In some of the latest polling on the two tax initiatives, Prop 30, the guv’s proposal is running about even while prop 38 is running behind. The AOC stands as the representative poster child of why no fees or taxes should increase because government in general has done zero to reign in fraud, waste, public corruption and patronage employment.
California’s executive branch still has more than 300 boards and commissions, a number that no one can truly seem to nail down because there is no master list of them according to the California Performance Review report. On this same page, it outlines the intended purpose of boards and commissions and the actual effect boards and commissions have had on transparency and accountability. Boards and commissions in some cases have served to increase transparency but have universally also served to shield others, mostly politicians, from accountability.
Similarly, the Judicial Council and the AOC have enlisted this stellar blueprint pushed forth by the executive and legislative branches of government in forming councils and committees that serve the same purpose. The AOC executive director and the chief justice enjoy the same shield that boards and commissions serve politicians – a shield from accountability. Our judicial branch leadership, the same people ripping our courts off Serving themselves to the detriment of all Californians and shutting courthouses and courtrooms down have not hesitated to follow up the word transparency with accountability as if they were part and parcel of the same thing.
We all know that transparency is not the same thing as accountability. The challenge for us California voters is that we discovered long ago that the only way to ever hold politicians (or judicial branch leadership) accountable is to limit their ability to levy taxes, fees and spending. Is it really worth 53 million dollars per year to rent 31 courtrooms in Long Beach when hundreds are shutting down due to a lack of funds? What would happen if California’s judicial branch was forced to walk away from that deal due to a lack of legislative appropriations?
In all cases, these councils and committees are charged with answering specific questions but in all cases they are also powerless to act upon their findings or resolve additional questions that might come up outside of their bright line charters or agendas, most of which is defined and approved by a small group of insiders that has run this branch for about 15 years.
In most cases we’ve seen in the Judicial Council and the AOC, the results of these various reports by their committees have served the same purpose of boards and commissions of the executive insofar as they outlined only a part of the problem and as a result came up with only part of a the solution. What we’ve witnessed time and again as a result of this is a re-arranging of Titanic’s deck chairs while the judicial leadership band played on trying to convince us all that there is nothing wrong at the crystal palace that six billion dollars worth of OCCM erected steel or a 3 billion dollar Information Systems wonder toy like CCMS won’t cure.
Lately we’ve seen a bunch of new blood but it only takes a quick gander of these new lists to come to the realization that it is the same tainted insiders that remain firmly in control either in terms of numbers of committee members or more importantly in terms of the number of committee chairs and vice chairs. Much like the states’ over 300 boards and commissions, these committees serve to somewhat obscure transparency. The mantra of “We have a committee that handles those matters” is repeated often while the same committee serves no purpose whatsoever in the arena of accountability. The chief justice gets to state that a committee covered that ground and finished their work and that this limited scope report represents their findings. What we the people get is that the various leadership and management changes their seating position at the table, yet they remain at or return to the table and they call that accountability.
California in general has a long ways to go to address these across the board leadership failures with leadership by unelected boards, commissions or committees. However, nowhere in California are these boards, commissions or committees more insular, self-serving and lacking both transparency and accountability than they are in California’s judicial branch and this is why California’s judicial council must be democratized.
Judicial Council Watcher 
unionman575
September 23, 2012
More fine work JCW.
You nailed it about the powers that be rotating spots yet they ALL remain at the table pulling the strings and calling the shots: “What we the people get is that the various leadership and management changes their seating position at the table, yet they remain at or return to the table and they call that accountability. ”
😉
Wendy Darling
September 23, 2012
Come the November election, just say “no” when marking your ballot on initiatives to increase taxes. They already have enough money to misappropriate, and no accountability for it, at 455 Golden Gate Avenue.
Long live the ACJ.
unionman575
September 23, 2012
So stipulated Wendy!
😉
JusticeCalifornia
September 23, 2012
The public is getting royally screwed. If, even after all the ACJ and others have done change is not going to come from within the branch, it is going to have to come from those outside the branch.
The public is and has been the sleeping giant, hasn’t it?
