Category: Class Warfare

Caitlin Johnstone: Disrupt The Culture Wars

Ever since the rise of the “Religious/Christian Right,” culture war combat

Caitlin Johnstone

has been the number one activity highlighted by some sectors of the evangelical/ fundamentalist church.

I believe that this has been the root cause of the widespread fracturing we have seen among Christian churches in the Trump era. Such is the deceptive power of culture war combat ideology. We are told that the battle is for the casue of Christ. When, in fact, Christ has never called us to do any such thing.

Blogger Caitlin Johnstone offers a good analysis of this error embraced by today’s culture-warriors. They miss the bigger picture. American evangelicals are particularly guilty of this particular blindness.

Because evangelical Christianity has always preferred to identify with the wealthy and the powerful, the church rarely addresses the class war continually being waged in this society.

Fortunately, addressing the class conflict between the haves and the have-nots does not require an either/or decision, choosing between either class or cultural issues.

It is possible to address both at the same time. Sadly, evangelicals prefer to remain blind to the one and pour all their energy into the other.

Though I do not fully endorse Ms. Johnstone’s solution to this problem of neglecting the class issues in our society. I do find her social analysis to be spot on.

Here is a brief excerpt:

One of the great challenges faced by westerners who oppose the political status quo today is the way the narrative managers of both mainstream factions continuously divert all political energy away from issues which threaten the interests of the powerful like economic injustice, war, militarism, authoritarianism, corruption, capitalism and ecocide and toward issues which don’t threaten the powerful at all like abortion, racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia.

This method of social control serves the powerful in some very obvious ways, and is being used very effectively. As long as it remains effective, it will continue to be used. The worse things get the more urgent the need to fight the class war will become, anf the more urgent the need to fight the class war becomes the more vitriolic and intense the artificial culture war will become in order to prevent political changes which inconvenience the powerful. This is 100 percent guaranteed. And what’s tricky is that all the vitriolic intensity will create the illusion that the culture war has gotten more important, when in reality the class war has.

It’s just a straightforward fact that the more miserable, impoverished and disempowered the public becomes, the more hateful and all-consuming the artificial culture war will be made to prevent revolution. That’s what’s been happening, and that’s what will continue to happen. You can hate hearing it, and you can hate me for saying it. But it is a fact, and I think we all pretty much know it’s a fact.

You can read the entire article here.

“Why we need to face the best arguments from the other side”

When making a major decision, it is always important to know all sides of the argument at issue, as well a the consequences of change.

Now that Roe vs. Wade has been overruled, it’s worth remembering what used to happen to women who sought (illegal) abortions prior to 1973.

Before abortion’s legalization, the cleaning agent called Lysol was commonly used to induce abortion. 

It was often fatal.

Why would anyone do such a thing? Curiously enough, Lysol was subtly marketed as a (secretly) safe abortion method.

Though I am not “pro-abortion,” I certainly understand why so many women are now angry and upset.  The majority of women who seek abortions are married and poor.

Below is an excerpt from an article in The Atlantic Magazine written by Caitlin Flanagan, titled “The Dishonesty of the Abortion Debate” originally published in December 2019:

We will never know how many women had abortions via this method, or how many died because of it. Why was Lysol, with its strong, unpleasant smell and its corrosive effect on skin, so often used? Because its early formulation contained cresol, a phenol compound that induced abortion; because it was easily available, a household product that aroused no suspicion when women bought it; and because for more than three decades, Lysol advertised the product as an effective form of birth control, advising women to douche with it in diluted form after sex, thus powerfully linking the product to the notion of family planning.

In a seemingly endless series of advertisements published from the ’20s through the ’50s, the Lysol company told the same story over and over again: One woman or another had “neglected her feminine hygiene” and thereby rendered herself odious to her husband, leaving her “held in a web of indifference” and introducing “doubt” and “inhibitions” into their intimate life. It was illegal to advertise contraception nationally before 1977, so the Lysol ads performed a coy bit of misdirection—they said that if women didn’t douche after sex, they would lose their “dainty,” or “feminine,” or “youthful” appeal. The implication was that sex made them stink, which revolted their husbands. However, women in the past knew what women of the present know: Having sex doesn’t make a woman stink, and the only necessary items for keeping clean are soap and water.

