Category: Legal Stuff

Old Times There Am Not Forgotten

Legal Stuff, Lies and Untruths

Here’s a little bit of rank injustice:

Harrods could be forced to pay out tens of millions of pounds to female employees sexually abused by Mohamed Al-Fayed because of ‘systemic wrongdoing’ at store, lawyers say.

The Egypytian businessman has been accused of raping five women during his 25-year tenure at the luxury retail outlet, with at least 15 other women saying they were sexually assaulted by him.

Lawyers have warned that Al-Fayed’s offences could range beyond the allegations made in a BBC documentary, with his other former business interests, including Fulham Football Club, now under scrutiny.

Okay, you may be asking about this “systemic wrongdoing” — i.e. that Harrods had a system in place which either encouraged or else allowed the old goat to molest his female emplyees.

Of course, Harrods doesn’t or didn’t have any such system.  But the lawyers have to argue that they did, because:

Al Fayed, who died last year aged 94…

They can’t very well go after him now, you see, so they have to go after the company because, well, because that’s where the bucks are.  And it’s really conveeeeenient that the old fart isn’t around to refute the claims now crawling, like their claimants, from the woodwork.

In the reign of Emperor Kim, of course, bullshit like this would be stopped in its tracks because, duh, it’s bullshit.  And of course some feeeemales stand to get a lot of money out of these unsubstantiated accusations, as do their lawyers, which is how this creative nonsense ever came to see the light of day.

‘It seems from the information received from those who have contacted us, and the information brought to light in the BBC documentary, that the abuse of young women at Harrods should properly be described as human sex trafficking,’ said Richard Meeran, a partner at the London law firm Leigh Day.

Ah yes, the old bogeyman “sex trafficking” — where would we be without this handy little catch-all expression?  And the BBC… hardly an unimpeachable source.

‘This is because the recruitment of young women for the alleged purpose of sexual exploitation entailed and depended on systemic wrongdoing by the company, its senior managers and security personnel, as well as the ultimate perpetrator.’

So these women were hired for the express purpose of being the Harrods owner’s sex toys?  And all the senior management of Harrods were aware of this and did nothing to stop it? 

And it’s not just one woman, but a hundred and fifty (always be suspicious of nice round numbers).  And all of them have kept their mouths shut for all this time, because…?

I report you decide;  but I’ve decided that this — all of it — is arrant bullshit and an attempt to wring money from a wealthy company, just because its erstwhile owner and the “alleged’ perpetrator is dead and can’t defend himself.

Just to be clear on this:  Al Fayed probably was a loathsome old bastard who deserved a good hard flogging / ball-kicking for oh-so many reasons.  But even given that, it doesn’t mean that this pussymail can be justified.

RFI: Powdered Wig Stuff

Legal Stuff

I know that there are more than a few [sigh]  members of the legal persuasion among my Readers, so if I may ask, could those who qualify drop me a quick note ([email protected]) when you have a free moment?

The matter is not criminal, not financial, and nor has it anything to do with New Wife’s immigration issue.  It’s more of a “What the hell do I do now?” situation, and it involves me vs. Global MegaCorp Inc.

Many thanks.

The REAL Big Loser?

Government Thugs, Legal Stuff

Last week the Supreme Court dealt what seems to be a massive blow to the bureaucracy of the modern Administrative State — wherein an agency can become a de facto mini-state by creating and interpreting its own regulations, and then enforcing them without much in the way of legal oversight and defense.

The beacon in this ruling is SEC v. Jarkesy, which noted “…the Securities Exchange Commission’s power to serve as enforcer, prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner in administrative proceedings for violating the securities laws. The Court found that the defendants are entitled to a jury trial before an Article III judge.”

Needless to say, the gun guys — especially these folks, from whom I excerpted and modified the previous paragraph — who have long suffered such iniquity at the hands of the loathsome Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (ATF) agency, are all over this.

However, lost in all this excitement is the agency which I think has the most to lose from Jarkesy  (and the earlier Loper Bright v. Raimondo decision).

I refer here to the still-more loathsome Internal Revenue Service (IRS), who have always been able to bludgeon taxpayers in this manner.  They have their own regulations, their own courts and, lest we forget, a veritable army of well-armed minions who are only too willing to enforce their agency’s regulatory diktat.  I remember seeing on TV an excellent summary of the power of the IRS when a judge said, “So basically, in order to win your case against this man, all the IRS has to do is prove that they followed their own internal procedures properly?”  to which the IRS lawyer said, “Yes, your Honor.”

Massive rafts of tax law have given birth to an entire world of tax lawyers and -accountants (both in private practice and in the IRS itself), which is in itself excessive and burdensome.  (I am reminded of the way colonial Hong Kong collected income tax:  once a year the taxpayer took to the tax office his employer’s statement of his gross salary paid, and he would write out a cheque for 5% of that total to the government.  That’s it.  Imagine the impact of that scenario in the United States today.)

Anyway, I’m not only not a lawyer, but I also don’t play one on TV and I sure as hell don’t play one on this blog.  But I am generally cognizant of the bigger picture, and I’m just wondering if the greatest losers of the Lopez Bright  and Jarkesy  decisions will not be the horrible SEC, EPA and ATF, but the fouler-still IRS.

