Tag: Class Warfare

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.”

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.

There is More Than One Way to Pack a Court

President Biden recently formed a commission that will look into the mechanics of restructuring the US Supreme Court by increasing the number of justices from 9 to 13.

The Republican media campaign is now in overdrive warning about the apocalyptic terrors that will be unleashed if Democrats are allowed “to pack” the Supreme Court. (Watch the Religious Right lament here.)

The hypocrisy is so thick you can cut it with a knife.

Republican legislators have their own troubled history with court-packing at the state level. Neither should we forget the manipulative powerplays undertaken by Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and Chuck Grassley in seating their own conservative choices.

Their Republican skull-duggery included denying Merrick Garland, President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, from receiving the Senate confirmation hearing that dominees deserve.

At the time, McConnell insisted that it was improper to appoint a new justice “so close to a presidential election” (recall, the Trump/Clinton election was weeks away).

However, McConnell’s appeal to principle proved to be nothing more than cynical, partisan gamesmanship as he then rushed to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett only weeks before the election of president Biden.

And this is only the tip of a very tawdry, partisan, judicial iceberg. (There is a laundry list of similar shenanigans in the appointments of Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, as well. But those sad stories are for another post.)

More to the point for the purposes of this post is the important warning

October 13, 2020, Washington, District of Columbia, USA: United States Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (Democrat of Rhode Island) makes a presentation during his questioning of President Donald Trump‚Äôs Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett during the second day of her Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing Tuesday, October 13, 2020 (Credit Image: © Greg Nash – Pool Via Cnp/CNP via ZUMA Wire)

repeatedly raised by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse over the anti-democratic flood of “dark money” now shaping the Supreme Court.

“Dark money” consists of untraceable, and therefore anonymous, financial contributions typically made to a political action committee and “front groups.” The promise of anonymity allows wealthy, big-money donors to move the court in the directions they want without the public realizing what is happening.

Although conservatives contribute the lion’s share of this money, it’s a bipartisan affair. Dark money pours in from both Republican and Democratic donors, lobbyists, billionaires, CEOs, and corporations.

Of course, big money, corporate money, generally gets what it wants.  And what dark money wants are Supreme Court justices and case decisions that promote their interests, leaving the little guy to hold the bag.

I urge you to take a few  minutes to watch Senator Whitehouse’s presentations where he explains the findings of own his investigations into the overwhelming influence of dark money on the Supreme Court.

Folks, the Supreme Court has already been packed. In fact, its been stacked — stacked against us, the people. Yet, you will never hear conservative politicians, Republicans, Pat Robertson or others of his ilk condemn this undermining of American democracy.

The current conservative outcry against Biden and his commission is just one more example of how easy it is for the wealthiest 1% and corporate power in this country to manipulate the public — especially conservatives.

Below is Senator Whitehouse’s explanation about the influence of dark money on the Supreme Court. His most pertinent remarks begin at the 8:40 mark:

 

More Evidence that the Republican Party Hates Democracy

The extraordinary phenomena of last year’s protests over George Floyd’s murder at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, combined with two Democratic victories in Georgia for the state’s seats in the US Senate has infuriated the Republican party.

Republicans have responded as Republicans do: undermine the power of the people.

First, they have introduced dozens of new voter suppression laws in local legislatures across the country. Naturally, Republicans object to this characterization, but Stacey Abram’s recent testimony before a Senate committee regarding Georgia’s new voter laws puts the lie to that Republican defense (watch here and here).

Second, Republicans have submitted numerous bills that would outlaw public protests and demonstrations.  They would also immunize drivers who run into protesters with their cars. (All the videos I have seen show drivers who deliberately target peaceful demonstrators.)

Today’s edition of the New York Times has an article about this second problem. It’s entitled, “G.O.P. Bills Target Protesters (and Absolve Drivers Who Hit Them).”

Below is a lengthy excerpt of that article. (It is behind a pay wall). Or you can read the entire piece by clicking on the title above:

Republican legislators in Oklahoma and Iowa have passed bills granting immunity to drivers whose vehicles strike and injure protesters in public streets.

A Republican proposal in Indiana would bar anyone convicted of unlawful assembly from holding state employment, including elected office. A Minnesota bill would prohibit those convicted of unlawful protesting from receiving student loans, unemployment benefits or housing assistance.

And in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed sweeping legislation this week that

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has used the term anti-riot bills for legislation that limits the right to protest. Credit…Phil SearsAssociated Press

toughened existing laws governing public disorder and created a harsh new level of infractions — a bill he’s called “the strongest anti-looting, anti-rioting, pro-law-enforcement piece of legislation in the country.”

The measures are part of a wave of new anti-protest legislation, sponsored and supported by Republicans, in the 11 months since Black Lives Matter protests swept the country following the death of George Floyd. The Minneapolis police officer who killed Mr. Floyd, Derek Chauvin, was convicted on Tuesday on murder and manslaughter charges, a cathartic end to weeks of tension.

