The following was posted on http://www.pissedconsumer.com/ recently.
First, background. I loaned my name to a friend of mine so that she could have a phone with Verizon. Shortly after she got the phone account she got into some trouble and was unable to pay the bill, and at the time neither was I. Time went by, Verizon sent notices to her address which was eventually vacated, and the account went into delinquency... after it did she tried to make a payment or two on it but gave up as she was also supporting a family and trying to keep a cell phone going with a different company. Two years go by... and I get a notice from this debt collection service called Allied Interstate. I'm wondering who these people are, and I call Verizon, and they verify that this is an agency that collects money for them and that indeed this old debt was valid.
So, I call Allied Interstate, a rather pleasant woman answers the phone and in the discussion she proposes these payment options which didn't at all fit with what my friend might be capable of paying all at once. I settled on $10 a month which would have incurred an extra charge of $6.95. The bill was over $250 total, and I thought about it, and though I'm unemployed I did actually have just enough to pay it by check. So, I repent of the $10 a month idea that my friend wanted to do and decided, "I just want this thing off my back." Mailed in a check for the whole amount.
The next day Allied Interstate leaves a message saying to call them. I'm like "what are they wanting now?" and it's 8 pm and my dad's in the shower and this isn't something I want to be his business. I talk to this male person, and he is abrupt and rude, the more so after I tell him I've changed my plans and am paying the whole amount up front. He starts treating me like I'm lying, and asks me these stupid questions like am I voluntarily doing this, and saying basically that AI won't accept the check unless I have a phone number to be reached at. His tone just gets more aggravating by the minute, he cuts me off when I try to tell him I don't really want to be called here, and he just acts like I screwed up by paying it all up front instead of letting them own me for two years on this stupid phone bill.
I was so angry after this, because of the verbal treatment of me doing the best thing I could do which is pay it all and have done with it, that I had to pray to God and you don't even want to know what it was I was praying for. All I can say is they better take the payment and leave me the hell alone or the next time I get a call and that asshole is on the phone taking the answer call, I'll file with the state attorney and have him up on stalking charges. Of course if there is also a class action pending or proposed that I hear about, I'll be signing up for that.
Showing posts with label bill. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bill. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Friday, October 12, 2007
Wiki article "Martial Law," in the United States
I'm posting the following from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martial_law and leaving it here for anyone to read:
"United States of America
See also: Suspension clause
The martial law concept in the U.S. is closely tied with the Writ of habeas corpus, which is in essence the right to a hearing on lawful imprisonment, or more broadly, the supervision of law enforcement by the judiciary. The ability to suspend habeas corpus is often equated with martial law. Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution states, "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion, the public Safety may require it."
In United States law, martial law is limited by several court decisions that were handed down between the American Civil War and World War II. In 1878, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids military involvement in domestic law enforcement without congressional approval.
The National Guard is an exception, since unless federalized, they are under the control of state governors. [5]. This has now changed. Public Law 109-364, or the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" (H.R.5122), was signed by President Bush on October 17, 2006, and allows the President to declare a "public emergency" and station troops anywhere in America and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities. Title V, Subtitle B, Part II, Section 525(a) of the JWDAA of 2007 reads "The [military] Secretary [of the Army, Navy or Air Force] concerned may order a member of a reserve component under the Secretary's jurisdiction to active duty...The training or duty ordered to be performed...may include...support of operations or missions undertaken by the member's unit at the request of the President or Secretary of Defense." [6]"
"United States of America
See also: Suspension clause
The martial law concept in the U.S. is closely tied with the Writ of habeas corpus, which is in essence the right to a hearing on lawful imprisonment, or more broadly, the supervision of law enforcement by the judiciary. The ability to suspend habeas corpus is often equated with martial law. Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution states, "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion, the public Safety may require it."
In United States law, martial law is limited by several court decisions that were handed down between the American Civil War and World War II. In 1878, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids military involvement in domestic law enforcement without congressional approval.