Read with this in mind, the ads appear rife with coded references to the idea of contraception. One woman’s doctor has told her “never to run such careless risks” and prescribed Lysol. Another is told by her doctor that failing to douche with Lysol could “lead to serious consequences.” Many of the ads stress that Lysol works “even in the presence of mucous matter,” a possible reference to the by-products of intercourse; some promote the fact that it “leaves no greasy aftereffect,” probably a reference to the vaginal jellies that some women used as birth control.

A doctor tells one woman, “It’s foolish to risk your marriage happiness by being careless about feminine hygiene—even once!” This is the language of contraception: something that must be used every single time, that can lead to serious repercussions if skipped even once, that one should never be careless about. The “doubts” introduced to the marital lovemaking, and the “inhibitions,” are not the result of stink; they are the outcome of there being no reliable form of birth control and the constant anxiety that sex could result in an unwanted pregnancy.

There are dozens of these ads on the internet, where they forever shock young feminists. I’ve seen so many of them that I thought I knew all of their tropes and euphemisms. But this summer I came across one that stopped me cold. It was a simple image of a very particular kind of female suffering. The woman in this ad was not caught in a web of indifference; she was not relieved because she had been prescribed Lysol by her doctor. The woman in this image has been “careless”; she is facing the “serious consequences.”

In a single panel, we see a line drawing of the kind of middle-class white housewife who was a staple of postwar advertising, although invariably the products she was selling were of use and of interest to women of all socioeconomic classes and all races—this product in particular. Her hair is brushed and shining, her nails are manicured, and she wears a wedding ring. But her head is buried in her hands, and behind her loom the pages of a giant calendar. Over her bowed head, in neat Palmer-method handwriting, is a single sentence: “I just can’t face it again.”

There’s a whole world in that sentence. To be a woman is to bear the entire consequence of sex. And here is one woman bearing that consequence: a married woman—probably with other children, for this is a matter of “again”—who for whatever reason is at her breaking point.

"I just can't face it again" Lysol magazine ad

Boom unable to face one more pregnancy? Start making a list of the possible reasons, and you might never stop. Maybe she’d had terrible pregnancies and traumatic births and she couldn’t go through another one. Maybe she had suffered terribly from postpartum depression, and she’d just gotten past it. Maybe her husband was an angry or violent man; maybe he had a tendency to blame her when she got pregnant. Maybe she had finally reached the point in her life when her youngest was in school and she had a few blessed hours to herself each day, when she could sit in the quiet of her house and have a cup of coffee and get her thoughts together. And maybe—just maybe—she was a woman who knew her own mind and her own life, and who knew very well when something was too much for her to bear.

Go here to read the entire article.

Chris Hedges: No Way Out but War

Chris Hedges’ most recent editorial at Scheerpost is titled “No Way Out But War.”

As thorough and prescient as ever, Mr. Hedges catalogues the many ways in

Chris Hedges

which the American political-corporate-industrial establishment — a thoroughly bipartisan, insatiable behemoth — is destroying our country through the pursuit of endless wars.

None of our wars are “wars of necessity,” as if there has ever been such an ugly but cuddly beast. No. American wars are unnecessary wars of imperial aggression, pure and simple.

And this includes the current war in Ukraine, for which the US bears a sizeable load of responsibility.

Below is an excerpt from Mr. Hedges’ article. All emphasis is mine:

Permanent war has cannibalized the country. It has created a social, political, and economic morass. Each new military debacle is another nail in the coffin of Pax Americana.

The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.

The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.

Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d’état of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of “national security.” The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide. . .

. . .The 57 Republicans who refused to support the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, along with many of the 19 bills that included an earlier $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine, come out of the kooky conspiratorial world of Trump. They, like Trump, repeat this heresy. They too are attacked and censored. But the longer Biden and the ruling class continue to pour resources into war at our expense, the more these proto fascists, already set to wipe out Democratic gains in the House and the Senate this fall, will be ascendant. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during the debate on the aid package to Ukraine, which most members were not given time to closely examine, said: “$40 billion dollars but there’s no baby formula for American mothers and babies.”

“An unknown amount of money to the CIA and Ukraine supplemental bill but there’s no formula for American babies,” she added. “Stop funding regime change and money laundering scams. A US politician covers up their crimes in countries like Ukraine.”

