Pro Se, “For one's own behalf; in person. Appearing for oneself

Pro Se, “For one's own behalf; in person. As in the case of one who does not retain a lawyer and appears for himself or herself in court”.

TBR Leighton Bradford Editor-in-Chief

Allowing attorneys to advertise on television undermines jurisprudence. As a result, justice goes towards the highest bidder? If the plaintiff does not have the means, the cold weal of market forces, should not dictate who receives justice. In college, a professor once asked me what is just? My retort, apparently not the merits of my studies within this class?  Within the current judicial process-fairness must come into play. The bottom-line or a profit margin must not influence due process. Our court system seems to reward association and alumni legal status. You rarely see a barrister accepting pro bono work? Honestly! Do you think an attorney is going to give weight to someone who is financially challenged?  It's obvious that the integrity of this profession is diminishing. The routine of the lesser courts judicial system trumps substantive or procedural due process. “So and so, for the people”!

Substantive Due Process:

The substantive limitations placed on the content or subject matter of state and federal laws by the Due Process Clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution.

In general, substantive due process prohibits the government from infringing on fundamental constitutional liberties. By contrast, procedural due process refers to the procedural limitations placed on the manner in which a law is administered, applied, or enforced. Thus, procedural due process prohibits the government from arbitrarily depriving individuals of legally protected interests without first giving them notice and the opportunity to be heard.

The Due Process Clause provides that no person shall be "deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." When courts face questions concerning procedural due process, the controlling word in this clause is process. Courts must determine how much process is due in a particular hearing to satisfy the fairness requirements of the Constitution. When courts face questions concerning substantive due process, the controlling issue is liberty. Courts must determine the nature and the scope of the liberty protected by the Constitution before affording litigants a particular freedom. (http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Substantive+Due+Process)

Procedural Due Process:

noun due process of law, legal fairness, legal safeguards, protection against deprivations, protection guarantees, protection of deprivation of accepted legal principles Generally: fundamental fairness Specifically: Fifth Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment
Associated concepts: procedural due process, right to confront accuser.(legal dictionary)

To that claim, Judge Hillman wrote: "To require the town to provide any greater level of procedural due process at the pre-discipline stage would unnecessarily intrude on the town's interest in temporarily removing an unsatisfactory employee and in efficiently administering its personnel system”.

COA director's request is denied; Political activity leads to ... by Telegram & Gazette (Worcester, MA

The aforementioned text offers insight into the basic concept or meaning of due process. The blind fold has been lifted off of the face of justice within Desoto and Shelby County courts, and legal venues throughout our nation. The good ole boy system includes people of color as well.  A receding culture holds on to the last vestige of a social stance, in lieu of social change. The Thwarting of Black males is the presumed understanding. Meaning; male individuals of African descent have an unsaid prison social contract.  The privatizing of prisons requires Black souls! The various state legal bars lack the oversight as it relates to its wayward offspring. Routine or manufactured precedent prevails. A first responder remarks “When the judge etc...” becomes an obvious flag of a manufactured precedent. This person or entity knows the outcome?  The incident has an identified result. The almighty dollar seems to dictate jurisprudence. Lawyers will seek fortune and will not embrace the constitution or serve the needs of the ongoing public with due diligence. Money or paper should not dictate whether or not justice is served!  The body politic is not best served with the hold host of barristers! The modern-day paper chase is an embarrassment towards the profession. Individuals of African descent continue to be wronged within our justice system, while our white house leadership concentrates on foreign or alternative lifestyles? The white house seems to scoff at the fundamental needs of individuals of African descent; moreover, the forgoing public opinion. The working man needs to rebuke a system that cultivates an exclusive lawyer stance.  The poor continue to suffer from the lack of due process. The recent Supreme Court decisions do not integrate the constitutionality of a given subject but offer biased political remedy. County, State, and Municipal provinces make their own rules, and scoff at constitutional attributes.  If an individual wants to embrace a pro se stance, what say the body politic? Is it a guaranteed loss? Do lawyers feel insecure about an individual representing themselves? It’s all about the paper “G”! The legal profession is diminished when justice is associated with the bottom-line. The salaries of public defenders should be increased. The constitution becomes a mere parchment adopted by old white dudes unless it’s given defined meaning. The United States will become a tier below a third world country if finances influence the outcome of court decisions.

Rahm Emanuel: A Symbol of Much of What Is Wrong with America

TBR-special to-
By Paul Bucheit, paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.
Nearly 60 percent of his 103 donors received "contracts, zoning changes, business permits or some other tangible benefit"

 April 06, 2015 "ICH" -   America's is a sickness of the mind, the unwavering belief by people in power that free-market capitalism will somehow work for everyone.

As with a virus that refuses to die, the effects are insidious, because the very rich have convinced themselves that they made it on their own, and that others have only themselves to blame if they are poor.

Rahm Emanuel is Mayor 1%. He speaks a politician's words to entice many Chicagoans to vote for him, but his actions are on behalf of his friends and colleagues in the business world.

Snubbing the Needs of Average People 

The author of Mayor 1%, Kari Lydersen, tells the story of Helen Morley, a resident of the southwest side of Chicago and a regular patient at one of the mental health clinics closed by Mayor Emanuel. At Chicago's 175th birthday party in 2012, Morley pleaded, "Mayor Emanuel, please don�t close our clinics! We�re going to die...There�s nowhere else to go." Emanuel ignored her. According to Lydersen, Morley and others believed that the mayor "didn�t understand the role these specific clinics played in their lives and the difficulty they would have traveling to other locations."

