How is the Occupy Movement Worse Than The NYPD - NYPD Must Pay $15 Million for Illegally Arresting 22,000

How is the Occupy Movement Worse Than The NYPD - NYPD Must Pay $15 Million for Illegally Arresting 22,000

For almost 30 years — from 1983 to 2012 — the New York Police Department went about arresting people under laws that state and federal courts had long declared unconstitutional, cuffing and booking almost 22,000 people. In 2010, federal judge Shira A. Scheindlin finally held them in contempt of court. Yesterday, she signed an order approving what is effectively their punishment: a $15 million class-action settlement that could generate individual payments of as much as $5,000.

Those arrested were forced to defend themselves in court and even served jail time for completely lawful behavior. The class action settlement also requires the city to help the courts vacate and seal all convictions stemming from the illegal arrests.

“NYPD used these void laws over the past few decades to target people based on poverty, race and sexual orientation,” said J. McGregor Smyth, an attorney from the Bronx Defenders and a lead attorney for the class. “We are happy that the city has finally taken responsibilities for these abuses, agreeing to pay meaningful damages to its victims and to stop its unconstitutional practices once and for all.”

The three unconstitutional laws under which the NYPD made the illegal arrests prohibited people from loitering to panhandle, to search for sex partners or to wait in a bus or train station. Federal and state courts struck down all three of those laws between 1983 and 1993 as violating First Amendment rights, according to The New York Times.

As NYPD officers continued illegally arresting people under the unconstitutional laws, the department made efforts to stop them. It increased communication and training, disciplined some of the officers and conducted an internal investigation, according to The New York Times. However, Judge Scheindlin found the NYPD in contempt of court because, she wrote, they were not proactive about preventing the problem.

“Nearly every measure that the city has undertaken,” she wrote, according to The New York Times, “has been at the direction of the court, the prodding of plaintiffs, and/or under threat of sanctions.”

Most of the violence committed around the Occupy movement has been by police against people exercising their first amendment rights. While some of the OWS folks have behaved badly, they have a ways to go to catch up with the NYPD and several other police departments who are acting like Russian police who have acted against protesters for freedom in Russia.

Occupying Corporations: How to Cut Corporate Power and Return it To The People

Occupying Corporations: How to Cut Corporate Power and Return it To The People

“Corporations are people, my friend.” Mitt Romney at Iowa State Fair

Corporations are obviously not people.  But Romney is accurate in the sense that corporations have hijacked most of the rights of people while evading the responsibilities. An important part of the social justice agenda is democratizing corporations.  This means we must radically change the laws so people can be in charge of corporations.  We must strip them of corporate personhood and cut them down to size so democracy can work.  People are taking action so democracy can regulate the size, scope and actions of corporations.

One of the most basic roles of society is to protect the people from harm.  The massive size of many international corporations makes democratic control over them nearly impossible.

Corporate crime is widespread.  The New York Times, ProPublica and others have revealed Wall Street giants like JPMorgan, Citigroup, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs have been charged with fraud many times only to get off by paying hundreds of millions.  Professors at University of Virginia have documented hundreds of corporations which have been found guilty or pled guilty in federal courts.

Corporate abuse is even more widespread.  For example, Corporate Accountability International named six to its Corporate Hall of Shame, including: Koch Industries for spending over $50 million to fund climate change denial; Monsanto for mass producing cancer causing chemicals; Chevron for dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Ecuadorian Amazon; Exxon Mobil for being the worst polluter; Blackwater (now Xe) for killing unarmed Iraqi civilians and hiring paramilitaries; and Halliburton, the nation’s leading war profiteer.
Making corporations responsible to democracy of the people is challenging considering Wal-Mart, the world’s biggest corporation, does more business itself annually than all but two dozen of the two hundred plus countries in the world.   Without dramatic changes, how can we expect people in small or even big countries to force corporations like Wal-Mart, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, BP, Toyota or Chevron to live by the same rules all the people have to?

Justice demands we make sure corporations do not harm people.  Democracy must require that they operate for the common good.

In order to cut corporations down to size, the people must strip corporations of the special artificial legal protections they have created for themselves.

The story of how corporations took the full rights of legal persons in one of the great perverse tragedies in legal history. Corporations have worked the courts mercilessly since 1819 to take a wide variety of constitutional rights that were designed to cover only people.  For example, the Fourteenth Amendment was passed in 1868 to make sure all citizens, particularly freed slaves and people of color, had full rights.  There was no mention of protecting corporations. But corporations jumped on this opportunity resulting in a questionable Supreme Court decision that granted them legal personhood.  At roughly the same time, the Supreme Court approved “separate but equal” racial segregation.  Thus in thirty years, African Americans lost their legal personhood, while corporations acquired theirs.

Corporations now claim: 1st amendment free speech rights to advertise and influence elections: 4th amendment search and seizure rights to resist subpoenas and challenges to their criminal actions; 5th amendment rights to due process; 14th amendment rights to due process where corporations took the rights of former slaves and used them for corporate protection; plus rights under the Commerce and Contracts clauses of the constitution.

The most recent corporate judicial takeover of constitutional rights is the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United versus the Federal Election Commission.  The court ruled that corporations are protected by the First Amendment so they can use their money to influence elections.

Because of the bad Supreme Court decisions, it takes a constitutional amendment by the people to change the laws back.  An amendment requires two-thirds of both houses of Congress to agree then three-quarters of the states must vote to ratify.  This will take real work.  But despite the growing size and unrestricted power of corporations, people are fighting back.

Dozens of groups are working to reverse Citizens United and restore limits on corporate election advocacy.  In January 2011, groups delivered petitions signed by over 750,000 people calling on Congress to amend the Constitution and reverse the decision.  More than 350 local events were held in late January 2012 to challenge the Citizens United decision.

Groups challenging this injustice include Code Pink, Common Cause, Free Speech for People, Moveon.org, Move to Amend, National Lawyers Guild, POCLAD, Public Citizen, People for American Way, The Center for Media and Democracy, and Women’s League for Peace and Freedom. 

Many groups are asking for a broad constitutional amendment that makes it clear that corporations are not people and should not be given any constitutional rights.  Representatives Ted Deutsch of Florida, Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont have sponsored bills in Congress to start the process for a constitutional amendment to make it clear that corporations are not people, are not entitled to the rights of people, and cannot contribute to political campaigns.

There are also many energetic actions at the state level.  People for the American Way list organizational efforts in nearly all 50 states to end corporate influence in elections or amend the constitution.

Massive corporations now rule the earth.  But they are recent arrivals which can and should be dispatched.  It is time for people to again take control.  The legal fiction of corporate personhood and the constitutional rights taken by corporations must cease.  Join the efforts to cut them down to size and restore the right of the people to govern.

It is always a good laugh to hear a conservative Republican say they stand for freedom or liberty. They are owned and operated by corporate masters who could care less about their personal liberty. Try fighting a corporation in court that has done you wrong. It will be corporate lawyers versus the little guy. You may actually grow old and die before they pay you for harm they have done you or your family. Complain about you right to privacy. Sure government intrusion has grown since 9-11, but corporations now regularly claim the right to spy on your every click and exchange information with other corporations. And you can always find a conservative or libertarian say that "private" entities have the right to do that - heck they may even go to the bother of offering up some bs about natural law.

Is it 2012 or 1968. You Can Hardly Tell By The Conservative Republican Candidates and Their Race Baiting

Is it 2012 or 1968. You Can Hardly Tell By The Conservative Republican Candidates and Their Race Baiting

It’s commonplace to note that Newt Gingrich’s dog-whistle appellation that Barack Obama is the “food stamp president” is both racist and politically cynical. But the stereotyping of black government dependency also serves the strategic end of discrediting the entire social safety net, which most Americans of all races depend on. Black people are subtly demonized, but whites and blacks alike will suffer.

