Leo Stoller

Ask any voter in Cook County; Can you name just three Cook County Judges…or how about just two?
The Cook County Court is a cloistered, clandestine organization that has given themselves an unimaginable power and a disgusting flow of continual money and benefits with absolutely no outside oversight or accountability, whatsoever.
Did you know that the Cook County Courts operate at an efficiency you would be fired for, while our classrooms are overcrowded due to teacher layoffs and our streets less safe from a $190 million dollar public safety budget cut?
Did you know we can employee 3- 4 more teachers or 2-3 police officers in place of just one Judge?
The Cook County Courts inefficiencies do however allow for many more Judges to be on the payroll.
And the majority of Cook County Voters cannot even name three sitting Judges, let alone two-yet they can also take all of your freedoms and constitutional rights away in under 5 seconds, without justifying it to a living soul.
If you look into the Cook County annual budget, you will find that the judicial budget portion is cleverly hard to total for a true picture of what they spend annually; It appears it is somewhere between $100,000,000-150,000,000!
The ‘lowest’ Judge on the pecking order is an associate Judge-they are NOT voted in, rather, they are appointed by other Judges-a very political position-and if you get a ‘bad’ one, there’s not a dam thing you can do about it.
Associate Judges start at approximately $167,000 per year, plus health Insurance, vacation and retirement/pensions-putting them well over $200,000 per year.
Circuit Judges, Presiding Judges and Chief Justices-dwarf that figure
Do you know how many hours they truly work per year?
Some states and cities are waking up to this fact in this economy; August 17, 2011 Michigan started to wake up when the Detroit News reported that “it is recommended to cut 45 Judges, saving $7.8 million in just salaries alone”, the report says’ there isn't enough workload to justify the current allotment of 584 trial judges and 28 appeals court judges’ (http://detnews.com/article/20110817/POLITICS02/108170402/Michigan-Supreme-Court-supports-cutting-49-judge-positions#ixzz1ZpkDAegQ)
They cannot be fired-except through a Judicial Inquiry board (we will discuss) they cannot be sued, liable or held accountable
If they are caught in wrongdoing, it’s a very long process, but they can be tried-You and I pay for their legal defense and pay for any fines they owe-and they can return to the bench!
And they ‘police’ themselves-in ‘theory’
We have allowed one of the biggest scams, blights and drain on our society that has ‘ordained’, empowered and protected its’ interests ,so cleverly cloaked and almost ‘invisible’ that you don’t even know it’s happening-and that was surely by design.
You can’t even name two.
Thomas Jefferson said, “We get the government we deserve”
Gore Vidal said, “We have become the United States of Apathy”
The combination in our judicial system has become lethal.
And it gets better.
They have given themselves the power of contempt, which almost no lay person understands what this allows them to do to each and every one of us.
For any reason whatsoever, a Judge can hold you in contempt; you’re wearing the wrong shirt or a bad haircut-it’s all up to them.
When you are held in contempt, you will be arrested and every right you have under our constitution and bill of rights-ENDS.
The Judge that puts you in jail has to justify that incarceration to not a living soul!
The only Judge that can set you free is the one that put you in jail, to begin with.
Yes there is a ‘writ of habeas corpus in some scenarios, which puts you before another ‘brethren’ Judge, who most likely has lunch scheduled with the Judge that put you away-so good luck on that.
I asked an attorney why they don’t fight that unmitigated power, he said, “we love it, for Judges hardly ever put attorneys in jail and the contempt power makes people do what the attorney wants them to do”!
Who Judges the Judges?
In theory, it’s the voters who supposedly have the ‘power’ to elect and or to ‘not retain’ Cook County Judges (except of course the appointed associate Judges-whom are completely ’cloaked’ and ‘invincible’)
But you the voter really don’t care-and boy oh boy, do they count on that!
When you, the apathetic voter go to the polls, they have conveniently given you one simple button that simply says, ‘retain all’
And, since you cannot even name two, and, you have errands to run, you ‘retain all’, because after all, if you do not want to retain them, you have to go through a seemingly endless list of no name Judges whereby you must check