Senator Bob Loves Xanadu!

June 12, 2009 at 4:34 P.M. I am denied access to the Internet from my home computer (shared with my child), I believe, as a result of these posts criticizing New Jersey's mafia-controlled government and the activities of Senator "Bob." ("Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends.")

I will do my best to regain access to the Internet while struggling against censorship. If there are any alterations or defacements of these writings, they should be understood to be part of the censorship and harassment designed to harm me. ("What is it like to be tortured?")

I am sure that Senator Menendez joins the community of nations in congratulating Cuba upon the lifting of the prohibition on membership in the Organization of American States (OAS). There are conditions attached to this invitation to Cuba concerning "democracy" and the freeing of "political prisoners." I also favor freeing political prisoners in all of the member states, including the United States of America, where Mumia Abu-Jamal is still incarcerated. Mr Menendez can prove his commitment to human rights by speaking out for the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal and by using his good offices to assist in this effort to win a pardon for a tortured dissident intellectual, Mr. Abu-Jamal.

I am afraid that further censorship efforts and defacements of this essay must now be expected despite America's commitment to freedom of speech. This may be aimed at hurting me and (even more) at embarassing President Obama, who is the leading advocate of freedom of speech in the world.

June 7, 2009 Television news broadcasts anounced that "construction is scheduled to begin on a rail link" between the Xanadu mall (that doesn't exist) and New York city "from the Meadowlands." The rail link is "scheduled for completion in 2017." The same authorities stated in 2006 that Xanadu and the rail link would open in August, 2009. In 2017, they will anounce completion by 2030. The hope is that everybody will be dead by 2030.

April 22, 2009 at 2:33 P.M. Obstructions of access to these sites, blocking of Google and MSN makes it very difficult to reach my work today. No italics of bold script could be used when this article was first posted. The uncovering of a CIA conspiracy and linkage to harsh interrogations aimed at establishing an association between Al Qaeda and Iraq -- an association which was known by intelligence agents not to exist when they were trying to prove to Congress that it did -- this intelligence effort was made in order to provide cover, allegedly, for the U.S. military venture in Iraq. A new Senate report of these matters has just been made public.

See "Report Links CIA to Harsh Military Interrogations," http://www.msnbc.MSN.com/id/30343776/ (April 22, 2009) and Peter Baker & Scott Shane, "Pressure Grows to Investigate Interrogations," The New York Times, April 21, 2009, at p. A1 and Scott Shane, "Waterboarding Used 266 Times on 2 Suspects," The New York Times, April 20, 2009, at p. A1.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is rumored to be contemplating a secret trip to Cuba for undisclosed negotiations, has called on countries (including Cuba) to respect human rights. Revelations of torture, cover-ups, censorship, suppression of speech, tainted judges and courts in New Jersey and other American human rights catastrophes -- for which the U.S. is held responsible under principles of international law -- will not help with Secretary Clinton's efforts.

I urge the U.S. Justice Department to act on evidence of New Jersey's crimes and tortures by U.S. officials in order to preserve the appearance of integrity in our efforts to strengthen human rights everywhere in the world. Someday, even in New Jersey, torture will be a thing of the past. See Assata Shakur, "Prisoner in the United States," in "Still Black, Still Strong" (New York: Columbia University-Semiotexte, 1993), pp. 205-220. (Testimony of Assata Shakur, whose torture may be compared with what I have described BEFORE my discovery of this book, possibly at the hands of some of the same officials.)

April 19, 2009 at 11:56 A.M. Harassment and computer warfare continues.

March 24, 2009 at 8:45 A.M. Attacks on these writings are a daily reality, emanating from Trenton government computers, defacements, alterations, obstructions will be a routine phenomenon. Access to MSN is still a problem. Anne Milgram is rumored to be on her way out.

New attacks today make it very difficult to edit these writings, spacing has been affected, again, and (so far) all attempts to get rid of these obstructions have been unsuccessful. I will do my best to continue writing, even under these conditions. The following article appeared recently in New Jersey:

Once upon a time, at a news conference that now seems long, long ago, there was word that a dazzling paradise would rise from the SWAMPS of New Jersey.

There would be a 16-story indoor snow slope, where residents could ski on the sultriest of summer days. They would build the tallest Ferris wheel in America, an Egyptian-themed movie theater, a skydiving simulation tunnel, a candy dreamland with a chocolate waterfall and a 1,000-gallon jellyfish aquarium that would light up like a lava lamp. They called it: Xanadu.

Five years later, the 2.3 million-square-foot complex at the Meadowlands stands as a cautionary tale of the parochial politics awaiting the $787 BILLION federal stimulus plan. The same regional authorities behind a troubled train line to Xanadu are now preparing one of the biggest "shovel ready" projects in the nation -- a $9 BILLION rail tunnel under the Hudson River.

[The $9 BILLION will disappear and nothing will be built.]

As stimulus money begins to flow to state and local governments, the Obama administration last week warned state auditors and budget officers that a lot is riding on how responsibly they handle the infusion of taxpayer dollars.

[In New Jersey, most of the money will be stolen by the mafia.]

"If the verdict on this effort is that we've wasted the money, we built things that were unnecessary, or we've done things that are legal but make no sense, then, folks, don't look for any help from the federal government for a long while," Vice President Joe Biden said.

It won't be an easy task. Though most of the money will flow through states, some of the projects will be managed by local and regional authorities that have proliferated in recent decades but get little scrutiny. Obscure federal agencies that have mismanaged funds in the past will now have billions to spend. And relentlessly, fraud experts say, the common huckster will try to make a buck by rigging a bid or overbilling the government.

Xanadu is slated to open in August, but some have their doubts. The development and its publicly-financed rail link have faced delays, increased costs and recurring controversy ever since ground broke.

Conflict-of-interest allegations pervaded the project. Losing bidders sued. The developer endured a securities investigation and nearly went bankrupt. The train line was routed through toxic lagoons where an oil company dumped chemicals for decades.

[New Jersey is called: "Cancer Alley."]

The stimulus package allocates $350 MILLION for oversight, with plans to hire dozens of new auditors and investigators.

[A lot of that oversight money will also be stolen.]

The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners has estimated that U.S. organizations lose 7 percent of annual revenues to fraud. Should it hold true for the stimulus plan, that's $55 BILLION -- roughly the state budget of Ohio.

[New Jersey's losses due to fraud far exceed this percentage because politicians, like Senator Bob, get a piece of every pie -- including the Xanadu pie.]

"If there's money to be had, someone will come along and try to find a way to deprive you of it," said Allan Bachman, the association's education manager. "The government resources are stretched right now in terms of accountability. To add this task to them is going to be a huge burden."

I. Unprecedented Cascade of Cash.

With spending spread far and wide, the stimulus package signed by President Obama in mid-February reads like a Nano version of the federal budget. Everything from lead abatement in public housing to space exploration gets money. Some will be doled out to states and some to federal contractors, some by formula and some by grant.

The various tentacles have public interest groups on edge, given the billions of dollars wasted and abused in the reconstruction of Iraq and after Hurricane Katrina.

"It's monumental," said Craig Jennings of the open government group OMB Watch. "I don't want to be too hyperbolic, but this is something that hasn't been done before and it's a lot of money."

Some small agencies will see their budgets balloon. Take the Rural Utilities Service, an Agriculture Department bureau started in the 1930s to bring electricity to the heartland. Its broadband loan program, which in the 2009 budget had $300 million, will now administer grants and loans worth $2.5 billion.

In 2005, the inspector general found problems with a quarter of the funds the program had received in its first four years. The service spent $45 million, intended to bring Internet service to underserved rural areas, to wire 19 affluent subdivisions in the Houston suburbs. One of those, the Sienna Plantation, is built around a golf course within five miles of the city limits. Another, River Park West, is just outside Sugar Land, which has a median household income of $95,000 -- one of the highest in Texas.

Government watchdogs also might have a hard time stopping crooked contractors from getting stimulus money. One of their main shields against fraud, a database of banned contractors, is riddled with holes, according to a Government Accountability Office report last month. Companies that have defrauded the government continued to receive contracts by simply changing their addresses or because officials failed to check the system, the GAO found.

[N.J. officials are usually paid off to look the other way.]

In one case, a computer-services company convicted of falsifying records received a new contract because, when searching the database, procurement officers left out a comma. In another, the owner of a medical equipment firm evaded a five-year ban for Medicare fraud by transferring the company to a neighbor, who transferred it back to the owner's wife, who used her maiden name to avoid detection.

Political thorns also await the stimulus as state and local officials fight over how to spend it.

In Texas, the stimulus dredged up an old political quarrel when the initial project list devoted money to repairing toll roads. That inflamed critics who say people shouldn't have to pay to use a road that is also built with tax dollars.

"The stimulus package came into play after all these years of battling," said Terri Hall, director of the anti-toll group Texans Uniting for Reform and Freedom. "It brings up the double-tax open wound and just puts salt in it."

Complicating the politics and oversight is a maze of local and regional authorities that will be conduits for large chunks of stimulus money. ("Big Pappa and New Jersey's Third World Ethics" and "More Problems for Menendez -- Tapes!")

In the 1950s, the U.S. Census counted 12,000 such districts, which develop everything from water supplies to railroads to housing, sometimes mixing public money in partnership with private developers. By 2007, they proliferated to more than 37,000.

The original idea behind such districts was to cut through red tape and reform a patronage-driven system of public works. But more recently, appointments to these special district boards have been dominated by campaign contributors and developers, creating potential conflicts of interest that can raise suspicions about who benefits.

“Those authorities were created in response to the shortcomings of the political system and multitude of municipal boundaries,” said James Hughes, dean of the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. “In creating those instruments to solve a problem, they added additional problems.”

II. Rail Link a Critical Link.

Perhaps no place shows the potential for conflicts more than northeast New Jersey.

[No, you don't say? Dem guys think we ain't honest!]

That is where two authorities involved in helping Xanadu get rail service -- the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and NJ Transit – are hoping to land $3 BILLION from the stimulus for the Hudson River tunnel. As recently as January, local officials talked about landing stimulus money for a second rail line to Xanadu.

Xanadu was conceived in 2002 as a way to redevelop the Meadowlands, a series of wetlands in northeast New Jersey best known as the home of Giants Stadium and the Nets basketball arena. The $2.3 BILLION project has relied on hundreds of millions of dollars in public spending for transportation improvements and environmental cleanup. But as with many aspects of Xanadu, precisely how much the public has invested is in dispute.

[Wait, somebody get a calculator. No wonder they want to censor me. They don't want you to discover these facts.]

The New Jersey Sierra Club estimates the public contribution exceeds $900 MILLION [that's your money!] when property tax breaks, financing and other types of subsidies are counted. But John Samerjan, a spokesman for the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, disputes that. He said the developers have so far spent $260 MILLION for lease payments to the state and for transportation and environmental cleanup costs.

[Oh, is that all? What the hell then ...]

Inside Xanadu, workers are laying tile and installing wires. The structure itself is nearly finished, but much work remains for the tenants. Two years behind schedule, the carnival-colored complex looms over the highway as a vibrant monument to economic revitalization or a gaudy albatross, depending on whom you ask. Local newspapers have exhaustively chronicled the project’s many ups and downs.

[Any public project in New Jersey will always be "2 years behind schedule with massive cost overruns."]

In 2003, The New York Times reported that Earle Mack, who sat on the board of one of Xanadu’s developers, Mack-Cali Realty Corp., provided a private jet to then-New York Gov. George Pataki for a Caribbean trip. A month later, Pataki and New Jersey Gov. James ["You gotta pay-to-play"] McGreevey agreed to have the Port Authority finance the $150 MILLION NJ Transit rail link. Aides said at the time that Pataki wasn’t lobbied by Mack and had repaid him for the flight.

Costs of the rail line have since ballooned to nearly $200 MILLION. The connection was critical: Xanadu’s promotional materials say the train is capable of bringing 10,000 people an hour to the complex. The 2.3-mile link also would cut traffic congestion and fulfill a long plan to connect the Meadowlands to New York City by rail, benefiting not only Xanadu but the stadiums, racetrack and concert hall.

[How successful will a shopping mall be during a long-term recession? There are 5 other shopping malls within 15 minutes driving distance of Xanadu.]

By 2006, when it came time for a Port Authority vote to formally approve the rail spur, four of the 10 commissioners present had to recuse themselves. The chairman, Anthony Coscia, works for a law firm that represents the Sports Authority, [Bill 'em, Cheat 'um, and How, Esqs.] the board overseeing the Xanadu project. Another commissioner was David Mack, Earle’s brother and a director at Mack-Cali.

Xanadu’s main developer, Mills Corp., disclosed in 2006 that the Securities and Exchange Commission had opened a formal investigation into the company and that it would restate its earnings because of accounting errors.

[Jose, you got company. Several more legal eagles in Hudson County are heading for a big fall. Accounting errors? Dipping in the trust account, boys? I never did that, but they said I was unethical.]

With Mills teetering toward bankruptcy, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine’s economic development chief, Gary Rose, helped find new investors for Xanadu – Colony Capital and Dune Real Estate, The Record of Bergen County reported.

At the time, Rose had an equity interest in Dune, The Record said, citing public disclosure forms. Rose also held stock and mutual funds in Goldman Sachs, which stood to lose more than $1 BILLION in loans if Xanadu went under, the newspaper said.

In an interview, Rose disputed The Record account and said he was only trying to help the players work together. He said he disposed of his interests in Dune as soon as he was advised they were joining Colony in an effort to rescue Xanadu.

The close connections feed skepticism nonetheless.

[Skepticism? Whatta-ya talking about? I love people. Right, Cheech?]

“If you look at who’s involved [Senator Bob?] and at what levels they’re involved,” said Jeff Tittel, director of the Sierra Club’s New Jersey chapter, “you end up seeing that this is part of this whole witch’s brew of New Jersey political insider dealings.”

[Take the canolis, Louie. Geez.]

Also raising critics’ suspicion was the decision to route the rail link through a federal Superfund site, which the Sports Authority purchased from Honeywell International for $6.2 MILLION, a price some said was unnecessarily high.

[Hey, it was worth 2 million, plus a little something for the kids. Part of the purchase price may have been coming back to the politicians under the table. Stuart Rabner was N.J. Attorney General when the project was planned. Prisco?]

Honeywell, based in New Jersey, has donated tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions through its political action committee in recent years. The firm has hired several former political aides and state officials, including the former assistant commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection.

“You wonder, ‘Why did they pick that site over all other places?’ ” said Mayor John Hipp of Rutherford, just south of the Meadowlands. “I think that an investigation should be warranted. It’s a disaster.”

Honeywell spokeswoman Victoria Streitfeld denied that politics influenced the property deal. The company remains on the hook for remediation on the property it sold.

[This Victoria Streitfeld is a New Jersey lawyer who is duty bound to speak the truth. Make her an ethics official. See "Does it Seem Like I'm Negotiating?"]

Samerjan, the Sports Authority spokesman, said it’s difficult to avoid environmental problems in the Meadowlands, given its history as an industrial landfill.

["They gotta keep picking up the bodies of dead politicians," a gentleman identified as "Fat Tony" said on Monday. Mr. "Fat Tony" is a New Jersey Superior Court judge.]

Port Authority spokesman Steve Sigmund said it’s unfair [it's all relative!] to compare the Xanadu rail link with the Hudson River tunnel. “Yes, they are both rail projects that happen to start in the Meadowlands,” he said. “But beyond that they are totally different projects.”