Democrat Jamie Raskin immediately attacked Greene for parroting the propaganda of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Greene, like Trump, spoke a truth that resonates with a beleaguered public. The opposition to permanent war should have come from the tiny progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which unfortunately sold out to the craven Democratic Party leadership to save their political careers. Greene is demented, but Raskin and the Democrats peddle their own brand of lunacy. We are going to pay a very steep price for this burlesque.

You can read the entire article here.

But, What About the Children?

The title to this post, But What About the Children, was a common catch phrase on the long-running Simpson’s cartoon on the Fox network.

Whenever the Simpsons’ neighborhood seemed poised to confront a new, intrusive cultural challenge, the local pastor’s wife could be counted on loudly to lament, “But what about the children?”, giving parody to conservative Christianity’s ostensible concern for the health and well-being of America’s young people.

Monday’s leaked draft of an (apparently?) imminent Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade is now fueling cries of jubilation among the evangelical community that has fought for decades to rid this country of abortion and the tearful tearing of garments among abortion’s distraught defenders.

Even though I am against abortion per se, I am also disturbed at what the social consequences will be if/when access to abortion becomes more restricted. (I also understand that nothing is certain about these things, and the aftermath will be complex and undoubtedly surprising. See the Constitutional, civil rights attorney, Glenn Greenwald’s helpful discussion of these Constitutional issues here.)

Daniel K. Williams fine book, The Politics of the Cross: A Christian Alternative to Partisanship (Eerdmans, 2021), contains a very helpful analysis of abortion in the United States, the evangelical battle against Roe v. Wade, and what should be the Christian church’s response to the issue’s complexities.

[I encourage you to buy the book and read especially chapter three – I do not agree with everything he says, especially in his chapter on marriage and sexuality. I am also shocked that Stanley Hauerwas does not appear in his bibliography! But overall, Williams provides the most balanced discussion of hot button social issues I have yet found written by an evangelical Christian.]

Here are a few short excerpts from The Politics of the Cross (all emphasis mine):

But what most people involved in the abortion debate seem not to realize is that we have largely returned to a pre-Roe past even without a direct repeal of Roe. The number of abortions per year in the United States is now lower than in any year since 1973 [the year of the Roe v. Wade ruling]. . .The number of abortion clinics has fallen by about two-thirds during the past twenty-five years. There are now more than three times as many pro-life crisis pregnancy centers as there are abortion clinics [in this country]. (103)

The primary explanation given by women as to why they want an abortion is that they are too poor to successfully raise another child:

[Pro-lifers are right] in that restricting access to abortion. . . does reduce abortion rates. . . But pro-choice advocates are also right in saying that this method of reducing abortion rates is likely to keep more women in poverty. This suggests that if pro-lifers really care about protecting all human life, including the life of low-income pregnant women, they will not merely try to rescind Roe v. Wade but will instead couple their restrictions on abortion with expanded efforts to provide economic resources to the women whose poverty has been exacerbated by an additional pregnancy. (104).

Fifty-nine percent of women who have abortions are already mothers. . .75 percent of the women having abortions are impoverished or classified as “low income.” (105)

My conscience is deeply troubled by the close connection between abortion rates and poverty in this country.

The majority of women seeking an abortion in this country are moved by, not just a sense of hopelessness, but by the hopeless reality of their desperately impoverished lives. They have no hope that their new baby will have any chance whatsoever at a decent, safe, healthy future in America.

My conscience becomes even more deeply troubled when I remember that the number of Americans now falling into poverty has only continued to grow over the past thirty years.

When this fact is combined with the steady, draconian reduction of family, social services (both public and private) available to poor people today, my blood curdles and I begin to drift slowly in the forbidden direction of supporting Roe v. Wade.

Excuse me, but I find the conservative hypocrisy on this issue stunning.

For if we want to be genuinely pro-life, then we will not only care about reducing abortion, but we will care equally about providing universal health care, especially for mothers and their children, free neo-natal health care, free well-baby home visits, free classes in nutrition and infant care, free pre-school and Head Start programs, especially in poor neighborhoods.

Earlier this year politicians in D.C. fought tooth and nail over the “social welfare” provisions included in president Biden’s Covid Relief bill, ensuring that those aspects of the bill were whittled down to a mere shadow of their original goals.