The National Guard is an exception, since unless federalized, they are under the control of state governors. [5]. This has now changed. Public Law 109-364, or the "John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007" (H.R.5122), was signed by President Bush on October 17, 2006, and allows the President to declare a "public emergency" and station troops anywhere in America and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities. Title V, Subtitle B, Part II, Section 525(a) of the JWDAA of 2007 reads "The [military] Secretary [of the Army, Navy or Air Force] concerned may order a member of a reserve component under the Secretary's jurisdiction to active duty...The training or duty ordered to be performed...may include...support of operations or missions undertaken by the member's unit at the request of the President or Secretary of Defense." [6]"
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Defenders of Bill of Rights should unite.
I've been observing the most nonsensical thing in American politics for the past few decades. We have the NRA defending the Second Amendment, gay rights organizations, right-to-die, and abortion rights groups defending the Ninth and Fourteenth, state's rights organizations and limited federalists defending the Tenth, nobody defending the Third, the NAACP defending the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Twenty-Fourth Amendments, women's groups defending the Fourteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, and the ACLU mostly litigating about the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments with some attention to the others except for the Second. It is amazing to me that it takes so many of these disparate groups, all acting separately from one another, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution against its sworn officers who refuse or neglect to carry out that oath. And the American people at large don't seem to have grasped that all of these Constitutional issues hang together -- if government breaches one right it can breach any of them.
What we need is an umbrella alliance comprising every organization that is devoted to defense of any part of the Constitution. The whole Constitution is under attack, from those who wield power in both the left wing and the right wing, and it is about time that both liberals and conservatives who have enough intelligence to see what is going on, get organizations like the NRA and the ACLU banded together as a permanent alliance to stop these depredations on our rights and stop governmental abuses of power and procedure.
What we need is an umbrella alliance comprising every organization that is devoted to defense of any part of the Constitution. The whole Constitution is under attack, from those who wield power in both the left wing and the right wing, and it is about time that both liberals and conservatives who have enough intelligence to see what is going on, get organizations like the NRA and the ACLU banded together as a permanent alliance to stop these depredations on our rights and stop governmental abuses of power and procedure.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
The Decline of Honor in Prosecution
I promised to rant about prosecutors and now seems like a good time. :) I'm not a lawyer so these remarks should be taken in context with the rest of my layman's knowledge of legal history. (Leaving myself a neat exit in case some lawyer raises a logodemic argument outclassing me about the technical aspects of this subject.)
Prosecutors and defense attorneys, as probably everyone knows, go to law school to learn their trade. Now, from what I remember a law degree is not enough to qualify to be a lawyer, in fact it is not the actual license to practice law, which I understand you could still potentially get without going to law school, what's actually required is the state bar exam. (Don't even think about it though, you'll waste your money taking that bar exam.) But, in old law school teaching tradition, there were differences in the approach to teaching the ethics of prosecution and the ethics of defense. They were not originally the same ethics. The basic theory goes something like this:
A prosecutor represents the people of the state. As such he has a fiduciary obligation to seek the truth wherever it may lead. Hence, when a crime is committed and evidence is presented to him by the police, he becomes the first line of evaluation, where he has to make a decision and weigh whether there is enough evidence to justify a trial. So, that's why whenever you watch a legal drama on television, which sort of boils down the actual process in a fictional manner, the police bring some evidence of a crime, the district attorney looks at it and says "There isn't enough here to hold him, kick him loose," and the bad guy goes free for a time. The viewing audience groans because they watched the suspect commit the crime, so you have created that dramatic tension from conflict between what the DA character knows, which is only what the police give him, and what they saw the crook do.
Second round, our hero detectives come to the DA again and plead for a wiretap or search or something of the like. Now, we are into a realm where civil rights become important. A search has to satisfy the requirements of the Fourth Amendment which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures unless a warrant is issued by a judge, or so the theory used to go (in practice, this has changed drastically especially since the passage of the Patriot Act.) So anyway, in those old TV shows when Fourth Amendment rights were still "in vogue," the DA would say "I can't take this to the judge, he'll turn it down because of insufficient cause." Audience groans again, and the crook can only be tailed around by the police who are waiting to catch him doing more to substantiate the original crime, even though every TV viewer knows he's guilty and what kind of moron is that DA anyway?
