Let’s start with some stats. The District of Columbia has the densest concentration of lawyers in the world. If you factor in the fact that 88% of lawyers are white and 60% of the capital’s population are minorities, you end up with some really mind warping numbers.
The population of the District is 672,000 (2015 census) and the number of households is slightly over 250,000. With 52,000 lawyers running around – it means that you can find a lawyer by randomly knocking on five doors. If you happen to be looking for a lawyer in Georgetown, a couple of knocks should do the trick.
There are more lawyers in the District of Columbia than in Japan. And they do very well for themselves with an average household income north of $350,000 and an average net worth of $2.1 million. Which means that the average DC lawyer makes an income to put him in the top 1%. They are the donor class. They are the bundlers who get their clients to contribute to Hedge Fund Hillary and other malleable politicians. They are the lobbyists, they are the law makers and their corporate clients are the law breakers.
The president is a lawyer and so is the first lady. Biden is a lawyer. The Senate has sixty lawyers and the other 40 have lawyers on their staff. Lawyers here – lawyers there – lawyers everywhere and the only people who can afford to hire a DC lawyer are DC lawyers.
Some lawyers make our laws and the rest do what they can to bend them out of shape. And it doesn’t help that all of them are old chums who graduated from the same Ivy League law schools. Twenty four senators boast Ivy League degrees.
Only lawyers can argue a case before the Supreme Court. If you are a whistleblower and you want to file a Qui Tam case under the False Claims Act, you need a lawyer. If you can’t afford a lawyer – tough luck.
The worst thing about lawyers is that they don’t sue other lawyers because gentlemen don’t sue gentlemen. If you have a case against government lawyers, the government has brigades of taxpayer funded lawyers to crush you. Even if you have an open and shut case, the Federal judges are taxpayer funded lawyers who send their kids to the same private schools as all the other DC lawyers.
We don’t have universal health care because of the insurance and pharmaceutical industry lawyers. We can’t cut our ‘defense’ spending because of the lawyers that work in the service of the military-industrial complex. Lawyers prowling the halls of Congress serve foreign interests. And no lobby has as much influence as the financial industry lobby.
Things look even bleaker when you realize that these 52,000 lawyers don’t hunt alone – they hunt in packs led by Alpha dogs. Take Covington & Burling, which was ranked as the number two law firm in Washington DC by the Washington Business Journal. That’s where Eric Holder now hangs his hat and that’s where he earned his lunch before becoming the top law enforcement officer in the country.
Covington’s website boasts that the firm has “850 lawyers and advisors including more than one hundred former government officials and they represent 50 of the FT Global 50 and more than half of the Fortune 500.” Their client list includes Citigroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo.
As Attorney General, Eric Holder arbitrarily decided that the Justice department had the discretion to prosecute or not prosecute crimes of forgery. That worked out real well for Wall Street bankers because Holder also made the call that some banks were too big to fail and their executives were too big to jail.
The result was that when the bankers got caught with forged documentation, they were let off the hook and the matter was put to rest because the DOJ simply exercised its discretion not to prosecute the big banks that were ever so essential to the health of the markets which is too often confused with the health of the economy. Eric Holder’s edicts were the equivalent of allowing banks to counterfeit currency and Holder knew it. Holder encountered no resistance from the rank and file DOJ attorneys. Not a single DOJ lawyer stood up and said “you can’t do that – it’s unconstitutional and it violates the due process rights of the victims of forgery.”
If you are not familiar with David Dayen, he is the author of Chain of Title which narrates how the banksters continued to forge documentation after the crash of 2008 to unwind their portfolio of sub-standard mortgage backed securities. Dayen was recently interviewed by Heather Digby Parton in Salon.com and what he has to say will make your eyes pop out. How could a criminal enterprise on this scale get past the DOJ and banking regulators? It didn’t get past anybody. If David Dayen, a freelance blogger from Los Angeles, can dig up the sordid details – Eric Holder had the full resources of the DOJ to throw the book at the banksters. We’re talking mass industrial strength forgery – a crime that has the same economic impact as counterfeiting. Try forging tax returns and pay stubs to get a loan from a bank and see how far that gets you.
The thing about counterfeiting is that it is a sovereign crime that is specifically mentioned in the constitution. If you want to cripple a country’s economy – flood it with counterfeit currency. Counterfeiting has been an instrument of war since the Chinese invented paper currency. The British used it to undermine the value of confederate currency. So the founders had good cause to single it out as a crime when they drew up the basic law of the United States.
There isn’t a country in the world that doesn’t have forgery statutes. Every state in the union has forgery statutes and forgery is about the easiest crime to prosecute. When it comes to forged documentation, there are no shades of grey. A financial document is either forged or authentic. If you forged financial documents to relieve law abiding citizens of their hard earned wages, all your property gets confiscated and you go to jail. That’s the standard universal punishment for the crime of forgery.