Both Republicans and corporate Democrats – which is all Democratic Senators and the majority of Representatives – waved the red flag of “increasing the national debt” and “bankrupting our grandchildren!” So, the bill was raped and pillaged until it became a mere skeleton of its original version.

Yet, last week the president asked Congress to approve $33 billion for a new round of military support and arms purchases for Ukraine and our NATO allies.

I have no doubt that the same Senators and Representatives who were previously losing sleep over the nightmare of America’s poor and needy bankrupting the nation, will now happily sign their names to another $33 billion in armament to fight Russia!

Once again, as always, America has deep, deep pockets for war, but instantly becomes penniless and unconcerned when faced with her own impoverished mothers and children.

Every decision is made within a bigger context. Nothing is isolated. Nothing is pristine. Everything is connected.

The way in which those connections influence my actions will always reveal the truth about my moral priorities.

This constellation of recent, national actions concerning Covid Relief, the Supreme Court, poverty levels, and military appropriations lead me to one, inevitable conclusion: American conservatives are no more “pro-life” than the Roadrunner or Bugs Bunny. They are pro-a-particularly-sick-and-twisted-conservative-political-economic-ideology.

I am telling you here and now, Jesus of Nazareth has never been a member of that club. And neither should you.

The Supreme Court’s Corporatist Majority Continues to Whittle Away at the Bill of Rights

Radley Balko is a criminal justice reporter at the Washington Post. He

Journalist Radley Balko

recently wrote a piece entitled “The Supreme Court has abdicated its duty to the Bill of Rights.”

His discussion of the Court’s rulings about “qualified immunity” for the police makes for chilling reading. Qualified immunity means that the police cannot be held liable, i.e. they cannot be prosecuted or sued for damages, by those they injure.

In other words, the police can violate your Constitutional rights with impunity whenever they like as they like. Leaving us, the citizens whose tax dollars finance our local police force, without any recourse for damages suffered during an encounter with the cops.

This is exactly what we can expect from conservative, pro-corporate judges who care more about the protection of institutional power than the rights and freedoms of anonymous individuals.

Pro-life my ass.

It is another example of the ongoing class warfare that characterizes American society — and why the working-class continues to lose.

For those who don’t think any of this is a big deal, remember the old definition of a liberal: a liberal is a conservative who just got mugged (in this case, by the police).

Below is an excerpt from Balko’s piece. He explains the contested history of qualified immunity; it is well worth some focused attention:

The Supreme Court, having created the problem of qualified immunity to shield

United States Supreme Court

police from being held liable for their misconduct, keeps refusing to fix it.

This week, the court declined to review an especially outrageous ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit involving a Denver man who was detained for recording a traffic stop, then had his computer confiscated and searched.

No one doubts the man, Levi Frasier, had the right to record the stop. To date, six federal appeals courts have ruled there is a constitutional right to record police officers in public, a sentiment shared by the overwhelming majority of constitutional scholars. No federal appeals court has ruled the other way. In fact, the law is so well established that the officers in Denver were trained that citizens have such a right, and to respect it.

Yet the 10th Circuit ruled that because that circuit had yet to rule on the matter, the right was not yet “clearly established.” In a truly remarkable sentence, the court added, “It is therefore ‘irrelevant’ whether each officer defendant actually believed — or even in some sense knew — that his conduct violated . . . the First Amendment.”

In my last column, I looked at the origins of qualified immunity, the court-created doctrine that makes it extremely difficult to sue police officers for abuse and other constitutional violations. . .

You can read the entire article here.

Don’t miss the last paragraph…ok, here it is:

George Orwell famously wrote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” In defiance of everything we know about violence and state power — and for that matter most of human history — somehow, the Supreme Court has decided that the boot deserves more protection than the face.

The Rittenhouse Trial Has Nothing to Do with Race, But Everything to Do with Guns and Media Distractions

Watching segments of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial is like stepping into a

Kyle Rittenhouse

circus fun-house. It is disorienting for me because no one bothers to point out the obvious elephant in the room.

No, it’s not a matter of race. All of Rittenhouse’s victims (the word outlawed from the courtroom by the judge) were white.

It’s not about Jacob Blake, the black man shot seven times in the back by police at close range, whose shooting sparked the Black Lives Matter marches in Kenosha, WI were the shooting occurred.

