Public shaming is the road to Fascism

We are told that in America, we are a nation of laws.  But increasingly, we are not.  With the connivance of political figures like Senate Democrat Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg and Assembly Democrat Executive Director Mark Matzen, the corporate media are attempting to create an extra-judicial method of determining everything from whether or not you can hold a job or operate a business to serving in public office.

Under this informal, extra-judicial system, the accusers do not need any proof -- as we recognize that term in our legal process -- to indict, convict, and punish someone.  The accusers, who are generally the media and political figures like Weinberg, simply need to "feel" that someone has done something for reasons that they disapprove of.  It can even be as simple as saying that you are personally "tired" of someone, as was done in a recent Star-Ledger column.  Just being "tired" of someone makes some people believe that they have the right to fire someone from his or her job, or put someone out of business, or overturn the will of the voters.

This is a form of technological vigilantism -- a post-modern lynch mob -- with elements of religion to it.  For "apologize... apologize... apologize," read "repent... repent... repent."  And it was specifically warned against by prescient writers like George Orwell, with the neo-religious fervor whipped up in a shaming exercise very like the two-minutes hate he describes in his great work, 1984:

Think of it.  Political figures like Weinberg and Matzen actually suggested that they could reach into another person's soul to determine evil there, adjudicate on said evil, and then demand that the will of the voters be overturned and said person be stripped of public office.  Mind you, the office-holder in question -- Assemblyman Parker Space -- is one of the most popular elected officials in New Jersey, as determined by the number of votes he receives, and gets more votes than any Republican legislator in the state.  So it does take a particular kind of philosophy, distinctly undemocratic, to suggest such a thing.

Also remember that no laws have been broken.  Unlike Senator Robert Menendez or Assemblyman Neil Cohen or Assemblyman Raj Mukerji or any one of a hundred New Jersey Democrats who actually broke the law but who, nevertheless, the Weinbergs and the Matzens dutifully stood behind, Assemblyman Parker Space did nothing even remotely illegal.  Fashion was breached perhaps -- the fashion held by some elites in a few, well-to-do enclaves -- but no laws were broken.  For the moment, we still have our Bill of Rights and our First Amendment.  But they are working on it.

If the media can use extra-judicial shaming to deny employment, ruin a business, or overturn an election, then they will have successfully undermined the Bill of Rights without recourse to a legal challenge before the United States Supreme Court.  In their minds, that is the beauty of what they are trying to do.  It is a subversion of the law, and the imposition of punitive sanctions, through the use of fashion and media technology.  Through the use of it, America will no longer be a nation of laws, but rather a nation of fashions, manipulated by a corporate media controlled by the likes of Jared Kushner, the Newhouse brothers, and the corporate racists at Gannett News.  Pleasant thought?

Gannett tries to hide its real racism

There is a reason why the Gannett news organization wants to keep your eyes focused on flags and the like.  Gannett doesn't want anyone looking at their behavior or the behavior of some of the corporation's media outlets. 

Like the recent federal class action lawsuit brought against Gannett alleging that the corporation is "running a racist workplace that makes it impossible for black workers to be promoted".  The 26-page lawsuit, with 23 pages of attachments makes for interesting reading:

"Gannett ran a sophisticated scheme and cover 'in the form of focus groups and other means and methods that are subjectively manipulated by Gannett to achieve its discriminatory goals and objectives.'

According to the lawsuit, Gannett 'has a corporate custom, policy, pattern, practice and procedure of not promoting African-Americans to director and leadership positions and utilizing a ‘one-and-done policy’ that disparately impacts African-American employed within the company.'

Gannett, based in McLean, Va., is best known for its flagship newspaper, USA Today. Its chain of newspapers, TV stations and other media reach than 110 million people a month, according to the complaint."

A journalist employed at Gannett added:

“In sum, the overall employment atmosphere and attitude at Gannett is hostile toward recruitment, training, leadership, management and advancement of African-Americans into top broadcasting leadership positions and opportunities.”

