Clarence Thomas Proves It’s Time for Supreme Court Term Limits

BY SONALI KOLHATKAR

 APRIL 17, 2023
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A pair of new investigative reports from ProPublica about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are a testament to not only the importance of good journalism in a democracy, but also Thomas’s unfitness on the court, and the need for better guard rails against moneyed influence. The first bombshell story, “Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire,” highlighted how a wealthy man named Harlan Crow befriended Thomas after he became a Supreme Court justice and treated him (and often his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas) to luxurious vacations on a near-annual basis. Thomas did not disclose the trips as he was required to. Although he at first refused to speak with ProPublica about the initial story, he eventually made a statement saying he was advised he didn’t need to disclose the gifts.

ProPublica followed that up just days later with another story whose title says it all: “Billionaire Harlan Crow Bought Property From Clarence Thomas. The Justice Didn’t Disclose the Deal.” The property in question “wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the road.” Like the vacations, Thomas also did not publicly disclose the sale. His mother has lived in the home and continues to do so after ownership passed to Crow. The billionaire has been busy making expensive renovations to it.

There is no question that Thomas broke the law by failing to disclose his financial transactions with Crow. Every American should read the ProPublica reports on how one of the nine Supreme Court justices, whose jurisdiction covers the entire nation, appears to be in the pocket of a billionaire. The relationship between Crow and Thomas is a cozy one that has borne fruit for wealthy elites: the justice has routinely sided with moneyed interests and their influence on policymaking.

Before ProPublica’s April 2023 investigations, most reporting on the court’s first Black justice had focused on his white conservative wife. Ginni Thomas has been an activist spouse, overtly reflecting the conservative political sensibility that her husband affirms in his judicial decisions. During Barack Obama’s presidency, she founded a “Tea Party” nonprofit called Liberty Central, a move the New York Times described as “the most partisan role ever for a spouse of a justice on the nation’s highest court.”

She then went further, becoming a political lobbyist and leading a small and secretive organization called Liberty Consulting. A 2011 Politico report points out that she touted “her ‘experience and connections’ to help clients ‘with governmental affairs efforts.’” She made headlineslast year for having pressured former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows via text messages to try to overturn the 2020 election results in favor of Donald Trump. More recently, the Washington Post published an investigation into anonymous donations totaling $600,000 made to yet another organization she leads called Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty. The donations helped fund the right’s vicious culture wars.

When asked about the conflicts of interest that her activism present for her husband’s work on the Supreme Court, Ginni Thomas has brushed them off, telling the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, “It’s laughable for anyone who knows my husband to think I could influence his jurisprudence… The man is independent and stubborn.” She also said in an interview with the conservative outlet the Washington Free Beacon, “Like so many married couples, we share many of the same ideals, principles, and aspirations for America.” She added, “But we have our own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too. Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.”

Well, that’s a relief. The sanctity of the nation’s highest court and its freedom from partisan influence rests on the word of a person who promises there’s no undue influence between a wife and her husband. This is a person who still believes that the 2020 election was stolen—a view that makes her even worse than Trump toady and former U.S. Attorney General William Barr, who said he would vote for Trump in 2024 but was at least able to admit that his election fraud claims were false.

In 2021, when Chief Justice John Roberts filed his year-end report on the federal judiciary, he stressed the importance of “impartial decision-making,” and that “[t]he Judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence and is crucial to preserving public trust in its work as a separate and co-equal branch of government.” Apparently, Roberts was either ignorant of the Thomases’ doings or confident that Ginni’s promise of insulation from marital influence was good enough.

Although Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni, offer arguably the most explicit examples of corruptive influence on the Supreme Court, they are not alone. In December 2022, the New York Times revealed that an innocently named charity called the Supreme Court Historical Society has “become a vehicle for those seeking access to nine of the most reclusive and powerful people in the nation.” The organization has raised millions of dollars from secret donors. The majority of the money that the New York Times was able to identify came from “corporations, special interest groups, or lawyers and firms that argued cases before the court.” Justices attend the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner, offering a tantalizing chance for individual attendees to influence them—as the leader of an anti-abortion group apparently took advantage of.

Notwithstanding the liberal minority that includes Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, this is a court that loves wealth and has protected it for more than half a century. It’s no wonder there is growing public disapproval of a body that is so influential that its highly anticipated decisions impact nearly every aspect of our lives, from abortion to guns, to labor unions, to LGBTQ rights, and more.

Supreme Court justices have lifetime tenure—ostensibly a mechanism to protect them from “partisan pressures.” But that only works if the regulations preventing corruptive influence are watertight and if there are actual consequences for violating such regulations. In the wake of the Nixon Watergate scandal, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act (EIGA) to ensure that officials like Supreme Court justices were independent of moneyed interests.

But even though Justice Thomas appears to have violated the EIGA, there is no direct mechanism to hold him accountable short of Congress starting impeachment proceedings against him—a move that has almost no precedent short of a House impeachment more than 200 years ago of a justice who was ultimately acquitted by the Senate.

No other democratically run nation on the planet gives its highest court justices lifetime tenure. Now, some legal experts have suggested term limits, and numerous Democratic senators have introduced the TERM Act, which would introduce 18-year terms for Supreme Court justices. This would mean that a new justice would replace one who was termed out every two years, and presidents would have two opportunities during each four-year tenure to appoint new justices.