I am sure that the Powdered Wigs among my Readership will be only too pleased to set me straight.

Too Polite By Half

Bureaucracy, Gummint, Legal Stuff, Politics, Resistance

Here’s a story which is quite heartening:

The people in question are with the American Accountability Foundation in Kentucky, and they are busily engaged in a project that I’ve been hoping to see all throughout the current presidential campaign. Tom Jones of the AAF received a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation to do some important research work. They are poring through the backgrounds of federal workers, starting with the Department of Homeland Security. They are checking public comments and social media posts, looking for swamp dwellers who may be opposed to the policies of Donald Trump should he return to office next year. They plan to publish a list of as many as 100 names later this summer, and those people may have to rethink their future career prospects if Trump returns to the White House.

There are, however, a couple of things which make me do a Lemon Face.  Firstly, while “accountability” is all well and good, what I’d really like to see is some kind of awful consequences for the disloyal (and perhaps criminal and treasonous both) government stooges, especially those who proudly proclaimed that they were doing their best to undermine the Republican administration.

I’ve always said that the State Department implements the foreign policy of the Democratic Party, regardless of which party is in power.  It’s a mordant comment, good for an amused smile, perhaps.

The time for that accommodation is over, or should be.

Just as Trump came to power in 2016 with a pre-vetted list of federal judges ready to be nominated and sworn in, I want him to arrive in the Oval Office in 2025 with a similar list of judges, to be sure — but with another list of Swamp apparatchiks who need, at best to lose their jobs, but preferably with some kind of legal censure — e.g. prosecution — and not just the prospect of losing their little place at the poxy government trough.

That little totalitarian cocksucker Anthony Fauci, for example, needs to spend his last years on earth in some dank federal prison for causing — and admitting he caused — untold harm to American society by his actions as a federal employee.  And he’s just the most egregious example.  There are a lot more than “100 names” who need to be kicked out of government and punished for their disgusting behavior.  Losing one’s job is a pointless “punishment” if all it means is a well-paid talking-head job on NBC or any of the other alphabet soup socialist-supporting media companies.  These bastards need to be punished.  At the very least, they should forfeit their government pensions:  they abused their positions, and don’t deserve to reap any benefits.

I know, I know:  this is not a good precedent to set because it will make people leery of working on government.  That, my friends, is a feature and not a bug.

What I’d like to see in Trump’s very first week as POTUS is a head-of-state summit with Argentina’s Javier Milei, both as an amicable confirmation of shared principle, and an exchange of ideas as to implementation of policy.

It appears that the Socialists — people like Kathy Griffin, Joy Behar and Rachel Maddow — are scurrying around like frightened mice at the prospect of Trump throwing people in jail when he comes to power.  I would advise Trump and his advisors to do precisely that;  just not to waste time with irrelevant nonentities like the above harpies, but to get serious with the actual bad agents like James Clapper, the entire upper management of the Justice Department and the Pentagon, and the authors of this document — for starters.  The State Department, EPA and so on can wait until Year Two of the 47th President’s term.

We don’t need an accounting;  we demand a reckoning.

Groundwork

Elections, Legal Stuff

We’ve all seen how the Democrat Socialists have tried to prevent Donald Trump from even running for office, by means of lawfare, crooked politicians and district attorneys and trumped-up (Trumped-up?) bogus criminal charges, all to drain his funds and keep him in court (and even muzzled) as he pushes on in his quest to become POTUS 45/47.

As that seems to have failed, quite spectacularly, the next step would be to engage in the time-honored (for Democrats) practice of fiddling with the ballots (see:  2020 election).

I am therefore heartened to see this development:

Lara Trump is building an army of ‘100,000 poll watchers and over 500 lawyers’ to ‘deploy’ across America in November.

Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump announced Friday from behind a podium in a Detroit suburb that she and the RNC are working to raise a veritable army of “over 100,000 poll watchers and over 500 lawyers” to “deploy” at election sites across the country in November. 

These volunteers will have three missions: Watch people vote, watch people count votes, and sue anybody who gets in the way.

Lara Trump’s vision is to have people “in the room” whenever votes are being counted or cast. 

The former president’s daughter-in-law also envisions teams upon teams of (surprisingly free) volunteer lawyers that can respond to any resistance from poll officials on the ground with “quick and effective” litigation. 

Far be it for me to criticize this extremely-laudable initiative, but I hope they’re also lining up a bunch of judges who can hear and rule on such litigation.  It’s no good filing a legal protest when all the judges are “asleep” or “unavailable” to hear the protests.  (And if you think the local Democrats wouldn’t dare try to engineer such a thing, I have a NY bridge and Covid vaccination drug to sell you.)

Frankly, I’d feel better if there were half a million volunteer poll-watchers and ten thousand lawyers on hand to combat Democrat lawlessness and skulduggery, such is the deep suspicion and apprehension with which I view the democratic process, as practiced in America at present.  I’d also like a couple hundred thousand impartial cops on hand to enforce existing election law, when the scumbag Democrat fraudsters attempt to circumvent it.

But good on ya Lara, me old darling.  It’s the right thing you’re doing.  Let’s hope it works, or the fucking Socialists will just steal another one.