9/11– 20 years later


On the 20th Anniversary of 9/11As we mark the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001, I cannot help but be reminded of the tragic similarities between what happened to our country since that date and what happens to innocent vulnerable wards on a daily basis in probate courts across America. The failed War on Terror. The war on Wards and Families.There are painful haunting similarities in the probate sphere to post 911 America—when the opaque, powerful surveillance state government intentionally exceeded its authority and ignore the Constitution with its Stellar Wind program (later exposed by Snowden)illegally spying on Americans to “prevent more attacks”; Just like probate exceeds its authority to prevent abuse neglect and exploitation by turning the 4th  and 14th amendments inside out and stripping rights from the people who need them most.In the probate racket we clearly see Government violating its own legislative mandate, turning against rather than helping its own citizens and intentionally creating a legal no man’s land where laws intended for one purpose are used for the exact opposite purpose. Wards suffer cruel and unimaginable abuses like Gitmo detainees in a rights-deprived legal limbo while they are incessantly assaulted in every way. Clever lawyers (military and probate) deftly sidestep the law calling the obviously illegal, legal. The massively illegal unfettered and unsupervised collection of terra bites of private information by the government is hauntingly similar to marshalling all the private assets of wards in secret with no witnesses or oversight. This kind of systematic betrayal of American core values and founding documents by those in authority inevitably leads to massive abuse and a predictable and justified decline in faith in our government.I and others who have seen these crimes close up and in person cannot sit by and only watch. We have learned the brutal lesson that even in a free country theoretically governed by laws, any power without constraint uniformly leads to abuse and decline and ultimately failure of a society. Those are the very real stakes for all of us at this moment in time when those in power abuse it with impunity.Like the military and political leaders of that post 9/11 era and since, the probate system suffers from a self-fulfilling delusional strategic narcissism—nothing to see here—we are winning the war! And guardianship is a great system that works just fine!For all the unwelcome and dysfunctional and thoroughly corrupt people and systems that American blood and money emplaced in Afghanistan for the “good of the Afghanis” at enormous cost, a kleptocracy instead evolved, based only on greed, raw power, cunning and massive corruption—so hauntingly similar to the financial rapists in probate. Young American war fighters in America’s longest war coined a term for the ingrained corruption they were sent to die for in that war—they called it VICE—a vertically integrated criminal enterprise. Such an apt description of the probate racket.As we know, wards without rights do not even the right to habeus corpus—to ask the question why are you doing this to me? As any law student will attest–to deny habeus corpus is to deny the law itself. That is exactly the problem. The entire system has become an architecture of deceit for the purpose of profit for the powerful elite—much like endless wars have massively enriched those who wage them from afar.Like the political-military-industrial complex systems that gave us the failed 20 years Afghan war, American Guardianship is so powerful and  broken it cannot be fixed; It is so fundamentally self-conflicted it cannot even come to terms with its own misplaced hubris and admit its massive and glaring failures. Until there is the political will to admit the need for massive change, there is no reason to expect that such systems will self-correct or take responsibility for the harm they have done and continue to do