In passing the TERM Act, the U.S. would join the rest of the world’s democratic nations in upholding an impartial judiciary, the Thomases could carry out their dystopian vision of the nation free from accusations of corruption—and billionaire Harlan Crow could even save himself some money.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV (Dish Network, DirecTV, Roku) and Pacifica stations KPFK, KPFA, and affiliates. 

Comstock, Contraceptives and the Culture Wars

BY DAVID ROSEN

 APRIL 17, 2023
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Photograph of Anthony Comstock (1844-1915) – Public Domain

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee in Texas, to rescind the Food and Drug Administration’s 2000 approval of mifepristone, the most common medication abortion protocol, is grounded in the now long forgotten Comstock Act (1873). It’s a perfect time to recall the legacy of Anthony Comstock (1844-1915).

The social and economic changes that followed the Civil War were traumatic and far-reaching. In the face of these challenges, a powerful movement emerged that attempted to contain the forces that were perceived as threatening moral order. It railed against vice in every form, be it alcohol consumption, gambling, prostitution, birth control or obscenity in the arts.

The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and the Women’s Christian Temperance Alliance (WCTA), among others, championed this movement. Its national leader was the ever-upstanding Anthony Comstock. So influential was this former dry-goods salesman that George Bernard Shaw coined the term “Comstockery” to denote overzealous moralistic officials.

In 1868, just three years after the end of the Civil War, the movement secured its first major victory when the New York State legislature passed an incredibly broad law to suppress what was described as “obscene” materials. The law defined obscene to include all materials and devices that dealt with conception, birth control and other sexual matters, be they medical or erotic.

Five years later, the movement was strong enough to have the U.S. Congress enact what became popularly known as the Comstock law, legislation that stands as the most sweeping, omnibus anti-obscenity law in American history. The law, in effect, extended New York State prohibitions to all interstate commerce and communications. It covered nearly every form of exchange then known or anticipated:

… no obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print, or other publication of an indecent character, or any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion, nor any article or thing intended or adapted for any indecent or immoral use or nature, nor any written or printed card, circular, book, pamphlet, advertisement or notice or any kind giving information, directly or indirectly, where, or how, or of whom, or by what means either of the thing before mentioned may be obtained or made, nor any letter upon the envelope of which, or post-card upon which indecent or scurrilous epithets may be written or printed, shall be carried in the mail …

Comstock was appointed a special officer of the U.S. postal system and given the power to seize what he labeled as obscene materials as well as arrest those he identified as pornographers.

The law was so effective that within the first six months of passage, Comstock boasted that it led to the seizure of 194,000 pictures and photographs, 14,200 stereopticon plates and 134,000 pounds of books and other media. In the 1910s near the end of his life, Comstock claimed that he had destroyed 3,984,063 photographs and 160 tons of “obscene” literature.  The law would remain in force until the mid-1930s, when it was partially reversed by the Supreme Court with regard to medical and scientific materials. It would take another three decades until literature and art were given comparable freedom.

Sex scandals followed Comstock everywhere he went during the nearly half-century he fought to restrict both sexual expression and sexual experience. His battles involved a wide range of issues, including birth control and purported obscenity. However, the confrontations receiving the most public attention involved his battles with Victoria Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin; Walt Whitman; and Madam Restell, America’s foremost 19^th century abortionist.

One of America’s great post-Civil War matchups pitted the country’s leading moral crusader, Comstock, against two indomitable free-love and free-speech advocates, Woodhull and Claflin. Woodhull was an advocate for the end to traditional, patriarchal marriage; Thomas Nast, the great 19^th century illustrator, dubbed her “Mrs. Satan.” Their publication, the Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, generated a national stir with its frank discussions of forbidden topics like women’s suffrage, prostitution, sex education and short skirts. In 1872 Woodhull ran for president of the U.S. on behalf of the Equal Rights Party; the party drafted the absent Frederick Douglass for vice president.

The showdown between Comstock and the Woodhull-Claflin sisters occurred when they published a story about an illicit sexual relation involving the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher. He was one of America’s leading theologians, bishop at Brooklyn’s Plymouth Congregational Church, a role analogous to that played by Jim Bakker in the 1980s and Ted Haggard before his outing in 2006. In 1872, the Weekly exposed the details of an affair between the good pastor and one of his parishioners, Mrs. Elizabeth Tilton.

Comstock had the sisters arrested, not because of Rev. Beecher’s hypocrisy, but because information about his dastardly deeds was available for everyone to read. Both New York and federal authorities charged them with circulating obscene materials. At their trial, the sisters were acquitted when the judge noted that the original Comstock law did not cover newspapers. After more than a year of legal wrangling in which the sisters were repeatedly imprisoned, Woodhull and Claflin were set free, their lives ruined, and the obscenity loophole closed.

Another memorable scandal of the Gilded Age involving free speech pitted Comstock against Walt Whitman, America’s greatest voice of creative and sexual freedom. Comstock repeatedly attempted to stop Whitman’s creative expression. He had long hated Whitman’s verse, once insisting that he had never read more than forty lines of his poetry. He also bragged that he had personally intervened to force Whitman out of his position at the Department of Interior during the Civil War. In a confrontation in the early-1880s, Comstock arrested Ezra Heywood for mailing a publication that included two Whitman poems and a contraceptive device called “The Comstock Syringe.”

