Tagged: political question doctrine

70 Years after the Holocaust, France agrees to pay “Jews” living in the U.S. $60M in REPARATIONS while AmeriKKKa has paid the descendants of African slaves ABSOLUTELY NOTHING and CONTINUES to MAINTAIN an ENVIRONMENT/CULTURE pervaded by the myth of white racial superiority.

Not long after Raphael Prober joined Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in 2008, he was asked to head a pro bono project advocating for Holocaust survivors who were seeking reparations from France’s national state-owned railway company, which operated the trains that transported them through the country to concentration camps in Germany and Poland.

Prober, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney who specializes in congressional investigations, policy and public law, says he did not hesitate to join the effort. Prober himself has many family members who were killed in Lithuania at the outbreak of World War II. But it wasn’t until he read a memoir by a man who leaped from a train that was carrying thousands to Auschwitz that Prober says he fully understood the importance of the work he was a part of.

“It painted such a vivid picture for me and made so clear how much he and his fellow survivors deserved justice,” he says. “After reading that book, I was all in.”

The author was a man named Leo Bretholz, and the book is called “Leap into Darkness.” Bretholz immigrated to Baltimore after the war and was active in the effort to gain reparations for Holocaust survivors living in the United States. While working on this case, Prober says, he and Bretholz became close.

Earlier this month, thousands of survivors, their family members, U.S. Department of State officials and dozens of lawyers had reason to celebrate. Seventy years after French trains began transporting what would become 76,000 deportees, the United States and France signed an agreement that gives Holocaust survivors who were carried to death camps $60 million in reparations. Those funds will be distributed by the State Department to several thousands of survivors or their family members.

“Most importantly though, to me, the agreement represents an acknowledgment of complacency and a very meaningful recognition of responsibility,” Prober says.

The railway company, Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Français (SNCF), was operated by the French government during the Nazi occupation of that country. France had reparations programs set up for deportees from France, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Poland and the United Kingdom, but none specifically for American survivors of the rail system.

“France recognizes that Americans and other foreigners deported during the Holocaust have not been able to gain access to the French pension program, and has agreed to compensate them through this agreement,” the French and American governments said in a joint statement.

Prober says his work has been to oversee strategy and to advocate at the State Department and in state governments. He says over 50 Akin Gump attorneys have worked on this case since 2005.

The case gained a sense of urgency about a year ago when Keolis, a subsidiary of SNCF, was invited to bid on a $6 billion project to build a light-rail line in Maryland, Bretholz’s home state, according to the Washington Post.

“SNCF willingly collaborated with the Nazis,” wrote Bretholz in a change.org petition, which gained more than 165,000 signatures calling for the company to pay restitution to American survivors.

Bretholz maintained in his petition that if SNCF had resisted, “even to a small degree, the number of those killed from France would have been greatly reduced. Had SNCF not imposed horrific conditions on its trains, many additional lives could have been saved.”

In March, the 93-year-old planned to testify before the Maryland State Legislature, but just days before he was scheduled to do so, he died, Prober says.

Bretholz had a good friend, Rosette Goldstein, who also survived the Holocaust and had been active in the effort to gain reparations. Goldstein’s father, who had been transported on SNCF trains, was killed at Buchenwald.

“She stepped up and said, ‘There’s no way someone’s not testifying on Leo’s behalf. I’m going to find a flight,’” Prober recalls. “And that’s exactly what she did.”

In a conversation with The Am Law Daily from her home in Boca Raton, Fla., Goldstein reflected on her work.

“I feel that I’ve done something for my father,” she says. “I’ve given him some kind of a life, a name. He’s there. He was alive.”

Even before Akin Gump entered the picture in 2005, Holocaust victims began pursuing claims against SNCF five years earlier, according to sibling publication The National Law Journal. They were represented by attorneys Stephen Rodd of Abbey Spanier and Harriet Tamen of Simon & Partners.

Tamen, who originally asked Akin Gump to join the effort to win reparations, says she is disappointed with the agreement reached with the French government.

“The work continues because the settlement does not cover the vast majority of the people we represent,” she says. The agreement covers survivors, spouses of survivors and children who lost one parent, but it does not include children who lost both parents or people who lost aunts, uncles or cousins.

Akin Gump not only lobbied for reparations, but also for the passage of the state and federal legislation, including the Holocaust Rail Justice Act, first introduced in 2003 and reintroduced by Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) in 2011, according to The National Law Journal. The bill would allow American survivors to make claims against SNCF or other railroads.

Both Prober and Goldstein attended the signing of the reparations agreement on Dec. 8 at the Treaty Room in the State Department.

“It’s coming 70 years late, but most importantly, it’s happened,” Prober says.

Goldstein says she was sorry her friend Bretholzwasn’t there, but adds, “I felt him at that signing. I felt that he was there.”

When are descendants of African slaves going to demand and receive reparations from the United States government for 500 plus years of oppression, which includes slavery [the “African Holocaust”], legal segregation and continuing discrimination? This nation has been unjustly enriched from its atrocious crimes against humanity and they owe us more than a TRILLION dollars!

