Law

Law
Type	fundamental
Interest of	• Philip Alston • Jonathan Zittrain
A system of rules that are enforced through social institutions in an effort to try to control behaviour. In the modern world, it is often enforced top down through a hierarchical system of paid functionaries.

“[A]n individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.”
Martin Luther King (April 16, 1963) 

Official narrative

"Legal theatre"... Credit:Schlock Mercenary

Law is a system of rules society enforces upon its members. While society's individual members may not agree with all its rules, they must all agree with them, for the collective good. Prisons and police are needed to prevent infractions by threatening sufficiently painful punishment that people are cowed into obeying the law. Officially, no one is above the law, and it should be applied impartially to all.

Problems

Law has an uneasy relationship with the legitimization of inherited privilege. The legal process has always been captured to a certain extent, and has been some sort of pretext for justifying ongoing oppression.

What kind of legal culture allows the massive deprivation of basic liberty without any evidence? If we want to put one person into a cage for a single criminal offense, we are required, at least in theory, to present evidence so compelling that there is no reason to doubt the person’s guilt. We have to be very close to certain, for example, that the heroin found in the backpack belonged to the accused. But laws authorizing the imprisonment of tens of thousands of people have gotten no such scrutiny — we have not required any factual showing that they lead to any benefits. Lawyers have never required evidence that jailing people with heroin in their backpacks furthers a compelling social purpose....

In courtrooms across America, people are sent to jail every day on the basis of a single witness’s testimony (often a police officer) with no supporting evidence, even though, as a matter of common sense, it is impossible for a reasonable person not to have a doubt about the observations or motivations of a single human witness.

Alec Karakatsanis, 2015

Economic bias

Since the demand to adopt an "all equal under the law" official narrative because irresistible, a range of ways have been found to replace a culture of explicit with implicit privilege.

For pay lawyers

Some national legal systems provide free legal assistance. Almost(?) all permit defendants to employ their own lawyers to assist them. Accordingly, the rich are less likely to be found guilty than the poor.

Fines

Variable fines (modifying the fine according to the financial wealth of the convict) have been trialled^[Where?](Finland?), but as of August 2019, almost all nations impose simple flat rate fines. For those with a large enough disposable income, this equates to impunity.

Corruption

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.”
Jonathan Swift (1709) 

In may countries, the use of direct cash bribes to influence the legal system is routine. This is arguably less widespread in nations with developed deep states.

Plea deals

Full article: Plea deal

Plea deals allow defendants to admit their guilt, which facilitates and expedites their prosecution, in return for a lower sentence. Crucially from the deep state's point of view, such deals prevent a detailed look at what went on. Jeffrey Epstein, who faced charges of sexual abuse of over 100 minors, was cut the "deal of a lifetime" to plea guilty to one charge. The deal also granted a blanket immunity to any and all co-conspirators.

Global political awakening

Full article: Global political awakening

As of 2015, a matrix of social changes - notably self-education through the internet - appears to be increasing awareness of the hypocrisy of the law in general and of unpunished establishment criminality in particular. Consider for example, the illegal mass surveillance carried out by the NSA, GCHQ and partner intelligence agencies, deep state false flag terrorism, the thefts referred to euphemistically as "bailouts" or Tony Blair's lying the inveigle the UK into the Invasion of Iraq.

Police State rollout

Full article: Police state

Concern about the implications of such a "global political awakening" may be spurring the deep state into a do-or-die to a power grab. In some of the self-styled "democracies" national leaders are abandoning long established legal practice (such as habeus corpus and civil liberties) in a rush to enable authoritarian rule by might rather than right.

US

Full article: United States/Police state

The US is already something of a police state, with open criminality by government leaders and flagrant abuse such as the DEA's purported right to seize property, even of those who are not accused of a crime, or (after a 2015 ruling by Lee Rosenthal) its complete lack to liability to those whose property it damages. In April 2015, Alec Karakatsanis noted that "In the seven years that I have spent working in American courts and jails, one thing sticks out above all else: the divergence between the law as it is written and the law as it is lived."

UK

In May 2015, David Cameron announced a radical re-think, a plan to give "the police powers to apply to the high court for an order to limit the “harmful activities” of an extremist individual. The definition of harmful is to include a risk of public disorder, a risk of harassment, alarm or distress or creating a “threat to the functioning of democracy”. He did this in the name of free speech, stating further "For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens: as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone... Freedom of speech. Freedom of worship. Democracy. The rule of law." This prompted exasperation in some quarters, and the observation that "Leviathan jumps the shark".

In May 2015 ^{[When?] [Who?]}Chris Grayling? announced a new policy was announced which would fine defendants £1200 if they plead innocent but were were found guilty - in addition to any fines or other costs including compensation orders and victim surcharges and costs. This has been criticised as creating an "unacceptable pressure to plead guilty" and because it is a flat rate, unrelated even to the crime, for penalising the poor. "Up to 30 Magistrates" resigned in protest about the charge. Unperturbed, the UK government has announced further increases in court fees.