Gingrich persists because it’s a dependable applause line, and because his political fortunes keep rising. Compare that to September, when Mitt Romney attacked then-candidate Rick Perry for calling Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” Perry backtracked, insisting that he only wanted to bolster the program and ensure its solvency. But in his 2010 book “Fed Up,” Perry made his opposition to Social Security clear, calling it “a crumbling monument to the failure of the New Deal.” Scrapping entitlements is a core tenet of contemporary fiscal conservatism, but most of the time politicians only get away with attacking the most vulnerable ones: Medicaid, food stamps and welfare cash assistance, which are means-tested and thus associated with the black (read: undeserving) poor, although whites make up a far greater share of food stamp recipients. Government welfare programs with Teflon political defenses — Medicare and Social Security — are nearly universal entitlements and thus associated with “regular” (read: white) Americans.

“Ending welfare as we know it,” as Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans did in 1996, is one thing. “Ending Medicare,” Republicans were last year reminded, is something else altogether. “Keep your government hands off my Medicare,” declared a 2009 Tea Party town hall attendee who today might very well be an ardent supporter of Gingrich’s assault on food stamps. It is a political lesson that free-market fundamentalists have to relearn with some frequency. It was only 2005,  after all, when President George W. Bush launched his ill-fated proposal to privatize Social Security — a setback he later called his greatest failure.

Yet as more government programs of any sort are framed as pernicious, laissez-faire ideologues are again emboldened to get rid of everything.

As recently as November 2009, the New York Times reported that stigma around food stamps had faded; the program received strong bipartisan support as millions of newly impoverished Americans reached out for food assistance. But temporarily cautious politicians had only stashed the old playbook on the top shelf, and the revival of welfare queen demagoguery made for quick political results. Nationwide, state legislatures are moving to impose drug testing of welfare, and even unemployment insurance, recipients.

“If you go apply for a job today, you are generally going to be drug-tested,” Florida Gov. Rick Scott said in October 2010. “The people that are working are paying the taxes for people on welfare. Shouldn’t the welfare people be held to the same standard?”

And and then came the push for cuts. Few noticed in April  2011 when House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., proposed cutting $127 billion from the food stamp program. The same went for the proposed dismantling of Medicaid, the healthcare entitlement for the nation’s poorest, which would be transformed into a block grant to the states with no coverage requirements.  Everyone was focused on Ryan’s audacious proposal to privatize Medicare, and conservative pundits were eager to sink the popular entitlement under the banner of pragmatic fiscal seriousness. “The Ryan budget,” David Brooks wrote at the time, “will put all future arguments in the proper context: The current welfare state is simply unsustainable and anybody who is serious, on left or right, has to have a new vision of the social contract.”

Republicans quickly backtracked. But the effort to dismantle the “poor black people” entitlements continues unabated. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Corbett this month announced that people under 60 with more than $2,000 in savings or other assets — cars and homes generally excluded, savings very much included — will be barred from receiving food stamps. The move elicited widespread criticism from anti-hunger advocates but little concerted political resistance. Corbett’s administration also cut 88,000 Pennsylvania children from Medicaid.

But politicians have more trouble getting away with criticism of less stigmatized benefits. Corbett suggested on the campaign trail that “The jobs are there. But if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there.” Democrats pounced and he rushed to issue a clarification, though a  conservative think tank eagerly backed up his original position.

Unemployment benefits, however, are on the political cusp: Once somewhat invincible like Social Security and Medicare, some states have made cuts amid the campaign of stigmatization.  In South Carolina, state-funded jobless benefits were reduced from 26 to 20 weeks. Republican state Sen. Kevin Bryant blogged, “I’m disappointed that we have a significant segment of our society leeching [off] the system.” Arkansas, Missouri, Michigan and Florida have also reduced benefits. Yet it was just two months ago that Republicans suffered their greatest embarrassment of 2011 after nearly blocking the extension of unemployment benefits.

Welfare was “reformed” in 1996 because politicians, and many white Americans, were convinced  the program’s beneficiaries weren’t meritorious. Indeed, the entire history of  the American safety net is one of programs losing popularity as they are associated with poor black people. Initially blacks were largely excluded from New Deal welfare. It was when the War on Poverty broke down racial barriers that white public opinion turned against it. “Increasingly associated with Black mothers already stereotyped as lazy, irresponsible, and overly fertile,” writes Northwestern School of Law’s Dorothy Roberts, “it became increasingly burdened with behavior modification, work requirements, and reduced effective benefit levels.”

The same was true for public housing, which once received broad-based support. But in the 1950s, whites moved to segregated suburbs and blacks were left behind, and the projects became unpopular and underfunded. Housing benefits for upper-income Americans, like the mortgage interest rate deduction, are not, to be sure, subject to such negative stereotypes, and neither are the billions in federal and state dollars that have been spent on highways and federally subsidized mortgages for disproportionately white homeowners.

Or take public schools. If all of our children, black and white, rich and poor, were in one big system, that system would get ample support. But since many poorer students of color are segregated into separate, unequal and low-performing districts, policy solutions like charters and an obsession over standardized testing that would never pass muster in a wealthy district are advocated as pragmatic solutions.

Count yourself lucky that rich people still (for the meantime) breathe the same air as everyone else.

Rick Santorum has declared, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” (He now says that he said “blah” people.) On Social Security, Santorum is making what appears to be a safe argument for reform: cutting rich people out of the program. Right now, Social Security belongs to everyone. Cutting rich people out is the first step to making it a program for the poor. Making something a program for the poor — see food stamps, Medicaid and welfare — is the first step toward eliminating it. While crazy Newt Gingrich talks about black people and food stamps, Mitt Romney (whom Brooks, of course, calls “serious”) resurrects a big idea: privatize  Medicare. That, of course, is why conservatives so fear single-payer universal healthcare: They know that once we got it, we would never let them take it away.

If some whites reap some cold comfort from Gingrich’s performance, the racial hostility on display comes at a much higher cost to the American people as a whole. We have long since traded the possibility of a decent society for fear and resentment. So watch out for the next attack on “the food stamp president.” The entitlement they end might be your own.


*Conservatives keep saying - in the middle of the second worse recession in our history, of which they caused - that since markets are perfect all Americans have to do is get off their lazy arses and get a job, we don't need a safety net with programs like Medicare and unemployment insurance. In other words do not believe what you see, do not believe reality, believe what conservative propagandists tell you to believe.

Fed Up With Congress? Get Rid of One of Its Worse Congressmen, Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin

Can Paul Ryan—and His Radical Anti-Middle-Class Agenda—Be Beat?

House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, is the poster boy for the assault on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. His budget plan, which laid the groundwork for the undermining of those essential programs and their eventual privatization, speaked a national outcry earlier this year. A historically Republican Congressional seat in western New York fell to the Democrats in a special election that turned largely on the question of Ryan’s austerity agenda.

But could Ryan himself be beat in 2012?

It’s possible. His southeastern Wisconsin district has elected Democrats in the past. It voted for Barack Obama in 2008. And even after a Republican-friendly redistricting, it is still home to traditionally Democratic towns such as Racine, Kenosha and Janesville.

Ryan faces a determined challenger in Democrat Rob Zerban, a local elected official in Kenosha who has been running hard all year. And a new poll suggests that Zerban, who has made the defense of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid the core theme of his campaign, poses a genuine threat to the Republican incumbent.

Pollster Paul Maslin writes, on the basis of his survey of 405 voters in Ryan’s district, that the fight over Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid has “weakened incumbent Paul Ryan, who used to enjoy electoral and image majorities well over 60%. Ryan’s favorable rating has declined to 54% positive, his job rating is 55% and his reelect is 54%—all this before the beginning of an active campaign against Ryan. When voters hear positive information about Rob Zerban and Paul Ryan, Ryan’s support weakens further to 52%. Rob Zerban’s description receives a better than 3 to 1 positive reaction.”

