you will agree with me that this simple solution is by far the best and that common sense must prevail.

For me hope springs eternal that this appeal to Reason will trump the police state's cynical use of FEAR and of the heroic stature of our soldiers to manipulate the emotions of the public.

I would also like to hear your opinion of my ideas for legal reform. We need a "legal services consumers bill of rights" that will protect the public from incompetent and dishonest lawyers. It should be required that every lawyer provide a printout of his practice and history such as his LSAT score, law school graduation rank, score on his Bar Exam and the number of times it took him to pass, awards and commendations, complaints and disciplinary actions his records of bankruptcy and legal malpractice, his health and use of alcohol or drugs, won-lost record in court and the names of his cases so his work can be researched and his billable hours audited by an agency that would look askance at, say, 100 hrs/wk total. Only with information like this can the legal services consumer be confident he is not paying or overpaying for work that is substandard. Lawyer also should be subject to annual testing to prove they are up to date on new developments.

We need to find a better way to hire judges too. We must forget about political appointments and (shudder) popular elections and begin a system to pre-qualify lawyers who want to be judges and judges who want a higher position. They will be required to submit to testing and interviews and scrutiny of their records and then pre-qualified so that when an opening occurs all who are already approved will have their names put in a hat and then blindly selected. That way We the People can be confident that our judges will be chosen not on the basis of who they know, but on the content of their abilities.

Law enforcement officers need to be subjected to polygraph examinations every year or whenever a credible accusation is made against them. The test result will result in termination if it shows an officer is lying. The test results cannot, of course, be used against them in a Court of Law any more than the results of a drug test taken by an employee can be used against him in a Court of Law. We merely want to identify those who may become problems and get rid of them before they do something terrible. The Supreme Court ruled long ago that such drug tests for employment are perfectly legal. In addition, we must institute an agency that will conduct sting operations against the police, especially those who receive many complaints and in those cities where there is a culture of corruption, violence and racism among the law enforcers. (We also need to triple the pay of cops so as to attract a better pool of recruits who will have no problem with the idea of polygraphs and stings.)

Do you think these ideas have any chance?

The final point I wish to make with this broadside has to do with the current New York Attorney General. When he was head of HUD one of his final acts in office was the mutilation of the Right of the People to possess firearms in their own homes. It seems that in America, under leadership like President Clinton's, all people are equal but some are more equal than others: a poor white, living in a shack in Essex County, can own a gun, but a poor person of color living in Federally subsidized housing can and has been deprived of this Right, first by local laws such as in New York and the District of Columbia, and then by executive fiat as happened when Mr. Cuomo eviscerated the American tradition that people have a right to defend their own homes against those who would do them harm even if they live in public housing. Cuomo obviously doesn't trust black folks to properly use firearms and is perfectly willing to treat them as second class citizens lacking the same rights as white renters. And the Bush Administration is just as obviously the dog that didn't in that it never rolled back this unconstitutional obscenity when it came to power. Here's hoping the Supreme Court does the right thing and establishes in no uncertain terms the Right of ALL people to keep and bear arms. Then We the People will be back on the road of Freedom and Justice.

Thank you, sir, for reviewing this letter. I hope you can help me or provide direction to clean up the obvious problems in the District Attorney offices in Manhattan and Queens. Something really needs to be done. A stitch in time can save us from another bloody Revolution. Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty and just because we got rid of the Redcoats doesn't mean we are forever immune from a similar onslaught by yet another un-democratic enemy using a color of authority merely changed to a dark blue topped with a tarnished badge.

Sincerely,
We The People