In the past few years, he said, the Port Authority has taken steps to become more transparent – opening committee meetings to the public, allowing public comment periods before decisions and broadcasting meetings on the Internet.

III. A New Sheriff in Town.

[They went that-a-way. We'll head them off at the pass!]

Not all stimulus projects will involve as much money or murky politics.

With the fraud in Iraq and New Orleans fresh in their minds, Democratic leaders included what they say is “unprecedented” accountability and transparency in the stimulus: $350 million for oversight, or about $1 for every $2,250 in the plan.

[Lots of luck.]

Spending will be overseen by the new Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, which some have dubbed the RAT board. It is composed of the inspectors general from every major federal agency receiving money.

[You won't see them no more.]

Earlier this month, Obama appointed Earl Devaney, a respected inspector general in the Interior Department, to head the board. Given the awe and praise that followed, one might have guessed that a tumbleweed had blown through the Capitol while someone cued the theme to "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly."

Devaney’s resume includes taking down powerful lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He exposed sex, cocaine and corruption in the government’s oil-and-gas royalty program. He once caught someone taking a bribe with a camera hidden in the mouth of a shellacked alligator’s head. “Earl is not one for sweeping things under the rug,” said Joseph Hungate, chief deputy to the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.

[They won't like that guy in New Jersey.]

In a few weeks, the stimulus board will take over Recovery.gov, the Web site where President Obama has promised that the public can track "every dime" of spending. But the president's Office of Management and Budget issued reporting guidelines that some critics say contradict his pledge.

Recipients of funds -- states, federal contractors and regional transit and housing authorities -- are required to report how they spend the money and to whom they award contracts. Those who receive funds from the recipients, such as cities and community college districts, will not. “All State A has to do is report the subgrant to City B, but City B has no requirement to report anything,” Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., said at a recent hearing. “So how to do we get to the contracts?”

Robert Nabors, OMB deputy director, responded that the Obama administration was trying to balance the desire for transparency with the burden on small businesses.

“I just think this guidance doesn’t match what we’ve advertised,” McCaskill shot back. Jennings’ group, OMB Watch, is urging the administration to provide detailed data in such a way that citizen watchdogs can look for political influence.

“It’s going to be very difficult to go through reams of [documents,] find one particular contractor and say, ‘Ah! This one particular contractor has gotten 500 contracts and he’s made X number of campaign contributions,’ ” he said.

[The contributions will be made by contractors through third parties and will not be detectable on the surface of transactions. Much of the money for such contributions will come from illegal transactions, mob cash. Political contributions provide an avenue for money laundering mafia and drug cartel profits. Right, Senator Bob?]

Pay-to-play cases draw big headlines. But the dire economy and the influx of stimulus dollars create textbook conditions for more mundane abuse, fraud examiner Bachman said. “I’m holding my breath on this,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some period of time down the line we’re still prosecuting frauds going years back because of the stimulus package.”

Bob Hennelly of public radio station WNYC in New York contributed reporting on Xanadu. This story is part of ShovelWatch, a collaboration by ProPublica and WNYC to track the $787 billion stimulus bill Congress passed in February.

Today has been a nightmare in terms of attacks against my sites, distortions of my posts and ability to edit or proofread my work. I think these examples of public censorship with the cooperation -- or deliberate inattention -- of Trenton officials send the message that: 1) censorship is routine in American public communications and the Internet, despite disclaimers and the First Amendment; 2) the feds either can not (or will not) protect persons fighting state government corruption, where the potential felons are of the same political party as federal officials; 3) allegations by Chinese and other scholars of a sharp decline in America's fortunes and values -- evidenced by efforts to move to a new global reserve currency -- are demonstrably accurate. I live in and love the USA. However, I am baffled by the persistence of these mafia cybercrime tactics taking place before the eyes of the world. I find it hard to believe that N.J. or U.S. lawyers and law enforcement are unable to control the harassment that I face every day or to provide me with the documents and records to which I am entitled by law. If this is a matter of a payoff, like most things in New Jersey, maybe I can try for a lay away plan.

Do you believe that this inability to do anything about torture and censorship of a person fighting mafia corruption will encourage others to come forward or to cooperate with law enforcement efforts against organized crime in New Jersey?

Senator Bob Says: "Xanadu and You -- Perfect Together!"

April 12, 2009 at 5:36 P.M. "errors" were inserted in this essay. I visited New Jersey today and made sure to relieve myself in North Bergen, New Jersey. I urge you to do the same.

New Jersey government hackers are preventing me from posting images or accessing my MSN group. I will continue to try to regain access and to write. I cannot say whether someone in that malodorous state is finally reaching out to me. Please do not pretend to be a friend. Have the decency to be honest about what you are doing and for whom you are acting if you try to contact me. I will continue to struggle for that face-to-face meeting until someone will actually "see" me.

Ms. Milgram's actions on the corruption front are too little and too late. Anne Milgram will be remembered as another tainted and questionable or corrupt N.J. public official, protecting persons sharing her sexual-orientation (Debbie, Diana), complicit in the crimes and cover-ups of the Democrat machine. Milgram is yet another disgrace for New Jersey's legal system. Maybe she'll go to work for Bernie Madoff when she leaves the Attorney General's job, which I hope will be soon.

New Jersey's political and legal systems are heavily influenced by organized crime. This is usually described in county courthouses as "business as usual." What else is new?

There are unwritten rules and a network of secret alliances and loyalties. Local "bosses" often control results in courtrooms, appointments to key positions, bar committee participation and judgeships, even the private use of police officers and equipment for illicit purposes.

New Jersey's Supreme Court chooses to remain oblivious to these realities. The "justices" keep their distance from humble attorneys and their grimy world, in order to ponder deep issues and provide the rest of us with their immortal thoughts. Naturally, the "justices" do not wish to anger their political patrons or bosses. The only explanation that makes sense of legal paralysis in New Jersey in response to the crimes detailed in newspapers on a daily basis and the horrors experienced by me is corruption. ("New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "One of New Jersey's Highly Ethical Attorneys Has a Problem.")

Jaynee must have been a so-called "consiglieri" (italics cannot be provided due to hackers) before finagling a judgeship by "doing a little something" for the boys. Perhaps this explains the HIP scam? What happened to those $300 MILLION, Jaynee? I am sure they'll come up with an "accounting error" type of bullshit to explain the missing money. Garcia? Meanwhile, Senator Bob is juicing up the bachelor pad in Miami Beach, owned (allegedly) under another person's or a corporate name. That's a good way to use the Xanadu dough, right Bob? ("Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "Senator Bob Loves Xanadu!")

Is (or was) Ms. LiCausi a lobbyist for Xanadu developers or interests of any kind? Did she disclose, in writing, her "relationship" with the Senator? Were any fees received by Ms. LiCausi for this "lobbying," either personally or through an intermediary -- a chaperone, perhaps? -- and if so, were these fees shared in any way with the good Senator from the swamplands of Secaucus? Has Ms. LiCausi visited the "swinging scene" in Miami Beach, Bob? Have you thought of Antonio cologne, Bob? Is there any connection between Senator Bob and the censorship directed against my sites? (I experienced difficulties in reaching my blogs again this morning, letters are deleted from words, "errors" will be inserted constantly to maximize frustration and to damage the essays.)

"Secaucus" is so close in spelling to the Cuban term "Sicote," and the smell in that town is so similar to what the Cuban word describes, that persons in Hudson County tend to associate the words. Several attacks on this essay have resulted in the removal or alteration of words. I will continue to make corrections as they are needed.

How much of the $2 BILLION has been spent on the Xanadu deal? How close are we to completion of the Xanadu project, including a rail link from the Meadowlands to the city? There are enormous disparities in "accounting" for the monies expended in this public/private project to create a mall -- with the same stores found in several other malls in the area -- in the midst of a severe recession? Lots of luck.

How many law firms "billed" for services in connection with Xanadu? How politically active are the said law firms? How many contributions to political campaigns, like Senator Bob's election "efforts," have these firms made? How many lobbyists have "sold themselves" to Xanadu developers? Ms. LiCausi? Do you speak to me of "ethics," Senator? You want to give these guys in New Jersey $4 BILLION in "stimulus" money? Where's the OAE? The word "whore" in New Jersey describes a subspecialty in law. ("New Jersey's Supreme Court Whores" and "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court.")

Ronald Smothers, "Six Police Officers Charged With Protecting a Drug Ring," The New York Times, July 12, 2006, at p. B3:

"Prosecutors say [New Jersey] police officers conspired to protect their [drug dealer] friends, and to cover-up their own efforts to shield them in order to continue living in the fast lane." ("Mafia Involvement in New Jersey's State Police" and "KKK Police Shocker in New Jersey.")

New Jersey Superior Court judges may be even more corrupt than the cops. Bribes, favors, combined with unprecedented levels of stupidity and cronyism to make New Jersey's judges the laughing stocks or worse of America's and the world's legal profession. ($15-$20,000 to buy a N.J. Superior Court judgeship, allegedly.) The response to what I say will be further illegal censorship and threats, together with the removal of a letter from one of my words in this essay.

I have received a notice suggesting that Yahoo e-mail is "closing" and MSN groups is, allegedly, "closed" and inaccessible to me. My image-posting feature has been destroyed and my book is suppressed. It is impossible to tell how many hits this blog receives. The number shown on my profile is a gross underestimate and unchanging, despite numerous "tests" indicating that visitors are not registered, even after several "visits" to the profile. I wonder why this N.J. government cyberwarfare is directed against my sites over so many years? ("What is it like to be tortured?")

It is probable that Senator Bob is behind these shenanigans. I can only hope that no U.S. Senator would assist in censorship and suppression of political speech, a crime under federal law, or in efforts to frame an Internet critic "for something." Say hello to Gloria, Bob. Any other lawyer in New Jersey would be sanctioned for ex-parte chats with a colleague's client. Cyberattacks? Planning to travel to Cuba, Senator Bob?

John Holl, "New Jersey Ex-Trooper Gets 24-Year Sentence for Involvement With Drug Gang," The New York Times, July 15, 2006, at p. B5:

Former New Jersey State Trooper, Moises Hernandez, "acknowledged on Friday, he was working for a Columbia-based drug gang that the authorities say was responsible for bringing almost $6 MILLION in cocaine and heroin into the United States every day."

This guy was a friend of Senator Bob's, allegedly. How many more N.J. cops are on the payroll? $6 million A DAY buys more than a few New Jersey judges and politicians, making the drug trade easier in the Garden State than in most other places. The Trenton Cartel regards this sort of thing as "business as usual." The hoods in blue suits must not be permitted to get away with threatening critics in the blogosphere or their family members, especially children. Is West New York's former police chief finally out of federal prison? The only thing easier than drugs in New Jersey is prostitution, right Bob? ("New Jersey Based Prostitution Ring and New York's Pay-for-Luv-Guv.")

Was my refusal to get involved in illegal activity of any kind grounds for investigating me? 1988-2009. What are the connections, if any, between Miami's Cubanoids and Colombian drug merchants? Do the Cubanoid-fascists provide a distribution network by way of their bought politicians and cops? Miami to New Jersey, only in order to get to New York and the rest of the country? We are discussing millions and billions of dollars? Is crime in America really about African-American kids? Whose crimes are we worried about? ("Driving While Black [DWB] in New Jersey" and "Mafia Participation in New Jersey Courts and Politics.")

Drugs are a lethal threat to our inner cities -- drugs are killing those African-American kids in more ways than one -- and drugs which are brought, mostly, by non-African-Americans into the cities must be opposed by all of us. Trenton politicians protect CONNECTED child molesters and distributors of child porn, many victims are minority children. ("We don't know from nothing," "Judges Protect Child Molesters in Bayonne, New Jersey" and "New Jersey Superior Court Judge is a Child Molester.")

Neil M. Cohen, Esq. is on the N.J. Legal "Ethics Committee"! Paul Bergrin? ("No Charges for Child Molester in New Jersey Assembly" and "New Jersey's Legal System is a Whore House.") Stuart Rabner, Esq? (Prisco?) Anne ("I like girls!") Milgram, Esq.? How young, Anne? Debbie Poritz?

This drug distribution network is not about the Italian mafia. This is Colombian and Cuban-American organized crime made possible by corrupt politicians and bribed judges in New Jersey. No amount of intimidation by hoodlums wielding public power on behalf of a criminal enterprise will silence committed critics of this evil. Such corruption and incompetence by the N.J. judiciary is what I call "unethical." Let's tell the OAE about it. Give 'em a call. Anne Milgram? Maybe you can meet women, Anne! Oh, oh ... they will remove another letter from one of my words. Isn't cybercrime illegal in New Jersey?

There are unspoken and unacknowledged legal double-standards that lead to the justified conclusion -- especially by many minority and poor litigants -- that the system is biased against them (which it is), also corrupt and inaccurate (which it also is). African-Americans are, overwhelmingly, victimized both by organized crime and by a corrupt legal system in New Jersey.

Michael Tigar and others have shown that too many people who should not be in prison are locked up; whereas, many who should be kept off the streets are set loose on an unsuspecting population. Senator Bob? Much depends on whether defendants can call on -- or become -- corrupt politicians or have plenty of money. These are overlapping categories. Money gets access. And in New Jersey, for some reason, politics makes people rich. Who knew? ("Does Senator Menendez have Mafia friends?")

$28,000 a year for a municipal job in the Garden State and a thrifty public servant managed to save one million dollars. Unfortunately, he passed away before spending this money that he had "saved," somehow. I should have taken a course in economics from him. I wonder how ex-Mayor of West New York Anthony DeFino saved so much money in New Jersey. Real Estate? Albio Sires seems to be doing equally well. Don't spend it all in one place, Albio.

Do you speak to me of ethics, boys and girls? Congratulations on becoming a millionaire, Senator Bob, after a life in public service. Amazing. This item may interest you, Senator: "Cuba: Fidel Castro Meets With U.S. Lawmakers," in The New York Times, April 8, 2009, at p. A8. (Not bad for a man who has been "dead for years.")

The Cuban-American National Foundation's alleged support for an end to the embargo and new relations with Cuba may obscure greater hostility behind the scenes to the Cuban people's economic improvement efforts. Cubans should be wary of offers of friendship from Miami's Cubanoids. Finally, easing of trade and travel restrictions by the Obama administration may be a first step towards normalization of relations. More attacks against my writings must be expected from Cubanoid-fascists.

John Holl, "Tenafly Ex-Councilman Gets Probation for Heroin Possession," The New York Times, July 12, 2006, at p. B5:

"Jeffrey Romano, a former councilman from Tenafly, N.J., who was charged with HEROIN POSSESSION in November and who has admitted continuing to use the drug, was sentenced on Tuesday to five years probation." (emphasis added!)

"Jay Romano and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "North Bergen is the Home of La Cosa Nostra."

African-American and/or poor offenders facing similar or identical charges are routinely treated much more severely than this mysteriously "fortunate" defendant. I wonder why? There are husbands in jail because, as a result of unemployment, they could not make alimony payments, while affluent defendants get a "walk" after much more severe convictions.

Of course, child support is an important right of mothers and children, but state "get tough" policies often result in denials of child support and an increased tax payer burden.

In some New Jersey counties, Mr. Romano's situation -- or the peccadillos of other political "personages" -- would not result in an indictment at all. The matter would be returned to the local municipal court level, where the defendant would get a slap on the wrist. Maybe only a little pat on the wrist and the wish that he "have a nice day." Charges against politicos have a tendency to simply "go away," like a summer rain storm. Let's make them an offer they can't refuse.