So where did Eric Holder get the crazy idea that the DOJ could arbitrarily give banksters a carte blanche to engage in forgery? The simple answer was that the Obama Administration made the assessment that if the banksters were held accountable for forgery – the sky would fall. Maybe they just didn’t notice that the sky had already fallen on tens of millions of households across the country because of Wall Street’s crime spree.
If you’re not familiar with the documentation used in the mortgage industry, you might find it hard to digest David Dayen’s ground breaking work. Dayen would be the first to admit that it’s difficult to follow the plot. That shouldn’t deter you from reading the interview in Salon. A lot of people who went to see the Big Short didn’t have a grasp of the financial mechanics of the mortgage crisis engineered by the banksters but most of them walked away with a basic understanding that the banksters had screwed the nation while their operatives in DOJ and the SEC had looked the other way.
We’ve got a ‘lawyer problem’ in DC that can’t be fixed and won’t be fixed by the likes of Hedge Fund Hillary or Bankruptcy Trump. Nothing short of walking in with sledge hammers and smashing the furniture will work. But a better gentler solution is to move Congress to the West Coast. Astoria would be the perfect place sitting right there at the mouth of the Columbia River. Now I suspect a number of Oregonians might resist having so many scoundrels mixing it up with the locals but we all have to make sacrifices for the national interest. As they say, keep your friends close and keep your enemies closer.
Relocate the Pentagon to Camp Pendleton so the brass can look the eighteen-year-old marines in the eyes before sending them off to die for the sacred petro dollar. And while we’re at it – let’s pack up the Supreme Court and ship it to Vermont or Kansas. There is no other way to break up the lawyer’s North Eastern cartel. Turn the SEC into a penitentiary and don’t let their staff lawyers walk free again. There was a time when we didn’t elect our Senators. Maybe it’s time to elect our Federal Judges. Let state banking regulators decide whether the banksters should get away with forgery. Write up some anti-trust regulations to bust up the mega law firms and dismantle the revolving door.
Now if you think these are drastic solutions, consider that the basic law of the land is twelve pages long and the bill of rights is spelled out in 500 words. You can fold the constitution up and put it in an envelope and there isn’t a word in it that a high school graduate can’t understand. Now print out a copy of the Securities Exchange Act or Sarbanes-Oxley and see if your eyes don’t glaze over after a few sentences. And when you ask the SEC or the DOJ why they settle financial crimes out of court – they tell you that it’s too complicated for a jury to understand. No kidding. It’s incomprehensible and you can’t send a man to jail without a trial by jury.
The Constitution was written to serve a nation of three million Anglo-Saxon farmers who resented the fact that the King and his Parliament were passing ridiculous laws from a distance of 3000 nautical miles. In the words of Samuel Adams, it was written so there would be “one rule of justice for rich and poor, for the favorite at court, and the countryman at the plough.”
Today, four out of five Americans are wage earners living in urban areas and only 2% are employed by Agri-Business. California has twice the population of New York. We don’t get around by horse and carriage and you can fly across the continent in five hours. There is no reason to concentrate so much power in a 70 square mile pocket of real estate that might as well be on a different planet. Our governors need to be dispersed so we can keep an eye on and cut them down to their natural size when they step out of line.
The sociopaths practicing the legal craft have abused their power and saddled every American with a crippling debt that will be our ‘gift’ to future generations. We put good food on the guardians’ table and they begrudge us a hard earned meal and basic health care. Three million Americans are rotting in jail and another three million don’t have a roof over their heads. That’s what you get when you live under the dictatorship of the lawyers.
Washington is a cesspool of globalists who are oblivious to the economic devastation they have inflicted on the fly over states. Eighty percent of us don’t trust them to do right by the common man and the other twenty percent aren’t paying attention.
Anybody who tells you Washington is broken is either a fool or politician. It is a Stalinist fortress manned by a lethal garrison of aristocratic lawyers who dole out their favors to money lenders and global corporate vultures.
240 years ago, a nation of three million semi-literate Anglo-Saxon peasants at the plough produced the likes of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Adams. It’s 2016 and 330 million well educated urban Americans are left to choose between Hedge Fund Hillary and a low breed divisive bigot with a filthy mouth. We’ve come a long way baby and it is all downhill from the low perch where we stand.
Einstein once said a problem cannot be solved on the same plane that it was created. You can’t fix anything in Washington DC – you have to dismantle it and relocate it to the heartland and figure out a way prevent the DC lawyers from plying their trade west of the Potomac River.