Third round, now the police decide to take the law into their own hands, and they sneak a guy in to do a wiretap without a warrant. Bingo, they hit the jackpot, they have enough evidence for probable cause, they act on the information, locate witnesses or evidence they didn't previously have, and it's enough to justify a search. Right? Wrong! This is called "Poisoned Fruits." The DA finds out about the illegal wiretap and chain of evidence from it leading to the witnesses and evidence to support the search warrant request. He says "This is poisoned fruits, the judge will turn it down if I tell him how I got this, and if I don't and the defense finds out later, the suspect will go free in a mistrial!" Audience tears their hair out. Is there any way to get this bad guy?
All of this is because the prosecutors under the old ethical theory taught in law school have to adhere to standards in their pursuit of truth -- remember, that means if they uncover disculpatory evidence, that is, evidence that proves the innocence of a suspect, they have the fiduciary obligation to set that suspect free, drop the charges, restart the investigation with another suspect, whatever it takes to get back on course with determining truth. The practicality following the ethics is, to have the truth on your side, you have to be on the truth's side, and that means following constitutional procedure and due process of law. You may want to win the case, but if you don't have the truth, and you win based on lies or by cheating on due process, you have committed an injustice.
Defense attorneys under the old theory are not bound by the same rule. Their fiduciary obligation is not to the people of the state, it is to their clients. They also must follow due process of law but their aim is to defend the civil rights of their clients and instill reasonable doubt in a jury, because their commitment is to win the case. Now, conservatives and prosecutors have pushed things to the point where this unfair advantage of the defense attorney, who only has to win the case, not worry about whether his case is based on truth, is to be reduced to the extent possible. They have had help in this regard by the fact that prosecutors have been able to campaign on their anti-crime successes (whether actual or not, whether ethical or not) to get themselves elected or appointed to judgeships.
Hence, there has been an increasing trend for judges to be friendlier to prosecutions and more hostile to defenses, leading to a loosening of common-law and constitutional restrictions on prosecutorial and police conduct. Also, as law schools import retired judges and prosecutors as professors, there is no longer so much emphasis on teaching budding would-be prosecutors that the most important aim of a prosecution is to arrive at the truth. Now the aim is to win, and law schools get vetted on their ability to teach lawyers how to win, regardless of whether they work for the people of the state or for a client. (It also hasn't helped that progressive education theory debased colleges from teaching ethics based on traditional Western philosophies, allowing them to adopt ethical frames of reference that are more relativistic than realistic.) So, now the technicalities and other constitutional pitfalls of a police investigation and a prosecution are being brushed aside, both by relativistic legal opinions and by changes in legislation that weaken the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments, to the point where they have now become seen as an irritating inconvenience to be swatted aside for the sake of public safety, instead of remaining the Supreme Law of the Land.
So nowadays the cops and robbers' shows, exemplifying art comically imitating life, regularly feature police officers and prosecutors running roughshod over civil rights because they almost always "know" who's guilty, or are REALLY GOOD at finding information, and because that dirty creep is guilty he deserves what he gets and the audience gets what it wants -- with the only real dramatic conflicts being about finding the bad guy, and you get these cookie cutter endings: the police shoot him as he reaches for his piece, or he gets browbeaten -- or literally beaten -- by some brilliant interrogator until he fesses up, confronted by all the evidence the police obtained illegally anyway and couldn't use until he corroborated it, or it's a Mr. Big situation where the bad guy is really rich and pays higher ups to cover him while he tries escaping to South America and gets caught by intrepid rebellious cops who cheated due process to find out where his flight was gonna take off from. The end justifies the means is the new message and practice. The reality is this is the beginning of a fascist dictatorship.