The same can be said for Chicago's shuttered public schools, once the vital centers of their communities. The state of Illinois cut education spending by a greater percentage than any other state in fiscal 2012, and for 2013 it was third-worst in percentage cuts per student. Privatizers rushed in and blamed the public system. As a result, 50 neighborhood schools were closed in Chicago, opening the way for charter schools, which take taxpayer money but have little accountability to the public and an obligation only to their investors. In the end, 2,000 public school employees were fired by Emanuel, including over 1,000 teachers.

Parent Ronald Brooks, whose daughter's school Lafayette was shut down, spoke in the aftermath of the mayor's action: "Lafayette was more than a school. It was an institution....the heart and soul of our community."

Lafayette, which was reportedly underutilized, was replaced by a selective publicly-funded contract arts school with approximately the same enrollment as before the closing.

Cozying Up to Cronies 

According to the Chicago Tribune, "The mayor regularly courts his benefactors behind closed doors.." Nearly 60 percent of his 103 donors received "contracts, zoning changes, business permits, pension work, board appointments, regulatory help or some other tangible benefit."

Democracy Now cites a report by the International Business Times which found that Emanuel uses no-bid, no-contract voucher payments to quietly pass along money to his contributors. It was also reported by the Chicago Tribune that the lawyers for Chicago's infamous parking meter deal contributed over $100,000 to Emanuel's campaign chest. City attorneys touted the 'benefits' of the deal.

In another egregious episode, Mayor Emanuel appointed Deborah Quazzo, a managing partner at GSV Advisors, to the Chicago Board of Education. The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Quazzo's business affiliates subsequently tripled their business with the public schools. Tellingly, GSV founder Michael Moe related his goal for the future: "An education revolution in which public schools outsource to private vendors such critical tasks as teaching math, educating disabled students, even writing report cards."

Making Deals that Send Our Tax Dollars to Wall Street

Rahm Emanuel has made Chicago look good for tourists, sprucing up the downtown (Loop) business district, adding retail stores and office space. But the funding comes at the expense of average citizens. The mayor's plan for a South Loop hotel and basketball arena is using Tax Increment Financing (TIF) funds (our tax money, meant for blighted neighborhoods), and stands to enrich a hedge fund that contributed to Rahm's campaign fund and then invested in the hotel as the deal was being finalized.

According to Crain's Chicago Business, Emanuel has borrowed high-interest money that won't come due until he's out of office. For example, instead of paying $120.8 million in bonds owed now, he refinanced, thus adding another $228.8 million in interest over 30 years. Like Mayor Daley before him, Rahm hides the costs until someone else is around to take the blame.

Even the vital area of pre-K education is set up to benefit big business, with progressive-sounding social impact bondslikely to double the profits of Goldman Sachs and other investors in the next few years. Said Chicago reporter Rick Perlstein: "[The mayor] struck a deal with a bunch of investment banks to use the preschoolers of Chicago as collateral.." The deal was arranged with little debate, and with little understanding of the long-term risk.

And what about Chicago's (and Illinois') massive deficit? In recent years the state's largest corporations have been payingonly about a third of their required state taxes. Threats to leave the city seem empty in one of the nation's busiest trading centers. Yet Mayor Emanuel opposes even a tiny tax on the quadrillion dollar business of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, whose profit margin in recent years has been higher than any of the top 100 companies in the nation.

His Legacy

The mayor claimed credit for a minimum wage increase, even though he didn't act until the State of Illinois began putting the plan in place. He took credit for a longer school day for the kids, but he didn't provide the necessary funding. He took credit for coal-burning power plant closings that resulted largely from neighborhood activism.

Like its mayor, Chicago has two faces. The rest of the nation sees the glitz and glamour of Chicago's magnificent downtown, but the city's south and west sides, according to urban analyst Daniel Hertz, are more dangerous than in the 1990s. This is part of the sickness: a persistent inequality, moreso of wealth than of income, that plagues America and manifests itself in the questionable dealings of a man like Rahm Emanuel. He may best be remembered as the privatizerof Chicago and, as Perlstein suggested, "a strikingly corrupt mayor." 

 Paul Buchheit is a college teacher, a member of US Uncut Chicago, and the editor and main author of American Wars: Illusions and Realities (Clarity Press). He can be reached at paul@UsAgainstGreed.org.

#content afforded via UFAA Alain Larreau

Orion Test Lab Mockup for Next Flight Finished

TBR-NASA by Rachel Kraft.

The construction of an Orion crew module and crew module adapter full-scale mockup has been completed at the Littleton, Colorado facility of Lockheed Martin, NASA’s prime contractor for Orion. This mockup was transferred to the company’s Orion Test Lab on May 13, where engineers will configure it with the exact harnessing, electrical power, sensors, avionics and flight software needed to support Exploration Mission-1 (EM-1), the first flight of Orion atop NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. Orion’s team of engineers will use the mockup to verify the configuration of these vehicle components for EM-1, which ultimately saves assembly time and reduces risk. The mockup will then be connected to hardware emulations of the full EM-1 stack (Orion crew module, European Service Module, second stage booster and the Space Launch System) as well as ground support equipment. Once it’s connected, the team will simulate and test every aspect of the EM-1 mission from launch to splashdown. Orion will enable astronauts to explore new destinations in the solar system, including an asteroid and on toward Mars.

Rachel Kraft, NASA public affairs officer, left, Frank Culbertson, Executive Vice President

This entry was posted in Uncategorized on May 15, 2015 by Rachel Kraft.

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