Whether or not it’s true that Comstock never read more than forty lines of Whitman, the censor was obsessed by the poet’s erotic sensibility. In 1881, while he was persecuting Heywood, Comstock assisted Boston District Attorney Oliver Stevens in an effort to suppress the publication of Leaves of Grass by the Boston publisher, James R. Osgood & Co. Aided by the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice, Stevens formally requested that Osgood edit the manuscript, removing what he—and Comstock—considered obscene passages. Ironically, Leaves had been originally published in 1855, 28 years earlier. Osgood requested changes from Whitman, who refused. Osgood pulled the book; America’s greatest work of verse was suppressed.

The suppression of Leaves of Grass precipitated a fierce national scandal over freedom of expression. While many among “better” society shared Comstock’s concerns about vice, they had second thoughts because it was Whitman. He was the author of “Oh Captain, My Captain,” the nation’s great ode to the fallen Lincoln, a figure who remained part of the living memory of many. Like Einstein a century later, Whitman symbolized wisdom and humility. Charges against Leaveswere ultimately dropped, as part of one of Heywood’s not-guilty decisions.

The U.S. government has not been above using the old Comstock law when it needed to. For example, as Attorney General, Robert Kennedy relied upon it in his victorious 1962 censorship battle against Ralph Ginsburg and Eros magazine.

Over the last century, the Supreme Court has repeatedly moved to restrict the Comstock laws with regard to contractive use.  In U.S. vs One Package, (1936), Margaret Sanger lobbied to made it possible for doctors to legally mail birth control devices and information throughout the country.  In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), it overturned the provision prohibited “obscene” materials from the mail, i.e., the sending of contraception information and materials to married couples; it followed-up with Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972) that extended contraceptive use to unmarried couples.

It’s time to final put the Comstock law into the dustbin of history.

David Rosen is the author of Sex, Sin & Subversion:  The Transformation of 1950s New York’s Forbidden into America’s New Normal (Skyhorse, 2015).  He can be reached at drosennyc@verizon.net; check out www.DavidRosenWrites.com.

Why the Republi-Fascists Can’t Stop Calling the Capitalist Democrats “Marxists”

BY PAUL STREET

 APRIL 17, 2023
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Photograph Source: Balogic – CC BY-SA 4.0

The Capitalist Democrats…

The Democratic Party is a militantly capitalist entity and always has been – and not just in the neoliberal era. The much beloved New Deal Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt, himself a wealthy member of the capitalist establishment, boasted that he had saved the US American profits system by overseeing reforms that helped deradicalize the populace in the wake of the great capitalist failure known as the Great Depression.

The leading post- New Deal neoliberal Democratic politicians and policymakers of my adolescence and adulthood, from Jimmy Carter through Joe Biden have all sworn and demonstrated their fealty to the capitalist order in numerous ways that I (along with many others) have written about and documented at great length.

Nancy Pelosi meant it when she was asked by a young Bernie Sanders fan to comment on the high popularity of the word “socialism” among US youth: “we’re capitalist and that’s just the way it is.”

With a net worth well over $100 million thanks largely to the parasitic accumulations of her investor husband, Pelosi had some selfish reasons to cancel discussion of alternatives to the system that has given the top tenth of the nation’s upper One Percent as much wealth as its bottom 90 percent.

“We’re capitalist and that’s just the way it is” has been the shared consensus opinion of all but a tiny share of the Democratic Party’s candidates, operatives, officeholders, policy wonks, ideologists and, of course, funders for all of my six decades-plus on this continent.

…Considered “Socialist,” “Radical Left,” and Even “Marxist” by Republicans

All of the above is meant to introduce a question that has been rolling around in my mind since the “Tea Party” rebellion against the supposed “Marxist-Leninist Black nationalist” US President Barack Trans-Pacific Partnership Obama, who was in fact a “deeply conservative” servant of the wealthy Few and their vast corporate and financial holdings:  Why this recurrent wild-eyed Republican/FOX News denunciation of the dismal, dollar-drenched neoliberal capitalist-imperialist Democrats as “radical Left,” “Marxist,” “socialist,” “communist,” and the like? Why do Republicans rail on and on about the “socialist” and even “Marxist” menace supposedly represented by a party that bends over backwards to demonstrate its fealty to the Lords of Capital – this in a country where Marxist and socialist forces are (dangerously and depressingly) marginalized?

The charge has gone ballistic in the Trump era, of course, with the false neo-McCarthyite, paranoid-style accusation of supposed socialist radicalism now routinely hurled at the bourgeois and (since the mid-1970s) neoliberal Democratic Party. Many readers here have probably heard or read about numerous Republicans from Donald Trump on down absurdly calling the recent indictment of Trump a politically vindictive “weaponization of the legal system” by “the radical socialist left,” as if the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and the 24 grand jurors who recently voted to charge Trump are members of a communist organization.

“A Marxism State of Mind”

Five weeks ago, Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump took things to a new level of paranoid anti-Marxism at the annual convention of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). There he claimed that “Marxist thugs, radicals” have turned “our once beautiful USA” into a  “crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare….I used to say that we will never be a socialist country,” Trump said.  Now, however, since his eviction from the White House and the rise of Joe Biden’s supposedly stolen presidency, Trump said, “that train has passed the station long ago of socialism. It never even came close to stopping, frankly…We’re now in a Marxism state of mind, a communism state of mind, which is far worse. We’re a nation in decline.”