The disorienting factor to me is the fact that a 17 year old kid crossed state lines (with his mother), purchased a semi-automatic rifle he could not legally own, and then casually walked the streets, parading himself before city police doing fist bumps with relaxing officers, and nobody stopped him.

Then after he murders a man, numerous onlookers try to disarm him (however ineffectual their attempts) as he casually walks away from his first victim (yep, there’s that word again). At that point the “active shooter”, aka Rittenhouse, believes he has the right to shoot more people “in self defense.”

I’m sorry but America has gone crazy.

The undeniable evidence of America’s insanity is not Black Lives Matter protests, or antifa agitators, but gun advocates’ and the Right-Wing’s unwillingness to acknowledge heavily armed, juvenile reckless endangerment as it parades through our streets after dark.

Nowadays such blatantly antisocial, dangerous, frightening, and ultimately deadly, behavior is perfectly acceptable. No one bats an eye (provided the shooter is a white male. So maybe there is a racial tint here, after all.)

And Rittenhouse will almost certainly be set free.

On an even more depressing related note, Matt Taibbi (one of my favorite journalists) points out the truly monumental economic story that is being ignored as the media keeps its cameras fixated on Rittenhouse.

“As America Falls Apart, Profits Soar” is the title of Taibbi’s  article. You can find it at his substack site.

It’s a common yet commonly ignored story.  The rich get richer while the rest of us become poorer. And nobody acts to stop the huge economic disparities that are becoming worse and worse.

Our growing wealth gap and class divisions are a much bigger pink elephant in America’s living room. A dangerous problem that billionaires and CEOs  prefer to ignore…at their own peril.

Below is an excerpt from Taibbi’s article (all emphases are mine):

As the country again prepares to go to war with itself, this time over a high-

Journalist Matt Taibbi

profile trial, a bigger story goes unnoticed.

. . . On the day the Rittenhouse trial began, the financial data firm FactSet released an eyebrow-raising report about the Covid-19 economy.

The firm noted that companies in the S&P 500 were set to post a net 12.9% profit in the third quarter of 2021. They pointed out this was the second-highest result since the firm began tracking the number in 2008. . . 

. . . Remember last year’s long summer of riots, that period that saw the whole world arguing over the definition of “mostly peaceful,” and saw Rittenhouse go charging into the streets of Kenosha? During that long stretch of unrest, corporate America, which had been headed for a depression in March of 2020, was soaring above the fray on an apparently endless, and endlessly escalating, ride to record profits. Take a look at this graph from the St. Louis Federal Reserve, and focus on the Jeff-Bezos-rocket-like ascent beginning in the second quarter of 2020:

Corporate profits in the second quarter of 2020 sat at $1.58 trillion. One year later, that number was $2.69 trillion, a roughly 71% increase. How many stories have you read in the last year telling you about how well the top end of the income distribution has been doing, while the rest of the country seemed to be falling apart?

Compared with how often you heard pundits rage about the “insurrection,” how regularly did you hear that billionaire wealth has risen 70% or $2.1 trillion since the pandemic began? How much did you hear about last year’s accelerated payments to defense contractors, who immediately poured the “rescue” cash into a buyback orgy, or about the record underwriting revenues for banks in 2020, or the “embarrassment of profits” for health carriers in the same year, or the huge rises in revenue for pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, all during a period of massive net job losses? The economic news at the top hasn’t just been good, it’s been record-setting good, during a time of severe cultural crisis.

Twenty or thirty years ago, the Big Lie was usually a patriotic fairy tale designed to cast America in a glow of beneficence. Nurtured in think-tanks, stumped by politicians, and amplified by Hollywood producers and media talking heads, these whoppers were everywhere: America would have won in Vietnam if not for the media, poverty didn’t exist (or at least, wasn’t shown on television), only the Soviets cuddled with dictators or toppled legitimate governments, etc. The concept wasn’t hard to understand: leaders were promoting unifying myths to keep the population satiated, dumb, and focused on their primary roles as workers and shoppers.

In the Trump era, all this has been turned upside down. There’s actually more depraved, dishonest propaganda than before, but the new legends are explicitly anti-unifying and anti-patriotic. The people who run this country seem less invested than ever in maintaining anything like social cohesion, maybe because they mostly live in wealth archipelagoes that might as well be separate nations (if they even live in America at all).