The EEOC found that it could not certify that Gannett is in compliance with federal anti-discrimination law.  The federal class action lawsuit "seeks class certification, restitution, and compensatory and punitive damages for Civil Rights Act violations, loss of prospective earnings and a court order 'to enjoin the discriminatory practices.'"

Gannett was also recently sued for age discrimination over its practice of replacing older employees with younger, less expensive ones.  Over 1,300 Gannett employees have been "fired" since 2011.

Gannett is a ruthless corporation that points fingers in a public relations spin operation designed to take your focus off them.  We will keep you informed about who they are.  Stay tuned...

How the Herald almost started the Watchdog

On June 14, 2011, blogger Rob Eichmann met with Herald editor Bruce Tomlinson to discuss taking the Herald website statewide.  Eichmann brought along Bill Winkler, who had arranged the meeting on his behalf, and Tomlinson brought in Herald Internet director Amy Paterson.  The meeting was held at the Herald's Newton offices.

Eichmann saw the need for a conservative-leaning print newspaper in New Jersey, to provide balance to the left-leaning Newhouse and Gannett newspaper groups , among others.  With the Herald print edition serving a conservative county, a right-of-center tilt wouldn't hurt it any, while assuming the mantle as the state's "conservative" newspaper would open up the possibility of the Herald operating a website with statewide reach.  To that end, Eichmann was willing to share a reader base of over 40,000 emails with the Herald.

Unfortunately, Tomlinson wasn't having any of it.  During the meeting, he lashed out at the idea of the Herald becoming "New Jersey's Fox News."  Eichmann took his idea away with him and had found funding for it when he was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive form of cancer.  He died in 2013, before his idea could be launched.  But not before launching a few websites of his own, including Sussex Watchdog.

Originally called Sussex County GOP Watchdog, Eichmann launched the blog in the spring of 2012 with the help of restaurant owner Gail Phoebus, a candidate for Sussex County Freeholder at the time.  After he died, it was relaunched as Sussex County Watchdog and adopted a less partisan, more reform-minded posture.  Many different people contribute to it, including Harvey Roseff, a sometime independent political candidate. 

Of course, the Herald's Tomlinson was furious when Eichmann went ahead anyway.  Tomlinson had assumed that his rejection meant an end to it and did not appreciate Eichmann's determination.  The Herald -- especially Tomlinson -- have had a hard on for the website and its contributors ever since.

Sometime after Tomlinson's arrival at the Herald, the newspaper began to adopt the role of political arbiter in Sussex County.  If politics were a scale with Republicans on one side and Democrats/Independents/Greens on the other, Tomlinson attempted to play the role of a kind of god, using the Herald to balance out the prospects of the opposing sides. This became preposterously obvious in 2011, when he suppressed coverage of the criminal conviction of an independent candidate who used violence against a mother and a child.  When the Herald refused to write about it -- but the candidate lost anyway -- Tomlinson blamed the professionalism of the Republican campaign.

Curiously, he was joined in this by a consultant-turned-politician on the make by the name of George Graham.  Graham was a journeyman political consultant from Hudson County -- where he mainly worked Democrat municipal campaigns and did the government relations work for a major county contractor.  He was also a local elected official in Sussex County who had flipped from Democrat to Republican back to Democrat and then back to Republican again.  Graham contributed to Democrat legislative candidates and even voted in the Democrat presidential primary in 2008 for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Graham wanted to take a piece of the political consulting action in Sussex County and he also wanted to advance up the ranks of elected office.  He took over the Sussex County League of Municipalities and held it until the finances ran out.  He made an important alliance with attorney Dan Perez, who had been introduced to Sussex County legal circles by the Herald's own attorney.  Perez is currently the Democrat Party candidate for Freeholder in Sussex County.

Graham worked in a kind of partnership with the Herald -- and boasted about the hundreds of times he had met with the editor and senior staff.  Graham opposed reform legislation to end the newspaper subsidy, which counted for a great deal with the Herald.  In return, the Herald has been uniformly supportive of Graham's political career.  Last year, the Herald suppressed coverage of the challenge to Graham in his bid to be re-elected Freeholder.  The contrast between 2016 and 2017 could not be greater.