But while Democrats seized on Mr. Floyd’s death last May to highlight racism in policing and other forms of social injustice, Republicans responded to a summer of protests by proposing a raft of punitive new measures governing the right to lawfully assemble. G.O.P. lawmakers in 34 states have introduced 81 anti-protest bills during the 2021 legislative session — more than twice as many proposals as in any other year, according to Elly Page, a senior legal adviser at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which tracks legislation limiting the right to protest.

Some, like Mr. DeSantis, are labeling them “anti-riot” bills, conflating the right to peaceful protest with the rioting and looting that sometimes resulted from such protests.

The laws carry forward the hyperbolic message Republicans have been pushing in the 11 months since Black Lives Matter protests against racial injustice swept the country: that Democrats are tolerant of violent and criminal actions from those who protest against racial injustice. And the legislation underscores the extent to which support for law enforcement personnel and opposition to protests have become part of the bedrock of G.O.P. orthodoxy and a likely pillar of the platform the party will take into next year’s midterms.

“This is consistent with the general trend of legislators’ responding to powerful and persuasive protests by seeking to silence them rather than engaging with the message of the protests,” said Vera Eidelman, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union. “If anything, the lesson from the last year, and decades, is not that we need to give more tools to police and prosecutors, it’s that they abuse the tools they already have.”

Laws already exist to punish rioting, and civil rights advocates worry that the new bills violate rights of lawful assembly and free speech protected under the First Amendment. The overwhelming majority of last summer’s nationwide Black Lives Matter protests were peaceful — more than 96 percent involved no property damage or police injuries, according to The Washington Post, which also found that police officers or counterprotesters often instigated violence.

Police officers making an arrest during protests in Miami last year over the death of George Floyd Credit…Cristobal HerreraEPA, via Shutterstock

Most of the protests held across Florida last summer were also peaceful, though a few in Miami, Tampa and Jacksonville produced some episodes of violence, including the burning of a police car and a sporting goods store. Still, as they embraced the bill that Mr. DeSantis signed into law, Republican leaders expressed scorn for cities that trim police budgets and tolerate protesters who disrupt business and traffic.

“We weren’t going to allow Florida to become Seattle,” said Chris Sprowls, a Republican who is the speaker of the Florida House, mentioning cities where protests lasted for months last year and demonstrators frequently clashed with the police. “We were not going to allow Florida to become Portland.”. . . 

. . . State Senator Shevrin D. Jones, a Democrat from Broward County and a vocal critic of the law, noted that Mr. DeSantis had been quick to emphasize how necessary the bill was the day after the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol but had made no mention of that event during Monday’s bill signing, focusing solely on the summer protests.

That was evidence, he said, that bills aimed at punishing protesters were disproportionately targeting people of color. “This bill is racist at its core,” Mr. Jones said.

So far, three bills aimed at limiting protests have been signed into law — Florida’s and new laws in Arkansas and Kansas that target protesters who seek to disrupt oil pipelines. Others are likely to come soon.

In Oklahoma, Republican lawmakers last week sent legislation to Gov. Kevin Stitt that would criminalize the unlawful blocking of a public street and grant immunity to drivers who strike and injure protesters during a riot. Last June, a pickup truck carrying a horse trailer drove through a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters on a Tulsa freeway, injuring several people and leaving one paralyzed. The driver, who said he had sped up because he feared for the safety of his family, was not charged.

The bill’s author, State Senator Rob Standridge, said the Tulsa incident had prompted him to seek immunity for drivers who strike protesters. He said Tuesday he wasn’t aware of any drivers who had been charged after striking protesters in Oklahoma. “My hope is that this law never is utilized,” he said in an interview. Carly Atchison, a spokeswoman for Mr. Stitt, declined to say whether he would sign the bill, which passed with veto-proof majorities.

Tiffany Crutcher, whose twin brother, Terence Crutcher, was shot and killed in 2016 by a Tulsa police officer who was later acquitted on a manslaughter charge, said the Oklahoma proposal represents Republican efforts to extend the Trump administration’s hostility toward people of color.

Reflections on the Derek Chauvin Verdict and George Floyd’s Murder

The good news is that Derek Chauvin has been convicted for the murder of George Floyd. In this instance, the justice system has worked. A white police

Derek Chauvin

officer is being held accountable for his excessive use of force against an unarmed black man.  Something that very rarely happens.

But this is also the bad news.

At this point in America’s history, Derek Chauvin’s conviction is a “black swan event.” Recall Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s bestselling book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House, 2010), reminding us that incredibly improbable events (like a black swan) may have considerable influence while remaining very rare.

Notice the two provisos: first, the transformative event is very rare; and two, it MAY have significant consequences. In other words, the possible results are far from assured, and the event itself may never be repeated.

Krystal Ball

Krystal Ball (yes, that’s her real name) reminded her viewers on “Rising” this morning of the extraordinary efforts that created the context for Chauvin’s successful conviction.

