Sexual Payoffs for New Jersey Judges!

"NEW YORK -- The money laundering and prostitution case against a high profile New Jersey defense attorney took another strange turn yesterday as authorities alleged he arranged sexual favors for friends and New Jersey law enforcement officials."

Prosecutors and judges -- perhaps even New Jersey Supreme Court justices -- indulged in a little illicit sexual delight in exchange for a lack of attention to this, allegedly, corrupt lawyer's activities. No OAE official apprehended Mr. Paul Bergrin -- some such officials were probably accepting his "hospitality" or, perhaps, payoffs -- only the feds and New York officials were interested in this person's activities. I wonder why?

"The Manhattan District Attorney's Office also said Newark attorney Paul Bergrin was a 'prime suspect' in the killing of a witness in a federal drug case and claimed he was grooming his son to take over the high priced call-girl operation at the heart of the investigation."

"... Bergrin found himself in need of his own attorney after he was indicted with two others on charges of money laundering" -- political contributions are always excellent money laundering techniques! -- "solicitation of prostitution and misconduct in connection with the escort service known as NY Confidential."

The New York District Attorney said: "... after Bergrin took over New York Confidential in January 2005, he tapped the escorts for free sex and brought friends to the brothel, 'including New Jersey law enforcement.' ..."

Brian T. Murray, "In Lawyer's Prostitution Case, Talk of Favors, a Killing," The Star Ledger, January 17, 2007 and http://www.nj.com/

"... sex was sold for $1,000 an hour or more."

Most women in the sexual services industry do not keep $1,000 per hour. They are usually exploited in vicious ways by people with police protection and judicial friends -- especially in a cesspool of corruption such as New Jersey -- so that these exploiters are licensed to abuse young men and women. New Jersey leads the nation in child porn and abuse. See the discussions in the "General" section at my group: http://www.Critique@groups.msn.com/ (Efforts are underway to deny me access to this group and/or the use of images, but I will keep trying to get back to it.)
"The dates were booked for $1,000 an hour. [The brothel] brought in about $1.2 MILLION in the first six months," according to "Detective Myles Mahadi of the Manhattan South Vice Enforcement Unit."

My concern is about protecting young women and men in this industry, getting minors safely out of danger, allowing those adults who wish to indulge in commercial sexual services to do so in a safe, legal environment (that gets rid of criminals and eliminates exploitation), while allowing for alternative career counselling, child care for those women who need it, health care, and yet permits "sex providers" to keep the proceeds of their efforts and pay taxes. I have never paid for sex in my life, but (apparently) this activity fascinates many men. If somebody is going to get rich from selling sex, then I guess it is fair for those doing the selling to keep the bulk of the proceeds from the sales.

This commercializing of sex is not an activity that will ever be eliminated from human societies, so the issue is: How can we protect women, mostly, and help them to be safe and prosper in their lives? How do we get rid of exploiters and see that they, such men (mostly), go to prison?

Most people who are honest about this industry are not trying to violate or injure women, but they want to make money. If money-making is possible in a safe, legal environment -- generating taxes -- then people will PREFER that situation. Women in the sexual services industry can become legal enterpreneurs. Most women in the sex industry (I believe) prefer to avoid hassels and problems, and would like nothing better than to live safe lives, where they can save for retirement and have health coverage as well as physical security. Again: I have never paid for sex. I am not involved in any way in this industry. I trust that I anticipated the bullshit spouted by New Jersey's mobster-lawyers about me in response to these allegations.

"Federal prosecutors say they are still troubled about [Bergrin's] conduct in a 2004 narcotics case. In court motions, prosecutors charged that Bergrin twice called ________, an alleged drug kingpin, and told him a key witness against his client was a man known on the streets as 'Ki-mo.'"

"Three months later, Ki-mo was murdered execution-style. Bergrin denied any wrongdoing, but withdrew from the case."

Mr. Bergrin was not deemed an "unethical attorney" by New Jersey's OAE, many of whose officials like to "party" on Friday nights. Public pressure may force the OAE to take action against this guy. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System" and "New Jersey's Office of Attorney Ethics.")

Guy Sterling & Brian T. Murray, "Former U.S. Prosecutor Charged in Call-Girl Ring," The Star Ledger, January 11, 2007 and http://www.nj.com/

"In a recent Wall Street Journal editorial, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor questioned why there is such an 'intensity of rage currently being leveled at the judiciary.' Last week, the New Jersey Supreme Court gave her the answer."

