Saturday Report 5/25/24 - Corporations are abusing “free speech” to destroy the world...

The Best of the Rest of the News

— Six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court just legalized racial gerrymanders. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other subsequent laws make it a federal crime for a state government to draw congressional district maps based on race. Prior to this past week, even as Republicans on the Court have gutted pre-clearance and other important parts of the Voting Rights Act, that core principle barring racial gerrymandering has been repeatedly upheld, both by lower courts and the Supreme Court itself. But in an openly partisan and totally bizarre decision authored by insurrectionist flag fanboy Sam Alito, the six Republicans on the Court concluded that because Black people vote Democratic around 90 percent of the time courts can now simply ignore the racial aspect and just call racial gerrymanders involving Black people “political.” Gerrymanders based on politics rather than race have been legal since the days of Vice President Elbridge Gerry, so, going forward, it’ll be virtually impossible for anybody to sue and force a state to undo a blatantly racial gerrymander because now the state doing the gerrymander can simply say it was based on politics instead of race. Alito wrote that the benefit of the doubt always has to go to the state doing the gerrymander, rather than the evidence of it being racially based. Slick. These corrupt Republicans on the Court are a cancer on our republic, and Dick Durbin and Democrats in the Senate should be hauling them before public hearings to explain themselves. Sadly, that would require Schumer and Durbin to grow a spine and do their damn Constitutionally-mandated oversight job, like you and I know Republicans would do in a heartbeat, but which doesn’t seem likely from these Democrats…

— Trump’s felon crew wants to crime again in 2024. Multiple people under indictment or identified as fake electors — a federal election fraud crime — are again offering their services to the GOP should the 2024 election go for Biden and Trump needs a new effort to block the will of the voters. The Washington Post broke the story, noting: “‘There is no hesitancy at all to be put in that same position again,’ said Pete Hoekstra, chairman of the Michigan Republican Party. ‘They would be excited by the opportunity to do it.’” Fake elector alleged criminals in Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico have stepped forward saying they’ll do it all again. They’ve gotta be betting that if they can help Trump steal the 2024 election he’ll pardon them, just like he’s promised to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists and murderers.

— Corporations are abusing “free speech” to destroy the world. One of my favorite books to research and write was Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became “Persons”. It tells the story of an 1886 Supreme Court case, Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific Railroad, in which the railroad’s argument that they didn’t have to pay a higher rate of property tax in Santa Clara county than in San Mateo county because they were “persons” under the law and entitled to “equal protection” under the 14th Amendment that would require taxes to be the same everywhere. The Court ruled definitively against them and the issue of corporate personhood was only briefly brought up, as the majority on the Court rejected the argument. The clerk of the Court, John Chandler Bancroft Davis, the former president of a railroad, however, wrote in the non-legally-binding headnote of the case that Chief Justice Morrison Remick Waite had said, in a sidebar, that “corporations are persons.” Again, it wasn’t the ruling, just a commentary that was in conflict with the actual judgement. But corporations and subsequent Supreme Court decisions quoted that headnote — over 30 times in the years since 1886 — establishing the doctrine that corporations are “persons” under the law. In 1978, in the First National Bank v Bellotti case, Justice Lewis Powell (yeah, that guy who wrote the infamous “Powell Memo” telling rich people how to take over the government) pointed to the Santa Clara case and said that corporations are not only “persons” but have full constitutional rights, including under the Bill of Rights (the Constitution’s first ten amendments). Based on that Bellotti decision, corporations are now arguing that they don’t have to follow rules set up by the EPA, SEC, and other agencies requiring disclosure of everything from campaign contributions to levels of pollution to details of billions in stock buybacks. They note that the First Amendment has been construed to mean that not only do “persons” have the right to free speech, but also the right not to be compelled to speak (this is also in the Fifth Amendment). Katherine Li reports at Lever News that the US Chamber of Commerce (the group Powell wrote his infamous “Memo” to) has spearheaded the cause, so far successfully arguing before Republican-appointed judges in several conservative jurisdictions that banks, fossil fuel companies, and others are protected from laws requiring transparency and disclosures. This is getting really ugly, and again points out why it’s so important to expand the Supreme Court and roll back some of these most egregious decisions of the past sixty or so years that the Court has been in rightwing hands.