"Mr. Romano, a real estate manager, had been arrested several times before. In 1991, he pleaded guilty to possession of narcotics in Orange County, New York, and received probation. Also, in 1991, he was arrested in Kirkwood, New York, and was fined $331.00."

Either of those original charges would have resulted in a jail sentence, that is, if Mr. Romano's skin were a little darker or if he were not "politically influential." Any minority or poor male, as I say, would be in jail for a long time on identical charges. In New Jersey, "allegedly," the "reward" for criminal activity is often a political position in local government, for the right boys. (See "Let's see what he's got under his fingernails." )

"In 1996, [Mr. Romano] pleaded guilty to petty larceny in Vestal, N.Y., and was fined $100.00." That is what I describe as official "theft." This seems much worse than knowing someone who is "alleged" not to have worn a seat belt on one occasion. These were the reduced charges, remember.

Mr. Romano's attorney Robert L. Galantucci, Esq., did a fine job. I cannot believe that dispositions on such charges in urban counties are fair. I also cannot accept that it is appropriate for a convicted defendant to have no problem (according to all indications at this time) with his professional license, if any, as a "real estate manager" (is he a licensed broker?), when others with minor civil lapses -- who are not charged with heinous crimes, until FRAMED of course -- are subjected to the maximum penalties, even when their own civil rights are violated and crimes are committed against them by so-called "ethics-enforcers" (a possible contradiction in terms in New Jersey), certainly as regards the bribe-taking and politically-tainted OAE.

Politics must be removed from professional disciplinary proceedings, even in the Garden State. For example, OAE attorneys should respect the civil rights and humanity of their "targets" by refraining from stealing or committing other crimes against them. My saying this is "nothing personal." I hope no one will take anything personally. The biggest lowlife, lying, and otherwise unethical shysters I had the misfortune to know in New Jersey were OAE attorneys entrusted with enforcing ethics rules. Most of them are probably judges today.

Observers of these questionable proceedings might be overheard to whisper: "Geez. Badda-bing, badda-boom!"

Senator Bob, the Babe, and the Big Bucks!

I find myself being quoted by reporters from many publications who have never spoken to me. I have posted -- since purchasing my computer -- my status regarding New Jersey. I have not spoken to any "self-identified" reporter from The New York Times or any other publication about any matters whatsoever. If I do so, given the relationships that may exist between N.J. political or "business" people and press figures, I will bring my own tape recorder and confirm my statements in writing. (See "Burn Notice" and "Incoherence in 'The New York Times.'")

Anyone claiming to be me may provide a statement to the media. My statements will always be posted in these blogs. As for being "restored," I am not sure how N.J. will "restore" twenty-plus years of my life or undo these crimes and continuing cover-ups. Have you no shame, Ms. Milgram? Have you substituted for your dignity, a job title and cash price tag, Mr. Rabner? How does a Jew become Mengele, Terry?

Many attempts to make use of my computer have been frustrated by hackers, viruses, spyware and other obstructions. A scan of my computer -- after installing a new "upgraded" security system -- has already disclosed three new security risks, since yesterday, only one of which can be resolved at this time. Thus, I cannot be certain when or whether I will be able to continue writing. I will do my best. That scan is still underway. At any time, I may be prevented from writing at my home computer and will search for a public computer to continue working. I am unable to access my MSN group, Critique. America is calling on other countries to respect freedom of expression and dissidents' rights. New Jersey is excluded from this requirement or call.

March 20, 2009 at 2:35 P.M. I cannot access MSN groups. Images cannot be posted. My books are still suppressed. Harassment is continuous. I will focus on the sex lives of more N.J. judges.

August 30, 2007 at 4:05 P.M. (See "What is it like to be tortured?")

August 31, 2007 at 10:40 A.M. I am unable to access my msn account or group, numerous attempts to do so have been obstructed by hackers. Corrections to this post were lost after an attempt to republish the essay failed. I will continue to struggle throughout the day against these obstacles. Mafia/mob involvement in Internet crime is to be expected. It usually follows upon criticisms of promiment New Jersey politicians, like Senator Bob. I wonder why?

David Kocieniewski, "Inquiry Focuses On Former Aide to Menendez," in The New York Times, August 28, 2007, at p. B1. (As of March, 2009 this matter and several others are still under investigation, allegedly.)
David Kcieniewaski, "Economic Woes Affect Some July 4th Fireworks," in The New York Times, June 22, 2009, at p. A15. (N.J. may cancel July 4, festivities and Christmas due to disappearing millions and yet a sparkling shopping mall has -- allegedly! -- appeared, along with a rail link to Manhattan by way of a new tunnel. However, no one has yet seen these items nor the $2 BILLION that vanished to "pay" for them.)

"A federal investigation of Senator Robert Menendez over potential conflicts of interest with recipients of government financing has shifted focus to the lobbying work of his former chief of staff and confidante, according to lawyers and others familiar with the case."

"A grand jury in Newark has subpoenaed hundreds of pages of financial documents, which received a variety of public financing when KAY LICAUSI, who was an aide to Mr. Menendez while he was in the House of Representatives, lobbied for the hospital. Last week, the grand jury heard testimony from Jonathan Metsch, a former Menendez fundraiser who was president and chief executive of the hospital when it hired Ms. LiCausi, the Star Ledger [sic.] of Newark reported on Sunday."

Ms. LiCausi must be well-connected to prominent officials in the area. Yes, I checked the spelling of her name. But she seems very young and may not have appreciated the full implications or ramifications of actions that I am sure others, like the junior Senator from New Jersey, asked her to take.

"You take the money."

"No, you take the money."

These kinds of statements are often heard near the New Jersey Senate building.

"Neither Mr. Menendez nor Ms. LiCausi would comment on the matter. But Marc E. Elias, a lawyer who represents Mr. Menendez, said that he expected the United States attorney leading the investigation to find that Mr. Menendez acted 'appropriately.' ... "

Mark, did you ever visit "The Philosophy Cafe"? You want a rematch, Mark?

This statement from counsel is what is known in legal circles as the typical bullshit. "Some other dude done it," will be next. Get your fee up front, Mr. Elias -- in cash. As for whether Mr. Menendez acted "appropriately," I'd say he's pretty typical for a New Jersey politician climbing to the top of the greasy pole in Hudson County. Look up the biography of Benjamin Disraeli, who -- in an old-fashioned way -- refrained from thievery as Prime Minister in Victorian Britain. Better yet, research the colorful political history of Union City ("La Bolita"!), New Jersey.

I have just corrected an "error" inserted in this text since my previous reading of it. I expect to encounter such criminal vandalism each time that I review this work.

"The investigation became public last summer, when the Star-Ledger reported that Mr. Menendez had collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent for a building he owned from the North Hudson Community Action Corporation, an antipoverty group."

This is a group that tries to prevent poverty for politicians and themselves. They are highly successful in avoiding financial difficulties for themselves, thanks to your tax dollars.

"Mr. Menendez had helped the group, which was run by a political ally" -- a partner in crime, Bob? -- "and campaign contributor, win MILLIONS of dollars in federal funding. When federal agents seized records from North Hudson last September, Mr. Menendez, a Democrat, was locked in a heated campaign against State Senator Thomas H. Kean Jr., a Republican."

It turns out that Menendez may be much worse than even Tom Kean suspected. Rumored alliances with Miami's so-called "Cuban-Mafia" have dogged Menendez for years. I wonder whether this has something to do with my computer troubles? Ya think? I have a feeling we're all going to find out. Perhaps Mr. Menendez will be "locked" once again, in a more literal sense this time. Harrison Williams? Bob Torricelli? "Slim Jim" McGreevey?

My experiences are examples of the way censorship works in America -- through denigration and discouragement, denials of creative opportunities, vandalism and destruction of creative or intellectual work, deliberate campaigns of frustration and orchestrated efforts aimed at the professional and personal destruction of critics, corruption goes unpunished. Contrarian attorneys are designated for destruction by politicians, usually secretly. Bob is reputed to be a master of the dagger in the back method of "conflict-resolution."

An "error" inserted in the foregoing sentence since my previous review has now been corrected. In response, I will focus on alleged use of prostitutes by current and former political and judicial figures in New Jersey. You know who you are, boys.

Read Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. Inevitably such efforts involve secret destruction of reputation and interference with professional as well as social advantage. I wonder why Lulu refuses to distribute my book?

"Mr. Menendez [sic.] relationship with Ms. LiCausi, who worked in his office from 1998 to 2002, has been the subject of criticism. Neither has commented on reports that they were romantically involved."

I don't care about anyone's romantic involvements because they're not my business. On the other hand, THEFT of public funds, HYPOCRISY in legal ethics enforcement, CRIMES by pontificating hypocrites (I am not naming anyone, yet) -- those things do concern me. Use of prostitutes is a crime. (See "Is New Jersey Chief Justice Deborah T. Poritz unethical or only incompetent?" and "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court.")

Anyone planning on inserting "errors," again, in my work? This would be a good time to do so. Who would want to do such a thing, Senator Bob?

"Mr. Menendez has acknowledged, however, that he helped Ms. LiCausi build a substantial client base after she left his office in 2002 by steering hundreds of thousands of dollars in lobbying business to her from [his] allies at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and other businesses and organizations."

How much was getting back to Big Pappa under the table we may never know. Big Pappa gotta get his, right Bob?

"Among the clients Ms. LiCausi had by 2003 was Liberty Health Care System, which runs Jersey City Medical Center, and was then headed by Mr. Metsch, said Tom O'Neal a spokesman for the hospital. Mr. Mensch did not return calls requesting comment. ..."

Care for a Cohiba, Bob?

"... investigators were trying to determine whether Mr. Menendez had helped Ms. LiCausi win the contract to represent Liberty, and if her position was linked to the hospital's successful efforts to win government backed bonds."

I wonder whether Kay knows Diana? Are they "connected" in any way? Notice this next paragraph for the proverbial smoking gun:

"Although Ms. LiCausi's filings with the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission do not list Liberty Health Care as a client until 2005, hospital representatives said she was paid $280,000 for work between January 2003 and February 2007."

$280,000 or some portion thereof, paid BEFORE the corporate entity was a client, for undisclosed reasons, which might have something to do with the Senator helping them get federal money. Ms. LiCausi may have been placed in peril by whoever arranged for her to receive those funds, for whatever purpose. I wonder who that could be? Does she realize that? I wonder where the money went? Do you think this also could be related to my computer troubles? On whose tax returns were these sums listed as income? Or were they listed at all? In what year and for which of these two persons was this money listed as income? After the cat is out of the bag "amendments" of tax returns will not help with the "ethics" of this situation, Big Pappa. Do you speak to me of "ethics," Senator? This is a U.S. Senator? Senator Bob is a member of the bar in the state of New Jersey. Where is the OAE? Hey, walking turds, "this buds for you."

"We forgot!" I'm still running the scan. My profile's image-posting feature is disabled. I cannot access my own books on-line. How surprising it is that I continue to experience these difficulties? I wonder why I have so much trouble on-line? Go ahead, take a letter out or put one in. I don't believe that such tactics will stop me from writing. (An "error" was inserted in this last sentence and has just been corrected by me, again.)

Whether a Senator from the aptly-named state of "Idaho" (I bet he did!) was trying to get laid in a public bathroom (get a room next time!) is much less interesting to me than misuse of power and public funds for personal gain. That used to be called STEALING.

How many others might also claim they "had" a "ho" -- a political or legal "ho" I mean? I never had a "ho." Misspent youth, I guess. In our divided political culture, party affiliation is everything. The liberal troops will fight for Menendez. Meanwhile, the people -- in Richard Nixon's elegant phrase -- "get shafted."

"Ms. LiCausi's client list included an array of other organizations that sought public financing or government permits or approvals for major projects. She represents the Mills Corporation, which is developing the XANADU shopping and entertainment complex in the Meadowlands."

This project has fallen under great criticism for lack of progress and disappearing MILLIONS of dollars, allegedly. $2 BILLION TOTAL PISSED AWAY? Senator Bob says: "Let's get tough on crime!"

"In 2004, several months after [Ms. LiCausi] was hired by Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Mr. Menendez announced the first of two appropriations totalling $9.5 MILLION to repair the shoreline and extend the berth for the company's ships."

That's you doing the financing, the chumps -- I mean the tax payers. Wait, I think I was right the first time. I wonder what that shipping company is doing for Senator Bob? Fruit basket?

"Mr. Menendez said that his relationship with [Ms. LiCausi] did not affect his actions."

Good old, Bob. He's for "all the people" -- especially the ones who can put big money in his pockets. Lots of luck with those grand juries, Bob!

As a member of the New Jersey State Bar Association, who is required to be "ethical" at all times and truthful, just like every other New Jersey lawyer you know, Bob has sworn to abide by all laws of the land and to be a good scout. I wonder whether the OAE is interested in this little tea party. I doubt it. I wonder why the OAE thinks that Bob is the cat's meow? Is the OAE a "ho"? Whatta-ya say, John?

I wonder whether OAE people were involved in committing crimes -- yes, CRIMES -- against me? Aren't crimes unethical? Censorship? Obstruction of justice? Denials of discovery? Solicitation and even preparation of grievances? Assault? Questioning under hypnosis? And so much more ... Ethics? New Jersey "Ethics" is what they call a "misnomer."

The OAE is the least ethical and truthful legal entity in the state. The agency is a dump site for political soldiers who genuflect to the powerful and agree to limit who they go after to the enemies of powerful political bosses. Their hypocrisy is sickening. I would not be surprised if some OAE lawyers are indeed part of the hacking campaign against me in violation of federal civil rights laws and the Constitution. You low-lifes in Trenton want to talk to me about ethics? Any time.

Gee, I wonder if N.J. attorneys had anything to do with my troubles at "The Philosophy Cafe"?

Hey, Big Stu' ... you awake?

Does Senator Menendez Have Mafia Friends?

Access to MSN and MSN Groups is still obstructed. Who would wish to prevent me from posting essays on line and why? Could it be New Jersey?

March 5, 2009 at 2:41 P.M. Access to MSN is still blocked, efforts to read earlier posts were obstructed. Suddenly, there are many attempts to frustrate communication efforts or to create distractions. I will continue to write. At any time, I may be prevented from further work on these essays. Also, I may suffer an unfortunate accident. However, such an eventuality will not alter the truth-content of these essays. You decide what you believe based on what you observe, read and know of life.

Peter Applebome, "Xanadu, Perhaps a Folly For Our Times," in The New York Times, February 22, 2009, at p. A27. ($2 BILLION is gone with the wind in New Jersey.)
Tricia Tirella, "North Hudson to Appeal NAACP Suit, Hiring Freeze," in The North Bergen Reporter, March 1, 2009, p. 1. (Union City, West New York, Guttenberg and North Bergen discriminate on racial grounds in hiring people.)
Bob Ingle & Sandy McClure, "The Gospel According to the Mob," in The Soprano State: New Jersey's Culture of Corruption (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2008), pp. 232-241.
For information on local political figures, read: http://indypendent.org/


As of 1988, Bayonne's rich mafia turf was taken over by "Genovese capo Angelo 'the Horn' Prisco." In 1994, following a three year investigation, Prisco and twelve other men were charged with murder, arson, extortion, and the illegal sale of automatic weapons. Prisco was also accused of sanctioning a plot to bomb an occuppied apartment building in Philadelphia. "That [bombing] never happened because the man assigned to do the deed was a state policeman working undercover."

