Update III:
Koch brothers revealed as John Birchers, racist and anti-Semitic
Update II:
Opus Dei comes to Washington D.C.
Update: Why Harris and Hobby Lobby Spell Disaster for Working Women (
Jafee, In These Times)
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Throughout U.S. history, nothing has spooked the political body as much as alarms sounded about the presence of insidious forces embedded in our community, bursting with bad intentions, amoral character and rapacious appetites.
Examples from the 20th-21st centuries are clear: African-Americans, anarchists, uppity women who want to vote, peace activists, sewer socialists, communists, artists, civil rights workers, immigrants and terrorists have all at times fit the bill for the purposes of narrow ideological interests intent on consolidating their political-financial power at the expense of the liberty of the disfavored citizenry.
In the wake of the
Citizens United, McCutcheon and the misogynistic
Hobby Lobby decisions [among others] by the five Republican justices on the U.S. Supreme Court, the Roberts Court has created a class of citizens (non-human entities) with more rights than the typical American, and imbued with immunity from the criminal justice system: The corporation, formerly chartered by the individual states to deliver a specific economic purpose for a specified benefit of the community, now aligned with closely held ideological interests such as the Koch brothers who endeavor to reengineer American society.
These cases are not decided out of naiveté or an academic misreading of the law by the justices.
This is a extra-judicial project constructed by raw and hostile socio-economic powers that resemble nothing so much as 20th century fascism with their concomitant political taunts against minorities and creation of a prison state.
Tortured, contrived jurisprudence by the allied, ultra-activist Roberts Court is simply a manner to engineer the transformation of power of narrow ideological and financial interests to the specific detriment of non-favored citizenry, an enterprise that could never be accomplished through the legislative process.
The judicial reasoning is fallacious and obvious: "In his dissent, Justice Stevens (in
Citizens United) acknowledged that 'we have long since held that corporations are covered by the First Amendment.' That traces back to the time when the
1907 Tillman act banned corporate contributions, the precedent overturned by the Court. In the early 20th century, legal theorists and courts came to adopt and implement the Court's 1886 (Santa Clara) principle that these "collectivist legal entities" have the same rights as persons of flesh and blood, an attack on classical liberalism that was sharply condemned by the vanishing breed of conservatives as 'a menace to the liberty of the individual, and to the stability of the American States as popular governments' (Christopher Tiedeman)," notes Noam Chomsky in reaction to the
Citizens United decision.
The maintenance of this Republican Party-economic royalists' long-term project's aims and objectives is ongoing.
Today, even as the servants of economic royalists such as Scott Walker and virtually the entire Republican Party attack the working class for organizing and selling their work product, the rightwing is calling for the Court to sanction the use of dark money into our
formal electoral system in an attempt to eliminate any popular accountability, and insulate
huge moneyed interests from the criminal justice system under the rubric of the new judicial doctrine of civil rights for invisible, non-human forces that were never recognized by the United States Constitution but have been created by a handful of Supreme Court justices for the benefit of a very few uber people.
Eric O’Keefe and Wisconsin Club for Growth, Inc. v Francis Schmitz, et al (Case No. 14-C-139) now before the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit may become the judicial vehicle through which the Court constructs a new doctrine in which any individual associated with a special class of interests becomes immune to campaign finance law and law enforcement.
We will soon see whether individual appellate justices in the Seventh Circuit define their legacy by acclaiming the lawless acquisition of political power by societal forces such as the Koch brothers, Christopher Cline and various other anti-social, criminal minds in American society.
One would think the trajectory of the drive to power for royalists would be addressed constantly by the Democratic Party, and it should be their number one appeal to the public.
J.B. Green argues this morning it's imperative:
Don't buy any of the crap about the narrowness or 'nuances' of the Hobby Lobby ruling. It established a precedent that begs to be broadened, and this is a High Court majority that is willing to go there. It's only a matter of time.
No one should be shocked either, that the court's right-wing (the term 'conservative' would be an insult to real conservative jurists in this context) majority is oblivious/hostile to worker rights. They have demonstrated that proclivity at every opportunity. ...
The Supreme Court of the United States has been dominated by politicized hacks since Bush v. Gore, although too many Dems have trod gingerly around the strong language needed to make it a front and center issue. The Hobby Lobby decision sends a clear warning that those days should be over. And if we needed an additional reminder that employer-linked insurance is a booby-trapped mess, and we really need to push harder for a single-payer system, here it is.
Hobby Lobby is a booby-trapped mess, but more broadly the case represents the ongoing project of a corrupt Supreme Court and its allies.
The presence of insidious forces embedded in our community, bursting with bad intentions, amoral character and rapacious appetites is a fact that cannot be ignored if our country is to continue to bear any resemblance to a classical liberal, constitutional democracy in the future.