Maslin adds that: “after respondents hear one additional paragraph description linking Ryan to the Republican leadership in Congress and describing his authorship of the House budget plan, his support falls below 50% and his favorable rating becomes like Obama’s and Walker’s—dead even at 46% positive and 46% negative. And… Rob Zerban trails Ryan by only six points after this very brief exposition of Ryan’s signature idea, 49-43%, with undecideds holding nearly unanimously negative views of Congress in general and more than 80% saying they have either a negative or neutral feeling toward Ryan at the end of the poll.”

Why Is Anti-American Values Candidate Mitt Romney Lying About Democrats and Equal Opportunity

Why Is Anti-American Values Candidate Mitt Romney Lying About Democrats and Equal Opportunity

So Mitt Romney, writes Thomas Edsall in The New York Times, wants to make the election about entitlements vs. opportunity.  He warns darkly against a government that “provides every citizen the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to innovate, pioneer or take risk.” This is the sort of thing that used to scare the bejesus out of Democrats and still does frighten some of them, but it needn’t. Romney’s error in this framing is one Republicans often make—assuming that they are the “real Americans,” and Democrats are in some way fake Americans, and therefore all of middle America must agree with them.

Romney’s approach is clever up to a point. It does successfully blend more traditional Republicanism with Tea Party resentment (reflecting, perhaps, the way in which this supposedly “new” Tea Party is really just the same old anger at poor people and nonwhite people, outfitted anew in sans culottes). He uses the lie Republicans have used for many, many elections, that liberals and Democrats insist not on equality of opportunity but equality of result. And he invokes “government dependency”—a well-turned locution I must confess, those being two pretty unappealing words to most people. If he becomes the nominee, and if he can get most Americans to see the election as a choice between the candidate who wants Big Daddy government to look after every aspect of your life and the candidate who insists on your freedom to pursue wealth and liberate yourself from any obligation to those below you, then he’ll be in pretty good shape.

But there exist mountains of evidence that most Americans don’t think the way Republicans want them to. As Edsall notes: “The American public is highly conflicted on the subject of providing aid to people in need. While strongly opposed to ‘welfare,’ decisive majorities support more spending in key public policy areas. Polls conducted since 1972 by the General Social Survey show that by margins of two to one, voters consistently say too little is spent on the poor, on education, on health care, on drug treatment—the list is long.”

And that’s just spending on the poor. Spending on the middle class enjoys far greater support. “Welfare” as we once knew it being largely off the table as a divisive political issue, the Republicans really don’t have much material to work with here. In one sense, the entire GOP approach on these issues since Ronald Reagan’s time has been to hide the actual agenda because Republicans know most people don’t agree with them. A famous memo from Paul O’Neill’s Treasury Department in early 2001 to the Bush White House told the new president and others to be careful about juxtaposing tax cuts with spending because “the public prefers spending on things like health and education over cutting taxes.”

Conservatives will not and cannot argue with the reality of Democrats on public policy and the concept of equal opportunity. Democrats want everyone to have a CHANCE to prove themselves and to achieve. Because most Americans believe the same thing - it is a challenge that most Americans are personally familiar with through their own life experience - so the integrity challenged conservatives twist that to mean wanting everyone to have equal outcomes by force of law. That is yet another conservative BIG LIE. Not to mention how cowardly it is that they will not have an honest debate about the subject.

If Newt Gingrich is Fundamentally Anti-Democratic Republic, What Does That Say About The Conservative Base

If Newt Gingrich is Fundamentally Anti-Democratic Republic, What Does That Say About The Conservative Base

“I’m not sure I understand how that works,” Bob Schieffer, of CBS, said to Newt Gingrich on “Face the Nation.” Gingrich was explaining how he would handle, or manhandle, judges who didn’t agree with him. In a debate a few days earlier, on Fox News, he had called America’s courts “grotesquely dictatorial”; he said that he had “warned” Supreme Court Justices to their faces that if “you keep attacking the core base of American exceptionalism, and you are going to find an uprising against you which will rebalance the judiciary.” He told Schieffer that he was ready to send the Capitol police to bring judges to Congress to explain their decisions, to abolish entire courts, and, as President, to put his hands over his ears and pretend that he didn’t hear rulings that he didn’t like.

Gingrich expounds on various theories so often and so grandiosely that it can be hard to know whether he is stating a policy or just making things up. But he seemed as serious about this as about anything. “Your folks said to me be sure and ask him about judges so I know this is something you want to talk about,” Schieffer said at the beginning of the segment. Gingrich also directed viewers to a paper they could find at Newt.org, which he’d put together

    because I knew I was launching a topic that no other presidential candidate in modern time has launched. And I knew it had to be intellectually defensible.

The paper, which is more than fifty pages long (pdf), is much like Newt: skewed and self-important, its danger mitigated only by its lack of discipline, and seemingly constructed in the belief that anything will sound “intellectually defensible” if you add enough quotes from the Federalist Papers. (It’s also a bit hard to find on Newt.org, where the “Learn More” tab sends a person off to buy things at gingrichproductions.com.) Basically, he argues that the Supreme Court is is acting in a close to criminal way when it disagrees with anything the Congress and President agree on, or rules on matters of national security or public safety, or arrives at a decision that is unpopular or against “the culture.” The same is true of the lower federal courts, in his view.

Gingrich’s list of what he calls “constitutional steps” to take against judges includes several questionable measures, like abolishing unaccommodating courts, but one item stands out: “Ignoring a judicial decision.” This is the one that most confused Schieffer. “How do you decide, how does the president decide what’s a good law and I’m going to obey the Supreme Court or what’s a bad law and I’m just going to ignore it?” he asked.

This may be the place to pause and note that Gingrich’s scheme makes little practical or legal sense, that it has been rejected by Republicans like Mike Mukasey, George W. Bush’s former attorney general (“It would lead us to become a banana republic, in which administrations would become regimes, and each regime would feel it perfectly appropriate to disregard decisions of courts staffed by previous regimes,” Mukasey told the Times; “That’s not what we are”); that he mangles key cases, from Dred Scott to Cooper v. Aaron (which he argues is the ur-text for the judicial usurpation of Presidential and congressional power, although, as PolitiFact notes, in rating Gingrich’s statement’s on “Face the Nation” “Mostly False,” it’s actually about state officials); that he cites an order Lincoln gave that is news to Lincoln scholars; that his whole approach is about as un-conservative as one could get, in terms of its scorn for the eleven score years of effort that has gone into the still unfinished project of perfecting our union and securing our liberties; and that there is a serious argument to be made that one shouldn’t drive oneself mad figuring out what this is all about, because Newt’s whole judicial plan is just a vector for code words to excite Republican primary voters (prayer in schools, pornography, gay marriage), and his campaign is going to implode anyway. (Dahlia Lithwick, eloquently containing her impatience, wonders if beating up on judges, who can’t fight back, simply appeals to him as a bully.) Given all that, why worry about Newt?

There are a few reasons. One has to do with those code words: it’s worth figuring them out, and engaging in the conversation to which Gingrich’s meanderings may only be an allusion. Iowa, after all, is a state in which three judges lost their jobs in a recall campaign after ruling in favor of gay marriage. Was it just historical clumsiness that led Gingrich to cite Cooper v. Aaron, which was decided in 1958, in a period of the Court’s great civil-rights cases, as the moment when the principle of judicial supremacy was arrived at, rather than Marbury v. Madison, or any of several landmark cases in between? Many of his lines about judicial “oligarchs” and the dictatorship of the “lawyer class” echo those heard in Southern statehouses in the fifties and sixties.

