Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

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Re: Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

Post by blindpig » Thu Oct 15, 2020 11:13 am

blindpig wrote:
Tue Feb 11, 2020 12:10 pm
Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

anaxarchos
07-23-2007, 01:01 AM

No, really. Even as a bourgeois-democratic document, it really, really sucks. I'm talking about more than the obvious here: more than about how juridical and political "rights" don't impinge on economic society in the worlds richest country, more than about the institutionalization of only two parties, more than the observation that the commoner's House of Lords (the Senate) has more power than the legislature, more than the meaning of why it takes several more amendments 80 years after the first ten to establish that former slaves count as "humans" too and are candidates for "Human Rights" (and another 100 years to implement even those), and more than the two hundred other details that have become obvious in the last few years, such as the inability to recall a government except by criminal trial or coup.

I am talking about the fact that Bush has exposed the absolute power of the "presidency", a power hidden only because of the collusion of the major political parties for the entire life of the Republic. It appears that in this system, there are no limits whatever on the powers of the presidency save elections every 4 years (which would not have counted as "democracy" even in the 18th century), and the only reason that it even appeared that there were any such limits was exclusively the result of a voluntary super-constitutional etiquette practiced by the political participants but in no way enshrined in law. All it took was one asshole to show it all up.

Let me say it as controversially as possible - The constitution wasn't usurped, wasn't diluted, wasn't undermined; it was always like this.

Which means that the U.S. is governed by among the most primitive of current day political charters and that there is much less democracy here than in most recently established bullshit quasi-democracies, even by bourgeois standards... and this is said by someone who thinks that "democracy" don't mean shit, even when it's real.
a timely reminder....
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

Post by blindpig » Tue Oct 27, 2020 1:49 pm

Supreme Court, the Second Amendment and the Real History of the US Constitution
BY OAKLANDSOCIALIST ON OCTOBER 26, 2020 • ( 2 COMMENTS )

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Amy Coney Barrett shows she will be obedient to Trump by going maskless in close quarters.

The elevation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court and the fact that that court will now have five Trump thinkalikes; the role of the armed and dangerous “militias” and the “precious Second Amendment rights”; the view of the majority of the (in)Justices of the Supreme Court that all decisions must be based on the “original intent” of the framers of the Constitution – all of this once again should focus our attention on what was their intent. That can only be understood by understanding who the framers of the Constitution really were and what was happening at that time.

The American Revolution (1765-1783) lasted 18 long years. No revolution, especially not a victorious one, will leave the population untouched. In this case, it left the white American colonial population not only in a state of ferment but also impoverished. Largely small farmers (we will get to the slaves in a minute), they were in debt to both the state governments (whose taxes they largely couldn’t pay) and to the merchants and bankers who had loaned them money. Some were actually put in debtors prison for inability to pay those debts.

The indebted small farmers sought to get state legislatures to issue paper money, which would make it easier for them to repay their debts.

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Massachusetts militia fires on the tax and debt rebels of Shays Rebellion

The spirit of armed rebellion also lived on, and there was a series of armed uprisings culminating in Shays Rebellion in 1787. In that rebellion, the impoverished farm laborer and former soldier in the Revolution, Daniel Shays, gathered a force of hundreds of armed men and marched on the armory in Springfield, Massachusetts. His intent was to seize the arms there and organize a general revolution.

This armed revolt of private citizens was ultimately put down by the state controlled militias, and Daniel Shays had to flee for his life to Vermont. Vermont refused the attempts of the state of Massachusetts to force Vermont to return him, and Shays stayed in Vermont for several years until he was granted a pardon.

In those days the ruling “one percent” – the wealthy minority – were largely the merchants, bankers and slave owners. These events convinced them that the Articles of Confederation under which the states were governed was inadequate for several reasons:

First and foremost, the federal government lacked the power to levy taxes and, therefore, lacked the ability to build an army.

Second, since the states issued their own money, lack of one stable currency not only made debt collection in real terms uncertain; it also made interstate commerce uncertain.

Their problem was how to get a new form of government organized that would be accepted by the majority of the citizens (bearing in mind that only white males were really full citizens, and even then in most states only if they owned some property). So what they did was organize for the different legislatures to elect delegates to a convention in Philadelphia whose purpose supposedly was to revise the Articles of Confederation. Revise, not write an entirely new document. Nevertheless, when the delegates met in Philadelphia in 1787, they ran away with the supposed purpose and wrote an entirely new document – the Constitution of the United States of America. What were the views of the writers of the Constitution? What was their real purpose?

Much of this can be seen in the papers they exchanged called the Federalist Papers. James Madison was one of the foremost contributors to those papers. In Federalist Paper 51 Madison wrote: “The most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society…. The causes of faction cannot be removed.” Bear in mind that many small, white farmers were in effect without property since they were in debt. So were the workers in the cities.

As to the slaves: Some claim that the fact that the slaves were considered 3/5 of a person because that was how they were counted in the population. That is untrue. In any real sense, they were not considered as people at all. The 3/5 rule was a compromise between the slave owners in the largely rural South and the merchants and bankers in the North. It was aimed at ensuring that neither ruling class dominated the other.

In another sense, though, the “founding fathers” well recognized that slaves were human beings and dangerous ones at that. In Federalist Paper Number 43, Madison commented on the danger they posed when he wrote that “in the tempestuous scenes of civil violence (the slaves) may emerge… and give a superiority of strength to any party with which they may associate themselves.” In other words, he and the rest of the ruling class were keenly aware of the extreme danger should some new rebellion like Shays Rebellion widen and merge with a slave uprising.