Yes, Donald Trump proclaimed the end of Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution!

Apparently believing that the United States has progressed from the mere dictatorship of the proletariat to full communism beyond class, Trump promised counter-revolution: “we’ll kick the communists out.”

(Trump, who was mentored by Joe McCarthy’s legal counsel Roy Cohn, has got the present  “Marxist thug” writer right at least:  I transitioned from revisionist socialism to MSOM [“Marxism state of mind”] and CSOM [“communism state of mind”] years [well, decades] ago and wish more folks on “the left” would do the same.)

Fascist Ideology Requires It

Forget for a moment, if you can – I can’t – that this country and the world are in dire existential need of socialist revolutions to replace a capitalist-imperialist order that is quite literally destroying life on Earth.  That critical matter aside, what’s behind this preposterous but pervasive Republican charge that the plutocratic, deeply conservative Dems are Marxists, socialists, and communists?

No small part of the answer, I suspect, is that the Republican Party over the last fifteen years and with particular intensity since the rise of Trump has gone fascist and that anti-Marxism and anti-socialism are critical ingredients of the political and ideological virus that is fascism.  The very logic of the fascist world view requires a big menacing socialist enemy even when no such enemy objectively exists.

This, I think, is one of two absent or at least underdeveloped pieces in the Yale philosopher Jason Stanley’s brilliant ten-point analysis of fascist politics.  The first thing missing (if implicit) in his widely read book How Fascism Works is fascism’s explicit rejection of parliamentary bourgeois democracy and its violent determination to introduce a new authoritarian political superstructure. The second thing missing (though this is also implicit and hinted at in Stanley’s book) is obsessive anti-socialism and anti-Marxism.

Why Look for Evidence and Reality in Anything the Republi-fascists Say?

Then there’s the many-sided falsity and madness of most of what the Republi-fascists say. It’s a mistake to look for rationality and empirical evidence behind most of what the nation’s rightmost major party and its adherents believe or purport to believe.  Three of Stanley’s ten fascism-defining points are critical here: constant political propagandization, anti-intellectualism, and “unreality,” seen in the Republi-fascists’ attachment to wild conspiracy theories.  Look, folks (to steal a line from Biden), this is a party that:

preposterously clings to the massively false claim that Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election.

ridiculously claims that the January 6 Capitol Riot was a minor and mostly friendly affair – a curious description of a bloody physical assault on the US legislative branch meant to provoke a crisis cancelling Joe Biden’s election.

lethally denies decades of scientific research on the deepening climate catastrophe. It purveys thoroughly mythical narratives of voter fraud.

passes state laws criminalizing the accurate teaching of any history that does not match its white nationalist myths about of when “America was great.”

is full of anti-vaxxers and book banners and people who ludicrously believe that American grade school children are being taught graduate and law school-level critical race theory (CRT) by “socialist” elementary teachers and that CRT is “Marxist.”

thinks there’s a giant “radical Left” organization called Antifa exercising vast power in connection with “deep state” forces who want to collapse America’s fossil fuel industry in service to supposedly communist China.

contains and elevates people who think that the Democrats are party of a child-eating globalist conspiracy funded by George Soros.

believes that small fetal cell clusters are living human beings with as much claim to civil and legal rights life as fully grown women.

is loaded with fundamentalist Christians who take the endless wild, often bloody, and vindictive stories in The Holy Bible as revealed truth and who believe that Armageddon is at hand. (Many of the more unhinged Bible-thumpers in the party believe or claim to believe that the slithering sociopath Trump is God’s Chosen One sent to Earth to lead the select to heaven.)

I could go on listing the ludicrous and even psychotic things Republi-fascists believe. Seen against the backdrop of their overall madness, the Republi-fascists’ idea that the Democrats are “Marxists” and “socialists”, and that the nation is haunted by “the radical Left” seems par for the course and relatively mild.

Hints of Plausibility

At the same time, there are perhaps just enough tiny hints of the seeming truth of the at once neofascist and neo-McCarthyite narrative to give Republi-fascist anti-socialism/-Marxism a slight scent of plausibility.  Democratic voters and Democratic-affiliated organizations do stand to the comparatively social-democratic, environmentalist, anti-racist and feminist left of the ever more right-wing Republicans (this is not very hard to do, of course).  This reflects the Democrats’ base in highly unequal, poverty-plagued, and racially and culturally heterogenous metropolitan areas with a good number of highly educated professionals and a decent smattering of liberal and leftish intellectuals and colleges and universities – polyglot cities that are viewed with classically fascist fear and loathing (see this book’s ninth chapter) by “red” (try brown) state Republicans.

There is a small handful of national Democratic Congresspersons who occasionally claim to be “democratic socialists,” including a telegenic Latina Congressperson (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) who once said that capitalism is “irredeemable” and a senior US Senator (Bernie Sanders) who has made two serious runs of the Democratic presidential nomination in the last two election cycles.

The nation’s rampant identity politics and ideological confusion has helped identify “the left” and even socialism with racial minority and female and gay representation, not proletarian revolution. The “woke imperialist” Democrats are deeply invested in splashing a fake-progressive multi-cultural and cross-gender veneer on their capitalist and imperialist politics by putting Black, Latino, female, and gay faces in high places.