— How 2016 WAS stolen — with help from Russia! Bette Midler recently asked on X, “Can you imagine what would have happened if Hillary Clinton had claimed the election was stolen?” That simple tweet has sent the right-wing-o-sphere into a paroxysm of hysteria. But the more we learn about what happened in 2016, the clearer it is that without Putin’s intervention — from hacking Hillary’s emails to spending millions of dollars and investing hundreds of thousands of man-hours on social media — Clinton would have easily won the election. As Frank Vyan Walton writes over on Daily Kos:
“Don Jr. met personally with a Russia lawyer in order to get dirt on the Hillary campaign. They were told by Russian operatives about the GRU hack of the DNC emails system months before it came out. Trump said ‘Russia if you're listening...’ Trump kept working on the Trump Tower Russia project until mid-2016 and lied about it, while secretly in negotiations with Dmitri Peskov. Paul Manafort gave internal polling data to a GRU operative, Konstantin Kilimnick. Carter Page was told about the sale of 19.5% of Rosneft stock even though it was a sanctioned company and he couldn't legally profit from that. Roger Stone was in contact with a Russian operative, Guccifer 2.0, and arranged for Wikileaks to release the Podesta emails in order to distract from the Access Hollywood tape. Michael Flynn suggested Trump would drop sanctions on Russia if they didn’t react to Obama expelling their diplomats for…. wait for it… interfering with the election. Five members of Trump's entourage — Papadopoulos, Stone, Flynn, Van Der Zwaan and Cohen —  were prosecuted and convicted for lying under oath about their contacts with Russia.  They all did time, the cases were proven.” There’s more over at Frank’s Kos article, which is well worth the read.

— Is Putin trying to move his border into the Baltics? You Betcha! Russia has a small slice of land bordering the Baltic Sea that’s a Russian territory called Kaliningrad. This week the Russian Ministry of Defense, in a move reminiscent of China’s encroachment on Taiwan’s territorial waters, put Europe on notice that they intend to declare part of that sea as Russian territory, an extension of Kalainingrad’s territorial waters. The leaders of the Baltic states are freaked out, as Putin moves the world, one step at a time, closer to the possibility of World War III.

— Here’s a poll that I’ll bet won’t show up on the front page of the New York Times. The Times admitted yesterday that the “Biden is losing” polls they’ve been trumpeting for months in an effort to force the president to do a sit-down interview with the paper’s owner/publisher have been based on phony information. Instead of polling exclusively “likely voters” based on their having voted in the 2020 election, they’ve been polling Democratic voters who didn’t bother to vote last time and probably won’t this time. In fact, as D. Earl Stephens reports at his excellent Substack newsletter Enough Already, the more likely somebody is not to vote this year, the more likely they are to say they’ll vote for Trump. Even worse, a new Navigator Research poll finds that 58% of Americans want our government to crack down on corporate price gouging and 53% want the feds to do something about the cost of healthcare and prescription drugs. These are all strong Democratic and Biden issues, but don’t expect to see this poll on the front page of the Times; that’s reserved for the latest Trumpy news.

— Speaking of polls, do you know what that money Michael Cohen confessed to “stealing” from Trump was for? It was $20K out of a paper bag with $50,000 cash in it that was paid to online services company RedFinch to juice an online poll about Trump. Seriously. They were apparently paid to post thousands or hundreds of thousands of phony online votes to swing the 2016 poll to make Trump look more popular as a businessman than he really was. It reminds me that when he came down the escalator in 2015, the crowd waiting for him was a group of actors paid $50/hour to hold Trump signs and cheer. Why aren’t our media reporting this? And how many polls today are Trump paying to juice?

— Good News Alert! President Biden is moving forward with a whole series of progressive policies, even going around Congress. MSNBC reports that the president has shut down noncompete clauses in employment contracts that screw workers, made millions more Americans eligible for overtime pay, cracked down on investment hustlers, put billions into residential solar, required airlines to offer cash refunds when they cancel flights, phased out coal-fired power plants, and made it easier for military spouses to work from home. Meanwhile, Trump is…well…ranting and raving about an imaginary attempt by Biden to assassinate him…

— Wisdom School Alert! My Journey to Mastering Writing: Discover How You Can, Too. Like learning how to competently play a musical instrument, there is no better lesson than daily practice.

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 — Hunter in a Farmer’s World Alert! ADHD: Can You Learn to Pay Attention to Paying Attention? Sometimes, the biggest benefit of using medication — even for a short while — is that it can give us insights into that process of paying attention to paying attention.

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