And then there is the question of history and its uses. What is notable about Gingrich’s foraging in our country’s annals is that he treats what some might view as low or at least troubling moments, such as Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus or Roosevelt’s court-packing scheme, as prizes—sources of comfort and encouragement. What should be admonitions are inducements, not just precedents but lodestars. That should give pause to any President—including the current one, in his countenancing of the National Defense Authorization Act, with its provisions on indefinite detention—who thinks that the situation he faces is a truly unique crisis that allows for a dodge of the rule of law. It might be useful to picture a Gingrich-like figure a hundred and fifty years for now, in a silvery jumpsuit or whatever they’re wearing then, bringing up Guantánamo as he defends the military commissions on Gliese-581d.

Gingrich’s second-favorite example of judicial overreach, after the Ninth Circuit rulings on religious speech in public institutions (overturned, incidentally, by the Supreme Court) is Boumediene v. Bush, which recognized that habeas corpus ought to be available to prisoners at Guantánamo. One of the spectres, in the discussion around Boumediene and other Bush-era detention cases, was the court’s decision, in Korematsu v. United States, deferring to an executive order for the internment of Americans of Japanese dissent. (In an example of the plasticity with which he treats facts, Gingrich cites Korematsu, a case in which the Court did just what he says it should, as an example of the danger of unchecked judges.) A part of Korematsu that has endured is the passage, in Judge Robert Jackson’s dissent, in which he warned that, by going along with the argument of military necessity, the court was establishing a principle:

    The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.

Gingrich picks up those loaded weapons, wherever he can find them, and adds on sniper scopes and Teflon bullets. He also, in his distortions of the past, covers toy water guns with shoe polish and pretends that they are real. But sometimes a person armed with a fake still manages to rob a bank. And Newt is still in the race.

Newt is just your average conservative. He hates the basic framework of the Constitution and the freedoms, and checks and balances it guarantees. So like the average conservative he has a point of view he pulled out of who knows where and uses mangled bits and pieces of the law and history to justify his deeply Anti-American beliefs and those of his knuckle dragging followers.

Like Most American Conservatives Newt Gingrich Admires the Tools of Tyrants

Like Most American Conservatives Newt Gingrich Admires the Tools of Tyrants

Newt Gingrich and His 'Rock, Paper, Scissors' Constitution

The candidate is selling a wrongheaded plan for legislators to bully the judiciary

 "[T]he surest curb on judicial activism, for those who fear it, is executive and legislative activism in defense of constitutional liberties. The courts possess only so much power as the other branches relinquish."
                                                                           -U.S. District Judge Frank Johnson, 1979

The closer Newt Gingrich gets to the Republican nomination for president, the more unhinged become his attacks on the independence of the federal judiciary. In early October, when Gingrich was nowhere in the polls, he ginned up a patently unconstitutional argument for subpoenaing judges to come before Congress to justify and explain what Gingrich considers their "radical" decisions. "The spectacle would be like a dog walking on its hind legs," said Bruce Fein, the respected conservative attorney and former Reagan official, when asked about Gingrich's plan. "You are surprised not that it is done ineptly, but that it is attempted at all."

Now, leading most polls, but evidently still needing his own radical pitch, Gingrich has doubled down on his crackpottery. On Sunday morning, he told Bob Schieffer of CBS News' Face The Nation that the Capitol police, or federal marshals, could and should come and arrest those judges if they refuse to respond in person to a subpoena seeking to publicly shame them for making unpopular decisions. He also delivered this shuddering version of the Constitution, an unfamiliar Rock-Paper-Scissors version, in which the promise of separation of powers is akin to a playground game:

    Here's the key -- it's always two out of three. If the president and the congress say the court is wrong, in the end the court would lose. If the congress and the court say the president is wrong, in the end the president would lose. And if the president and the court agreed, the congress loses. The founding fathers designed the constitution very specifically in a Montesquieu spirit of the laws to have a balance of power not to have a  dictatorship by any one of the three branches.

Poof, just like that, the leading candidate's "key" to nowhere. What Gingrich really is saying, under the guise of blasting "elitist" judges, is that the Bill of Rights would no longer be used to protect individual rights because the judges who help ensure those (often unpopular) rights can be outvoted by the White House and the Congress. In President Gingrich's world, evidently, the Supreme Court would not have the final say on the law. The majority, as represented by the popularly elected branches, would have the ultimate vote. Not in every case, Gingrich says, just in some. Does that reassure you the way he meant it to?

Here's the Face The Nation video from this morning in which Gingrich says "... there's no reason the American people need to tolerate a federal judge who who is that out of sync with an entire culture...."

There are two possibilities for this level of jeremiad. Either Gingrich actually believes this nonsense, in which case he would be a constitutionally dangerous president, or he doesn't, in which case he's committing constitutional heresy just to win a few primary votes. Either way, it is conduct unbecoming a president. Close your eyes for a second and imagine if a Democratic candidate for the White House suggested that the judiciary be neutered by the White House and Congress; if a "liberal" running for president suggested that individual liberties and minority rights would hereafter be defined by Washington. Wouldn't Gingrich be first in line with his pitchfork and torch?

Gingrich's view is simply an appeal to the mob. Which way is public opinion blowing? Well just forget judges ruling on the merits of the law and the structure provided by the Constitution and the courts, let's just go with what the mob wants on any particular day. Not exactly what the Founders had in mind when they established the SCOTUS. Modern conservatism is literally infested with this constant attacks on American values, wrapped up in plastic patriotism. It is mind boggling how many people fall it.

Police and Politicians Across America Spend Tax Dollars To Shut Down Ist Amendment: Millions Spent To Evict Camps, While Cutting Shelter Funds

 

Police and Politicians Across America Spend Tax Dollars To Shut Down Ist Amendment: Millions Spent To Evict Camps, While Cutting Shelter Funds

As cities around the country have swept Occupy Wall Street camps from their plazas and parks in recent weeks, a number of mayors and city officials have argued that by providing shelter to the homeless, the camps are endangering the public and even the homeless themselves.

Yet in many of those cities, services for the homeless are severely underfunded. The cities have spent millions of dollars to police and evict the protesters, but they've been shutting down shelters and enacting laws to prohibit homeless from sleeping overnight in public.

In Oakland, Atlanta, Denver and Portland, Ore., there are at least two homeless people for every open bed in the shelter system, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. In Salt Lake City, Utah, and Chapel Hill, N.C. -- two other cities that have evicted protesters from their encampments -- things are better but far from ideal. In Chapel Hill, according to the HUD study, there are 121 beds for 135 homeless people, and in Salt Lake City, 1,627 for 1,968.

Heather Maria Johnson, a civil rights attorney at the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, said most cities in the U.S. lack adequate affordable housing, emergency or transitional housing, or other social services for people who are either homeless or are in danger of losing their homes. "This was true before the current economic crisis and remains true today, particularly in areas that have cut social services due to budget concerns," Johnson said.

According to HUD, job losses and foreclosures helped push more than 170,000 families into homeless shelters in 2009, up nearly 30 percent from 2007. Of course, those are some of the same problems that have inspired people to protest.

ATLANTA

After Atlanta's Mayor Kasim Reed forcibly evacuated Occupy Atlanta from a public park, protesters moved into a homeless shelter. As it turned out, the shelter had been tied up in court battles with the city for a few years, and the city had planned to close it. The shelter was scheduled to be shut down a few days after the protesters moved in, but that date has since been postponed indefinitely and protesters have taken up the shelter's cause.

Local stakeholders -- including city officials, the local business development group Central Atlanta Progress, Emory University and other business interests -- have been trying to boot the Task Force homeless shelter from its home as it sits on a valuable piece of real estate.