Prosecutors and defense attorneys, as probably everyone knows, go to law school to learn their trade. Now, from what I remember a law degree is not enough to qualify to be a lawyer, in fact it is not the actual license to practice law, which I understand you could still potentially get without going to law school, what's actually required is the state bar exam. (Don't even think about it though, you'll waste your money taking that bar exam.) But, in old law school teaching tradition, there were differences in the approach to teaching the ethics of prosecution and the ethics of defense. They were not originally the same ethics. The basic theory goes something like this:
A prosecutor represents the people of the state. As such he has a fiduciary obligation to seek the truth wherever it may lead. Hence, when a crime is committed and evidence is presented to him by the police, he becomes the first line of evaluation, where he has to make a decision and weigh whether there is enough evidence to justify a trial. So, that's why whenever you watch a legal drama on television, which sort of boils down the actual process in a fictional manner, the police bring some evidence of a crime, the district attorney looks at it and says "There isn't enough here to hold him, kick him loose," and the bad guy goes free for a time. The viewing audience groans because they watched the suspect commit the crime, so you have created that dramatic tension from conflict between what the DA character knows, which is only what the police give him, and what they saw the crook do.
Second round, our hero detectives come to the DA again and plead for a wiretap or search or something of the like. Now, we are into a realm where civil rights become important. A search has to satisfy the requirements of the Fourth Amendment which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures unless a warrant is issued by a judge, or so the theory used to go (in practice, this has changed drastically especially since the passage of the Patriot Act.) So anyway, in those old TV shows when Fourth Amendment rights were still "in vogue," the DA would say "I can't take this to the judge, he'll turn it down because of insufficient cause." Audience groans again, and the crook can only be tailed around by the police who are waiting to catch him doing more to substantiate the original crime, even though every TV viewer knows he's guilty and what kind of moron is that DA anyway?
Third round, now the police decide to take the law into their own hands, and they sneak a guy in to do a wiretap without a warrant. Bingo, they hit the jackpot, they have enough evidence for probable cause, they act on the information, locate witnesses or evidence they didn't previously have, and it's enough to justify a search. Right? Wrong! This is called "Poisoned Fruits." The DA finds out about the illegal wiretap and chain of evidence from it leading to the witnesses and evidence to support the search warrant request. He says "This is poisoned fruits, the judge will turn it down if I tell him how I got this, and if I don't and the defense finds out later, the suspect will go free in a mistrial!" Audience tears their hair out. Is there any way to get this bad guy?
All of this is because the prosecutors under the old ethical theory taught in law school have to adhere to standards in their pursuit of truth -- remember, that means if they uncover disculpatory evidence, that is, evidence that proves the innocence of a suspect, they have the fiduciary obligation to set that suspect free, drop the charges, restart the investigation with another suspect, whatever it takes to get back on course with determining truth. The practicality following the ethics is, to have the truth on your side, you have to be on the truth's side, and that means following constitutional procedure and due process of law. You may want to win the case, but if you don't have the truth, and you win based on lies or by cheating on due process, you have committed an injustice.
Defense attorneys under the old theory are not bound by the same rule. Their fiduciary obligation is not to the people of the state, it is to their clients. They also must follow due process of law but their aim is to defend the civil rights of their clients and instill reasonable doubt in a jury, because their commitment is to win the case. Now, conservatives and prosecutors have pushed things to the point where this unfair advantage of the defense attorney, who only has to win the case, not worry about whether his case is based on truth, is to be reduced to the extent possible. They have had help in this regard by the fact that prosecutors have been able to campaign on their anti-crime successes (whether actual or not, whether ethical or not) to get themselves elected or appointed to judgeships.
Hence, there has been an increasing trend for judges to be friendlier to prosecutions and more hostile to defenses, leading to a loosening of common-law and constitutional restrictions on prosecutorial and police conduct. Also, as law schools import retired judges and prosecutors as professors, there is no longer so much emphasis on teaching budding would-be prosecutors that the most important aim of a prosecution is to arrive at the truth. Now the aim is to win, and law schools get vetted on their ability to teach lawyers how to win, regardless of whether they work for the people of the state or for a client. (It also hasn't helped that progressive education theory debased colleges from teaching ethics based on traditional Western philosophies, allowing them to adopt ethical frames of reference that are more relativistic than realistic.) So, now the technicalities and other constitutional pitfalls of a police investigation and a prosecution are being brushed aside, both by relativistic legal opinions and by changes in legislation that weaken the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments, to the point where they have now become seen as an irritating inconvenience to be swatted aside for the sake of public safety, instead of remaining the Supreme Law of the Land.