The Republi-fascists are not about to see or acknowledge the capitalism-imperialism behind the identity screen.  Their white nationalist form of anti-socialism makes it a no-brainer for them to merge neoliberal identitarianism (what Nancy Fraser has oxymoronically called “progressive neoliberalism”) with Marxism and “a communism state of mind.”

There was in fact a leftish Occupy Movement/moment directed against class inequality and plutocracy that spread across the nation’s cities and town like wildfire in the fall of 2011. That felt kinda radical and socialist even if it was really a mixture of populism and anarchism.  And there have been major and often remarkably cross-racial rebellions against racist police brutality in major, medium-sized and even some small US cities and towns since the murder of Trayvon Martin in February of 2012.  The George Floyd Rebellion was the biggest protest wave in American history. It sparked no small white-Amerikaner neofascist reaction, from Trump on down.

Alt-Fact Fascist Media

Meanwhile, the right possesses a vast communications “alt-fact” network that permits it to circulate and reinforce its malicious and fantastic narratives free of empirical challenge and reasoned debate. From FOX News and its further right competitors One America Network and Newsmax to the vast right-wing talk radio network to the dark web chat rooms where fascists plot armed attacks on “the radical Left” and “the deep state,” the ever more mainstreamed far right creates its own alternative un-reality, where Donald Rumsfeld’s Orwellian statement holds “true”: “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” False and malevolent things said and posted repeatedly across the bias-confirming and self-reinforcing right-wing echo chamber become facts in the minds of millions.

The Third Reich’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels would have appreciated this neofascist communications system. It’s not for nothing that he ordered the mass production and distribution of the Volksempfänger, the single-channel “people’s radio,” to broadcast Adolph Hitler’s vicious racist and expansionist, evidence-free propaganda directly into everyday Germans’ homes, hearts, and minds. “By 1941,” historian Allison Marsh notes, “nearly two-thirds of German households owned a Volksempfänger, and Goebbels had succeeded in giving Hitler a direct conduit into people’s homes via the airwaves.”

Our modern-day Goebbels, Tucker Carlson, has used Fatherland/FOX to poison millions of Amerikaner minds with false election theft and January 6 narratives he does not privately believe – and with a constant drumbeat of propaganda  meant to convince masses that the neoliberal capitalist-imperialist Democrats are “radical Left Marxists,”  and that the nation is in danger of socialist takeover.

Of course, nothing would be better for this country, continent, hemisphere, and world than an actual socialist revolution in the United States of America – the last thing the Democrats ever want to see, even if Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez did once properly call capitalism an “irredeemable” system.

A Telling Irony

Even as the Republi-fascist party gets away with routinely, absurdly, and inaccurately excoriating the Democrats as “socialists” and even as “Marxists” (supposedly terrible things to be), the Democrats, with very few occasional exceptions, can barely if ever bring themselves to honestly, publicly, and accurately call the Republican Party of “Retribution” fascist.  Adding to the irony, the Republikaners’ constant absurd demonization of the Dems as supposed socialists and Marxists is a significant part of what helps us identify the current Republican Party today as a fascist organization.

More on why the F-word fits the Republicans[1] – and how this is messing with the American System – later this week.

+ This is a slightly longer and updated version of an essay that appeared on The Paul Street Report two weeks ago.

Note

1. A partial preview: ‘let’s acknowledge something unpleasant about why the Republi-fascists steadfastly oppose even elementary gun control measures even as the nation experience one mass shooting after another. Let’s say what we know or ought to know out loud: the nation’s rightmost major party is now a socially, racially, and politically eliminationist and neofascist formation that embraces the rule of men over the rule of law. It channels and contains definite white-supremacist genocidal tendencies and sensibilities. As such, it leaders are happy about the fact that its adherents possess a wildly disproportionate share of the insane number of firearms and especially of the military style weaponry that is out and about in the US-American Armed Madhouse. It is pleased with the private arms status quo as it applauds demented politicos including a putschist ex-president who fascistically and absurdly call their corporate Democratic opponents “radical Left animals” and who speak in open terms about bloody “retribution,” “vengeance,” and “Civil War.”’

Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).

The Emerging New World Economy

BY RICHARD D. WOLFF

 APRIL 17, 2023
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Photograph Source: cogdogblog – CC0

The emerging new always both frightens and inspires the fading old. History is that unity of opposites. Sharp-edged rejections of what is new clash with enthusiastic celebrations of it. The old gets pushed away even as bitter denials of that reality surge. The emerging new world economy displays just such contradictions. Four major developments can illustrate them and underscore their interactions.

First, the neoliberal globalizing paradigm is now the old. Economic nationalism is the new. It is another reversal of their previous positions. Driven by its celebrated profit motive, capitalism in its old centers (western Europe, North America, and Japan) invested increasingly elsewhere: where labor power was far cheaper; markets were growing faster; ecological constraints were weak or absent; and governments better facilitated rapid accumulation of capital. Those investments brought big profits back into capitalism’s old centers, whose stock markets boomed and thus their income and wealth inequalities widened (since the richest Americans own the great bulk of securities). Even faster was the economic growth unleashed after the 1960s in what quickly became capitalism’s new centers (China, India, and Brazil). That growth was further enhanced by the arrival of the capital relocated from the old centers. Capitalism’s dynamic had earlier moved its production center from England to the European continent, then on to North America and Japan. That same profit-driven dynamic took it to mainland Asia and beyond during the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries.