The fight between the shelter and its opponents goes back at least to 2008. In a recent court case, the task force that runs the shelter contended that Emory University had been trying to rid their area of the shelter for years. Emails released in court show that officials from Emory approached major private donors to the task force to make their case against the shelter, and that they talked with investors about foreclosing on it. And in recent weeks, the shelter has fought the city to prevent local authorities from turning off their water.

Some point out that the media has been paying more attention to the shelter's troubles since the protesters' arrival. Earlier this month, the county told a local TV station that tuberculosis had broken out at the shelter. Protesters told HuffPost that they thought these claims were bogus.

One protester, Tim Franzen, said he'd been living in the shelter for weeks and had yet to see signs of anyone getting sick. He described the claim as an attempt to smear the Occupation and the shelter.

So did Shab Bashiri, another protester. "The city wants to shut it down with absolutely no alternative," she said. According to Bashiri, the protesters had not only been "occupying" the shelter but had also been sleeping outdoors in areas where homeless people stay.

The shelter is the largest in the southeast, housing more than 1,000 people on some nights. "The city doesn't have the infrastructure to deal with 1,000 people," Franzen said. "So where would they go? We don't know."

Atlanta has been flagged as one of the worst cities nationally in which to be homeless and has the widest income gap between rich and poor.

Many protesters argue that the city should fund the shelter with the money they've spent on dealing with the protest. The mayor's office reports they spent nearly $500,000 in just two weeks dealing with Occupy Atlanta, most of it on overtime pay for police. Maurice Lattimore, who helps run the shelter, said $500,000 could fund the shelter easily for two years. He noted that the city hasn't put any money into the shelter's coffers since the court battle began three years ago.

The Atlanta mayor's office did not respond to a request for comment.

PORTLAND

In Portland, Ore., Mayor Sam Adams said despite his support for the Occupy movement's principles, the Portland camp was getting dangerous. After the eviction, the mayor pointed to the presence of homeless people and people with mental illnesses. Nearby businesses had been pressuring him with claims that homeless residents were scaring away customers.

Judas James, a member of Occupy Portland who is himself homeless, said the protesters have tried to help homeless people who sought shelter with them by providing food, medical attention, tents and blankets.

"If there was money there for them, these people could be taken care of," James said. "It's hard because we want everyone to be safe, and we just don't have the resources to help them with it."

If the city were to take care of them using the money they've spent to pull down tents and clean up the park, it would amount to nearly $850,000, according to data from Mayor Adams' office.

Adams has acknowledged that the Occupy Portland movement has highlighted the city's homelessness problem, and said he supports a lot of the protesters' positions.

The city has invested $13 million towards relieving homelessness in the past five years and has devised a long-term plan to combat the problem. Yet, in an attempt to climb out of a budget hole of over $3 billion, Oregon has slashed its funding for social services by more than $73 million.

Amy Ruiz, a spokesperson for the mayor, wrote in an email that "providing social services and maintaining peace are not mutually exclusive. The City must, and does, do both." Ruiz pointed out that several nonprofit organizations, which receive money from state and local governments, had moved several dozen homeless people out of the Occupy camps into shelters, motels and other "lower-impact, and safer, camps."

Ruiz said more than 20 outreach workers representing at least seven organizations reached out to the homeless at the encampments before shutting them down.

Dennis Lundberg, an outreach worker, told Adams that the camp was doing more harm than good to Portland's street youth, who preferred the camp to the shelter system because they could reap the benefits of free meals without submitting to the sorts of rules imposed by the shelters.

DENVER

In October, Denver Mayor Michael Hancock came out in support of new legislation that would ban homeless people from sleeping in public places overnight.

"We only have one downtown," Hancock said at the time. "We cannot afford to lose our city core. If people don't feel safe going downtown, that is a threat to the very vitality of our downtown and our city."

A couple weeks later, Hancock said he didn't want to allow protesters to set the precedent for sleeping in tents in the public parks. This was a prelude to Denver sending in riot police to evict the protesters.

Johnson, the civil rights attorney with the NLCHP, said the organization has noticed a nationwide increase in laws that criminalize homelessness, including laws that prohibit sleeping, sitting or storing belongings in public spaces, even when there is insufficient shelter space.

She argued these criminalization measures cost far more to municipalities than providing adequate shelter to people. Citing studies conducted in 13 cities and states, she said that it costs on average $87 per day to jail someone, compared to $28 per day to house them in a shelter. "With state and local budgets stretched to their limit, it's profoundly irrational to waste taxpayer money on these expensive criminalization policies," she said.

According to Revekka Balancier, the communications director of the homeless outreach program Denver Road Home, the city's homeless shelters are at capacity every night, and many have long waiting lists. And she noted that the city's homeless population is growing. A report from 2009 found that 10,604 people were living on the streets and in area shelters on the night the survey was conducted. By 2011, that number had increased by 6.5 percent, to 11,377.

Not to worry Americans can still camp out in front of retail outlets to buy cheap crap. So we do have some freedoms left. Funny how you can get in tons of trouble in America for being homeless, but the too big to fail banks can get rich stealing billions from the government and the American people. To date I don't think one billionaire thief has been evicted from his home or pepper-sprayed.

US Senate To Vote On Bill That Will Allow The Military To Arrest Americans On American Soil And Hold Them Indefinitely

National Rifle Association Radio Smears Occupy Movement With White House Shooting

National Rifle Association Radio Smears Occupy Movement With White House Shooting

Sorry Fox and Friends, in the race to gin up political controversy following the arrest of suspected White House shooter Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez the National Rifle Association's (NRA) Cam and Country was the clear winner. Maybe it's time to send a Fox News talent scout to check out their operation.

Wednesday evening, hours before Fox and Friends attempted to smear the Occupy movement by referring to Ortega-Hernandez as the "Occupy shooter," NRA radio host Cam Edwards was using the White House shooting to attack gun control groups.  Not surprisingly neither Fox and Friends or Cam and Company had their facts straight.

Edwards spent the beginning of yesterday's show interviewing PJ Media contributor Bob Owens and asked him about a recent blog post in which Owens reported that Ortega-Hernandez "was suspected of being at Occupy DC."

After complaining about press coverage of an anti-Obama protester that showed up to an August 2009 Obama rally with an AR-15 rifle, Cam suggested that Ortega-Hernandez shows gun control groups are ignoring "left-wing insurrectionists".

    EDWARDS: I noticed that even the gun control groups like Violence Policy [Center] and others, they love to talk about the right-wing insurrectionists, but when a guy who has been hanging out at Occupy DC is now accused of taking a shot at the White House, I don't see anything in their timeline about those crazy left-wing insurrectionists.

    OWENS: Well, of course not. And being one of the crazy right wing insurrectionists that Media Matters has cited on more than one occasion, I'm not surprised at all. They have a message and a narrative that they have been working on for years and years and they aren't going to let a little thing like a fact get in the way of that narrative.

But there's simply no evidence linking Ortega-Hernandez to Occupy DC. While there were reports that the Secret Service searched the Occupy tents on Monday, the Washington Post reported Wednesday afternoon that investigators "have found no connection between him [Ortega-Hernandez] and the Occupy protesters." Speaking on Fox and Friends, Michelle Malkin offered her thoughts on Ortega-Hernandez saying, "the guy was just completely off his rocker and had nothing to do with any coherent sense of political ideology."

Edwards references the Insurrectionism Timeline that is maintained by the Coalition To Stop Gun Violence, not the Violence Policy Center. It's ridiculous to ask them to add Ortega-Hernandez based on Edwards own imagined connection between Ortega-Hernandez and left-wing politics.

As for Owens' inclusion in Media Matters research on violent and insurrectionist rhetoric, we'll let Owens words speak for themselves:

Bob Owens: "Go To Your Congressman's Office... If You're Willing To Do The Time For The Crime, Have A Swing At Him." In a March 24, 2010 post on his blog, PJ Media (formerly Pajamas Media) contributor Bob Owens suggested that assaulting members of Congress was an acceptable form of protest:

    No matter what you think of Obamacare and the craven ideologues that passed it, is totally unacceptable to threaten their relatives or friends and put them in danger.