New Jersey's Hudson County is mob country. No other county in New Jersey's mafia-saturated wastelands is as thrilled about its organized crime credentials. This goes way beyond Italian-American organized crime. Colombian drug cartels are well-represented with attorneys on call 24 hours per day. Cuban-American drug runners from Miami liked to stop off for lunch at the Union City Cafeteria before driving back to Miami Beach in a new car with cash in their pockets.

The countless La Cosa Nostra guys were the most colorful, however, enjoying political and legal protection from local politicians and (allegedly) from "friends" and "made members" among the judiciary. This is something that "I have reason to believe" is true. (See "Judges Protect Child Molesters in Bayonne, New Jersey," "Law and Ethics in the Soprano State" and "Senator Bob, the Babe, and the Big Bucks.")

"In 1998, Prisco pleaded guilty to arson for hire and conspiracy in the burning of a Garfield, New Jersey bar." This is the sort of offender who, deservedly, should be denied parole. Furthermore, given the back up in parole determinations in New Jersey, Mr. Prisco's case should not mysteriously leap to the top of the Parole Board's humanitarian considerations. Parole decisions, like everything else in the Garden State that involves the legal system, is tainted by corruption -- allegedly. (See The Soprano State, Supra et seq.)

Pictured above (the image is blocked) is Senator Robert "Bob" Menendez and a friend described, I believe and allegedly, only as "pinkie rings." I can neither confirm nor deny that this gentleman with the pink pocket handkerchief is, in fact, called "pinkie rings." Anyone wishing to supply this person's name is welcome to do so. I think that both of these men appear quite dashing in this photo. Union City is rumored to be "home base" for the Cuban illegal numbers game in America.

"Considering what the prosecutors said about his career, it is no surprise that the two times Prisco applied for parole he was rejected. Then, miraculously, after McGreevey became governor, the state parole board reversed itself just four months after the last parole denial in what insiders called a highly unusual move."

In New Jersey, this is not so unusual. I am surprised that Mr. Prisco was not appointed to a Municipal Court judgeship in Bayonne or North Bergen, or even a Superior Court "spot." Probably, this has something to do with the fact that a judgeship would be a pay cut for Prisco.

"Records show there was none of the customary paperwork that would indicate that someone in the appeals unit had reviewed the case."

Hey, what the hell. It's good old Joe. The following was the stunning and brilliant conclusion of New Jersey officials questioned about this matter:

"... 'It appears that it didn't go through the normal channels,' said Edward Ocksay, chief of the parole board's appeals unit."

No shit. How about that? Geez. Take a look at this typical Jersey "coincidence" -- like all the computer troubles that I have experienced lately:

"Prisco's original turf was the Bayonne waterfront, where International Longshoremen's Association Local 1588, long associated with the Genovese crime family, operates. Seven weeks before Prisco got paroled, campaign records show, the International Longshoremen's Association, based in New York, donated $85,000 to the Democratic National Committee's non-federal account. The union donated $5,000 to the Hudson County, New Jersey, Democrats the day the parole board withdrew its denial of Prisco's parole. ..." (emphasis added!)

Guess who was the point man on this operation? Yep, you guessed right. Menendez buddie and front-man "Donald Scarinsci of the Scarinci and Hollenbeck law firm signed the Hudson County Democratic Committee's report as its treasurer." (See "More Problems for Menendez -- Tapes!") In the words of Ingle and McClure, "Scarinci is a Democrat fund-raiser known to run Hudson County for then-Congressman and now U.S. Senator Robert ['BobbyM'] Menendez."

According to journalist Gregory J. Volpe, "while a member of the House of Representatives Menendez worked to ease the prison transfer of Nicholas Parlavecchio, a racketeer, convicted on Cocaine charges, who was eventually sent to the same prison as his son convicted for similar charges." (Soprano State, pp. 76-77.) All in the family, huh? Sweet.

In addition to these colorful friends, Senator Bob a.k.a. "Pappa" was rumored to be friendly with quite a few guys from Miami who made many trips to New Jersey -- for the weather. This can neither be confirmed nor denied at this time by anyone. All of this is entirely apart from regular incidents involving Mr. Scarinci acting for Menendez in "helping" persons benefitting from government contracts in the county for a "small fee," allegedly, in order to allow the Senator to "wet his beak." Also allegedly.

Where is the Democrats' "non-federal account"? Where did this "political contribution" go? There were several instances of money being paid to local towns on transtactions "disappearing" for a year or so? Where did that money go, Bob?

The Xanadu matter -- 2 BILLION GUACAMOLES -- involves pouring your dollars into a projected development of a shopping mall in the Meadowlands in which Senator Bob was an alleged "beneficiary" or "investor," whether directly or indirectly. The deal may not go through, and the public investment will be gone with the wind -- like the millions that went to fill a hole in the area that somehow was never filled up with dirt, only with your money. ("New Jersey's Third World Ethics.")

Tape recorded conversations between Dr. Sandoval and Scarinci make for depressing confirmation of (in Mr. Scarinci's own words!) the obvious fact that "the only reason I stuck my nose in this thing is because Menendez asked me." (p. 76.) He wasn't kidding.

Try the empanadas, Bobby.

Message From a Torture Chamber.

Hackers have affected the paragraph spacing in this essay. Defacements and attempts to alter this text are always expected. My Norton Security system has been damaged once again. June 24, 2007 at 5:09 P.M. I am still trying to get an ISBN number. My computer has losts of problems these days. For some reason, my second book is not available for download. I will see what I can do about that. Lulu refuses to send the book to booksellers. On October 10, 2007 at 1:36 P.M. I am coping with damage to one of the disks in my computer as a result of cyberattacks against my system. I am still running scans.


Drawing inspiration from George Orwell's 1984, I thought I'd take this opportunity to make some timely political points. In too many nations and in some of the worst American communities, corrupt political machines have taken over the offices of government and use them -- with the help of their "friends" in the media -- for nefarious purposes, including character assassinations of their enemies or worse. http://www.movieposterbid.com/pics/92dcp_0030.jpg

Recent examples of rampant corruption include South Africa during Apartheid, some military dictatorships in South America, and some less than enlightened jurisdictions in the U.S. -- New Jersey being the worst -- also fall into this category. The recent assassination of Ms. Benazir Bhutto is a dispiriting example of what I describe. What is happening in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo defies rational comprehension or explanation, until one realizes that it has a history. My hope is that the days of such corrupt regimes, even if honest men and women must pay a great price for it, will soon be ended:

http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article3746.html (self-explanatory.) For additional sources, see: http://www.nj.com/corruption/stories/021110sl_state.html (The worst political corruption in the U.S., now resulting in more than 200 convictions of lawyers, politicians, and "others" -- as of 2007 -- is found in New Jersey.)

Former N.J. Attorney General, Zulima Farber -- and U.S. Attorney, Christopher J. Christie -- and many others are concerned to do something about the Garden State's infamous reputation as the home territory of organized crime in America, which controls state government and law courts. Reprisals against critics should always be expected, no matter what seemingly unrelated form they take, including bizarre traffic incidents: http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newjersey/nj-bc-nj--newsmaker-farber0318mar18,0,6153543,...

On psychologists' and psychiatrists' obligations to refrain from and prevent all forms of torture, including torture on behalf of the State or for private clients -- for example, making use of hypnosis to extract information, illegally and secretly, that is then used against victims, directly or indirectly -- usually while being denied publicly -- see: http://www.apa.org/releases/pentaskforcerereportfinal.pdf

Please see also: "Psychological Torture in the American legal System" and Kate Randall, "U.S. Doctors Tied To Torture," http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/jan2005/tort-j13.shtml.

How is it possible for Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli to be licensed as any kind of "therapists" anywhere in America? Protection? If I can help to make certain that neither of those two dangerous idiots gets close to any suffering human being again, I will have benefitted humanity. Do other Tuchins and Ricciolis in the swamplands of New Jersey feel no disgust and shame at the actions of their relatives or colleagues, or at the disdain and cowardice displayed by those relatives in avoiding me now? Where are those reports, Terry? How is it possible for any Jewish person to become Mengele?

My family members and friends were told hideous lies about me. I welcome the opportunity to speak truths to the family members of my torturers, since those torturers continue to avoid me, as well as their responsibility for so much human suffering. How much longer will you hide from me Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli?


My Love,

As my penalty was read out in court, I remember that it was "a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen." I have now accepted my penalty (aren't we all condemned to death?), though not the means by which that penalty was imposed. No judicial proceeding that lacks most of the essential criteria of a fair process is truly legal.

I insist on the right to form and express my opinions and beliefs, regardless of whether they are pleasing to the authorities or others. Even if I find myself in a minority of one, I will always say what I think and why. For example, I do not believe in perfect societies. Any society may be improved by being made more free and just. Politics should be concerned with limiting the power of the State in favor of the individual.

No society or faction that engages routinely in secret information gathering from citizens or that makes use of anonymous psychiatrists and their helpers as "interrogators" -- typically PRODUCING pathologies in victims who are then judged for their "behavior" apart from intent -- even when that society prefers to call shrinks "evaluators," can be considered anything but totalitarian and evil. No legal system in which key decisions are made behind the scenes and off the record, as in New Jersey -- often by unelected "bosses" -- deserves legitimacy.

How can you deny me information to which I am entitled since it concerns me -- in violation of law and medical ethics -- then presume to judge me? How can the members of the N.J. Supreme Court wear judicial robes, then defecate on the Constitution they have sworn to uphold by ignoring violations of fundamental rights and crimes taking place under their noses and, ostensibly, on behalf of the institution which they serve?

Prohibiting smoking in public places or granting family leave rights is not "sufficiently compensatory," but only an attempt to change the subject in what is now a hopelessly disgraced and deligitimated legal system. New Jersey is known everywhere, accurately enough, as America's shit hole. The inhabitants of that "hole" are not in a position to judge my ethics.

I distrust all governments. I am wary of all persons with power, whatever form that power takes. My inner life in its entirety -- the persons I love, what I believe or choose to say, how or whether I worship a God, what I find beautiful, what I think of the State or public officials -- must not be the State's business. Any invasion of my inner life through conditioning or by any other means is an abomination. Any interference with the free expression of that inner life in writing or other art is offensive to the U.S. Constitution. This is true even if that abomination or crime takes place to gather so-called "necessary" information or based on someone's idea of what will "help" me. Secrecy is the enemy of freedom. Nothing done secretly to you and denied publicly is for your own good. Worse, such a thing is never for the good of a free society. Since 1988, I have maintained these views. I will continue to do so until the day I die.

March 4, 2008 at 2:48 P.M. new computer attacks prevent me from accessing my own e-mail. I will continue to struggle.

I do not accept instruction on these matters from any government official, nor from any priest, nor from a self-described "therapist." I am a free human being. While the State always has the power to deprive me of my physical liberty, livelihood -- even my life -- it does not have the authority to do such things without making its real reasons public and affording me the opportunity to respond, in an unimpaired state, with due respect for my human rights and dignity. I insist on my dignity. Tell me, Ms. Poritz, I will continue to confront you with this question: How is it possible for a Jew to become Mengele? How is it possible for any of us, Jews or gentiles, to become indifferent to Mengele's actions? Are you a guilty bystander to psychological torture and cyberstalking? What are you doing about the censorship of my writings which you witness every day? To do nothing is to share in the guilt for these crimes committed against me and many people like me.

"The rule 'Do no harm' is perceived by some to be a limit on scientific and technological progress, and it is intended to be exactly that. More precisely, it is a frankly moral placing of limits on what some, driven by what is aptly described as the scientific or technological imperative, deem to be progress. ... It is precisely the business of ethical and moral reason to make normative judgments regarding present and proposed measures aimed at ... ['the relief of man's estate.'] This is true with respect to the dignity of the human person and with respect to more ambitious proposals aimed not so much at relieving as at transforming 'man's estate.' ..." (Richard John Neuhaus, in First Things, November, 2007, p. 24, emphasis added.)

The destruction of any person's relationships and self-esteem as part of an undisclosed "program" or "experiment" is worthy of Stalin. "It might have been for your own good" just does not seem like much of a response to what I am saying. In the end, every attempted invasion of my inner life will fail, morally and spiritually, whatever success it may have physically. Whatever physical pain I suffer or acts I am forced to perform, I can transcend them, spiritually, by thinking of how much I love you and a few others in this world, also how little such torments have to do with me.

The forces that would deprive me of my humanity will fail in the long run because they lack a center of value from which to withstand the moral pressure that I will bring to bear, which is simply the insistence on memory and justice, the insistence that my torturers face me as an equal, eye-to-eye, in a forum where the only recourse is to uncorrupted principles of law and not treachery, frame ups, malice or evil, without hidden agendas and cronyism. There are places where such legal proceedings are no longer possible. New Jersey is one of them. It is in those places that we must insist on such proceedings, even at the risk of our lives. It is time -- after so many years -- to compel my would-be assassins to step out from behind the curtain of their cowardice and mendacity in order to face me. I have things to say to them.

I reject any law, rule, or command from any institution, authority or person that violates my right to privacy or to my own autonomous thought processes, because such laws or rules are illegitimate and fraudulent. They will always lack the binding character of true law. No one is allowed to destroy or deface my writings. I reject the legitimacy of any adjudicative process in which an adversary is also a judge, or in which the most important basis for decision is discussed in my absence and never mentioned in my presence, where vital exculpatory records are hidden from me and where their existence is denied, as is the truth concerning what has been done to me and by whom it was done.

When one party in litigation is granted the opportunity to revise or alter the record of proceedings -- in accordance with his convenience, secretly and unilaterally -- the result is not a valid legal process, but a hideous farce. No record of such slanted proceedings or "hearings" can be regarded as reliable.

I will not permit anyone to prescribe my opinions or my values. I am not reducible to a set of behaviors to be modified by persons claiming the power to "fix" me, "for my own good." I reject all directives or judgments concerning what I "must" believe or what my private ethics should be. No one is permitted to sanitize my language, determining what I am allowed to say. No alleged threat from any quarter -- including the terrorists who are said to lurk under our beds -- is sufficient grounds for the State to violate my fundamental human rights. Any such violation renders all government actions taken pursuant to it illegitimate. It makes the State a terrorist.

Continuing to "cover up" what has been done makes it worse. Each day that the cover up continues is a renewal of the tortures. If there is some corner of New Jersey judges' souls that still contains a minute portion of decency or ethical understanding, beneath your trappings of office, then please understand that psychological torture is evil and can never be justified, do everything in your power to halt the ongoing tortures of persons, then make amends for what you are responsible for already. You will not slip or slide your way out of this in Trenton.

Is the only response that you can provide more daily defacements and destructions of this text and other writings? If so, then your views are empty and indefensible. This previous paragraph that I have just revised has been corrected in the same way numerous times. The only answer that my adversaries can provide to my arguments is such criminal destruction of my writings. No doubt I will find it necessary to make the same corrections again. (See "We Must End the Embargo Against Cuba" and "Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")

How do you live with your hypocrisy? How do you wear those robes, Mr. Rabner? What do you tell yourselves in Ridgewood, Clifton, or Trenton that makes it O.K. that you delight in so much unnecessary human suffering and in the violation of fundamental rights whose protection is the reason for the existence of your tribunals and offices in the first place? I am not a laboratory animal. I am not a slave. I am not a chess piece in a game played by others. I am entitled to the truth about my own life. (See "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court" and "What is it like to be tortured?")