Neoliberal globalization in theory and practice both reflected and justified this relocation of capitalism. It celebrated the profits and growth brought to both private and state-owned/operated enterprises around the world. It downplayed or ignored the other sides of globalization: (1) growing income and wealth inequalities inside most countries; (2) the shift of production from old to new centers of capitalism; and (3) faster growth of output and markets in new centers than old centers. These changes shook the old centers’ societies. Middle classes there atrophied and shrank as good jobs moved increasingly to capitalism’s new centers. The old centers’ employer classes used their power and wealth to maintain their social positions. Indeed, they got richer by harvesting the greater profits rolling in from the new centers.

However, neoliberal globalization proved disastrous for most employees in capitalism’s old centers. In the latter, the employer class not only grabbed rising profits, but also offloaded the costs of the decline of capitalism’s old centers onto employees. Tax cuts for business and the wealthy, stagnant or declining real wages (abetted by immigration), “austerity” reductions of public services, and neglect of infrastructure produced widening inequality. Working classes across the capitalist West were shocked out of the delusion that neoliberal globalization was the best policy for them too. Rising labor militancy across the U.S., like mass uprisings in France and Greece and left political shifts across the Global South, entail rejections of neoliberal globalization and its political and ideological leaders. Beyond that, capitalism itself is being shaken, questioned, and challenged. In new ways, projects for going beyond capitalism are again on the historical agenda despite the status quo’s efforts to pretend otherwise.

Second, over recent decades, the intensifying problems of neoliberal globalization forced capitalism to make adjustments. As neoliberal globalization lost mass support in capitalism’s old centers, governments took on powers and made more economic interventions to sustain the capitalist system. In short, economic nationalism rose to replace neoliberalism. Instead of the old laissez-faire ideology and policies, nationalist capitalism rationalized the state’s expanding power. In capitalism’s new centers, enhanced state power produced economic development that markedly outgrew the old centers. The new centers’ recipe was to create a system in which a large sector of private enterprises (owned and operated by private individuals) coexisted with a large sector of state enterprises owned by the state and operated by its officials. Instead of a mostly private capitalist system (like that of the U.S. or UK) or a mostly state capitalist system (like that of the USSR), places like China and India produced hybrids. Strong national governments presided over coexisting large private and state sectors to maximize economic growth.

Both private and state enterprises and their coexistence deserve the label “capitalist.” That is because both organize around the relationship of employers and employees. In both private and state enterprises/systems, a small employer minority dominates and controls a large employee majority. After all, slavery also often displayed coexisting private and state enterprises that shared the defining master-slave relationship. Likewise, feudalism had private and state enterprises with the same lord-serf relationship. Capitalism does not disappear when it displays coexisting private and state enterprises organized around the same employer-employee relationship. Thus we do not conflate state capitalism with socialism. In the latter, a different, noncapitalist economic system displaces the employer-employee organization of workplaces in favor of a democratic workplace community organization as in worker cooperatives. The transition to socialism in that sense is also a possible outcome of the turmoil today surrounding the formation of a new world economy.

The state-private hybrid in China achieves remarkably high and enduring GDP and real-wage growth rates that have continued now over the last 30 years. That success deeply influences economic nationalisms everywhere to move toward that hybrid as a model. Even in the U.S., competition with China becomes the go-to excuse for massive governmental interventions. Tariff wars—that raised domestic taxes—could be enthusiastically endorsed by politicians who otherwise preached laissez-faire ideology. The same applied to government-run trade wars, government targeting of specific corporations for punishment or bans, government subsidies to whole industries as so many anti-China economic ploys.

Third, over recent decades, the U.S. empire peaked and began its decline. It thus follows every other empire’s (Greek, Roman, Persian, and British) classic pattern of birth, evolution, decline, and death. The U.S. empire emerged from and replaced the British Empire over the last century and especially after World War II. Earlier, in 1776 and again in 1812, the British Empire tried and failed militarily to prevent or stop an independent U.S. capitalism from developing. After those failures, Britain took a different path in its relations with the U.S. After many more wars in its colonies and with competing colonialisms across the 19th and 20th centuries, Britain’s empire is now gone.

The question is whether the U.S. has learned or even can learn the key lesson of Britain’s imperial decline. Or will it keep trying military means, ever more desperately and dangerously, to hold on to a global hegemonic position that relentlessly declines? After all, the U.S. wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq were all lost. China has now replaced the U.S. as the major peacemaker in the Middle East. The days of the U.S. dollar as the supreme global currency are numbered. U.S. supremacy in high-tech industries must already be shared with China’s high-tech industries. Even major U.S. corporate CEOs such as Apple’s Tim Cook and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce want the profits of more trade and investment flows between the U.S. and China. They look with dismay at the Biden administration’s rising politically driven hostilities directed at China.