“Jurors should acquit, even against the judge's instruction... if exercising their judgement with discretion and honesty they have a clear conviction the charge of the court is wrong.”
Alexander Hamilton (1804) 

On Wikispooks

Full article: Project:Licensing

Wikispooks is an open licensed project under the CC BY-SA licence. This means that you are free to rebroadcast and remix it, including for commercial purposes, provided that you do so under this same license.

 

Examples

Page name	Description
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine/Legacy	A list of long term political effects that have a significant chance of becoming permanent in the countries of participants or sponsors.
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine/War Crimes	A list of War crimes and propaganda in this event.
Berufsverbot	Ban from public service jobs in Germany based on political convicitons - in 2021 also for "conspiracy ideologies".
COVID-19/Vaccine/Authorisation	Not all vaccines were authorized in all countries.
COVID-19/Zero Covid	Policy during Covid-19 to have no cases of a flu-like disease, which (as history has shown) proved impossible. Heavily enforced by China when many other countries already abandoned the policy within a year or 2. Its scientific need has never been proven.
Cheney Loophole	A 'get out of jail free card' for the Fracking industry, to permit them to poison the US drinking water.
Civil Contingencies Act 2004
Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act	US 1986 sanctions against apartheid South Africa
Court order
Digital Economy Act 2017
Document:H.RES.758	This bill puts America on a footing for war against Russia. It has received close to zero coverage in the US and other establishment media.
E-FOIA	A widely flouted US law mandating openness in handling FOIA requests and publishing information online.
Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013	UK law that expands copyright to pictures of "designer objects".
Fair Sentencing Act
Federal Reserve Act	The 1913 law which secured operational control of the US dollar for the US Deep state up to the present day.
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
Freedom of Information Act
Freedom of Information Act 2000
Gender Recognition Reform Bill	landmark transgender legislation in Scotland
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
George W. Bush/Torture Indictment	The Center for Constitutional Rights and the Canadian Centre for International Justice have been taking legal action against George W Bush for his role in authorizing and overseeing his administration's well-documented torture program.
Guantanamo Bay detention camp/Prisoners' appeals in Washington courts	Appeals in Washington courts of Guantanamo prisoners
Gun control
Habeas corpus	Habeas corpus is a recourse in law through which a person can report an unlawful detention to a court and request that the court order the custodian of the person, usually a prison official, to bring the prisoner to court, to determine whether the detention is lawful.
Human rights
International humanitarian law
International law
Invention Secrecy Act
Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act	US law to allow civil claims in the US justice system against a foreign state for injuries, death, or damages from an act of international "terrorism"
Minimum wage
NDAA 2017	US military budget 2017
National Emergencies Act	Basis for later coup d'état legislation and CoG activation
National Labor Relations Act
National Security Act
Nuremberg Code	The Nuremberg Code is a set of research ethics principles for human experimentation set as a result of the subsequent Nuremberg trials at the end of WWII.
Official Secrets Act 1911
Official Secrets Act 1989	An expansion of the Official Secrets Act 1911.
Online Safety Bill	Proposed piece of landmark legislation which will enable internet censorship in Great Britain
PCSC Bill	UK law
Pan Am Flight 103/The Trial	Judges at the Lockerbie Trial, sitting without a jury, convicted Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and sentenced him to life imprisonment
Patriot Act	A legislative coup d'état
Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act
Repeal of the 2002 AUMF	The repeal of Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002 by the US/House.
Rockefeller drug laws
Section 230	Federal regulations mainly affecting Big Tech.
Section 86a	German law which criminalised holocaust denial, and other organisations and symbols.
Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs	An important step in the globalisation of the illegal drug trade.
Terrorism Act 2000
Terrorism Act 2006	Even more power to the government
UK Public Order Act
... further results

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Attorney General for England and Wales	“It’s not unusual for the attorney general to intervene in cases in order to represent the public interest. He has sought to intervene in this case because it raises important issues about the scope of the criminal law.”		2017
Robert Cooper	“The postmodern world has to start to get used to double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security. But, when dealing with old-fashioned states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era--force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.”	Robert Cooper	April 2002
Brian Crozier	“The ultimate sophistication of subversion is to take over the government, not by unlawful but by lawful means.”	Brian Crozier
Kleptocracy	“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”	Frédéric Bastiat
Karl Lauterbach	“We are now entering a phase where the state of emergency will be the normality. We will always be in a state of emergency from now on.”	Karl Lauterbach	2022
Michael Parenti	“When change threatens to rule, then the rules are changed.”	Michael Parenti
Bertrand Russell	“Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible. Even if all are miserable, all will believe themselves happy, because the government will tell them that they are so.”	Bertrand Russell	1952
Secret trial	“No free man shall be taken, or imprisoned, or dispossessed, of his liberties or be outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed excepting by the legal judgment of his peers, or by the laws of the land.”		1215 JL
Malcolm Turnbull	“The laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.”	Malcolm Turnbull	14 July 2017

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:A new turf war with Strasbourg pushes Warsaw further down the road towards Polexit from the EU	Article	4 August 2021	Paul Nuttall	Will the schism between Poland and the European Union over legal differences eventually lead to "Polexit"?
File:Terrorism & Relative Justice.pdf	paper	2007	Mark Findlay

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