All sense of noblesse oblige is gone. The logic of our kleptocratic economy has gone beyond even the “Greed is Good” mantra of the fictional Gordon Gekko, who preached that pure self-interest would make America more efficient, better-run, less corrupt. Even on Wall Street, nobody believes that anymore. America is a sinking ship, and its CEO class is trying to salvage the wreck in advance, extracting every last dime before Battlefield Earth breaks out.

It’s only in this context that these endless cycles of hyper-divisive propaganda make sense. It’s time to start wondering if maybe it’s not a coincidence that politicians and pundits alike are pushing us closer and closer to actual civil war at exactly the moment when corporate wealth extraction is reaching its highest-ever levels of efficiency. Keeping the volk at each other’s throats instead of pitchforking the aristocrats is an old game, one that’s now gone digital and works better than ever. That might be worth remembering after the coming verdict, and ahead of whatever other hyper-publicized panic comes down the pipeline next.

You can read the entire article here.

Conservative Hypocrisy Over ‘Packing the Supreme Court’

Republicans and other conservatives were seized by conniption fits when

AP Photo. J. Scott Applewhite

President Biden formed a commission to investigate the possibility of expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court.

Quite predictably, the committee has recommended that the court should not be expanded. So what else is new in D.C.?

What that committee, Republicans, other erstwhile conservatives, and establishment Democrats all fail to recognize, at least in public, is that the Supreme Court has already been successfully “packed” by Senator Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump.

Millions of dollars of “dark money” has been invested in placing new justices on the bench that will predictably rule in favor of big-money, corporate interests.

The fact that some of these justices may also lean in an anti-abortion direction is a serendipitous coincidence for “pro-life” evangelicals who are generally so monomaniacally focused on their anti-abortion agenda that they give little thought to other issues at stake.

The Daily Poster has an important article entitled “How Dark Money Captured the Supreme Court” describing a recent report issued by three senior members of the Senate.

The report explains the pivotal role played by anonymous, big-money donors in the selection of the Supreme Court justices appointed by Donald Trump and the Republican members of the Senate.

Justice may still be blind — though that is debatable — but her sensitive nose can detect the sickening-sweet smell of money a mile away. And her hand is always held out for another corrupting contribution.

Here is the article. I strongly encourage you to follow the links and read the additional material you find there:

As Congress nears a deal on Biden’s Build Back Better reconciliation bill, a separate battle is quietly playing out within the Democratic Party over how to handle the extremism and minoritarian rule of the Supreme Court.

Last week, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sens. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., and Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., published a report on the way that dark money and corporations have captured the Supreme Court.

The report lays out how an extensive network of right-wing groups — including the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and organizations in the Koch network — have worked to appoint judges who undermine voting rights and favor corporate interests.

What is perhaps most remarkable about the report is that three senators, including the Senate majority leader, are raising serious questions about the legitimacy of an institution that many Democrats are unwilling to confront.

For example, just two weeks earlier, the commission that Biden set up to examine court reform published draft materials of their own report. Those materials expressed skepticism about adding justices to the court, suggesting that it would be seen as a partisan move and undermine public trust in the court.

“Some commissioners believe that there is a real risk that the willingness of Congress to expand the size of the U.S. Supreme Court could further weaken national and international norms against tampering with independent judiciaries,” said the draft document on court expansion, even going so far as to suggest that court-packing may be evidence of “democratic backsliding.”

But, as the three senators’ new report on “court capture” argues, the country’s highest court is already being manipulated.

Whitehouse separately wrote a law review article last week about the influence of dark money and dark money groups’ use of amicus briefs to influence the court.

“The effects of this litigation strategy on our democracy are frightening: the courts are becoming an arena for enacting policies by judicial decree that are too unpopular to pass through democratically elected legislatures,” he wrote. “These coordinated efforts warp the judiciary toward anonymous, ultrawealthy donor interests, all without the public ever learning about the role of dark-money interests in shaping the law.”

News Flash: CBN Actually Stands for the “Capitalist Broadcasting Network”

David Doel, host of The Rational National

Canadian commentator, David Doel, host of the YouTube program Rational National, is right to mock Pat Robertson’s cold-hearted, uninformed, slanderous, Republican propaganda report on the CBN program, The 700 Club. Watch Doel’s comments below as Pat Robertson spouts neoliberal nonsense about the recently passed Senate Infrastructure Bill:

It is clear, as if it wasn’t before, that the CBN abbreviation actually identifies this channel as the Capitalist Broadcasting Network, or perhaps the Conservative Broadcasting Network.