The need for security from external threats, which are always real enough, must not blind us to the equally real internal threat of the loss of freedom. These beliefs are endorsed by thinkers from John Locke to Thomas Jefferson to Martin Luther King, Jr. They are not necessarily "Jewish" beliefs, though I am proud to be associated with any group or race that is the object of hatred. Fascists assume that anyone who states such views must be a Jew. For Jews to side with such Fascists is especially hateful. Earlier versions of this letter received more than one antisemitic response. I expect more racist, anti-semitic and other hate-filled responses, perhaps from powerful officials in the Garden State. How does a Jew become Mengele? How is such a horrible moral deformation possible? "We can learn from you," Terry said.

I am running scans of my computer and coping with the usual harassment and bullshit -- as I type these words, again -- in a society that claims to guarantee my freedom of expression. I fully expect words or letters to be deleted, or that this text will be altered and defaced, as it has been in the past. I will continue to revise this work and to confront the powerful with this message: "You cannot prove me wrong by framing me for something, hurting, or even killing me. You only say something about yourselves by doing such things to others."

That persons from victimized minority groups may be sufficiently coopted to torture others on behalf of the State, seemingly without a qualm, is especially distressing and sad to me. I know that I have been drugged and subjected to questioning under hypnosis by persons who never identified themselves. I do not know how many persons were in the room or where I was questioned on each occasion, nor on how many occasions in total these inquisitions took place. They occurred on numerous occasions, over a period of many years. I am sure that both men and women were involved in this activity. I may have been filmed or recorded during this questioning.

So-called "ethical" New Jersey Lawyers and judges witnessed or aware of these secret and criminal torments. Perhaps these films of tortures are shown at parties. I do not know whether I was undressed during all these torture sessions or only some of them. I have no idea where these tapes or other records -- my own medical records -- if they still exist, may be found nor have I been shown them. I consented to nothing. I continue to request, publicly, that these records be turned over to me.

I am asked to pretend that "nothing happened" by persons who are complicit in the commission of these terrible crimes against me, who then speak to me of ethics. Ethics? Whose ethics? "Even the fetus had to be torn out of the womb," George Steiner writes, "lest there be even one Jew left to bear witness, to remember (though no one would believe him or her, a point the Nazis made with derisive logic)." The torturers always say: "No one will believe you."

I refuse to pretend that nothing happened. To the extent that you are still human, neither can you (my torturers) or those I love, believe -- for one second -- that nothing has happened. It is because you know exactly how much "happened," and that you will not escape me, that you are now frightened enough to try to silence me. You won't silence me. Character assassinations in the media should be next. I will avoid travelling in cars in New Jersey for a while. I am wearing a seat belt as I sit at my computer. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "Law and Ethics in the Soprano State.")

I was questioned about matters that I consider humiliating, episodes of embarassment or inadequacy in my life, which produced much laughter at my expense. Humiliation, preferably sexual humiliation and laughter, insults, are favored weapons of torturers everywhere, so are sleep deprivation and emotional isolation or social ostracism, usually achieved through the manipulation of family members and friends, who are lied to about the "subject." In destroying such relationships, for me, they were destroyed also for those innocent persons, who were made unwilling stooges and servants of State torturers -- torturers like Terry Tuchin and Diana Lisa Riccioli -- who are selected for their special aptitude for the infliction of mental pain.

Some of those family members and friends will be ignorant or stupid enough to cooperate; others will be frightened into cooperating; still others will do so in order to "get along" with the powerful group making the request. The goal is to isolate the subject, while capitalizing on his or her subconscious fears, in order to destroy a person's identity. Ideally, these tactics can be combined with high levels of stress or frustration, so as to induce total collapse. Maybe this insight has something to do with all of the tampering with my writings on a daily basis. Opportunities to steal from incapacitated victims are not wasted.

Nothing is more convenient for totalitarians than arranging for friends and family members to spy on and inform against one another. Children may be induced, for example, to betray their parents "for their own good." Somewhere in his 1959 autobiography, Primo Levi writes: "... we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offense, the demolition of man."

I remember an account of Jacobo Timmerman's experience of torture in Argentina under the military dictatorship -- Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number. My experience of psychological torment has been quite similar to his. While I am certain that the information obtained as a result of these sessions was turned over to the government functionaries who served as my prosecutors, paradoxically, in a civil proceeding -- and I suspect that at least one of them was present at some of these sessions -- New Jersey authorities have pretended and will continue to do so, that they do not have such information and are unaware of any torture.

After a while, they will probably come to believe their own lies. These liars and bribe-takers, again, then speak to me of ethics. Laughter is not only an appropriate response, it is the only antidote to this madness. The opinions and judgments of such persons -- and of the tribunals that they "serve," to the extent that they are complicit in such evil -- can only produce defiance, never acceptance or legitimacy. They may get away with what they have done to me and others, but this does not make their actions or themselves any less evil. Saying that it is "nothing personal, just a job" also changes nothing. Such a claim makes things worse.

Hatred is at least a human emotion. I prefer hatred to the clerical torture of persons by bored functionaries, who are seemingly amused rather than upset by the experience. The judiciary is too important to be placed in the hands of bored functionaries. I feel disgust and revulsion for my torturers and their enablers in Trenton. They will never get fear or respect from me, only disdain for their unpunished criminality. (See again: "Is New Jersey Chief Justice Deborah T. Poritz unethical or only incompetent?"; "New Jersey's Feces-Covered Supreme Court"; and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

Such evils, if they are not impossible today in America -- I fear that they are all-too possible and real -- some day soon will be impossible everywhere. Until then, we must continue to protest and to fight against the inhumanity of so-called "therapists," who sell their services -- their training in the use of hypnosis and expertise with techniques of regression -- to the highest bidders for the purposes of tormenting and torturing others, so as to gather information for governments or for their own pleasure in causing pain.

It is highly likely that I was beaten or choked at some point since I awoke with bruises on my arms and chest. I do not know whether a transcript of these sessions exists. If it does, then it has also not been shown to me. Sadly, I have reason to believe that all of these things are done to people, routinely, in some of the darker corners of the U.S., where corruption has blurred the boundary between organized crime and government. Organized crime is government and the courts in New Jersey. ("Mafia Involvement in New Jersey's State Police" and "Mafia Influence in New Jersey Courts and Politics.")

It is far less likely that you will ever be the victim of such torments living in America. If you are, then there is at least a slim chance that those responsible will be held accountable for it and punished accordingly. Anyway, they will always insist that you are "delusional" if you confront them with their own actions, which may be a tribute to their own capacities for self-deception. Harold Pinter's closing words in accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature must not be forgotten by America's elected officials and judges:

"When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror -- for it is on the other side of the mirror that the truth stares at us."

Mr. Pinter added:

"I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory."

Finally,

"If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us -- the dignity of man."

You are always better off in the U.S. than in most other places, or so I continue to believe. You certainly stand a much better chance of expressing your opinions in the U.S. without too many unpleasant repercussions. At least, you can usually eat regularly -- if not always well -- in America.

I am glad for this chance to express my anger at the persons who did these terrible things to me and for any "tribunals" or "committees" (and those who sit on them), who were and are aware of torture, while continuing to do nothing to prevent such abuse against others, thereby failing to remove the foul stench of such deeds from themselves and the institutions which they claim to "serve." I ask them to think about what they have become. I am aware that in speaking so bluntly I may have sealed my fate. Yet there comes a point when one is willing to pay any price to be heard by one's oppressors. Personal and peaceful confrontation is next. (See Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls.)

I reserve special contempt for professionals -- lawyers, judges, "therapists" and other government functionaries, hypocrites and self-styled "pillars of the community" -- who are part of this evil on a daily basis in many parts of the world, including the worst parts of the U.S., even as they lecture to others about ethics. The opinions of unethical people, guilty of torture (or who permit torture), concerning our ethics should not trouble us very much.

Hey, Jaynee, did you find the $300 MILLION? How's the babe, Senator Bob? Mr. Florio, how are your friends in Atlantic City? Mr. McGreevey, still studying for the priesthood? Mr. Cohen, still like the altarboys? Mr. Bergrin, is there a special at the brothel for St. Patrick's Day? Mr. Rabner, did you have something to do with the Prisco release? Maybe you were not paying attention? Remember, Stuart, it is always better to admit to incompetence than criminal culpability? Ms. Poritz and Ms. Milgram, you gals going out on the town? Ethics?

Family members or so-called friends of a person who cooperate with such tactics are beneath contempt, unworthy even of that much recognition, but never deserving of torture themselves. We must not become what torturers are. We must never be indifferent to the violations and torments imposed upon others. We must never be willing to assist the torturers in their tasks.

Worst of all, are those coopted government men and women living in societies that publicly disavow such tactics, like the U.S., who cope with the vestiges of a conscience and the memory of what they have done, by developing a sophisticated capacity for selective unawareness or denial. They learn to do things and pretend not to be aware of doing them. I am shocked by the men and women who live with such knowledge every day, while pretending that they do not know about the human rights violations that take place in order to provide them with mostly useless information. They "kill two birds" with the "one stone" of their banalities -- and one of those birds is the U.S. Constitution. How do you live with your hypocrisy, Virginia? Still smoking weed, Mr. Wallace?

I am grateful, finally, despite our painful separation and the probability that I will never see you again, despite the agony of longing that I feel for you as I write these words, for having known and loved you. We have had so little time together; we have been together for so few moments in our lives -- moments that I relive in my imagination all the time. The loss of time together hurts and angers me more than any other torture that I have endured. I am seemingly trapped in my own version of the myth of Tantalus. Perhaps all of this is part of the torture.

There is nothing that I would not give or endure for only five minutes with you, just to say these things personally, only to tell you how much I love, respect and admire you. I have no alternative to writing what I feel here, hoping that you will receive these words. Time is too precious now to linger over such injustices. I have fought too long and hard for each of my memories to give them up now, or fail to savor them, however painful and sweet they may be. Whatever the cost, I will continue to own every nuance of my recollections of you and all of my loved-ones. I possess nothing now, except my memories.

Neither of us will ever understand ourselves -- our lives -- without the presence of the other, a presence allowing us to make a shared effort to come to terms with what each must be (and is) for the other, to appreciate what has happened to us, if our lives are to make sense or have meaning. For each of us, the other keeps -- and has become -- an essential fragment of identity. This insight is subtle and powerful and, seemingly, beyond the grasp of American "therapists" and torturers.

I want you to know some things while I can still say them. You are a far better person than most of those who have judged and dismissed you. You are a better human being, in every way that matters, than the majority those who sit in judgment of others. You are certainly far better than the unofficial torturers (Terry and Diana) that I have dealt with during the course of this nightmare or their friends in judicial robes. I hope that, at my best, I have been worthy of this love I feel for you and that I have been able to communicate it to you.

I hope that that I have made it clear to all of those persons I love, how much I need them. Whatever other faults I have, I am not lacking in the capacity for love. There are persons I love more than I can say. And there is no one that I have ever loved more than I love you. Not one of the people who judge you harshly would have survived half of what you have overcome in your difficult life. Most of them are worse than you, morally. If they were charged for only some the crimes that they commit, every day, most of them would also be found legally guiltier than you could ever be. Right, Senator Bob?

If someone loves you this much, whatever you may feel, then you should know it. Despite all of my inadequacies and failures -- I cannot even imagine the lies that you have been told about me by now! -- it says something about you that at least one human being has existed in a state of rapture from the first moment that he saw you. Believe that your mere presence in this world has had such an effect on another person. This must be a tribute to you that transcends anything to do with your physical appearance.

My feelings for you and my certainty about your beauty (physical and non-physical) have not changed with the passing of the years nor will they change with any alterations in your physical appearance. It will not matter whether I see you again or not. I will feel this way whatever your weight may be and regardless of your age, no matter what has been done to you or what may be done to me, no matter what guilt you may feel about your actions in life. I feel the same for any woman I love or have loved in my life.

I know that there will always exist in you the moral beauty and unlimited possibilities I saw in the young woman that you once were, and that young woman will always be a part of me. That wonderful and wounded young woman will live for as long as I do, within me, and you will always find her there when you need her. To fail to understand the sincerity of these feelings, is to fail to understand me.

Whatever tortures and rapes we have endured, there is a space where we can feel safe -- a space where we are restored to an innocence and goodness that I have sheltered within me, for you. There is a part of you that has done the same for me. Whatever anyone says to you that contradicts this is bullshit. Whoever tells you that I no longer care or that I have forgotten you is lying. I will hold on to my memories of you, even at the cost of everything else, since I have paid dearly for them. I would have paid even more. I will always feel the same, as I say, for any person I love. I do not seek and will not accept "government approval" of my loves.

Knowing that you are so loved makes you an object of hatred for some people. No love this intense and all-consuming, no love that ripens and matures with the passing of the years, despite physical separation -- no matter what anyone says to you -- is reducible to mere sexual desire nor can it be "only" about an act that is merely physical. It has been many years since we met, maybe it is safe to assume, at this point, that this is more than an infatuation or some "fantasy." None of us can be captured or understood in trendy nonsense or the fortune cookie wisdom of American psychobabblers and torturers.

Perhaps the greatest mystery emerging from this experience (for me) is the discovery that there are persons for whom the reality of selfless love -- in whatever form, among any persons -- is an unbearable and odious thing to be destroyed. Diana?

I have loved, in a mature and full way, very few women in my life -- only two, in fact. Yet those women I will love forever, regardless of what they may feel about me, or what anyone thinks about them or me, or the judgments made about what we feel. In the end, our feelings are no one's business but our own. I have no idea why it is true, but there are people who hate a love like this, as I say, detesting anyone who gives or receives it with a sick and intense loathing.

Maybe this is because such a love is a reminder of all that is absent from their own twisted lives. Love is no longer possible for the emotionally desiccated beings that they have become. Such a love cannot be bought; it cannot be acquired through shady deals with corrupt politicians; it cannot be inherited. Such a love cannot be taken by force or faked. It cannot be stolen. It cannot be demanded of a person. It can only be given. I worry about you. I don't think that they can do too much more to me now. Soon it will not matter much about me anyway.

I love and have always loved most of all the part of you that hurts ... because it sees the part of me that hurts just as much. I know that each of us sees -- and shares in -- all of the other's wounds and vulnerabilities. To understand the darkness, it is necessary to have experienced it. I am glad that, among all of the persons that I know and love, only you have experienced the levels of cruelty and malice at the hands of others that I have also known. Ideally, none of us would ever experience such things, but that is not the world in which we live.

As I write these words, pain at being separated from you is so overwhelming that it seems as though the room in which I sit shakes and begins to melt. Nothing compares to this agony. It is as though most of my vital organs and life-energy had left me and were with you, wherever it is that you are. I don't know where you are or if you are still alive. It is this emptiness which makes it impossible for anyone to threaten me. Most of me is not here to be threatened, wherever it is that I am. Nobody can hurt me now. I am with you. I am somewhere else, right now, with you. I am always with those few people that I love.

The part of me that wanders through his day is something empty, a straw man. I withdraw more and more, getting farther away all the time from hostile people. They can't hurt me at this distance. They only shout insults and threats at me from far away. People speak to me by way of a distant telephone connection. Torture and all the insults over time -- the daily struggle against computer harassment to write -- all of these torments create their own forms of resistance and numbness, like scar tissue. I am not where they can touch me now, not anymore. I am with you. The last thing in the world that frightens me now is the possibility of death.