Tom Fitton, "New Jersey Supreme Court Mandates Rights," http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/19803.html

The hostility to the Garden State's tainted Supreme Court is not primarily the result of disagreement over controversial decisions, but legitimate repugnance at the hypocrisy of a court that covers-up torture, incompetence, and unethical or criminal conduct by its agents and in its own name, while indulging in a "holier-than-thou" sanctimonious reprimanding of minor offenders, as public money is wasted on expensive portraits, dinners, and other "treats" and luxuries for the so-called "justices." ("Jaynee La Vecchia and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "Law and Ethics in the Soprano State.")

The true whores in this story are the members of New Jersey's Supreme Court and judiciary. Preventing me from posting essays at my msn group or other harassment of me will not change this truth. If you wear black robes and are indifferent to the commission of such crimes before your eyes, in violation of fundamental Constitutional and moral rights to free expression, then you relinquish any right to be called a "judge." Mr. Rabner, will you tell me with a straight face that you have not been aware of this censorship for ten years? ("Stuart Rabner and Conduct Unbecoming to the Judiciary in New Jersey" and "No More Cover-Ups and Lies, Chief Justice Rabner!")

"What was astonishing was the spread of the corruption to the New Jersey Supreme Court, which unanimously approved this action [the Democrats' naming of a successor for Robert Torricelli, D-NJ] in defiance of the plain words of the written law. ..."

Thomas Sowell, "The Houdini Award," October 11, 2002 and http://www.townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2002/10/11/the_houdini_award 1/28/2007

Ethics? Whose ethics? New Jersey's Supreme Court is a partisan branch of the corrupt mafia-Democrat establishment in the Garden State. Continued silence in the presence of this blatant evil is complicity in atrocity. ("Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")

Beauty and Goodness.

There is much disagreement in Western philosophy concerning the role and importance of art in a full or rich human life. I think that this debate is worth considering for a moment, since I have been engaged in discussions of literature and aesthetics over the past several days.

It should not be forgotten that every philosophical topic or issue that I discuss in one of these eletronic journal entries merits much greater analysis and exploration than I can possibly provide in this setting. As Santayana would say, I am merely "dipping my finger in the pie." No Freudian observations please.

Nothing would please me more than to encourage people interested by something that I say, in any one of these posts, to read a book by one of my heros (or heroines): Harold Bloom, Peter Ackroyd, George Steiner, Terry Eagleton (when he is not abusing Americans), Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, Gore Vidal (we must bow when speaking his name), Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Iris Murdoch, Alison Lurie, Germaine Greer, John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, Jose Marti, Carlos Fuentes, Erica Jong, James Baldwin, Cornel West and Marina Warner are among the names that will turn up in these discussions, sooner or later. All of them know more than I do about most things and are better writers. My goal is only to interest you in the issues.

So is there a connection between art and ethics, beauty and goodness?

I would like to think so. On the other hand, after the Holocaust, I am not so sure that we can say so with great confidence. Theodor Adorno's question hangs in the air: "How can one write poetry after Auschwitz?"

I think that we must write poetry after Auschwitz if we are to retain our sanity or preserve such ability to cope with evil as we may possess. The two polarized positions may be characterized, very roughly, as the views that: 1) there is no connection between the degree of a person's civilization or artistic sensitivity and awareness, that is, education in the arts and what that person will do in extreme circumstances; or 2) the claim that there is such a connection, so that great art makes us better persons.

George Steiner comments on the man who listens to Bach in the evening, reads Goethe in the morning, and then goes to his job in a concentration camp. Iris Murdoch and others -- including George Santayana, in an earlier generation -- speak of the capacity of all great art to direct human attention towards the "mysterium" of love and goodness. In the tradition derived from Plato, by way of Kant and the Romantics, "art elevates the spirit to the contemplation of lofty things, allowing us to achieve a transcendence of our particularities." All of this sounds like Oxford armchair stuff these days, especially to the millions coping with hunger and plague in the Third World, or even in the inner cities of the United States.

For Marxists, art is ambiguous. It may serve the purpose of, for example, a gift of candy to an injured child, distracting that child from the injustices to which he or she is subjected; or it may be a form of resistance when it becomes part of the social struggle for liberation. But this is to ignore the ways in which some of the best art is concerned with a spiritual liberation and not with transforming the world through revolution or altering the material conditions of people's lives.

I continue to believe, perhaps childishly, that the best art can heal and serve as a balm for our wounds in life, that there is a kind of catharsis in aesthetic experience. Both the artist and recipient of the work of art are enriched and healed by artistic communication. They are made better persons. I cannot say exactly how this happens, but I believe that it does.