    Go to your Congressman's office and scream at him in the most colorful language possible. Hang him in effigy at protests. If you're willing to do the time for the crime, have a swing at him.

    Better yet, throw a shoe... after all, the left values such behavior as a form of "vigorous dissent," and will no doubt ask for any charges against you to be dropped.

    Perhaps one day stronger action will be required if Progressives continue to trample on our liberties in their blind quest for power. But that time is not now. [Confederate Yankee, 4/24/2010]

Bob Owens: "I Pray For Peace. But I Prepare For War." In a July 31, 2010, post, Owens wrote:

    Our would-be ruling class has abandoned the principles that founded this nation. They are attempting to establish a state of affairs where the people serve the government and the government determines your success or failure. Corruption no longer matters. Sovereignty no longer matters. The rule of law no longer matters.

    They have won in a bloodless coup.

    Or so they would like you to think.

    Whether they actually win or not depends upon how much you love your family and your nation and the principles that made this nation great. Our founders themselves believed in the right of revolt, and knew better than any of us that governments must be replaced from time to time. They were wise enough to provide us with a constitutional framework that will outlast any government, including this one. We can dispose of this government, and restore the Constitution that has served us and the rest of the world so well for so long.

    We stand at the brink.

    [...]

    The question for you, my fellow Americans, is simple.

    Will you fight, or will you surrender your liberties?

    I pray for peace.

    But I prepare for war. [Confederate Yankee, 7/31/10]

Bob Owens On Media Matters Employees: "I Hope They Do Feel Threatened."  In an August 3, 2010, blog post titled "Closer to Midnight," Owens suggested political allies conduct a "serious review of our capacity for violence" and wrote that he hoped Media Matters employees "feel threatened":

    Propagandists for the elitists at Media Matters seem troubled by A Nation on the Edge of Revolt [an Owens blog post].

    They portray it as a threat when "Conservative media figures openly discuss armed revolution."I have not yet been swayed to the point of view that an armed conflict is inevitable, TN_NamVolunteer.

    But we are close enough that one would be wise to prepare for a possible conflict, just as one would prepare for any coming storm. [Confederate Yankee, 8/3/2010]

As a gun owner and someone who supports the general right to have a firearm for home protection, The NRA continues to be a huge embarrassment to gun owners. The NRA are generally insecure assclowns who like to talk tough - this is supposed to prove their manliness. The NRA sees anti-gun conspiracies everywhere when there are none. They went on a gun buying spree after Obama was elected because he was supposedly going to take everyone's gun. Obama has not passed one  - repeat not one - restrictive gun law.

Staten Island cop bragged of being a gangsta on MySpace

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Herman Cain Plantation Master Would Reduce Women to Slave Status

Herman Cain Plantation Master Would Reduce Women to Slave Status

Today on Face The Nation, GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain claimed that Planned Parenthood wants to “kill black babies” and is part of an organized effort to commit “genocide” against the black community:

    BOB SCHIEFFER: Okay. I want to ask you, since we’re on the subject of abortion, it was at one point back there when the question of Planned Parenthood came up and you said that it was not Planned Parenthood, it was really planned genocide. Because you said Planned Parenthood was trying to put all these centers into the Black communities because they wanted to kill Black babies–

    CAIN (overlapping): Yes.

    SCHIEFFER: –before they were born. You still stand by that?

    CAIN: I still stand by that.

    SCHIEFFER: Do you have any proof that that was the objective of Planned Parenthood?

    CAIN: If people go back and look at the history and look at Margaret Sanger’s own words, that’s exactly where that came from. Look– look up the history. So if you go back and look up the history– secondly, look at where most of them were built. Seventy-five percent of those facilities were built in the Black community.



Both of Cain’s proof points are demonstrably false.

Cain’s statement about the location of Planned Parenthood clinics is wildly inaccuate. According to a study by the Guttmacher Institute from January, “Fewer than one in 10 abortion clinics are located in predominantly African-American neighborhoods, or those in which the majority of residents are black.”

Politifact previously evaluated the Cain’s claim that Planned Parenthood was created to “kill black babies” and deemed it “a ridiculous, cynical play of the race card.”

In 2004 and 2006 Cain led a radical group that produced radio advertisements accusing Democrats of wanting to kill “black babies.” Cain himself provided the voiceovers for some of the ads.

Cain would have the government have absolute control over a woman's body and basic rights. His view of women is in fact much like that of the world's worse despotic regimes, such as Iran. Cain would make a good ayatollah.

Republican pundit Roger Simon: Being ‘a little bit racist’ helps in GOP primary

House GOP's "Job Creating" Spending Cuts Destroyed 370,000 Jobs

Why inequality in America is even worse than you thought - A new study shows economic and social conditions in the U.S. rank near the bottom of the developed nations

Democracy Under Attack By Conservative Republicans -The Year of Voter Suppression

Democracy Under Attack By Conservative Republicans -The Year of Voter Suppression

From new photo ID requirements to permanently disenfranchising citizens with past felony convictions to ending same-day registration, many states have introduced bills and passed legislation this year that will put in place obstacles that make it significantly harder for millions of people to vote in 2012. Five million, in fact, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, an institute that focuses on issues such as voting rights and campaign reform.

In a report on the voting law changes the authors, Wendy R. Weiser and Lawrence Norden, write:

    Ahead of the 2012 elections, a wave of legislation tightening restrictions on voting has suddenly swept across the country. More than five million Americans could be affected by the new rules already put in place this year—a number larger than the margin of victory in two of the last three presidential elections.

As writer Ari Berman points out in this video, these changes are coming “just in time for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign.” While those leading the charge for voter suppression laws cry foul on charges of intentional disenfranchisement, claiming the moral high ground as warriors against voter fraud, Berman points out in a recent Rolling Stone article, “A major probe by the Justice Department between 2002 and 2007 failed to prosecute a single person for going to the polls and impersonating an eligible voter, which the anti-fraud laws are supposedly designed to stop.” He continues:

    Out of the 300 million votes cast in that period, federal prosecutors convicted only 86 people for voter fraud – and many of the cases involved immigrants and former felons who were simply unaware of their ineligibility. A much-hyped investigation in Wisconsin, meanwhile, led to the prosecution of only .0007 percent of the local electorate for alleged voter fraud. "Our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere," joked Stephen Colbert.

Writing for Al Jazeera, Heather Digby Parton gives some historical context to this current state of affairs, arguing that, against the interests of the wealthy and privileged, voting rights for all Americans “was one of the great American democratic accomplishments of the 20th century.”

    In the United States, there has always been tension about the franchise, going all the way back to the beginning of the Republic. Aristocrats were afraid of it for the simple reason that it would mean the government might have to represent and defend people whose interests interfere with their own interests: to maintain their wealth and pass it down to their heirs.

    Whenever you give the vote to poor people and others who need government's protections against the predations of privilege, you are endangering that arrangement - and the privileged fight back. Conservatives are traditionally their soldiers in that battle….[Today] conservatives have been able to leverage racial resentment and a sort of perverted populism to help their wealthy benefactors keep their money.

The Brennan Center for Justice report looks to be “the first full accounting and analysis of this year's voting cutbacks” and seeing them all together—along with their possible consequences on future elections—is sobering, to say the least. It begs us to keep in mind what Utne Reader associate editor Danielle Magnuson wrote in an earlier post on this topic: “voting for our leaders is not a privilege but a sacred right. A disenfranchised person’s vote has the same weight as that of a wealthy and powerful person—and that’s the way it should remain.” Unfortunately, many in charge around the country seem to disagree.