I admire your courage in facing honestly your wounds and faults, while struggling to overcome their effects. You -- and all of my loves -- are the best part of my life, even now, because you have made it possible for me to experience levels of emotional intensity and meaning that, without you, would have been unknown to me. You have allowed me to feel, really to feel -- and even in pain this is better than the opposite. The opposite must be the spiritual deadness that makes it possible for a person to become a torturer from nine-to-five, like Terry and Diana, without even being aware of it, or caring much if they are aware of it.

I don't want power or wealth. I have no interest in fame. I don't want to meet celebrities. My writing is only a way of being with you in the magic castle of this text. I will think of you and of our children -- and any child of yours is mine too -- of all the children and persons that I love (loves cannot be compared, since they are always unique and equal), at the instant when I draw my final breath in this life. Even then, I will reach out for you and all of those I love. I know that the torturers of this world will never win. The human future will not be "a boot stomping on a human face forever," as a therapist happily takes notes nearby. "I'll go to bat for you," the therapist says.

I believe that there is something in the human spirit that resists oppression. Never allow anyone to impose beliefs on you. No one may determine what you are "allowed" to say nor how you must say it. Teach this to our children. Love freely and passionately, without concern for the judgments of others; know yourself to be at least as good -- and probably better -- than your self-declared "social superiors."

I will close my eyes now and picture your lovely features: your smile and laughter, your sadness, the feel of my hand as it touched your face once, your scent of shampoo and perfume. In my memory and imagination, you are always like this: beautiful and emotionally giving, yet also needy. I will think of George Santayana's words when my time comes: "Nothing you can lose by dying is half so precious as the readiness to die, which is a man's [or a woman's] charter of nobility."

With love and gratitude, always ... "I hope that you will be."

Charles Taylor on Multiculturalism and Identity.

My essay entitled "Is this atheism's moment?" has been submitted to Quodlibet, an Internet journal of theology and philosophy, but it was returned to me unopened for some reason. "David Foutz" is identified as the editor of this journal. How curious? Perhaps I will try again. http://www.quodlibet.net/misc/howto.shtml and http://www.quodlibet.net/ I resubmitted the essay. I have received no response.

To ensure that a distorted version of this essay does not appear, I will retain and republish the original for purposes of comparison. On May 22, 2007 at 2:30 P.M. there were 639 intrusion attempts against my computer and 106 web sites were blocked. The day is young. Main attacker 24.192.174.68. (NJ)

On May 24, 2007 I cannot print out items from my msn group. This is the sort of insult that may help to illustrate my argument in this essay. I only get a blank piece of paper with the following address on it:

http://ad.doubleclick.net/adj/N2998.MSNAdDirectResponse/2304119.3;sz=728x90;ord=159625831?cli...


I have reason to believe that the true number of visitors to my book's site is not recorded accurately. On May 27, 2007 at 6:07 A.M. there were 743 intrusion attempts against my computer, 130 web sites blocked and numerous illegal connections to my computer and spyware, which I will detail in a future post.

If you care about the First Amendment, then these crimes committed against me over a period of years, on a daily basis -- probably with the blessings of the authorities in at least one state -- should trouble you. Today, it's me. Next week it may be you or your favorite newspaper. Below are my primary sources for this essay on the work of Charles Taylor:

Charles Taylor, "The Politics of Recognition," in Multiculturalism (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 25.

Commentaries on this paper by leading scholars are published with the original:

Amy Gutman, editor and Introduction.

K. Anthony Appiah
Jurgen Habermas
Steven C. Rockerfeller
Michael Walzer
Susan Wolf

Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvrad University Press, 1992), entirety.
Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity (Ontario: Anansi, 1991), entirety.

Charles Taylor, "Overcoming Epistemology," in K. Baynes, J. Bohman, T. McCarthy, eds., After Philosophy: End or Transformation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991), p. 459.
Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), pp. 127-214.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvrad University Press, 1989), chapter 3 and 15.

This essay is for Angela Davis and Armando Valladares.

I. "Mirror, mirror on the wall ..."

Many problems in the world today, both at the national and international level, are reducible to fundamental conflicts over recognition. "I see you, but do you see me?" There is a natural -- maybe it is only a Western -- tendency to reduce others to something less that fully autonomous and self-determining beings, turning them into objects of manipulation and control, or instruction. ("Behaviorism is Evil" and "What is it like to be tortured?")

The best defense against such efforts is to provide dehumanizers with a lifeless replicant of the self, a stereotype or caricature satisfying their own demeaning representations and expectations, that can then be debased or destroyed by the powerful, as victims retain their humanity, keeping a safe distance from the caricature of themselves created by -- then for -- the powerful, while continuing to struggle. (See Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.) Many people in the world have adopted this strategy in response to perceived American stereotyping or attempts at manipulation.

The human tendency to bend moral space around intentionality expresses itself collectively and individually: "We will improve you. "We will teach you." "We will make you good." I am among those unfortunate persons who have heard these and similar phrases spoken by powerful "others," assuming a natural superiority of some kind, often on the basis of no discernible evidence of such superiority. Such an experience is a reduction of a person to the status of a slave. (See "Sybil R. Moses and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")

Suppressed fury at denials of human equality and dignity can be lethal, both for bearers of such slights and for those who impose them. An important point argued by Professor Taylor is that non-recognition or misrecognition "shows not just a lack of respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred. Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need." (Multiculturalism, p. 26.)

Much of the violence and military struggle in the world today can be traced to failures of recognition, often based on torturers' lack of comprehension. "You," an Iraqui insurgent said to an American soldier, "do not respect the people."

What that insurgent fails to realize is how many of those American soldiers in his country -- and other Americans at home -- are also denied their measure of respect. To be burdened with paralyzing life-long pain and limitations as a result of idiotic plans of instruction or improvement -- let alone criminal violations of one's rights which are sanctioned by corrupt officials -- will remain a source of seething rage forever. I am referring to the kind of rage which deforms and destroys people, producing catastrophe on a massive scale. Think of suicide bombers and the attacks on 9/11. Fortunately, there is art and philosophy, together with shared moral commitments, especially the peaceful struggle for respect and recognition. No wonder they want to silence me for saying such terrible things and to prevent my expression of these ideas for the benefit of the "little brown people." My books will always be suppressed to some extent in America.

"To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame of horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon," Charles Taylor writes, "within which I am capable of taking a stand." (Sources of the Self, p. 26.)

We are certainly forced to "see" perpetrators after they commit their crimes. It must be possible to do so before tragedies occur. I have suggested that art and philosophy have a role to play in making peaceful expressions of legitimate outrage and aspirations for justice possible. This may be one response to that Iraqui insurgent. There is (or should be) a center of value within a person from which he or she will not be moved, even at the cost of that person's life. (See "Saving Private Ryan.")

This attempt to express "dangerous thoughts" in writing may explain continuing defacements of my texts. If you destroy a person's moral space, his or her cultural environment so as to disconfirm his identity, you will produce a kind of human monster. This is because persons can only thrive in communities. (See the film "No Such Thing.") American prisons are factories for the production of human monsters.

The pointless destruction of identity-confirming relationships and blighting of lives produced by ideologies of "normalization" or "cultural imperialism" and "adjustment" is a cause of lingering anger, as I suggest, but also of hope. There is always the power of love against oppression. Indeed, this is one of the issues to be discussed later. Hence, the Palestinian struggle (if it is ever conducted exclusively in peaceful ways) and Nelson Mandela's "stations of the cross," to say nothing of the sufferings resulting from the "troubles" of the Irish people in Northern Ireland and African-American history in its entirety. The worst possible mistake is to pretend that such tensions do not exist when it is clear that they do. (I plan to see soon "The Colors of the Cross.")

More close to home and obvious are the mixed messages in traditions of chivalry and romance now seen as ambiguous, both lovely and aesthetically admirable -- yet, potentially, diminishing the equality of women. Part of the challenge faced by my generation of men and women -- and all who come after us -- is to reinterpret these traditions in order to retain all that is beautiful in them, cherishing love and mutuality of concern, while insisting on equality between sexes. Creative reversals of traditional roles can be useful in achieving these goals. (See "Thoughts of a Domestic Revolutionary" and "Let's Hear it for the Boys.")

Why are we in Iraq? Weapons of mass destruction? Exporting democracy? Importing oil? No. We are there because it is "for their own good." "Wear your seat belt!" "Wear your helmet!" "Wear a condom." We are -- especially in America -- very concerned about what is good for other people. This is most true when paternalism also happens to be really good for us -- if we are, say, Halliburton Corporation. Terry Tuchin? However, we are deeply resentful of other people's attempts to control us or dictate what Dr. Phil calls, "life-values." We should be. Such a thing is a denigration of one's humanity. In the case of any individual who commits no crime, subjection to forced "improvement" -- by anyone -- in violation of his or her natural rights is a "crime against humanity":

"... two American physicians, Andrew Ivy and psychiatrist Leo Alexander, wrote the ten-point Nuremberg Code for ethical human experimentation. At the heart of the code, which America promoted as natural law that should be respected by all, was the principle that the interests of science should never take precedence over the rights of the human subject. Research subjects were not to be seen as a means to a scientific end, and they needed to give [unimpaired] informed consent [at every stage of any such "experiment"]. As Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel later wrote: 'The respect for human rights in human experimentation demands'" -- demands -- "'that we see persons as unique, as ends in themselves.' ..."

Robert Whitaker, Mad in America (Cambridge: Perseus, 2002), p. 235.

Deciding what is for my own good -- morally or spiritually, aesthetically or in terms of my relationships -- is my business. It is not something for any government agent to determine on my behalf. We rightly resent attempts by strangers to tell us what is for our own good. Naturally, we are good and wise in our own eyes, so it is o.k. for us to tell others how to live their lives. It is never for anyone to tell us how to live our lives, certainly never acting secretly upon those lives as they do so. I consent to and accept no instruction on these matters.

Dictatorial governments answer: "Daddy" -- especially a white, middle-class-comfortable daddy -- "knows best." Yes, Freudians ... we know. Well, he doesn't. Not anymore. We live in a "post-daddy" world. This is something for future American presidents to remember. Most of the people of the world want to make this point to American governments: "We don't want a white daddy telling us what to do." Partnerships in the interest of peace that are mutually beneficial are always welcome. This explains both Mr. Lula's statement concerning the greed of SOME "blue-eyed" people and his handshake with Barack Obama. America should extend an invitation to the world to enter into a "partnership for peace" with us, as equals. (Contrast "'For America to lead Again': A Speech for President Barack Obama" with "'America's Real Strength is Character': A Speech for President John McCain.")

My drafts of speeches for the two candidates (at the time) for the U.S. Presidency were posted at my MSN group, Critique. I am told that MSN groups has closed and that my essays at that site no longer exist. If they do exist -- along with the images accompanying them -- then I urge readers to see my works there.

This antinomy between autonomy and altruism (or community) is at the center of the paradox of modernity/postmodernity, where we find ourselves placed by history, like it or not. Even in the coolest neighborhoods of Manhattan, we must now live between worldviews. My neighborhood would not be described by most people as "fashionable," perhaps. But this is our way of achieving coolness in northern Manhattan. We keep our greatness (and affordable rents) to ourselves.

To borrow Lenin's question: "What is to be done?" The challenge of recognition is one of the great subjects of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's work. I wish to examine one famous essay by this McGill University Professor, after saying something concerning Taylor's general philosophical stance, then to offer a response to some aspects of Taylor's essay that, I am sure, are especially important today, both politically and culturally.

A. Taylor's Philosophical Sources and Placement.

"Charles Taylor describes his work as a contribution to philosophical anthropology. His initial approach was largely polemical. He attacked the view that the natural sciences should serve as a model for the methods and procedures of the human sciences. Whether in the form of classical behaviorism, functionalism, AI-based psychology, or any other reductivist explanatory strategy, 'naturalism,' Taylor argued, 'is inappropriate to the sciences of man,' because they must incorporate into their explanations the common meanings that are embedded in social institutions and practices, as well as in agents' self-interpretations." After Philosophy, p. 459.

"Naturalism," as used by Taylor, refers to classical materialism and scientism. Taylor alludes to the denial of a spiritual or communicative and aesthetic reason in some social settings. Both are crucial to understanding persons and events, while materialist reductivism is seen as the great error in contemporary social sciences and philosophy. Psychobabblers should take note.

Taylor is not suggesting that science is irrelevant to human self-understandings or that there is a "supernatural" realm to be consulted by using a crystal ball if we are to decipher political events. He welcomes analogizing on the basis of scientific learning to social predicaments. Taylor is well-versed in the history of science and contemporary developments in the so-called "hard sciences." However, Taylor opposes all forms of reductivism that deny the vital importance of communicative reason and interpretive rationality in social theory and philosophy. Communicative reason, culture, is a kind of figurative crystal ball. In art and theory we "prefigure" or foreshadow the future. The dialogue between Taylor and Habermas is particularly interesting. (Spacing may be affected, again, by New Jersey's hackers.)

"Taylor revives this classical distinction" -- between Natur- and Geistwissenschaften -- "on the grounds that the latter necessarily include a hermeneutic dimension in a way the former do not. At the same time, Taylor's critique of naturalism and its underlying conceptions of the self, language, and knowledge has led to the development of an alternative that draws heavily on the expressivist tradition of Hegel and Romanticism." Ibid.

For Charles Taylor, human beings are "self-interpreting" animals, defined by our self understandings and self-descriptions. On this view, the self is connected to its projects. Accordingly, human identity is constituted by self-chosen and self-understood purposes which -- if denied -- result in dehumanization or a kind of killing of one's humanity. All conditioning of responses to stimuli is a kind of affront to human dignity. Hence, the insistence on individual recognition:

"... when we think of a human being, we do not simply mean a living organism, but a being who can think, feel, decide, be moved, respond, enter into relations with others; and all this implies a language, a related set of ways of experiencing the world, of interpreting his feelings, understanding his relations to others, to the past, the future, the absolute, and so on. It is the particular way he situates himself within his cultural world that we call his identity." (Hegel, p. 380.)

Richard Bernstein comments on this passage:

"The institutions and practices which make up the public life of a community are not merely external constraints on what we are. For they themselves are expressions of what we are."

"Why Hegel Now?," in Philosophical Profiles (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1986), pp. 173-174.

This central human need, capacity and yearning is linked to the collective project of modernity, from Kant to Hegel, then Marx. Subjects are constituted by intersubjective meaning in a "hermeneutics of freedom" (Paul Ricoeur), which must be rooted in a community providing recognition. Professor Taylor brings together Kant's transcendental ego with Hegel's understanding of Stillichkeit. (Hegel, pp. 376-378.)

"The path to this conception leads to a kind of 'transcendental argument' that discloses the indispensable conditions of experiencing a world, that is, of intentionality. Perusing this path in the footsteps of [Kant, Hegel, Marx and] Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty immediately reveals the untenability of the picture of the self as disengaged and disembodied, punctual and atomistic, related to the natural and social worlds, and even to parts of the self, only as objects of disinterested knowledge and instrumental control. It reveals that we are first and foremost embodied agents in a natural and social world." After Philosophy, p. 459.

This should be sufficient to set the stage for Taylor's comments on multiculturalism.

II. Multiculturalism and Identity.

Taylor formulates the issue with great care and precision:

"The demand for recognition ... is given urgency by the supposed links between recognition and identity, where this latter term designates something like a person's understanding of who they are, of their fundamental defining characteristics as a human being. The thesis is that our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the mis-recognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being." ( Multiculturalism, p. 25.)
"Errors" were inserted in this foregoing paragraph since my last reading of this essay. Not only am I insulted, but so is Charles Taylor.