It may be that art helps to cultivate or develop feelings in people. The capacity to accept and learn from emotional responses is crucial to a sane life or to wisdom. In America, especially in legal circles, feelings are feared as "subjective" and not amenable to "rational analysis or discussion," usually based on an archaic bit of moral epistemology that distinguishes sharply between facts and values, emotions and rationality. Many of these distinctions and antinomies are due for re-examination. Also, one cannot "bill" for one's "feelings," usually, which lawyers find distressing. I am sure that some lawyers manage to bill for their feelings, so that their compassion is only an "extra charge" at the end of the month. Law and the sexual services industries have so much in common.

I will leave the reader today with the words of two of my teachers and ask you to reflect on them. First, Santayana:

In what might be called classical philosophy, art meant command over instrumentalities and methods: it might be abused, but it was a moralist's duty to watch over it and see that it was directed towards the ultimate and harmonious service of the soul. Beauty, on the other hand, was one side of the ultimate good. Art was called fine or beautiful, in so far as it was directed towards this good: but a material work of art, or a method, had to be judged not only on this ground, but in view of all its effects. A beautiful work of art might be evil in that it flattered falsehood or vice; but to a truly refined taste only that could be wholy beautiful which was wholly attuned to the health of human nature. Now-a-days all this has been confused and lost sight of. In radical quarters beauty is not regarded as a good, but art is respected as expression -- but expression of what? You say of feeling. Swearing then would be art. [And much worse too.] ... "art," in the modern world, is a pure affectation and self-indulgence on the part of a group of ill-educated persons, who have no discernment of the good in any form, but only a certain irritability and impatience to put their finger in the pie.

And next, Germaine Greer:

As long as Shakespeare remains central to English cultural life, [English, but also American life?] will retain the values which make it unique in the world, namely tolerance, pluralism, the talent for visible compromise, and a profound commitment to that most wasteful form of social organization, democracy. To an outsider such lack of system may seem amorphous, disorganized, and even hypocritical; from within it is evident that such an inclusive mode can be no more inconsistent than life itself. The puzzle is to discover the intrinsic ordering principle in apparent disorder. Perhaps the reason the principle eludes so many is that they are searching in the wrong place; in the theatre of the beholder is the medium. The missing middle term in the Shakespearian proposition is our response. Without that there is and can be no argument.

Pierced Vessels.

Most of us are desperate for some meaningful human connection in our lives. There is so much loneliness in a big city, like New York. There is so much pain that is written on the faces of the strangers that I see in subway trains, or at a Deli ordering a sandwich, at a bookstore or coffee shop.

At times, I see so much yearning in people's eyes and a desperate hope for love that I can barely keep from crying. Other times, I sense a forlorn and lost condition in a person, who seems (spiritually) petrified, frozen and atrophied, stone-like, behind walls that will now never be scaled by another human being. So many have given up, choosing a kind of death-in-life. Too many of us in big cities have chosen to exist, defensively, "in splendid isolation" -- like the British during the Edwardian period.

I see people who have taken their hearts, placed them in a steel box, and buried them in a desert deep within themselves, turning into "cleverly constructed automatons" (Descartes), who only resemble the human beings that they once were. In the movie The Sixth Sense, the child actor who is the protagonist of the story says, "I see dead people." I wanted to shout in the movie theater: "I do too." The dead people are all around us. Worse, we are in danger of becoming one of them, without realizing it.

Community, real community, genuine social interaction is a necessity. I will say this again for those who came in late. We need other people and our relationships with them. Contrary to America's unspoken religion of "self-reliance," and to Dr. Phil, life is not about "being who you are" and "making yourself happy." That very American tendency to self-indulgence is a necessary way of coping with the pain resulting from the absence of meaningful relationships in life, something which is reaching epidemic proportions in America (along with the selfishness and lonelyness that this absence both causes and reflects). Individualism is necessary, but it is not enough for any of us.

This widespread suffering is partly due to moronic advice from "therapists" -- like Dr. Phil and even the much nicer Dr. Ruth ("use a cucumber!") -- but it is also the result of a confusion of the means to happiness, for happiness itself. Money, power, fame -- all run a distant second to love and beauty. You all know that, unless you are an imbecile ... in which case you would not be reading this, but would have entered politics long ago.

Yes, you need some money to survive, but why surive? What is it that makes that survival worthwhile? The look in someone's eyes who matters to you. We can accept this much from Freud: The reason why most men, anyway, do most things is to impress a woman -- one woman in particular. We laugh and hope, we dream and play, much more when there are children we love in our lives, children who speak -- usually without intending it -- to the child alive in us.

I have suggested that human connection is becoming more, not less difficult. There are many reasons for this and for the human misery that results because of it. Most of this misery has to do with the sheer idiocy of our therapists. Some of it is the result of how we live now. We are overworked, skeptical from coping with all the bullshit dispensed daily by politicians and advertisers, cynical about politics and everything else, way beyond a simplistic or literal religious belief, even when we claim that we believe. Nothing matters, people say. Everything is tainted by the banalizing power of the mass media, a power which must be reappropriated by and for us.