As all of us can tell, family law litigants can hardly contain themselves, because everything that is near and dear to them — including children– is being unceremoniously ripped from them — and now they don’t even have a record of the proceedings. Heck, in many cases, they don’t have any of the basics.
Perhaps it’s time to unify and mobilize this massive energy.
But it is not going to be pretty. Everyone in the branch is going to be fair game.
When it goes down, blame branch leadership. They have had every opportunity to fix things, but have screwed the public and opted to defend misconduct and corruption — on the public dime — every time.
What is NOT going to happen: cowed disregard for the corruption going down in the branch.
Wendy Darling
September 23, 2012
“The public is getting royally screwed.”
Yep.
courtflea
September 23, 2012
Too bad Mike Wallace is no longer on 60 Minutes (is he still in this world any longer?), it would be so cool to see him kick in the door of J head and Patels office with his cameras in tow and ask them a few pointed questions. Ah, those where the days!!
unionman575
September 24, 2012
Yes those were the days.
😉
Gary L. Zerman
September 24, 2012
This post by JCW is a bulls eye. And as the ol’ saw sings, as California goes, so goes the nation.
Trouble is, the nation, the federal government is California squared, cubed and probably a much greater exponent of dereliction, deceit, dysfunction, damage and destruction.
Washington D.C. is (Sacramento & San Francisco are) sick corrupt swamp(s) because both major political parties have made it a pig trough which they gorge themselves at. There are over sixty-four (64) federal Inspectors General – that mostly do not rock the boat and largely provide cover for government fraud, waste and abuse. Almost nothing ever gets better. Latest example, the IG’s report on Fast & Furious.
Washington D.C. and Sacramento/San Francisco intersect in Daniel Dydzak’s recent federal lawsuit filed in the D.C. Circuit. See Dydzak v. Schwarzenegger, et. al. Here is the link. http://dockets.justia.com/docket/district-of-columbia/dcdce/1:2012cv01534/156089/
Last night on C-CPAN’s Q & A host Brian Lamb interviewed the former Special Inspector General (SIG) of the Troubled Assest Relief Program (TARP) Neil Barofsky.
It is a very candid and very informative interview, well worth your time to watch.
Here is the link to that program. http://www.c-span.org/Events/QampA-with-Neil-Barofsky/10737434196/ which you can go to and watch via the internet, and here is a summary of the program:
Washington, DC
Sunday, September 23, 2012
This week on Q&A, our guest is Neil Barofsky, the former Special Inspector General in charge of oversight for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP). He discusses his new personal narrative titled “Bailout: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street.”
Barofsky shares his perspective from serving in his position for both the Bush and Obama administrations. He describes his efforts to ensure against fraud and abuse in the spending of $700 billion allocated for the Troubled Asset Relief Program. He explains how he established the office of SIGTARP, and built it to 140 employees who had won criminal convictions of 18 people, and was continuing work on 153 pending civil and criminal investigations when he resigned in 2011. He relates his constant struggle with officials at the Treasury Department, as his office made more than 68 recommendations to protect taxpayers from losses in the programs. He offers accounts of his behind the scenes conflicts with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and other representatives from the Treasury department. Barofsky talks about his prior job as an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and comments on what it was like to work for the federal government in Washington, DC.
Neil Barofsky is currently a Senior Fellow at the New York University School of Law where he received his law degree in 1995. He was Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for eight years. From December 2008 until March 2011, he was the Special Inspector General in charge of oversight of the Troubled Asset Relief Program. This is his first book. He is married, has two children and lives in New York.
Barofsky is aslo the author of the recent book BAILOUT: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street (2012) Free Press. From the reviews I read (and from watching the above interview) Mr. Barofsky appears candid, honest and names names.
___________________________________________________________________
BAILOUT: An Inside Account of How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street
Here is a link to the book http://www.amazon.com/Bailout-Account-Washington-Abandoned-Rescuing/dp/1451684932 and here is a summary:
Book Description
Release Date: July 24, 2012
In this bracing, page-turning account of his stranger-than-fiction baptism into the corrupted ways of Washington, Neil Barofsky offers an irrefutable indictment, from an insider of the Bush and Obama administrations, of the mishandling of the $700 billion TARP bailout fund. In vivid behind-the-scenes detail, he reveals proof of the extreme degree to which our government officials bent over backward to serve the interests of Wall Street firms at the expense of the broader public—and at the expense of effective financial reform. During the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Barofsky gave up his job as a prosecutor in the esteemed U.S. Attorney’s Office in New York City, where he had convicted drug kingpins, Wall Street executives, and perpetrators of mortgage fraud, to become the special inspector general in charge of oversight of the spending of the bailout money. From his first day on the job, his efforts to protect against fraud and to hold the big banks accountable for how they spent taxpayer money were met with outright hostility from the Treasury officials in charge of the bailouts.