Aside from Graham, the Herald has adopted an antagonistic view towards political professionals -- seeing them as a direct threat to their ability to "play god" and place a thumb on the scale as seen fit.  This is strange, because political professionals have been working in Sussex County -- and indeed everywhere else in America and the free world -- for at least 40 years.  The political consultant is a well established staple of American political life, not the dangerous novelty that bizarrely the Herald would have us believe.

The Herald is part of a mid-western based media empire and we know for a fact that each and every one of those media units within Quincy Media corporation, every radio or cable station and the Quincy Whig, they all have professional dealings with political consultants.  Throughout the whole of the Quincy empire they are viewed as clients -- but not by the Herald.

With malice and premeditation, the Herald has worked to draw out and "expose" political professionals for the purpose of making them boogey men -- all except George Graham.  The Herald has imposed rules on subscribers who pay to use its website in order to identify them with the equivalent of stars and triangles -- for the purposes of making them objects of hate.  No other newspaper in the state of New Jersey has similar rules.  None.  Most newspapers don't even ask that you be a subscriber to comment.  None monitor political professionals.  None care if you post anonymously.  Only the Herald, with its agenda, and a stick planted firmly up its arsehole.

Not content with "exposing" political professionals, the Herald has worked to "expose" their family members and to apply the same rules to them.  The Herald actually trolls social media in order to determine relationships between paid subscribers who comment and elected officials.  That is how mental it has become.  The Herald has become so obsessed that, in our opinion, it crosses the line into restraint of trade. 

The philosopher Michael Oakeshott reminds us that journalism is not about persuading others but rather it is about reporting events clearly.  The Herald is very far removed from this ideal.  In fact, Tomlinson and company more often behave like marketing reps than reporters -- laying their hands all over a story to spin it this way or that.  But in the interest of whom? 

In contrast to the Herald, we have an open policy.  Please feel free to send Watchdog leads or indeed full columns and we will post them.  Thank you.

APP/Gannett: Reform money-grabbing municipal courts

With the ACLU and the NJ Bar Association conducting major studies of the corruption endemic to the New Jersey municipal courts system -- and the Legislature about to tackle the problem with hearings scheduled for early next year -- America's largest newspaper group has added its voice to the call for reform.  Over the weekend, the Asbury Park Press/ Gannett published the following editorial (printed in full because of its importance).

Once again, blogs like More Monmouth Musings and Sussex County Watchdog are asking for your assistance in uncovering and exposing local municipal court corruption.  If you have anything to pass along confidentially, please contact More Monmouth Musings at artvg@aol.com or Sussex County Watchdog at info@sussexcountywatchdog.com.

EDITORIAL: Reform money-grabbing municipal courts

New Jersey’s municipal courts have increasingly become more interested in cash than justice.

That’s what a Gannett New Jersey investigation has found, reinforcing long-held concerns that local officials view the courts primarily as revenue generators. That motivation influences the development of local ordinances and penalties, and effectively pressures locally appointed prosecutors and judges to conduct court business with an eye toward maximizing fines.

The end result is a system that unfairly exploits residents to help balance local budgets. It’s a dirty business that needs to be cleaned up quickly, and to that end we’re encouraged by the reactions of some lawmakers, in particular Assemblyman John McKeon, D-Morris, chairman of the Assembly Judiciary Committee, who is already calling for a legislative examination of the court system in the wake of our report.

There’s nothing terribly new about the realization that money rules the municipal courts. We’ve heard such complaints for years, and rare is the person who hasn’t at some point railed against what feels like selective enforcement of traffic laws by police officers filling ticket quotas.

Disenchantment with the court system is inherent; people don’t often appear before a judge to contentedly pay fines they believe they deserve.

But as local budget burdens have increased, so too has the abuse of the municipal courts. For instance, in the Jersey Shore counties of Ocean and Monmouth, court revenue jumped 14 percent between 2010 and 2015. But perhaps more significantly, among the individual towns where increases occurred, the average hike during that same period was 39 percent. That tells us that while not every community is abusing the system, many are doing so outrageously, especially in smaller towns where the court revenue can build up to a substantial portion of the overall budget.