So nowadays the cops and robbers' shows, exemplifying art comically imitating life, regularly feature police officers and prosecutors running roughshod over civil rights because they almost always "know" who's guilty, or are REALLY GOOD at finding information, and because that dirty creep is guilty he deserves what he gets and the audience gets what it wants -- with the only real dramatic conflicts being about finding the bad guy, and you get these cookie cutter endings: the police shoot him as he reaches for his piece, or he gets browbeaten -- or literally beaten -- by some brilliant interrogator until he fesses up, confronted by all the evidence the police obtained illegally anyway and couldn't use until he corroborated it, or it's a Mr. Big situation where the bad guy is really rich and pays higher ups to cover him while he tries escaping to South America and gets caught by intrepid rebellious cops who cheated due process to find out where his flight was gonna take off from. The end justifies the means is the new message and practice. The reality is this is the beginning of a fascist dictatorship.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Examples of First Amendment under attack in America
This is to be considered an update and amendment to my previous blog. In it I made general statements about the direction of restrictions on assembly and speech in the US -- well, it turns out the picture is quite a lot more complicated than I imagined, and in some cases considerably more frightening. Here's some specific examples:
Pleasantville, New Jersey had as of May 2003 a parade ordinance that required a permit for a parade or procession of any kind, which had to be approved by the mayor AND the chief of police, and which required demonstrators to obtain expensive insurance. Failure to abide by this could result in fines up to $1,000 and 90 days in jail. There was also no limit placed on the discretion of the mayor or police chief to approve or deny the permit. See http://www.aclu.org/FilesPDFs/dissent_report.pdf page 11.
West Virginians (now Texans) Jeffrey and Nicole Rank, and Coloradans Alex Young and Leslie Weise filed a lawsuit in June 2007 with the aid of the ACLU against Gregory Jenkins, the Director of the White House Office of Presidential Advance, for violating their civil rights. In July 2004 the Ranks entered a Bush campaign rally in Charleston, West Virginia that was open to the public and removed shirts revealing an antiwar symbol. They were immediately arrested and put in jail on a charge of trespassing -- remember, this was a public assembly. After they were fingerprinted and booked the charges were dismissed and they were released. Following that, in March 2005 Young and Weise went to see President Bush speak in Denver on Social Security, with no intent to do anything but go to the event and listen to the speech. They had gotten tickets through proper channels, and were never told that persons with opinions contrary to the President's views would be unwelcome.
But when Weise went into the event through a different entrance than Young, she was taken aside by staff members and told to wait for someone from the Secret Service. Young passed his security check and was seated. Meanwhile a White House staff member named Michael Casper came and told Leslie Weise she had been "ID'd" and told her that if she tried any "funny stuff" she'd be arrested. Why? Because they had found a bumper sticker on the back of Weise's car that read "No More Blood For Oil." Anyway, after that chilling warning they allowed Ms. Weise and a friend with her to go in and sit. But, Casper went to consult with two people from Gregory Jenkin's office, and they told him to expel both Weise and Young, whereupon both them and their friends with them were shoved out the door none too politely.
That incident is legally documented here: http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/freespeech/rank_v_jenkins_complaint.pdf , and an article about the resolution won by the Ranks can be read here: http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/protest/31331prs20070816.html . And you can read page 8 of http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/freespeech/presidential_advance_manual.pdf to find out how our highest elected official in the land avoids hearing anyone who is against his point of view during public appearances.
A Pennsylvania man named Bill Neel, an opponent of President Bush's policies, has encountered "free speech zones" several times since 2001, finding it virtually impossible to approach a Presidential appearance as an opposing peaceable demonstrator without being herded away out of sight of the President and his supporters every time he has tried, and finally getting arrested after protesting the very concept of "free speech zone" to the Allegheny Police at a protest of Bush, well outside of a Presidential speech. You can read about it here: http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/protest/11418res20030923.html .