There certainly is nothing Christian about any of THIS. (Robertson’s remarks conclude at the 4:20 mark):

This, folks, is neither news nor informed commentary. It IS hard-core, right-wing propaganda of the worst sort.

Of course, faithful Christians can be politically conservative. But God’s people cannot confuse lies, misinformation, slander, propaganda, or blind partisanship with honest, informative communication. 

From all that I can see, neither Pat Robertson, the 700 Club, nor CBN are able to distinguish truth from falsehood much less integrity from manipulation.

Whether or not you watch CBN, I am sure everybody knows by now that Congress has passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill with a $3.5 trillion dollar price tag.

That may sound like a lot of money, but it really is pocket change when compared to the cumulative expense, contributing to the national debt, that piles up annually from our:

  • ever-expanding military budgets,
  • continual war-making around the world (I have never heard Pat Robertson, precious few conservatives at large, nor many Democrats for that matter condemn the many wanton, US military adventures we carry out around the world),
  • government subsidies paid out to America’s largest corporations (otherwise known as corporate welfare — Come on. Am I really supposed to believe that companies like Exxon haven’t yet figured out how to make a profit on their own dime?),
  • tax cuts consistently given to the largest US corporations,
  • additional tax cuts given to the wealthiest members of society (Remember, Trump’s big tax give away?),
  • the trillions of dollars the IRS estimates is lost by the US treasury each year through tax fraud and evasion among the richest Americans and corporations (Remember that Jeff Bezos, the richest man on the planet, paid no income tax last year!).

The list could go on…

Now, in the face of so many obscene, public injustices, all of which drain the public purse to the tune of billions if not trillions of dollars annually, conservatives are lamenting a direly needed infrastructure bill that will improve essential services for the poor, elderly, and working class members of our society.

Oi vey!

Anti-Abortion, “Pro-Life” Justices Rule in Favor of US Corporations Using Child Slavery

This what happens when single issue voters applaud the appointment of anti-abortion justices to the Supreme Court while ignoring, or remaining oblivious to, the fact that these same justices are strongly biased toward pro-corporate, anti-worker policies.

The Supreme Court this week ruled 8-1 in favor of corporate giants Nestle and Cargill who were being sued by former child laborers accusing the two  companies of trafficking in child slavery in the west
African nations of the Ivory Coast and Ghana.

According to the corporations’ defense attorney, the corporations “could not be sued for complicity in child trafficking because they are corporations, not individuals.”

How convenient.

Those of us old enough to remember the Citizen United decision in 2010 will recall that, in that case, the Supreme Court ruled in exactly the opposite direction, declaring that corporations are people and therefore able to contribute massive amounts of dark money to US political campaigns.

Many people warned in advance that the current slate of conservative, pro-

Neal Katyal, defense attorney for Nestle and Cargill corporations, testifies on behalf of now-Justice Neil Gorsuch, pro-corporate lawyer who ruled against the plaintives in a child slavery case. Tasos Katopodis Getty Images

corporate Supreme Court justices would have a disastrous effect on workers’ rights in this country.

The Supreme Court’s exoneration of two US corporations who knowingly profit immeasurably from the exploitation of child slavery in west Africa is entirely predictable. 

Congratulations to all those evangelical activists who lobbied vociferously for the appointment of “pro-life” justices to the US Supreme Court!  You got what you wanted. The desperately poor, exploited, enslave children of the third-world thank you.

Below is an excerpt from the article by Julia Conley at Common Dreams, “‘Dangerous Precedent’: US High Court Sides With Corporate Giants Nestle and Cargill in Child Slavery Case.” I encourage you to follow up the numerous links included in the article:

A lawyer for six men who alleged they were victims of human trafficking said the corporations “should be held accountable for abetting a system of child slavery.”
Human rights advocates Thursday denounced a Supreme Court decision in favor of the U.S. corporate giants Nestlé USA and Cargill, which were sued more than a decade ago by six men who say the two companies were complicit in child trafficking and profited when the men were enslaved on cocoa farms as children.
The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 against the plaintiffs, saying they had not proven the companies’ activities in the U.S. were sufficiently tied to the alleged child trafficking. The companies had argued that they could not be sued in the U.S. for activities that took place in West Africa. . . 
. . . The plaintiffs, who are from Mali and say they are survivors of child trafficking and slavery in Côte d’Ivoire, filed their lawsuit under the Alien Tort Statute, an 18th century law which allows federal courts to hear civil actions filed by foreigners regarding offenses “committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”
In recent years the Court has limited when the law can be invoked in court, arguing it cannot be used to file a lawsuit when the offense was committed “almost entirely abroad,” according to the New York Times.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that Nestlé and Cargill have total control over the production of cocoa in Côte d’Ivoire, where child labor is widespread and where the men said they were forced to work long hours and to sleep in locked shacks at night. 
The U.S. Department of Labor recently reported that the use of child labor on family farms in cocoa-growing areas of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana increased from 31 percent to 45 percent between 2008 and 2019.
The corporations “should be held accountable for abetting a system of child slavery,” said Paul Hoffman, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.
Read the entire article here.

Hightower: There’s No Labor Shortage. There’s a Wage Shortage

Jim Hightower has an article at ScheerPost on the so-called labor shortage in the US economy and the airy-fairy theorizing now coming from America’s

Jim Hightower

most wealthy about how to solve the problem.

I live in Montana. Another state with a multi-millionaire governor (Greg Gianforte) who is planning to terminate the $300/week of extra unemployment benefits granted by the federal government in its most recent relief package.

This is how callous capitalists force underpaid workers to return to low wage, high risk jobs. It’s a form of wage slavery similar to the death grip that old-fashion “company towns” once held over coal miners and railway workers.

It’s called CLASS WARFARE. The haves against the have-nots. It’s the American way.

As Heidi Shierholz writes at the Economic Policy Institute, there is actually little evidence that the economy is currently experiencing a labor shortage. While citing a number of different factors at work, she explains:

…the footprint of a bona fide labor shortage is rising wages. Employers who truly face shortages of suitable, interested workers will respond by bidding up wages to attract those workers, and employers whose workers are being poached will raise wages to retain their workers…

But, of course, capitalists like Gianforte don’t think to raise wages for the working class. Instead, they think of ways to control workers, strip them of the few benefits that have come their way (after a pandemic!), and empower the owners who refuse to pay their workers a living wage.

Personally, I would love to see statewide labor strikes in every state where rich governors have instituted such predatory anti-worker, pro-capitalist shenanigans rather than doing the obvious — institute a $15 minimum wage.

Hightower’s piece hits the nail on the head with a good resource for more information at the end. It’s entitle “There’s No ‘Labor Shortage.’ There’s a Wage Shortage.”

Here is it:

To find workers, there’s a free-enterprise solution right at employers’ fingertips: raise pay, improve conditions, and show respect.

At a recent congressional hearing on America’s so-called “labor shortage,” megabanker Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, offered this insight: “People actually have a lot of money, and they don’t particularly feel like going back to work.”

Dimon is a billionaire who may be unaware that most people are living paycheck to paycheck. Since COVID-19 hit, millions have lost their jobs, savings, and even homes. Relief measures have helped, but ordinary people are not exactly lollygagging around the house, counting their cash.

Instead of listening to the uber-rich class ignorance of Dimon (who pocketed $35 million in pay last year), Congress ought to be listening to actual workers explain why they’re not rushing back to the jobs being offered by restaurant chains and such.

These workers would point out that there’s no labor shortage — there’s a wage shortage.

More fundamentally, there’s a fairness shortage.

It was not lost on restaurant workers, for example, that while millions of them were jobless last year, their corporate CEOs were grabbing millions, buying yachts, and living large. Yet more than half of laid-off restaurant workers couldn’t even get unemployment benefits because their wages had been too low to qualify.

Then there’s the high risk of COVID exposure for restaurant employees, an appalling level of sexual harassment in their workplace, and demeaning treatment from abusive bosses and customers.

No surprise, then, that more than half of employees said in a recent survey that they’re not going back to those jobs. After all, even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked.

So rather than demanding that government officials force workers to return to the old exploitative system, corporate giants should try the free-enterprise solution right at their fingertips: Raise pay, improve conditions, and show respect.

In short, create a place where people want to work! For a straightforward view from workers themselves, go to OneFairWage.site.