Barofsky discloses how, in serving the interests of the banks, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his team worked with Wall Street executives to design programs that would funnel vast amounts of taxpayer money to their firms and would have allowed them to game the markets and make huge profits with almost no risk and no accountability, while repeatedly fighting Barofsky’s efforts to put the necessary fraud protections in place. His investigations also uncovered abject mismanagement of the bailout of insurance giant AIG and Geithner’s decision to allow the payment of millions of dollars in bonuses—including $7,700 to a kitchen worker and $7,000 to a mail room assistant—and that the Obama administration’s “TARP czar” lobbied for the executives to retain their high pay.
Providing stark details about how, meanwhile, the interests of homeowners and the broader public were betrayed, Barofsky recounts how Geithner and his team steadfastly failed to fix glaring flaws in the Obama administration’s homeowner relief program pointed out by Barofsky and other bailout watchdogs, rejecting anti-fraud measures, which unleashed a wave of abuses by mortgage providers against homeowners, even causing some who would not have lost their homes otherwise to go into foreclosure. Ultimately only a small fraction (just $1.4 billion at the time he stepped down) of the $50 billion allocated to help homeowners was spent, while the funds expended to prop up the financial system—as Barofsky discloses—totaled $4.7 trillion. As Barofsky raised the alarm about the bailout failures, he met with obstruction of his investigations, and he recounts in blow-by-blow detail how an increasingly aggressive war was waged against his efforts, with even the White House launching a broadside against him. Bailout is a riveting account of his plunge into the political meat grinder of Washington, as well as a vital revelation of just how captured by Wall Street our political system is and why the too-big-to-fail banks have only become bigger and more dangerous in the wake of the crisis.
***
FROM BAILOUT
The further we dug into the way TARP was being administered, the more obvious it became that Treasury applied a consistent double standard. In the late fall of 2009, as I began receiving the results of two of our most important audits, the contradiction couldn’t have been more glaring. When providing the largest financial institutions with bailout money, Treasury made almost no effort to hold them accountable, and the bounteous terms delivered by the government seemed to border on being corrupt. For those institutions, no effort was spared, with government officials often defending their generosity by kneeling at the altar of the “sanctity of contracts.” Meanwhile, an entirely different set of rules applied for home- owners and businesses that were most assuredly small enough to fail.
Nowhere was the favoritism toward Wall Street more evident than with the government’s approach to AIG, where inviolable contract terms were cited to justify the absurd executive bonus payments as well as far richer payouts provided to the megabank counterparties to AIG’s CDS deals, honoring even their most reckless bets. For homeowners and small business owners, though, contracts went from being sacrosanct to inconvenient irrelevancies. So when mortgage servicers blatantly disregarded HAMP contracts by trampling over homeowners’ rights, Treasury turned to an endless series of excuses to justify its refusal to hold them accountable. Similarly, for more than two thousand auto dealerships, Treasury’s auto bailout team sought to void the contractual rights granted them under state franchise laws to shut them down.
administration’s “TARP czar” lobbied for the executives to retain their high pay.