The evils in racism immediately come to mind. Feminism has also appropriated these arguments. Gays and transgendered persons must be among those who have endured such torments. Also, the deliberate infliction of harm by psychologists seeking to condition socially desired behaviors or to force "adjustment" on persons are terrible, destructive and wounding violations of human autonomy, usually with disastrous permanent consequences in terms of future functional capacities of victims. Again: "Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need." (p. 26.)

The emergence of recognition as a social value coincides with Modernity because the traditional code of "honor," reserving recognition to the elites in European societies, burdening all others with obligations of obedience, came to be replaced with a universal and egalitarian sense of human "dignity" -- dignity was given implied expression, for example, in America's founding documents. (See "William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft" and "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")

The sense of inwardness, inner life, particularity, of identity as self-creation -- all of these things would have been incomprehensible to people before the modern era. Such pre-modern individuals would have said that your identity is shaped by what is not particular to you, by what is spiritual and timeless. Identity had nothing to do with choice. Your identity is not merely universal, for these pre-moderns, it is eternal and determined before your life began. Your essence precedes your concrete existence. Sartre would reverse this phrase in the twentieth century. For Sartre and atheistic existentialists: "existence precedes essence."

The proverbial medieval peasant when asked "Who are you?" would answer "I am a child of God." With modernity, identity becomes much more specific and social, a matter of confirmation or disconfirmation. Identity is, thus, much more dynamic -- for moderns. Who you are is determined by your place within a social, familial, and intimate scheme of relations. Holistic schemes of meaning become important.

An ingenious form of oppression is to disconfirm and deny the merits of members of oppressed groups, as I say, to feed back to them a negative self-image, with the hope that persons will accept that negative self-image and internalize it. To do such a thing is to commit psychological suicide. Intelligence and talent are simply unacceptable in some people -- like me. Sometimes this process of feeding back a negative self-image is very subtle, at other times the process is just plain brutal. (See photos of the Holocaust and records of slave ships, or the haunting images from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.) Stephen E. Eisenman, The Abu Ghraib Effect (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), p. 9 ("The Abu Ghraib Effect").

This set of issues has led to the fusion of perspectives derived from Continental thought and contemporary physics seeking to define the self in terms of its social space and moral context, or as a set of entanglement relations. Like a chameleon placed in an environment, selves become an accomodation to what is confirmed and disconfirmed in them. This process is a matter of negotiation and struggle that never ends. It is, as I like to suggest borrowing Anthony Powell's title, "a dance to the music of time."

Among the most disturbing discoveries of psychologists is the delight in inflicting suffering on others displayed by those given power -- especially power without accountability -- that quickly degenerates to vicious and horrifying levels of sadism in the creation of hellish social environments aimed at the destruction of a human mind. Psychologists and analysts are not immune to these human tendencies. Concentration camps in the twentieth century -- or torture chambers and killing fields -- make such discoveries all too believable and familiar to us by now. This is especially true for persons (like me) who have experienced comparable evils. (Milgram, Zimbardo) Right, Terry Tuchin? ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture" and "What is it like to be tortured?")

With this shift in the focus of identity, feelings and authenticity become much more important to selfhood as a project in time. After the French and American Revolutions, the whole of Western culture takes a massive "subjective turn." (p. 29.) See E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (New York: New American Library, 1962), pp. 22-101. Taylor speaks of the "subjective turn of modern culture, a new form of inwardness, in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths."(p. 26.)

Total adjustment to any society amounts to a sacrifice of identity. "Not only should I not mold my life to the demands of external conformity; I can't even find the model by which to live outside myself. I can only find it within myself." (pp. 30-31.)

Bear this point in mind when encountering my quotes from the writings of R.D. Laing. From the Romantics to Picasso, Surrealism and Existentialism, sixties hippies and postmodernist chaos -- these ideas wind their way through Western history in a dialectic with the forces of instrumental reason, conformity, totalitarianism, order and efficiency in mechanization and commercialization, centralized economies and the politics of control. (One new "error" discovered since my last reading of this essay, so far.) Each side of this equation expresses itself in both the sciences and humanities. Authenticity tends to be identified with Hegel's "subjective spirit" (Neo); whereas conformity is associated with Hegel's "objective spirit" (Agent Smith). Solutions have tended to resemble Hegel's attempts at reconciliation and transcendence of these values in a new unity of self and other.

Rather than being allied with God or spiritual truth, objectivity is identified with reason in the modern world. However, meaning becomes the province of soul (yes, I am invoking African-American philosophy) and expression, based on feeling. This bifurcation in the psyche would have been impossible in the medieval era, where other problems were indeed philosophically predictable. The medieval universe was purposive, reason and feeling were one in devotion to God's will, which was perceived and expressed in all things. Hegel's goal was to find a new way to achieve such unity, after the Kantian revolution in Western thought. If you want an image of the young Hegel's dream made flesh (and this would have shocked Hegel!), it is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "beautiful soul."

Think of the film "The Advocate." In the medieval era, the prosecuting of animals made sense in a universe in which all aspects of nature reflected God's purposes and will, so that they were meaningless apart from morality. Thus, any act of evil was a disruption in the cosmic order calling for restoration. How could the law not punish the animal causing harm? Impossible. Freedom and agency were secondary or meaningless considerations. Like today's behavioral scientists, medieval jurists focused on external actions and "order." Lloyd L. Weinreb, Natural Law and Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 1: "In its origins and principal development, the philosophy of natural law was an effort to mediate these dual aspects of human existence." (See also Professor Weinreb's chapter "Kosmos," pp. 15-43.)

Psychoanalysis is the product of late Romanticism and misleadingly makes use of the jargon of scientific objectivity to conduct its inquiries into subjective "truths of the mind." Psychoanalysis is really only another form of German idealism. The noumenal (Kant) becomes Will (Schopenhauer), before being captured in Freud's concept of the id. All three, for Hegel, are only expressions of Spirit's self-discovery in history. Jung tosses all of these other guys and their concepts into the territory of the "collective subconscious." Similarly, New Jersey mobsters relegate their underlings to a life of struggle in places like Bayonne or North Bergen.

Many of our difficulties stem from this very German displacing of feeling from the province of objective reason -- which is related to sexism -- dividing authenticity from social adjustment, subjective from objective. Richard Rorty, from a very different direction, sets forth arguments reflecting similar insights.

Before proceeding with my discussion of Taylor's views, I wish to take a look at some of those other thinkers concerned in various ways with modernity and its discontents. The popularity of the discussion concerning the "Problematic of Modernity," multiculturalism and identity, suggests that Taylor's "issues" are important. Why is modernity so much of a problem now? Why is it that philosophers are so often unaware of relevant work being done by scholars in other areas?

B. "Round up the usual suspects."

From multiple angles these dialectical tensions are detected and challenged today, as the traditional modernist world view is crumbling. I will mention some important books that others may not see as related. I suggest that they are related since each is seeking to articulate this growing dissatisfaction with the conceptual architecture of Western modernity:

John Raulston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason (New York: Free Press, 1992), p. 8:

"Thus, among the illusions which have invested our civilization is an absolute belief that the solution to our problems must be a more determined application of rationally organized expertise. The reality is that our problems are largely the products of that application." (Historian)

Agnes Heller & Ferenc Feher, The Postmodern Political Condition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 1:

"Politically speaking those who have chosen to understand themselves as postmodern are in the first place after the 'the grand narrative.' [The ideologies of reason.] The grand narrative, not to be confused with holism, which is, according to Lyotard, conducive to totalitarianism, is world interpretation of a very peculiar kind." (Political Theorists)

Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 7-9:

"The aim of this book is to undermine the reader's confidence in 'the mind' as something about which one should have a 'philosophical' view, in 'knowledge' as something about which there ought to be a 'theory' and which has 'foundations' and in 'philosophy' as it has been conceived since Kant."

What follows is my highlighted passage from Rorty's book purchased in the early eighties. I was then a graduate student and found this work puzzling in a different way from how it puzzles me today:

"The very idea of 'philosophy' as something distinct from 'science' would make little sense without the Cartesian claim that by turning inward [subjectivity] we could find ineluctable truth, and the Kantian claim that this truth imposes limits on the possible results of empirical inquiry. [objectivity] ... "

I then wrote a question mark next to this next passage:

"If we have a Deweyan conception of knowledge, as what we are justified in believing, then we will not imagine that there are enduring constraints on what can count as knowledge, since we will see 'justification' as a social phenomenon rather than a transaction between 'the knowing subject' and 'reality.' ..." (Philosopher, Literary theorist, Political Figure)

Is this hermeneutics? Pragmatism? Literary criticism? All of the above. Notice that Rorty suggests justification is dialogical and can never be an imposition from above. Dewey began life as a Hegelian, so did Rorty. In connection with this controversial reading of modern thought, Rorty's interpretations and conclusions are challenged by (thus far) unindicted New Jersey person, John W. Yolton, who teaches at Rutgers University: "Mirrors and Veils, Thoughts and Things: The Epistemological Problematic," in A. Malachowski, ed., Reading Rorty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 58-74. For a follow-up on the big issues in metaphysics, see John W. Yolton, Realism and Appearances: An Essay in Ontology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Indiana: Ujniversity of Notre Dame, 1984), p. 257:

"In chapter 9 I posed a stark question: Nietzsche or Aristotle? The argument which led to the posing of that question had two central premises. The first was that the language -- and therefore also to some large degree the practice -- of morality today is in a state of grave disorder. That disorder arises from the prevailing cultural power of an idiom in which ill-assorted conceptual fragments from various parts of our past are deployed together in public and private debates which are noted chiefly for the unsettlable character of the controversies thus carried on and the apparent arbitrariness of each of the contending parties." (Philosopher, Religious Thinker)

Terry Pinkard, "MacIntyre's Critique of Modernity," in Mark C. Murphy, ed., Alasdair MacIntyre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 187:

"... irrational modes of social and moral reality inflict so many psychological wounds on their members that they can only be sustained both by the construction of elaborate ideologies [scientism] that justify the suffering imposed as historically and socially necessary and by sustaining practices and institutions that, although inimical to the reigning social practice, are necessary for its sustenance ..." (emphasis added)

Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Knowledge and Politics (New York: Free Press, 1975), pp. 3-5:

"... it became clear that the problems of legal theory, the immediate subject of my interest, are not only connected with each other, but are also strikingly analogous to the basic issues in many other social disciplines. Second, it seemed that the views that give rise to these problems and the theories used to deal with them are aspects of a single mode of thought. Though taken apart and refined, this style of thought [Modernity] has neither been refuted nor abandoned."

Again:

"Thus, the house of reason in which I was working proved to be a prison house of paradox whose rooms did not connect and whose passageways led nowhere. ... The premises of this vision of the world are few; they are tied together; and they are as powerful in their hold over the mind as they are unacknowledged and forgotten. They took their classic form in the seventeenth century. For reasons that will become clear I resolved to call them the liberal doctrine, [Modernity] even though the area they include is much broader than the one occuppied by what we now ordinarily take for liberalism. This system of ideas is indeed the guard that watches over the prison house." (Legal and Social Theorist)

Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1991), pp. 396-397:

"... In this understanding the world cannot be said to possess any features in principle prior to interpretation. [This does not deprive us of objectivity or truth.] The world does not exist as a thing-in-itself, independent of interpretation; rather, it comes into being only in and through interpretations" -- some of these interpretations are necessary and objectively true! -- "The subject of knowledge is already embedded in the object of knowledge: the human mind never stands outside the world, judging it from an external standpoint. Every object of knowledge is already part of a preinterpreted context, and beyond that context are only other preinterpreted contexts. All human knowledge is mediated by signs and symbols of uncertain provenance, constituted by historically and culturally variable predispositions, and influenced by often unconscious human interests. Hence, the nature of truth and reality, in science no less than in philosophy, religion, or art, is radically ambiguous." (Therapist, Teacher, Philosopher)

Notice that Tarnas is not saying "ambiguity" is equal to non-existence or meaninglessness. This paragraph contains a truth claim about knowledge -- which is often misread by nihilists -- and also the suggestion that truth may be different when it comes to relationships as compared with tax accounting, but that where there is truth, that truth remains absolute and real to the extent that it exists. I might quote Terry Eagleton and (this may surprise you) Bernard Williams, along with many others in support of these ideas. And F.H. Bradley does not, by any stretch of the imagination, help nihilists in light of Bradley's concept of the Absolute.

What is challenged by Mr. Tarnas and others is an exhausted theory of truth. And that challenge is based on reworking and developing ideas at the dawn of Modernity, in the light of current scientific understandings, especially the ideas of thinkers like Kant and Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche, James and Wittgenstein. Among contemporaries, in addition to those quoted above, there are Foucault and Derrida, Butler and Davis, West and Putnam.

Robert Pippin, Modernity as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 3:

"As I shall try to show, this complex of problems should lead us back to a number of philosophical issues -- problems about the very possibility of autonomy, critical self-reflection, and self-rule -- most at home in the German Idealist tradition, and its aftermath, a tradition I shall claim, not yet accorded the attention it deserves in the current discussion." (Philosopher)

R.D. Laing, "Us and Them," in The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1967), p. 84 and p. 109. Laing is explicitly echoing Hegel in this section:

"When we have installed Them in our hearts, we are only a plurality of solitudes [subjectivities] in which what each person has in common is his allocation to the other of the necessity of his own actions.[Objectivity] Each person, however, as other to the other, is the other's necessity. Each denies any internal bond with the others; each person claims his own inessentiality, [to his or her own peril.] ... "

I am in search of another who is my necessity. I think Western culture finds itself in a similar predicament. We cannot find a solution to this predicament by torturing other people. We cannot "make others good." We cannot tell others what to believe. We can only INVITE others to a dialogue with us on these matters, remaining open to the possibility that any transformation will be mutual. I will not be anyone's slave. African-Americans are already a part of you -- if you are any kind of American -- because African-American culture is central to U.S. identity. You cannot have "separate, but equal" forms of citizenship in this society. Such a thing is now absurd, besides being immoral. Racism inevitably devours its children. The racist will end by hating himself. ("America's Holocaust.")

I will close this section of quotations with another passage from Laing's book. Laing returned to Hegel by way of Sartre's Being and Nothingness. At about the same time, Charles Taylor -- and later Rober C. Solomon -- also returned to Hegel hoping to resolve these outworn oppositions. Scientists, like Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend provide similar statements and recognitions. Other scientists today make surprisingly similar statements from a more Kantian direction -- notably quantum theorist David Deutsch. Finally, given the inescapable nature of these philosophical divisions and the need for recognition, Laing's most urgent warning seems more timely than ever:

"I think, however, that schizophrenics have more to teach psychiatrists about the inner world than psychiatrists their patients." (Psychoanalyst, Philosopher, Teacher, Poet.)

This may be a crucial insight to undertand not only Charles Taylor's essay, but Hegel's philosophy of Spirit in a time when Western culture displays schizoid and autistic tendencies. The choice is between recognition for the displaced Other or mutual self-destruction, within and among persons, as cultures collide in endless military struggles. As I write this sentence, factions of the Palestinian people are killing each other. This has nothing to do with Israeli forces. We are witnessing a people's self-destruction. What is Israel supposed to do? Who do Israelis talk to in order to negotiate for peace? Do they intervene? Do Israelis "respect" Palestinian autonomy and allow a massacre to take place?