Where is the outrage that many students, seniors and Americans of color are the most adversely affected by these right-wing conservative laws to discourage voting, thus participation in our democracy. You certainly will not hear any outrage from conservatives who have never had much respect for small r- republicanism - the concern for the individual and their rights. Conservatives, like every despotic movement in history thinks political power is best left in the hands of the ruling elite. 

Record number of deportations still not enough for anti-immigration zealots. The Obama administration kicked out 400,000 people this year, satisfying no one and winning no support for reform

What Is Judicial Activism? Just Watch The Conservative Supreme Court Kiss Corporate Ass and You'll Know

What Is Judicial Activism? Just Watch The Conservative Supreme Court Kiss Corporate Ass and You'll Know - How a Corporatist Supreme Court Cabal Joined Forces With Right Wing and Kochs to Quietly Sell Out Our Democracy

Bill Watterson is Mark Twain--with a drawing pen. He is a master cartoonist, but also a sharp-witted observer of the absurd, with an impish sense of humor. From 1985-1995, Watterson penned "Calvin and Hobbes," the truly marvelous comic strip that featured six-year-old Calvin and his stuffed tiger Hobbes. In Calvin's inventive and iconoclastic mind, Hobbes was a genuine tiger (and his best friend) and they shared boundless adventures that challenged conventional thinking and defied authority, often crashing right through the prescribed social order of the 'real' world.

A recurring theme in the strip was a two-player baseball competition in which both the kid and the tiger simply made up the rules as they went. In one strip, Calvin has hit the ball thrown by Hobbes, and he's scampering toward home plate:

Calvin: Ha Ha! A home run!
Hobbes: You didn't touch all the bases!
Calvin: I did, too.
Hobbes: No, you didn't. You didn't touch seventh base.
Calvin: Yes, I did! I touched the water barrel right after the front porch.
Hobbes: That's not seventh base. That's twelfth base!
Calvin: I thought the garage door was twelfth.
Hobbes: The garage door is twenty-third base. You touched them all out of order, and you didn't touch the secret base.
Calvin: The secret base?? What's the secret base?!
Hobbes: I can't tell you. It's a secret.

That exchange between a six-year-old and a stuffed tiger pretty well sums up the nonsensical political gamesmanship being played out today by the five-man lineup of corporatists on the Supreme Court: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas. They are on an unrestrained ideological tear, making up their own rules to score big points for corporate power. Reasoning? Try twenty-third base! Precedent? Throw it out! History? Rewrite it! The Constitution? Slide by it! Judicial restraint? Only for liberals! Logic? That's a secret! The rule of law? The law is us!

Only, this isn't a game. Barely six years into Roberts' tenure, he and his narrow majority have thoroughly politicized the Court. The one branch of our national government that was intentionally designed by the Founders to set the rule of law above politics has been turned into another political front group to advance corporate rule. The Constitution granted life tenure to the justices specifically so they could feel free to stand up to wealthy wrongdoers--particularly those avaricious business schemers who wanted to endanger the people's rule by establishing, as Jefferson put it, "the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations."

Hiding under robes

"Leveling the playing field can sound like a good thing. But in a democracy, campaigning for office is not a game." --Chief Justice John Roberts, fumbling a sports metaphor in a June ruling that does, indeed, tilt the political field to assure that corporate-backed players win the crucial money game.

In case after case, the five hard-core Republicans of the Roberts Court have been chopping furiously at the hard-earned legal rights of workers, consumers, voters, and others who dare to challenge the power of big business elites to reign over us, both politically and economically. There has been way too little public attention focused on (much less a sustained political challenge to) what has become a spectacular abuse of government power. A survey last year by the Pew Center found that nearly three-fourths of Americans have no idea who John Roberts is. Eight percent named Thurgood Marshall as the chief justice (and I certainly wish he was, even though he's been dead for 18 years).

It's not that the public is stupid, but that the Court deliberately hides itself. No C-SPAN or other television cameras are allowed, even in the relatively few times the justices convene in public session. The bulk of the justices' official policy-making work takes place behind closed doors. They practically never have press conferences or give interviews, and some have even refused to let the media cover their 'public' speeches.

Curiously, mass media outlets show little journalistic curiosity about the doings of this tiny but enormously powerful third branch of our national government. If Obama so much as sneezes, newscasters and pundits are all over it, and hordes of reporters and analysts constantly poke into the back rooms and dark corridors of Congress. Yet, nine black-robed mandarins--with the power to overturn the decisions of the two elected branches, as well as decisions by state governments and even of the voting public-- sit in splendid obscurity in an imposing, white marble bunker, periodically tossing out rulings that essentially make law.

When the mass media do cover the Court (usually only when a new justice is named or a major edict is handed down), the reporting is superficial, even lazy. Two months ago, for example, the New York Times ran an"analysis" of decisions in the 2010-2011 term, concluding that the hallmark of the Roberts Court is "defending free speech." Never mind that it is corporate speech that they have radically enhanced, to the detriment of your voice and mine. But the Times didn't probe.

It's time for you and me to probe, because the Roberts-Alito-Kennedy-Scalia-Thomas cabal is openly aligning itself with the all-out political push by such far-right billionaires as the Koch brothers to impose a corporate plutocracy over America (see February 2010 and June 2011 Lowdowns). "Come on, Hightower," you might say, "such learned jurists wouldn't be engaged in such extremism." Oh? Remember Bush v. Gore in December 2000? In that case, five justices abruptly shoved their way into totally unprecedented, overtly partisan territory to dictate who would be America's president. With no need to do so, they imperiously interrupted a recount of the people's vote in Florida, usurped jurisdiction from state courts, invented a legal theory out of thin air, and arbitrarily seated corporate-favorite George W in the White House.

This was so far beyond the bounds of the Court's role, such an arrogant act of magisterial extremism, that none of the usurpers were willing to claim the decision as their own. None put their name on the opinion. Also, in an extraordinary confession, the opinion itself concedes its legal shoddiness by saying that it's a one-of-a-kind decision that should not be cited as a precedent for any other case. Tellingly, it hasn't been.

Eleven years later, three of those five Bush v. Gore judicial extremists--Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas--are still on the bench, forming a solid core of today's corporate cabal.

Also, while it's not widely known, Roberts himself was a key member of Bush's election-stealing team in Florida. A protege of Republican attack dog Kenneth Starr, Roberts was a corporate lawyer in Washington at the time (becoming a multimillionaire by helping such clients as Big Coal defend the abominable min-ing method of mountaintop removal). He was flown to Florida to polish legal briefs and do a dress rehearsal to prepare Bush's lead lawyer for getting the Supremes to seize the election for the Republican.

In 2005, George W returned the favor by entrust- ing the top spot on the nation's highest Court to this radical corporate activist. With the addition of Alito in 2006, Corporate America had its slim ideological majority in place.

Not only did pro-corporate decisions begin to flow, but the cabal also became brazen about its alliance with the right-wing Republican network that's now pushing aggressively in Washington, state capitals, and all of America's courts to rewrite laws so an "aristocracy of our moneyed corporations" can rise above the American people's democratic rights and authority. Jeff Shesol, author of Supreme Power (a history of FDR's fight with the Court), wrote a June New York Times op-ed about this "flurry of judicial fraternization," warning that it threatens to destroy the Court's credibility as an impartial guardian of the rule of law. Here's a sampling of their fraternization:

In 2010, Scalia was a featured participant in the Koch brothers' annual political retreat, joining assorted billionaires and GOP operatives as they plotted strategy and raised money for defeating Democrats. And this January, when tea party Republicans marched triumphantly into Washington to take their seats in Congress, they were welcomed by Scalia, who presented a constitutional tutorial to the newly minted partisans.