Source: Nell Gluckman. “Akin Gump Partner Helps Holocaust Survivors Win Reparations.” The American Lawyer. December 17, 2014. http://www.americanlawyer.com/id=1202712863574/Akin-Gump-Partner-Helps-Holocaust-Survivors-Win-Reparations-#ixzz3MLsZSv88.

TODAY marks a year from the day Arbitrator David L. Gregory of the American Arbitration Association issued his Partial Final Award, which concluded that “William Morris Endeavor Entertainment LLP discriminated against [me] in violation of pertinent federal, state, and local law prohibiting discrimination in employment on the basis of race” and indicated during phase two of our bifurcated proceeding, that I was entitled to the full gamut of monetary damages (e.g. back pay, front pay, compensatory & punitive damages, “reasonable fees and costs, as a pro se non-attorney prevailing party on statutory claims in a case of considerable procedural and substantive complexity,” etc.)

Although the American Arbitration Association knew they did not have jurisdiction to disqualify Arbitrator Gregory after he issued his final decision concerning on the issue of liability, they disqualified him anyway and never provided a reason. Thus, my victory was short-lived due to the fact that AAA conspired to deprive me of my constitutional right to due process and Republican appointed federal judge P. Kevin Castel of the Southern District of New York turned a blind eye to the overall fraud that was being perpetrated in my case at the hands of highly unethical Loeb & Loeb LLP attorneys Michael P. Zweig and Christian Carbone on William Morris’ behalf.

the Reply to my Motion for Extraordinary Relief is submitted to the 2nd Circuit!!!

Wow! I can’t believe that in four days, I was able to condense my discussion of the overall fraud that has been perpetrated upon the Court by Loeb & Loeb LLP and the Court itself, into those 10 pages!! What makes things even better, is that if the appellate court denies my Motion [without providing an ethical and objective judicial opinion], then this pleading can essentially serve as my petition for writ of certiorari to the Supreme Court.

Below are some pix chronicling my day as I prepared to submit what could very well be the last pleading I submit to the Second Circuit:

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Thank you GOD for always watching over me [and intervening while I was at the post office to prevent me from mailing Loeb & Loeb LLP the wrong version of the pleading]!!

“Our nation must hold ‘any corporation that breaks the law and enriches its bottom line at the expense of the American people’ accountable. In addition to significant monetary sanctions, ‘non-monetary measures must be put in place to facilitate change in corporate behavior and help ensure the playing field is level’ for all people in our democratic society. Therefore, my final request is that this matter be brought to the attention of the Departmental Disciplinary Committee (“DDC”) and the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. And since there is a dispute regarding the ‘political question doctrine’s’ applicability to this case, this case should also be brought to the attention of the President of the United States, Barack Obama, as well.”

Source: Pl. Fraud Upon the Court Motion, 93-94.

“Holocaust era settlements from U.S. based litigation have totaled over $8 billion. Similarly, Japanese internment victims have also achieved redress in the form of $1.2 billion in reparations.”

Source: Shelley Buchanan, Questioning the Political Question Doctrine: Inconsistent Applications in Reparations and Alien Tort Claims Act Litigation, 17 Cardozo J. Int’l & Comp. L. 345, 363, 2009.

spending the day reading about the “political question doctrine.”

The political question doctrine stems from the concept of separation of powers between the three branches of government. Courts invoke the doctrine to avoid deciding a case on the merits if it raises issues that could be better resolved through political processes, or where a judicial decision would infringe upon powers that the Constitution commits to the other branches of government.

The exact parameters of the politicalquestiondoctrine are uncertain, as two schools of thought have presented competing interpretations of the doctrine’s breadth and scope. The classical approach to the politicalquestiondoctrine has focused on textual interpretations of constitutional provisions that grant specific powers to the executive or legislative branches. According to the classical approach, courts should decline to adjudicate claims based on the politicalquestiondoctrine only if the Constitution grants one of the political branches the authority to resolve the issue. Over time, though, courts incorporated prudential considerations about the effects of judicial jurisdiction into their analyses of the politicalquestiondoctrine. This meant that rather than restricting their inquiry to the text of the Constitution, courts also considered the practical ramifications of deciding to hear a case. Other courts have eschewed textual analysis completely and relied solely on prudential concerns to find cases nonjusticiable.

Advocates of the prudential approach argue that courts should avoid “rampant activism” and maintain their legitimacy by declining to adjudicate controversial claims on their merits. Proponents of the classical approach, on the other hand, argue that courts must fulfill their constitutionally mandated obligations to adjudicate cases and should therefore abstain from cases only when the Constitution has committed resolution of the issue to another branch. They contend that the prudential approach could be subject to abuse and that courts might decline to adjudicate cases simply because of their potential for controversy or complex subject matter. The tension between the classical and prudential approaches and the lack of clear standards for courts to determine whether claims raise political questions have led to scholarly critiques of the political question doctrine as ill defined and poorly conceived.

Source: Sarah Willig. Politics As Usual? The Political Question Doctrine In Holocaust Restitution Litigation. 32 Cardozo L. Rev. 723, 727-729. 2010.