And there was a man named Michael Tocher, who was arrested by the Santa Barbara, California police for disturbing the peace after reading 400 of the then 1200 names of those killed in the Iraq War into a megaphone on Veteran's Day, 2004, what he intended as a gesture of respect to our nation's fallen heroes. The lawsuit arising from this case ended up costing the city $17,000 in damages payable to Mr. Tocher and Santa Barbara is now required to exercise constitutional caution before arresting anyone conducting an assembly. Why aren't all cities, states, and the Federal Government required to do so? You can read about that here: http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/protest/29287prs20070405.html .
Pleasantville, New Jersey had as of May 2003 a parade ordinance that required a permit for a parade or procession of any kind, which had to be approved by the mayor AND the chief of police, and which required demonstrators to obtain expensive insurance. Failure to abide by this could result in fines up to $1,000 and 90 days in jail. There was also no limit placed on the discretion of the mayor or police chief to approve or deny the permit. See http://www.aclu.org/FilesPDFs/dissent_report.pdf page 11.
West Virginians (now Texans) Jeffrey and Nicole Rank, and Coloradans Alex Young and Leslie Weise filed a lawsuit in June 2007 with the aid of the ACLU against Gregory Jenkins, the Director of the White House Office of Presidential Advance, for violating their civil rights. In July 2004 the Ranks entered a Bush campaign rally in Charleston, West Virginia that was open to the public and removed shirts revealing an antiwar symbol. They were immediately arrested and put in jail on a charge of trespassing -- remember, this was a public assembly. After they were fingerprinted and booked the charges were dismissed and they were released. Following that, in March 2005 Young and Weise went to see President Bush speak in Denver on Social Security, with no intent to do anything but go to the event and listen to the speech. They had gotten tickets through proper channels, and were never told that persons with opinions contrary to the President's views would be unwelcome.
But when Weise went into the event through a different entrance than Young, she was taken aside by staff members and told to wait for someone from the Secret Service. Young passed his security check and was seated. Meanwhile a White House staff member named Michael Casper came and told Leslie Weise she had been "ID'd" and told her that if she tried any "funny stuff" she'd be arrested. Why? Because they had found a bumper sticker on the back of Weise's car that read "No More Blood For Oil." Anyway, after that chilling warning they allowed Ms. Weise and a friend with her to go in and sit. But, Casper went to consult with two people from Gregory Jenkin's office, and they told him to expel both Weise and Young, whereupon both them and their friends with them were shoved out the door none too politely.
That incident is legally documented here: http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/freespeech/rank_v_jenkins_complaint.pdf , and an article about the resolution won by the Ranks can be read here: http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/protest/31331prs20070816.html . And you can read page 8 of http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/freespeech/presidential_advance_manual.pdf to find out how our highest elected official in the land avoids hearing anyone who is against his point of view during public appearances.
A Pennsylvania man named Bill Neel, an opponent of President Bush's policies, has encountered "free speech zones" several times since 2001, finding it virtually impossible to approach a Presidential appearance as an opposing peaceable demonstrator without being herded away out of sight of the President and his supporters every time he has tried, and finally getting arrested after protesting the very concept of "free speech zone" to the Allegheny Police at a protest of Bush, well outside of a Presidential speech. You can read about it here: http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/protest/11418res20030923.html .
And there was a man named Michael Tocher, who was arrested by the Santa Barbara, California police for disturbing the peace after reading 400 of the then 1200 names of those killed in the Iraq War into a megaphone on Veteran's Day, 2004, what he intended as a gesture of respect to our nation's fallen heroes. The lawsuit arising from this case ended up costing the city $17,000 in damages payable to Mr. Tocher and Santa Barbara is now required to exercise constitutional caution before arresting anyone conducting an assembly. Why aren't all cities, states, and the Federal Government required to do so? You can read about that here: http://www.aclu.org/freespeech/protest/29287prs20070405.html .
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