In 2008 and 2010, Alito lent his supreme prestige to the fund-raising efforts of the right-wing, anti-Democrat mag, American Spectator. He served as chief draw and keynote speaker at the group's 2008 fund-raiser, where he regaled wealthy funders with Joe Biden jokes. In 2009, he headlined a fundraiser for the Koch-backed Intercollegiate Studies Institute(which boasts the right-wing video trickster and criminal activist James O'Keefe among its alumnae). Also, in 2010, Alito was the chief sparklie at a high-dollar event for the Koch-funded Manhattan Institute.

Thomas, too, has put his judicial imprimatur on the Koch boys' annual plutocratic political gathering. He addressed their 2008 getaway at a Palm Springs resort, apparently enjoying four days there on the tab of the Koch-funded Federalist Society. He also is closely tied to the Heritage Foundation, which is richly financed by the Kochs. In 2009, he was the featured draw at a fundraiser for the group, which often takes part in Supreme Court cases--and which employed Thomas' wife, Ginny, from 2003-2007, paying her $686,000 that the justice "inadvertently omitted" from his financial disclosure filings. In addition, Thomas is corruptly entangled with Dallas real estate billionaire and right-wing political funder Harlan Crow. Even though Crow's financial and political interests are directly affected by the high court's rulings, Thomas has been injudiciously accepting a steady flow of gifts from the tycoon, including: a $175,000 donation from Crow to a Georgia library project dedicated to Thomas; a $2.8 million gift for an historic preservation project being developed under Thomas' supervision near his childhood home; and a $500,000 donation to Thomas' wife, Ginny, last year so she could start a tea party lobbying and political group (which, by the way, takes an aggressive partisan stance on legal questions that will soon come up for Justice Thomas' consideration, including Obama's health care law).

Good grief! Is there no code of ethics outlawing such rank conflicts of interest for federal judges? Yes. But, conveniently, Supreme Court justices have been exempted from the code.

Soiling clean elections

The Lowdown has periodically exposed the Court's slaphappy extremism and its make-up-the-rules activism as found in such now-infamous cases as Citizens United (see Sept. 2009, March 2010, and Feb. 2011 issues). In that 2010 ruling, using contorted language that even Orwell could not have dreamed up, the five actually re-wrote the laws of nature, decreeing that lifeless corporate entities are "persons" with a constitutional right to "speak" in every American election. These necromancers then invented a "voice" for corporate-speak: money. They ruled that top executives of these inanimate for-profit constructs are entitled to spend unlimited sums of corporate cash (money that belongs to shareholders, not to them) to run secretly funded campaigns for or against anyone they choose.

Interestingly, none in this bloc of five has ever run for office, much less won. So they have no real- life experience with the way big money suffocates democracy, both in politics and in the close confines of government decision-making. Worse, all of them express an uncommonly deep contempt for a truly democratic process, in which the people would reign over corporations, allowing grassroots human endeavor and ideas to trump the blunt force of money.

They really should talk to their shrinks about this psychosis. But, meanwhile, they keep working out their contempt on us, not only by jacking up the clout of corporate players, but also by slapping down grassroots efforts to give people power a path around the ever-rising money barrier:

2006. Roberts, Alito, Kennedy, Scalia, and Thomas vote to overturn limits that the people of Vermont placed on campaign contributions.
2007. The same five throw out Wisconsin's effort to keep corporations from swamping their elections with last-minute ad blitzes.

2008. The same five strike down the "millionaire's amendment," a part of the McCain-Feingold election finance reform passed by Congress in 2002; this provision had allowed candidates who were confronted by self-financed millionaire opponents to raise more money than otherwise allowed in order to level the playing field.

June 27, 2011. The same five kill the "matching funds" provision of Arizona's Citizens Clean Elections Act--a provision that was key to making the state's extremely popular and successful public financing system work.

The Arizona ruling was a stinging slap in the face to the conscientious citizens of that state. Arizonans have labored diligently to free their politics from the corruption of big money, while also opening the possibility of holding office to those who don't have piles of money or don't want to be beholden to those who do. Nauseated in the 1990s by an epidemic of gubernatorial and legislative scandals, the people themselves launched a grassroots initiative to get the democracy-destroying corrosion of special-interest political contributions out of their elections. In 1998, Arizona voters emphatically said, "yes."

Their Clean Elections Act established a voluntary public financing system that gave office-seekers of all parties and all economic classes an alternative, no-strings-attached way to finance their campaigns. By agreeing not to take any special interest contributions, these candidates received a fixed sum of public money--enough for them to be competitive under normal campaign conditions and have their voices heard. However, abnormal happens. So, if clean-running contenders found their voices being drowned out by a flood of special interest cash flowing to a rival, the "matching funds" provision allowed them to get a limited level of extra money from the public fund to help counter the free-spending opponent's unfair advantage.

It is this matching mechanism that the mammon-worshipping Supremes went after. Why? Because it works. Former Governor Janet Napolitano, for example, says she could not have even considered running for Arizona's top office without the availability of this funding alternative, but with it she won two terms. A majority of all parties' candidates use the Clean law, and it is enormously popular with the public.

But the corporate powers hate, hate, hate it, for it diminishes their political control. Having failed again and again to repeal it at the state level, they turned to the vipers nest of Koch-funded, right-wing policy fronts to find a way for the federal courts to inter- vene and do their dirty work. With support from the American Legislative Exchange Council (see Feb. 2011 Lowdown) and the Institute for Justice, this clique developed a perversely-novel theory of law, framed it into a lawsuit, and had the Republican leader of the state house, John McComish, sign on as plaintiff.

The Roberts quintet happily swallowed the perverse legal theory fed to them in the case, known as Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett. Turning both common sense and the Constitution topsy-turvy, the Court found--get this--that Arizona's matching provision gives cash-poor candidates an unfair advantage over those flush with money. Huh?

Well, explained the five, money speaks in politics, and the speech of the rich is inhibited if they know that their money-raising can result in "counterspeech" from opponents. Corporatespeak, good; counterspeak, bad. In a twisted and overwrought opinion for the majority, Alito wrote that public matching funds impose an "unprecedented penalty on any candidate who robustly exercises [the First Amendment right to buy an election]." Okay, I edited-in that last bit, but that's precisely what the Court's majority (and the Koch brothers) are actually saying. Not only are they freeing big money to shout as loud as it wants in our elections, but the Court has now allowed the money interests to quash the political speech of others. The good news is that Roberts & Company only nixed the matching provision, not the Clean Election Act itself. At least not yet. As Roberts wrote: "We do not today call into question the wisdom of public financing."

Stop them before they rule again

These guys are a clear and present danger to our democratic rights, not only in election cases, but also in a rising flood of upside-down economic rulings--including their shameful June decision involving Walmart's discrimination against women employees and their ridiculous ruling in April allowing AT&T to defraud customers. Both of these court opinions eviscerate the people's right to hold corporations accountable by filing class-action lawsuits. The Roberts Five are not objective and reasoned judges. They are crass political operatives disguised in robes of authority, deliberately contorting the law to transfer huge chunks of the people's power to corporate suites.

Roberts. Alito. Kennedy. Scalia. Thomas.

Memorize these names, for they are thieves. Put their names and deeds into every political discussion. Spread their infamy. Distribute wanted posters! Make bumper stickers. Send emails and letters-to-the-editor. Chastise Republicans for coddling them, Democrats for doing nothing, and tea partiers for giving these ultimate Big Government authoritarians a pass. It's up to us.

One of the big generalizations about the Constitution is that it exists in large part to protect the people from tyrannical government (some people say just "from government". That is an erroneous interpretation. Government itself must exists to act as a kind of referee). The only function of the Constitution is to protect citizens from powerful special interests. The right-wing Roberts Court does does see it that way. The conservatives on the Court -   Roberts. Alito. Kennedy. Scalia. Thomas. - think they should be looking out for the interests of corporations.