MORE: Town profits spiked under municipal judge

Defenders of the current system fall back on some familiar tropes, none of which deserve much credence:

•If the fines bother you, don’t do anything wrong: Such expectation of perfection is egregiously self-righteous. We’re not talking about crimes here, but such heinous offenses as a lapsed dog license or an expired auto inspection sticker. People make mistakes, and while penalties are needed to assure compliance, that doesn’t explain the size of the fines and the frequency with which they are applied.

•This is about safety, not money: No it’s not. Safety may be the theoretical underpinning of most of these ordinances and traffic laws, but that’s not how the process plays out in practice. A prime example had been the automated red-light cameras calibrated to issue as many tickets as possible at designated intersections. Legislators mercifully scrapped that program, at least for the time being.

•Our judges and prosecutors are above reproach: While there are some bad apples, no doubt, this isn’t primarily about the court personnel. Even those with the best intentions understand that their marching orders from the local officials who appointed them are to squeeze residents for as much fine money as possible. That has to be in the backs of their minds, and their ability to continue in their posts may depend on that particular measure of success.

MORE: Judge Thompson suspended from nine Monmouth County jobs

Insulating the municipal judiciary in some fashion from those local pressures appears to be the most likely and most effective reform. Judges should not be forced to bow to local officials’ revenue grabbing just to keep their jobs; those who do the right thing and more definitively place justice first will merely be replaced, doing residents no good in the long run.

How best to achieve that independence, and overcoming what’s certain to be aggressive local resistance, remains the overriding question. The New Jersey State Bar Association has already been studying the problem, but has not yet released a report. Taking away local control of municipal judge and prosecutor appointments could be an option, as would a potential regionalization of the courts; under the current system, all fines from local ordinance violations go the municipality, while traffic fines are shared with the county. Spreading the fine proceeds more widely would reduce the local incentive.

Some locals who concede the value of the court revenue say it helps pay for services about which residents care, and that might otherwise have to be sacrificed — like trash pickup or snow plowing. That’s a convenient justification, but the perception would be different if the “sacrifice” was, for example, the trimming of some outrageous local salaries.

Regardless of the financial impact, however, a court system that emphasizes revenue collection to the degree of New Jersey’s municipal courts is failing residents. That has to change.

Is Christie wrong to call police officer a "pension pig"?

We believe he is.

New Jersey Police Benevolent Association (NJ-PBA) President Patrick Colligan is a 24-year veteran of the Franklin Township Police Department.  He earns an annual salary of $121,000 and would receive a yearly pension of $78,650 if he retired next year.  That's according to the Gannett news organization's data universe and the state's pension calculator. 

Let's be clear.  Pat Colligan is not a double-dipper.  He earns a salary that was negotiated at the bargaining table.  In return for that salary, he straps a gun on and (in his words) "was on duty today in New Jersey and, like most days, I was wearing a badge and a gun.’’ 

Back when Pat Colligan started his career in law enforcement, back when he was a rookie police officer, he joined under a given set of pension rules provided to him and to every other police officer by the political establishment of the day.  The Governor should know this, because the person hired back then by the PBA to negotiate those rules was none other than Chris Christie's law partner -- the future Republican National Committeeman for New Jersey and gubernatorial kingmaker, William J. Palatucci.  Officer Colligan is merely living under the rules negotiated by others. 

Lastly, the local Police and Firemen's Retirement System (PFRS), under which all local police officers and firefighters appointed after June 1944 are covered, is fiscally healthy, in contrast to the pension systems administered by the state, which are failing.   Local governments set aside money to fund their pensions, while state governments have historically underfunded the system.  So targeting Officer Colligan with this sort of language misses the mark entirely. 

Others may have a different opinion, and we invite them to write to us and express it.  We will, as is our policy, publish it in full.  You can even insult us if you wish.  Unlike some in corporate media, we believe in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights of our Constitution.  It is your right to do so and we will oblige you by printing it without edit.