Clearly, the issues raised by these philosophers extend beyond Western culture. Cuban-Americans may wish to re-think their stance concerning their brothers and sisters living on the island of Cuba. I just revised this foregoing sentence for about the tenth time in the same way. I am being subjected to the same dehumanizing treatment that I oppose when it is applied to all others. Perhaps my would-be censors are supplying me with an argument ad demonstratum.

III. Back to Taylor on Multiculturalism and Identity.

A. From Personal to Social.

Professor Taylor develops the idea of recognition and its connection with identity in two directions: Taylor begins by insisting on a Hegelian point which was much neglected at the time when scholarly interest first refocused on Hegel (late sixties) --

"-- to understand the close connection between identity and recognition, we have to take into account a crucial feature of the human condition that has been rendered almost invisible by the overwhelmingly monological bent of mainstream modern philosophy." (p. 32.)

The next paragraph is crucial:

"We become full human agents capable of understanding ourselves, and of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression. ... I want to take language in a broad sense, covering not only the words we speak, but also other modes of expression whereby we define ourselves, including 'languages' of art, of gesture, of love, and the like. But we learn these modes of expression through exchanges with others. People do not acquire the languages needed for self-definition on their own. Rather, we are introduced to them through interaction with others who matter to us -- what George Herbert Mead called 'significant others.' The genesis of the human mind is in this sense not monological, not something each person accomplishes on his or her own, but dialogical." (p. 32.) (emphasis added)

Insisting on being seen in the mirroring gaze of the other is the demand for recognition of what we struggle to present to the world, our best selves. In loving relationships this self-presentation is most completely -- or, perhaps, exclusively -- achieved. Hence, mind cannot be reduced to the individual brain. An analogy may be drawn to ideas developed in higher mathematics ("fractals") and physics ("Supersymmetry"). Self-similarity, for example, is symmetry accross scale. "It implies recursion, pattern inside pattern." James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Viking, 1987), p. 103. For a comparison, see Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York: Freeman, 1977).

With people, unlike Mandelbrot's other entities and objects, it is precisely the rough edges that do not allow for a perfect "fit" that create romantic "symbiosis." This analogy allows for a linking of the thoughts of Mandelbrot and David Deutsch, together with Brian Greene on "supersymmetry" and Lee Smolin's cautions as a useful corrective. Needless to say, Lisa Randall is responsible for making sure the boys "play nicely together." Warped Passages (New York: Harper & Collins, 2005), pp. 256-276, and compare pp. 342-343.

We can only become our best selves in dialogue with a few other special persons, ultimately, with all others in a community. Hence, the enormity of the deprivation and psychological harm done to persons -- like slaves separated involuntarily from family members, or persons shipped off to concentration camps who are brutally parted from loved-ones -- torn out of a community and set of relationships to be thrust into another, much harsher social setting or none at all. Similar harm is inflicted on the person whose self-expressions are destroyed or damaged before his eyes, as a way of communicating the message that such expressive content cannot matter because their creator does not matter. It also says that adversaries have no intelligent response to these arguments.

"A woman I love ... becomes internal to my identity, even as I become part of her perception and understanding of the world." Where do I end so that she begins? We are a unity, one community, subjects and objects: "Love relationships are not just important because of the general emphasis in modern culture on the fulfillments of ordinary needs. They are also crucial because they are crucibles of inwardly generated identity." (p. 32.) (emphasis added)

The identical correction has been made in this paragraph on many occasions. It is made again now. Hackers will make it necessary for me to correct the same sentence again, in the same way, each time that I read this essay -- so that I will be frustrated and discouraged from writing in the future. The effect on me may not be what is expected.

People who love each other can only "be" (flourish) in relation to each other, seeing and confirming what is best about one another. Thus, the unique aspects of a loved-one's personality, which may be visible only to someone who loves her, will atrophy or wither away and disappear -- if they are not reinforced and confirmed in the mirror of her lover's persona. For this to happen, he must remain a powerful physical presence in her life. This is true in all loving relationships. My child will stop playing the piano if I do not encourage and applaud her efforts. Human lives are "entangled," bound together with the lives of all others in a community.

The damage done to those demeaned and insulted -- sometimes in order to hurt family members or "others" -- by powerful forces in society seeking to deny their identities, to manipulate or control them, is devastating and permanent. There is a political insight here that needs to be developed socially or culturally. People denied justice and recognition, within their own cultural institutions and as members of the human family in collective loving relationships, will degenerate into desperate forms of violence, as a final plea for recognition of pain. (See "What a man's gotta do.")

Love is the only answer to this plea. Violence is never the solution. Think again of my reference to the current battles among Palestinian forces. The worst option is always the denial of recognition.

"How can anyone become a suicide bomber?" A member of an Islamic militant group was asked this question by a BBC interviewer. He answered that a man who has nothing. No weapons. No family members or friends left alive who can be trusted. A man who is oppressed and humiliated, an object of ridicule and insults, assaulted and deprived of his meager earnings in his own land -- such a man will use his body, because it is all he has left, as a weapon or even a bomb in an eloquent statement of the human need for respect and recognition.

A suicide bomber is always attempting to communicate with us. I suggest that he use his mind instead of his body, by engaging in acts of philosophical violence. Loving and angry expressions of legitimate aspirations for recognition will be more successful than physical violence. This is because philosophy, by definition and a priori, is invitational. Philosophy implies a kind of recognition in itself. Philosophy is a great equalizer which cannot be taken away from us -- the powerless billions -- not even by the powerful few, since as we are tortured or face death, philosophical truth stands.

To engage in philosophical effort is to postulate the importance of reason and respect for your interlocutor, whose intelligence must be equal to that of the communication submitted for his or her consideration. Internet brawls have very little to do with real philosophy. True philosophy, like love, is the opposite of torture or terrorism.

I am certain that these final gestures of physical violence -- these "fatal strategies" -- are always self-defeating and futile. In resorting to violence, you have surrendered that dignity that inspires your passion by denying it to others. Brutality, even in response to brutality, makes you less than human. However, asserting and demanding recognition of your humanity and pain at the hands of oppressors and torturers does just the opposite. The killing of innocent civilians by anyone -- including Fidel Castro or his Cuban-American opponents -- is a terrible crime and must be treated as such. Persons convicted of such crimes must be punished in accordance with the law. This is not to deny or undervalue the importance of philosophical criticisms of Cuba or the American government.

In a professional setting years ago -- and, just moments ago, thanks to a caller on the phone -- I was refused the minimal courtesy of being addressed by my surname. My first name is used, unquestioningly, by people who are not my friends or persons I have invited to refer to me in such a manner. I have decided to do the same to them. I am hoping that this method will make my point clear. I am not something to be patronized and instructed by self-professed "superiors." Feisty debate is sometimes called for; violence never can be -- except as self-defense against attackers and only until the threat of harm against us is quelled. Noise and other distractions "enrich" my writing experience today.

Recognition of human dignity and of the unspeakable crimes to which so many of us are subjected by comfortable hypocrites, who then have the nerve to speak to us of "ethics" and "legality," can only happen by insisting on loving confrontation. We must say to torturers: "This is what you have done and are doing. This is what you have become." ("Deborah T. Poritz and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey.")

We must remain an irremovable presence before evil and corrupt power. The naked humanity in each of us compels all others to alter the moral space surrounding them to accomodate us, whether they wish to do so or not. We will not be moved or deterred in our quest. Think of the students in Tiananmen Square. Perhaps the transformations in China -- and the possibility that some of those students who were protesting then now work for the government -- is a tribute to one society's successful transition during a difficult period in its history. Perhaps there is a lesson for others in the Chinese experience.

My best teacher on this subject is Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Many others have taught this lesson in our century: Ghandi, Bishop Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Anwar Sadat's mission to Israel (had his life not been cut short) might have led to even greater achievements for displaced persons and all Palestinians in the Middle East. Simone Weil, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, F.D.R., Robert Kennedy -- many others have come to similiar conclusions in their lives, embarking on the same journey. Professor Taylor's philosophical essay, thus, leads to a new Kantian-Hegelian politics for postmodernist societies.

An American language of associations would invoke Jefferson (autonomy) and our great nation-builder Lincoln (national unity in community), freedom with equality. The U.S. is a much more fascinating place than anti-American stereotypes would have you believe. If you put together Jefferson, Lincoln and King, the result is Obama.

"For Kant, whose use of the term dignity was one of the earliest influential invocations of this idea, what commanded respect in us was our status as rational agents, capable of directing our lives through principles. Something like this has been the basis of our institutions of equal dignity ever since, though the detailed definition of it may have changed." (p. 41.) (Freedom)

Again:

"This new critique of pride, leading not only to solitary mortification, but to a new politics of equal dignity, is what Hegel took up and made famous in his dialectic of master and slave. ... [Hegel] takes it as fundamental that we can flourish only to the extent that we are recognized." (p. 41.) (Equality, Social Justice)

In light of the two quotes that appear above, see my essay: "Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution." (Among persons I value in America's current political discussion are President Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, Justice Breyer, and in opposition to my views, Senator McCain, Justice Scalia, Philosopher Hadley Arkes.)

The quest for recognition has been part of the African-American struggle for centuries. The search for freedom and respect was the motive for Nelson Mandela's life-journey. This is the homecoming sought by the Jewish people, after the Holocaust, in returning to Israel. This very universal human quest, paradoxically, may yet become the locus for a meeting with their Palestinian neighbors, bringing about a peaceful resolution in war-torn regions. The Jews in 1948 were the Palestinians of today. In conclusion, I will quote Albert Camus' invitation to join in the struggle in which so many of us find ourselves involved at this dark time in human history:

"The great citizens of a country are not those who bend the knee before authority but rather those who, against authority if need be, are adamant as to the honor and freedom of that country. And your country will always recognize in you its great citizen, as we are doing here, because you, scorning all opportunism, managed to bear up against the total injustice that was inflicted upon you. At a moment when the most shortsighted realism, a debased conception of power, the passion for dishonor, and the ravages of fear disfigure the world, at the very moment when it is possible to think that all is lost, something on the other hand, is beginning, since we have nothing more to lose. What is beginning is the period of the individual men [and women] devoted to the unconditional defense of liberty. This is why your attitude serves as an example and a comfort to all of those who, like me, have now broken with many of their traditional friends by rejecting any complicity, even temporary, even and above all tactical, with regimes or parties whether of the Right or of the Left that justify, however little, the suppression of a single one of our liberties."

"Hommage to an Exile," in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York: Vintage, 1960), pp. 105-106.

New Jersey Man Is Accused Organized Crime Leader.

Kareem Fahim, "New Jersey Man Is Accused As Organized Crime Leader," in The New York Times, May 24, 2007, at p. B4.


"ELIZABETH, N.J., May 23 -- From his base on a work site underneath the Goethels Bridge, a member of the Gambino crime family gained influence in the affairs of two state unions, ran gambling rings in northern New Jersey and New York and collected a salary from a no-show construction job, prosecutors said yesterday."

"The man, ANDREW MEROLA, 40, was arrested during a vehicle stop in East Hanover, N.J., where he lives, the authorities said. He faces charges including being a leader of organized crime, racketeering and theft by extortion. Two union officials were also arrested this week, along with more than twenty other people who prosecutors said played roles in Mr. Merola's various criminal schemes."

The feds seem to have worked out a method of "sharing" information - "selective leaks" -- with some New Jersey prosecutors and law enforcement people, perhaps unofficially, while bypassing the Trenton Syndicate's players in the legal system as much as possible. I suggest that they avoid sharing information with the notoriously corrupt Office of Attorney Ethics (OAE) or with New Jersey's baby attorney general, Anne Milgram.

This arrest is only the beginning since such a massive criminal network, allegedly, could not operate in New Jersey and other states without the cooperation of government and other officials. In New Jersey, this probably includes judges and maybe Supreme Court justices.

"Wada-ya, kidding? Naaa ... " How many federal Grand Juries are hearing matters pertaining to New Jersey "events" and "personalities"? Several -- allegedly. Besides the one or more concerned with Senator Menendez, of course, who claims to have "absented" himself from Hudson County politics, allowing the "barons" to do what they like. See Raymond Hernandez & David W. Chen, "In Immigration Debate, Menendez Sees an Opportunity," in The New York Times, June 25, 2007, at p. B1. (Menendez is very good at seeing opportunities.)

"The authorities said that Mr. Merola, working with associates, inserted himself into the financial affairs of two unions: Local 825 of the International Union of Operating Engineers, based in Springfield, which Mr. Merola belonged to, prosecutors said; and Local 1153 of the Laborers' International Union of North America, based in Newark."

I think it is becoming clearer why $187 million was spent in New Brunswick and no high school was built. Many of these alleged criminal organizations have judges and state employees, at the Department of Labor, perhaps, on the payroll. Traditionally, in New Jersey, "nothing happened" is the only response to such criminality. Union County Prosecutor Theodore J. Romankow is brave (and unusual) in following through on these matters. Mr. Romankow seems like a good candidate for New Jersey Attorney General, or someone to fill a vacancy on the state Supreme Court, whatever his party affiliation. The same may be said for Monmouth Prosecutor Luis A. Valentin. Other prosecutors and judges are doing an exceptionally good job under difficult circumstances in New Jersey. It may not be wise to name them. You know who you are. Several good prosecutors in Hudson and Essex are doing excellent work right now.

"Working with a member of the rival Luchese family, Mr. Merola solicited a $20,000 bribe from a construction company that did not want to hire workers from Local 825, the authorities said. Another associate of Mr. Merola approved pay raises and was involved in other employment matters regarding workers in Local 1153, they said."

Mr. Merola, is (apparently) not Italian-American, having changed his name some time ago. I am sure that, among his alleged associates there are Latinos and members of other ethnic groups in New Jersey. (See Al Pacino's great performance in "Scarface.") Those members of the Cuban-American community who are under the impression that all persons in our ethnic community are lawyers, doctors, dentists and accountants are in for a disappointment.

Former Chief Justice Zazzali specialized in labor law when he was in private practice, right? I wonder whether he had occasion to "encounter" any of these fine "gentlemen" or to represent these labor unions or other "allied organizations" in the Labor sector of the economy? When it comes to New Jersey's legal corruption, nothing surprises me. You don't get to the New Jersey judiciary by staying away from the state's corrupt politics.

"Prosecutors said Mr. Merola and his lieutenants used a web site called Topbettors.com in their operations" -- I wonder why I have so many computer troubles? -- "but they did not detail exactly how the site was used. The site bills itself as an offshore facilitator of betting operations, providing 'an offshore call center and accounting services' for land-based sports wagering interests. A man who answered a phone number listed on the web site and who would identify himself only as Frank said no one was available to answer immediately."

"The gambling operations led to loan sharking, the authorities said, and Mr. Merola, using two enforcers, 'resorted to violence or threats of violence to collect his debts,' according to a statement released by prosecutors."

Allegedly, the preferred method used by organized crime in the Garden State is to arrange for the arrest of someone -- for a minor traffic offense, like not wearing a seat belt perhaps -- and then to have that person assaulted or killed in jail. It is rumored that judges, cops, newspaper people (including some on the best periodicals) -- are all at the service of these organizations, that also employ highly "ethical" attorneys, who are usually asked to serve on ethics committees before rising to a Superior Court judgeship, or higher. How you doing there, Jaynee?

"Don't forget to plan your New Jersey vacation!"