First, is Darnella Frasier, the teenage girl who had the presence of mind and the courage to pull out her cell phone and film the 9 minute video of officer  Chauvin kneeling of Mr. Floyd’s neck.

Second, is the largest, most sustained protest movement in US history, which spread around the world.

Were it not for these two momentous actions, George Floyd would have been just another anonymous victim of police brutality. And Derek Chauvin would have gotten away with murder.

Hardly encouraging news.

Think about that. Let it sink in. It hardly indicates that this is the beginning of a new day in prosecuting police misconduct, let alone altering police behavior nationwide.

[Krystal’s remarks begin at about the 30 second mark.

Now is the time to keep the celebrations brief.

Because now is the time to insist that our legislators pass H.R. 1280, The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021. Though this piece of legislation is inadequate on its own, it may serve as a piece of the larger police reform puzzle.

Now is also the time to continue campaigning for local Defund the Police programs across the country. Numerous cities are testing these ideas now and the preliminary reports are very encouraging in places like Denver and Colorado Springs (see here, here, here, and here).

Now is also the time for Christian leaders to continue speaking out about  justice and equality for all people, regardless of race, color, ethnicity, or class.

Do not swallow the Fox News cool-aid insisting that this trial was only about one bad apple who did one bad thing, and that his conviction proves the reliability of our glorious criminal justice system.

That predictably conservative framing of the issues is a recipe for going back to sleep and maintaining the status quo. A status quo that ignores the larger context of US policing and police training which allows police brutality to continue unabated.

No. Now is the time to keep the pressure on, to continue protesting, to insist that the culture of American policing is in dire need of regeneration.

Now is also the time for the evangelical church to break ranks with the Republican party, Fox News, and the politics of fear.

It will mean wanting to become more like Jesus, releasing our vice-like grip on worries over personal security and caring more for those who suffer than we care for ourselves.

What the Church Can Learn from Eugene Debs

Eugene Debs (1855-1926) was an American politician who became an important early leader in the labor union movement. He condemned

Labor activist Eugene V. Debs speaks at the Hippodrome in New York City in 1910

corporate greed, was a vocal proponent on behalf of American workers, helped to lead numerous strikes, and fought for genuine democracy in the workplace.

Naturally, figures like Debs are a thorn in the side of entrenched, establishment power, so he made many enemies in high places. President Woodrow Wilson had him imprisoned for speaking out against the US entry into World War I. [No, folks, “cancel culture” is hardly new!]

In my view, Debs is a true American hero who has been largely forgotten by mainstream America.

Ed Quish has an interesting article about Deb’s life and legacy at Jacobin magazine. It’s entitled “The Cold War is Over. It’s Time to Appreciate that Eugene Debs Was a Marxist.”

Whenever a learn something new about a figure like Eugene Debs (or a man like Henry Wallace, another person I admire for similar reasons) I can’t help but ask myself, “Where were his Christian counterparts?”

Though he didn’t claim to be a Christian (to my knowledge) in the

Eugene Debs

evangelical sense, his politics, ideology, and actions demonstrate a more profound appreciation for the nature of the kingdom of God and the demands that kingdom makes upon its citizens than is shown by the evangelical church today.

Below is an excerpt:

Throughout his life, Eugene Debs was smeared as an enemy of the American nation. During the 1894 Pullman strike, Harper’s Weekly attacked Debs’s leadership of the uprising as equivalent to Southern secession, claiming that in “suppressing such a blackmailing conspiracy as the boycott of Pullman cars by the American Railway Union, the nation is fighting for its own existence.” Thirty years later, when Debs was imprisoned for speaking against World War I, President Woodrow Wilson denied requests to pardon him, refusing to show mercy to “a traitor to his country.”

Debs’s sympathizers have often defended him against allegations of treason by highlighting his authentic Americanism. Rather than a traitor, they claim, Debs was a true patriot who stood up for nationally shared ideals like freedom and democracy while imbuing them with socialist values. Historian Nick Salvatore, for instance, argues in his landmark 1982 biography that Debs’s life “was a profound refutation of the belief that critical dissent is somehow un-American or unpatriotic.” Inspired by Debs’s example, socialists today might occupy the left flank of a progressive patriotism, pushing the United States to make good on its democratic promise in a way that liberals and centrists cannot do on their own.

Despite some intuitive appeal, this nationalist strategy is a dead end. . . At a basic level, democratic nationalism presents the nation as bound by a shared identity and shared interests, uniting different classes behind a common project domestically and internationally. In the United States, this project has only ever been a variant of capitalist empire that, even when grafted to the cause of democracy. . . 

In his own time, Debs rejected that kind of nationalist project, making his politics more than the radical edge of common sense “Americanism.” When Debs called out the absurdity of the wartime view that patriotism means dying overseas for capitalist profits while treason consists in defending workers everywhere, he showed us the proper response to nationalist ideology: not to try to hijack it for progressive ends, but to liberate us from its obfuscations.

Click here to read the complete article.