There is a terrible, bleak and cold emptiness inside people, inside us, and lethal boredom. Hence, the bandaids that are placed on the gaping wound of alienation. Indiscriminate sex, greed, trinkets, drugs, pursuit of power, all of the usual baubles that we seek in order to avoid facing both our sense of this nothingness or of something "missing," and the oh-so literal death that awaits all of us.

Many of us are attracted to art, to the wonders of the aesthetic encounter which provides clues to what we really want, ultimately, which is love and social transformation. You know who the authorities are at this point: Plato and Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin and Iris Murdoch, together with many others. And yes, for those who are not religious, there is also Jesus. Not the Jesus of the television evangelists, but Jesus the rabble rouser, fellow sufferer, rebel with a cause -- a postmodernist Jesus, who wears faded denims and a baseball cap. "Jesus," says an eloquent New York t-shirt, "is my homeboy."

For those who wish to be seen with impressive books everywhere, books that define you as an "intellectual" -- as you wait for your Mocha Frapuccino at Starbucks -- I suggest Professor Terry Eagleton's The Ideology of the Aesthetic, or anything by George Steiner or Richard Wolheim. Yes, I go to Starbucks and, occasionally, I even have a book in my pocket, but I NEVER order "Mocha Frapuccino." Not lately, anyway.

"You are a fucking Anglophile!" O.K., O.K., read Gore Vidal's essays and Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself. Susan Sontag or Jonathan Franzen won't kill you either. My point is that art, which is fun, may be the easiest access to the communal in a time and place intending to deny us communal experiences of any kind. Religious ceremonies are unlikely to make a come back among the hipsters in the East Village, while sports are "too corporate" and electoral politics is about big money and sound bites in America. But there is still art. In a democratic age, cinema rules.

I anticipate that there are some readers who are determined to twist anything I say into an insult or to provide a gratuitous psychobabble analysis, so I will try to be cautious. Best of all, for the hostile crowd, is to find an interpretation that makes an accusation of political incorrectness against me plausible, but the need to find the most dismissive and insulting, demeaning and basest interpretation of everything anyone says is also a sign of pathology. The Internet is the realm of insult and accusation in debate, almost like the U.S. Congress. The accusation of childishness directed at another, for instance, is a way of not facing the hunger for imaginative expression and connectedness in the accuser. Are you denying your own remaining child-like needs or hopes by accusing me of childishness?

Our aesthetic encounters provide a clue to the loving recognition for which we really yearn. Art is a revelation of the "unalienated relatedness" that makes life meaningful and good, that we know must exist somewhere -- like "Shangri-la" in Lost Horizon -- and it is the pointer to the love which redeems the human condition. These encounters are also politically significant now, because they expose the vicious injustices against which we struggle as we cope, and from which, we seek relief.

Some readers will doubtless find my use of the category [of the aesthetic] inadmissably loose and broad, not least when it comes at times to merge into the idea of bodily experience as such. But if the aesthetic returns with such persistence, it is partly because of a certain indeterminacy of definition which allows it to figure in a varied span of preoccupations: freedom and legality, spontaneity and necessity, self-determination, autonomy, particularity and universality, along with several others. My argument broadly speaking is that the category of the aesthetic assumes the importance that it does in Modern Europe [and America] because in speaking of art it speaks of these other matters too, which are at the heart of the middle class's struggle for hegemony. The construction of the modern notion of the aesthetic artefact is thus inseparable from the construction of the dominant ideological forms of modern class-society, and indeed from a whole new form of human subjectivity appropriate to that social order.

This paragraph is taken from Eagleton's treatise, but what follows is from Steiner's introduction to Iris Murdoch's collection of essays, Existentialism and Mystics:

[Dame Iris speaks of the art object as a "pierced object,"] Note the exact felicity of "pierced object" (would that Dame Iris had alluded to its source, which is the famous kabbalistic trope of the "pierced vessels" of divine creation). ...

Art is our supreme clue to morals (an arresting phrase). Both [art and morals] direct the spirit towards the MYSTERIUM of love. The program is [always] that mapped in Neo-Platonism, in Augustine and in Dante's PARADISO. ... Dame Iris argues for a morality of love, of individualised reciprocity whose foundations can, ought to be those of rational humanism. Or indeed, as a number of her most intricate fictions suggest, of a remembered paganism, of myth and allegory as metaphors of ethical possiblity.

Let us dream together of "ethical possibilities," for a little while ...