Fourth, the U.S. empire’s decline raises the question of what comes next as the decline deepens. Is China the emerging new hegemon? Will it inherit the empire mantle from the U.S. as the U.S. took it from Britain? Or will some multinational new world order emerge and shape a new world economy? The most interesting possibility and perhaps the likeliest is that China and the entire BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) grouping of nations will undertake the construction and maintenance of a new world economy. The war in Ukraine has already enhanced the prospects of such an outcome by strengthening the BRICS alliance. Many other countries have applied or will soon apply for entry into the BRICS framework. Together, they have the population, resources, productive capacity, connections, and accumulated solidarity to be a new pole for world economic development. Were they to play that role, the remaining parts of the world from Australia and New Zealand to Africa, Europe, and South America would have to rethink their foreign economic and political policies. Their economic futures depend in part on how they navigate the contest between old and new world economic organizations. Those futures likewise depend on how critics and victims of both neoliberal/globalizing capitalism and nationalist capitalism interact inside all nations.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan and Capitalism’s Crisis Deepens. He is founder of Democracy at Work.

Portland cops broke own policies by spraying dangerous amounts of tear gas toward protesters

Travis Gettys
April 17, 2023

Portland had seen more than three months of sometimes violent protests against police brutality and racism

Portland police indiscriminately blasted tear gas toward demonstrators during the George Floyd protests in violation of their own policies.

The research agency Forensic Architecture, which investigates human rights violations, analyzed hundreds of videos from June 2, 2020, along with internal police files and other evidence, and found the Oregon city's downtown area was blanketed with tear gas in amounts more than 50 times above levels considered to be "immediately dangerous to life or health," reported The Guardian.

“Teargas is a form of violence that is formless and shapeless and to a certain extent invisible,” said Lola Conte, an advanced researcher with Forensic Architecture. “Visualizing allows us to understand the massive scale of the spread, and I hope this makes the harm unignorable and shows that something is failing on so many levels with the use of tear gas.”

The findings strongly contradict the police department's claims in internal reports at the time, when officers defended their actions as heroic and restrained, but instead show police sprayed chemicals considered to be a weapon of war toward hospitals, freeways and other facilities before eventually reaching the nearby Willamette River.

“If tear gas is a war crime among soldiers, why is it appropriate to use on your own people?” said Juan Chavez, civil rights project director at the Oregon Justice Resource Center. “And the Portland police department doesn’t care about the effects of long-term consistent exposure to teargas. To them, it’s an inventory issue: ‘Do we have enough teargas and how much more can we use?’”

A number of protesters -- and downtown residents who didn't even participate in the demonstrations -- describe painful and disturbing symptoms after they were gassed, and one woman says her persistent menstrual issues and respiratory problems improved after she moved outside the city.

“There was a burning while I was breathing that was gone once I moved,” said 42-year-old Liv Vasquez, who didn't directly attend the protests.

Forensic Architecture reviewed internal records that suggest the Portland Police Bureau knew officers did not track how much tear gas they were spraying or whether the levels were above Occupational Safety and Health Administration thresholds for dangerous exposure.

“It’s disturbing that this is so much higher than the standard, and yet it’s completely normal for protests everywhere,” said Dr. Rohini Haar, an emergency medicine physician and adviser for Physicians for Human Rights (PHR).

As Fox News case heads to trial, far right 'Gateway Pundit' faces its own defamation lawsuit

Jason Hancock, Missouri Independent
April 17, 2023

Photo: Screen capture

They didn’t know it at the time, but Dec. 3, 2020, was the start of a nightmare for Wandrea Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman.

Both were election workers in Atlanta, and that was the day Rudy Giuliani — ex-New York mayor and adviser to former President Donald Trump — testified to a state Senate committee that Georgia election officials had counted illegal ballots to steal the presidency for Joe Biden.

The allegations were quickly debunked by government officials and the media, but they still reverberated through right-wing media outlets.

Later that day, the Gateway Pundit, a St. Louis-based site run by brothers Jim and James Hoft, identified Freeman as one of the election workers accused of producing and counting 18,000 hidden, fraudulent ballots from a suitcase.

“What’s Up, Ruby,” the site’s headline read that day. “BREAKING: Crooked Operative Filmed Pulling Out Suitcases of Ballots in Georgia IS IDENTIFIED.”

A month after the initial allegations, Trump himself singled out Freeman by name in a call with Georgia officials pressing them to alter the state’s election results. The Gateway Pundit bragged in an article about the call that the site was “first to identify” Freeman and Moss in the “suitcase fraud scandal that was caught on tape and went viral online.”

The former president’s supporters went on the attack.

Freeman and Moss say they were almost immediately bombarded with threats of violence, many tinged with racial slurs. Under advice from the FBI, Freeman says she had to flee her home. On Jan. 6, 2021 — the day of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol — Freeman said her home was surrounded by Trump supporters shouting through bullhorns.

Moss says strangers tried to get into her grandmother’s home to make a “citizen’s arrest.”

Gateway Pundit would go on to publish numerous stories about Freeman and Moss, with headlines like: “WHERE’S BILL BARR? — We Got Your Voter Fraud AG Barr — It’s On Video and They Attempted to Steal Georgia with It! — HOW ABOUT A FEW ARRESTS?”


“It’s turned my life upside down,” Moss testified last year to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Freeman and Moss say the Hofts never responded to a letter demanding they retract and take down the stories. So in December 2021, the women filed a lawsuit in St. Louis Circuit Court against The Gateway Pundit for defamation and emotional distress.