Providing stark details about how, meanwhile, the interests of homeowners and the broader public were betrayed, Barofsky recounts how Geithner and his team steadfastly failed to fix glaring flaws in the Obama administration’s homeowner relief program pointed out by Barofsky and other bailout watchdogs, rejecting anti-fraud measures, which unleashed a wave of abuses by mortgage providers against homeowners, even causing some who would not have lost their homes otherwise to go into foreclosure. Ultimately only a small fraction (just $1.4 billion at the time he stepped down) of the $50 billion allocated to help homeowners was spent, while the funds expended to prop up the financial system—as Barofsky discloses—totaled $4.7 trillion. As Barofsky raised the alarm about the bailout failures, he met with obstruction of his investigations, and he recounts in blow-by-blow detail how an increasingly aggressive war was waged against his efforts, with even the White House launching a broadside against him. Bailout is a riveting account of his plunge into the political meat grinder of Washington, as well as a vital revelation of just how captured by Wall Street our political system is and why the too-big-to-fail banks have only become bigger and more dangerous in the wake of the crisis.
wearyant
September 24, 2012
Yes, as the old saw sings. Greed and high stakes game-playing on the national level, identical to what Californians have to put up with from our “leaders” in the third branch. You can’t make this stuff up. Really. Thanks for stopping by, Mr. Gary Zerman. That book may keep my mind up my agonies over California’s judiciary for a short time. Does Barofsky have some time on his hands? Would he like a thankless job that offers only aggravation? C’mon down to sunny California!
wearyant
September 25, 2012
I just caught a typo. “… keep my mind up my agonies …” Ah-hem. I really hope my mind (head) is not up my — well, you know. A Freudian slip. Here’s hoping to keep my mind OFF my agonies, a little respite from watching the animal house at the JC/AOC.
Wendy Darling
September 24, 2012
Serving themselves to the detriment of all Californians. The only thing 455 Golden Gate Avenue really excels at.
Long live the ACJ.
The OBT
September 25, 2012
As Unionman has set forth the massive cutbacks in public service are exploding all around the trial courts of the state. I was at my parents house over the weekend and a caregiver for one of the 90 + year old neighbors told me her story about getting a ticket and going to a courthouse now closed and then having to drive for over an hour, only to arrive at traffic court where she was forced to wait another five hours to have her case heard .The result frustration and disappointment as her local traffic court was shut down and she missed almost a full day of work for someone she cares for deeply. This same story or something very similar is being recounted thousands of times all over the state every day while services and access to the courts continue to be reduced. The result ? A public that is losing faith in their courts. In contrast at 455 Golden Gate nothing has changed. The management gave itself new raises and insiders on the Judicial Council like Justice Hull , work to preserve their own power while attempting to suppress the voices of change and reform. Is anyone in the state legislature listening ? We need democracy to be brought to 455 Golden Gate before the branch closes down .
wearyant
September 25, 2012
The OBT, your excellent, poignant comments should be repeated in a letter to the editor of every California newspaper. It’s exceedingly irksome too that nothing has changed at 455 Golden Gate except more excesses dished out to the wrongdoers while our courts crumble about us, OUR courts that serve all Californians. Thanks for posting a look into the real world dealing with these massive and unfair cuts in service. Very, very sad indeed.
The JC/AOC/CJ, serving themselves to the detriment of all Californians.
Long live the ACJ.
unionman575
September 26, 2012
Hundreds of thousands of citiziens will suffer similar fates as we continue to be cut to the bone statewide in every trial court.
JusticeCalifornia
October 4, 2012
Have a friend report she got a $50 parking ticket. She didn’t pay it on time and she got slapped with a $50 penalty and a $25 “processing fee”. She reports that the meters in her area have bizarre time limits (39 minutes in one case) so people are getting tickets left and right. The public is going to get real tired of paying the price for what is going down in the branch, and being bled dry with fines and fees that are diverted to heaven knows where to pay for heaven knows what. It really is another form of taxation, isn’t it? Often imposed on those who can afford it the least.
DAN DYDZAK
September 25, 2012
0BT, Hull is a defendant for Rico activities with many others in my federal lawsuit that Mr. Zerman referenced. So is Jahr. It would seem that the legislature needs to step in or a federal judge. Thank you for your comments.
wearyant
September 25, 2012
The Feds had to go for tax evasion to rein in Al Capone. These slick dudes will be even more difficult, and that’s if the Feds are even interested. A very depressing situation. I just hope I live long enough to see them brought down, maybe the only way, by their own hand, their own greed and their own artifice.
Guest
September 25, 2012
I just found out that before become Director of the AOC that Mr. Jahr applied to be a replacement referee. But he was turned down by the NFL. So the AOC puts in leadership who everyone else turns down.