It’s scheduled for a jury trial on May 9.

The lawsuit against The Gateway Pundit is one of a smattering of defamation claims across the country against media companies and other figures accused of peddling misinformation about the 2020 election.

The most high profile is headed to trial this week, when Fox News will try to convince a jury it should not have to shell out $1.6 billion to Dominion Voting Systems, which alleges the cable news giant damaged its reputation by promoting phony claims that it rigged the 2020 presidential election by flipping millions of votes from Trump to Biden.

The judge in the case has already ruled that jurors will be instructed that those claims are false.

While the potentially landmark defamation case against Fox has drawn national attention, the lawsuit against The Gateway Pundit has quietly chugged towards trial without nearly as much attention. Most of the coverage of the case has appeared in the Gateway Journalism Review.

Yet both cases could have long-lasting consequences, said Daxton Stewart, a journalism professor specializing in media law at Texas Christian University.

“You’re dealing with publishers trafficking in conspiracy theories, ones they know or should know to be entirely bogus,” Stewart said. “They’re making factual statements that are demonstrably false, and that causes real harm to people.”

For their part, the Hofts deny that they ever knowingly fabricated or disseminated blatantly false stories about Freeman or Moss. And in January, the brothers filed a countersuit claiming they were in fact the ones who were being defamed.

The Hofts “believed (and still believe) that the 2020 election did not reflect the will of the voters,” the counterclaim states.

‘Actual malice’

In the nearly two decades since its founding, The Gateway Pundit has spread debunked conspiracies on a wide range of topics, from the 2018 Parkland school shooting to former President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. It’s helped proliferate lies about the brutal attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband and made false claims about U.S. aid money sent to Ukraine.

But its biggest focus in recent years has been promulgating lies about election fraud.

Jim Hoft was banned from Twitter last year after repeatedly promoting falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election, though he was reinstated after Elon Musk purchased the social media company.

The Missouri attorney general’s office last year added Hoft as a co-plaintiff in its lawsuit alleging the federal government colluded with social media companies to suppress freedom of speech.

In their response to the defamation lawsuit, the Hofts argued that any stories published by The Gateway Pundit regarding Freeman and Moss were “either statements of opinion based on disclosed facts or statements of rhetorical hyperbole that no reasonable reader is likely to interpret as a literal statement of fact.”

Rhetorical hyperbole, the Hofts' response states, “cannot form the basis of defamation and related tort claims.” The plaintiffs are “limited purpose public figures,” the Hofts argue, and thus must prove actual malice to claim defamation.

The Hofts are referring to the legal standard set in a 1964 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of New York Times v. Sullivan that found public officials must establish actual malice — or reckless disregard of the truth — before recovering defamation damages.

That’s a high bar to clear, said Samantha Barbas, a professor of law at the University of Buffalo who has written a book on the history of New York Times v. Sullivan. If Moss and Freeman were considered to be private figures, Barbas said, they would only have to show that the statements made by The Gateway Pundit were made with carelessness or negligence.

“However,” she said, “the courts have interpreted public figure broadly, so that someone who responds to a defamatory allegation could potentially be considered a public figure, since they ‘put themselves in the spotlight’ when they responded to the accusation.”

Does reputation matter?

Stewart said The Gateway Pundit may have an advantage in fending off defamation charges that Fox News does not.

While Fox has been decried as biased in favor of Republicans, and has peddled its share of debunked conspiracy theories, it is still largely considered a news operation.

While Gateway Pundit thrived under Trump — it was even granted White House press credentials — it has always existed largely in the fringes of the right-wing media ecosphere.

“You have these conspiracy theorists who try to have it both ways,” Stewart said. “They try to traffic in things they know are false or not plausible, whether it’s a vaccine denial, or you know, election fraud or space aliens. So they use that like plausible deniability. But they also want to be seen as credible.”

In a defamation lawsuit, Stewart said, “would a jury think that they are capable of making a credible statement?”

Trump led pressure campaign on state election officials, Jan. 6 panel says



Barbas, however, said The Gateway Pundit’s reputation shouldn’t matter.

“The question is, what did the publisher know about the facts at the time the statement was published?” she said. “If the publisher continues to repeat false statements after finding out that they are false, that is an example of reckless disregard.”

Moss and Freeman’s lawsuit seeks compensatory and punitive damages, as well as legal costs. It also asks a judge to declare that the statements published by the website are false and to order the false and defamatory statements removed from any website or social media accounts the Hofts' control.

Among the attorneys representing the Georgia election workers is John Danforth, former Republican U.S. Senator from Missouri.

The women have also sued Giuliani, who was deposed in that case last month, and the right-wing cable news channel One America News Network, which settled last year and agreed to say on air that there was “no widespread voter fraud by election workers” in Georgia in 2020 and that Moss and Freeman “did not engage in ballot fraud or criminal misconduct.”

In their counterclaim, the Hofts argue the defamation lawsuit against them is solely intended to drive The Gateway Pundit out of business. The Hofts are represented by the Las Vegas law firm of Marc Randazza, who in the past has represented numerous far-right figures, including Alex Jones of InfoWars and Andrew Anglin of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.

“It is a form of political lawfare,” the Hofts’ counterclaim states, “and lacks legal merit.”

Missouri Independent is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com. Follow Missouri Independent on Facebook and Twitter.