Such an uprising would threaten to be completely out of control, partly because under the Articles of Confederation the federal government could not levy taxes and therefore was largely hamstrung as far as building a national army. Remember that the ruling class had to rely entirely on a state militia to put down Shays Rebellion. That was why one of he major powers the US Constitution gave the new federal government was to levy taxes.

So, the problem was how to build a new government that the masses of white men could not control? Several of the top officers in the former Revolutionary Army combined into the Order of Cincinnati. They advocated a monarchy. However, wiser heads realized that any attempt to create a monarchy would be like pouring gasoline on a fire. Leave it to Madison to lay out the problem and craft a solution: “To secure the public good and private rights [of the wealthy minority] against the danger of such a faction [of the impoverished majority] and at the same time preserve the spirit [italics added] and the form of popular government is then the great object…” In other words, to ensure that the rich minority (the ruling classes) could control the government without making it too obvious (like through a monarchy).

The answer lay in the structure of the new government.

Madison again (in Federal Paper #51): “The only answer that can be given is… by so contriving the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may… be the means of keeping each other in their proper places…. It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different [economic] interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the [rich] minority will be insecure.” So it was that as Madison explained in the same paper “The House of Representatives being to be elected immediately by the people, the Senate by the State legislatures (this was only changed in 1913 because it became such an unwieldy source of corruption), the President would by electors chosen for that purpose by the people, there would be little probability of a common [economic] interest to cement these different branches in a prediliction for any particular class of electors.” Not only that, but Senators served for six years and only one third of them were elected in any one election. This made it impossible for any insurgent movement to constitutionally capture the federal government in any one election.

Nowadays, the talk is of the “genius” of the “Founding Fathers”. In his book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States, James Beard explains where that “genius” lay: “We cannot help marvel at their skill…. Their leading idea was to break up the attacking forces at the starting point: the source of political authority for the several branches of the government…. And the crowning counterweight to ‘an interested and over-bearing [impoverished] majority,’ as Madison phrased it, was secured in the peculiar position assigned to the judiciary, and the use of the sanctity and mysstery of the law as a foil to democratic attacks.” That is the role for those black-robed oh-so impartial (in)Justices, who are appointed for life.

That is what the division of powers is really all about!

Coney Barrett and the others of the menacing majority like to claim they rest on the original intent of the framers of the Constitution. At the same time, they oppose any restrictions on private gun owners, basing themselves on the “precious Second Amendment”. What hypocrisy! The Second Amendment was aimed at establishing state-run militias – the same militias that were used to put down popular armed uprisings. It had nothing whatsoever to do with the rights of private individuals to own guns! In the aftermath of Reconstruction, the Second Amendment

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Black Panther Party at the California capitol building. The NRA didn’t mind gun control laws aimed at the Panthers!

didn’t get in the way of disarming the newly freed slaves. Nor did it after the Black Panther Party marched into the California state legislature, arms in hand in 1967. No, that event was used to further restrict the right to carry guns, and the National Rifle Association and such groups offered not a word of objection. In other words, all this Second Amendment rights nonsense is purely aimed at strengthening armed and dangerous and usually racist right wing vigilante groups. (This is not meant to support or oppose restrictions on gun ownership; it’s just to say that all the hoopla about “Second Amendment rights” is historically and legally completely wrong.)

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George Washington, slave owner and real estate speculator.
He was considered the richest man in the country in his time.

As to the general view and intent of the framers of the US Constitution, we will let George Washington – considered to be the richest man in the country at the time – have the last word. He commented: “the tumultuous populace of the large cities are ever to be dreaded.”

https://oaklandsocialist.com/2020/10/26 ... stitution/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

Post by blindpig » Sun Nov 08, 2020 12:28 pm

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The United States is not a democracy
Posted Nov 04, 2020 by Ben Hillier

Originally published: Red Flag (October 2, 2020) |

The United States boasts one of the most farcical democratic systems to have been invented. The country’s constitution is an eighteenth-century relic penned by merchants and slave owners, amendments to which can be blocked by as few as 13 states representing less than 4 percent of the population. Its Supreme Court, conservative by nature and stacked with tenured-for-life justices, provides an institutional anti-majoritarian check on the popular will.

Its Senate, the more powerful of the two wings of the Congress, represents states, and thereby territory, rather than people. The weight of a vote in the least populous state is currently 68 times greater than one cast in the most populous. A minority of the population elect more than 80 percent of senators, thereby giving greater national influence to those living in rural areas. It is “the most powerful source of institutional racism in American life”, writes New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait.

The roughly 2.7 million people living in Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, and North Dakota, who are overwhelmingly white, have the same number of Senators representing them as the 110 million or so people living in California, Texas, Florida, and New York, who are quite diverse.

Presidential elections are conducted through a state-based electoral college system that, again, gives disproportionate influence to smaller, more rural states at the expense of the urban working class. Even then, tens of millions of working-class people are disenfranchised in various ways. There’s weekday voting, which makes it harder to get to polling stations. There’s polling station removal to make queues longer, and polling station relocation to make them harder to reach—usually taking them from Black or Latino areas and putting them far away, in a place not serviced by public transport. There’s the scourge of systematic gerrymandering—the process through which politicians choose their own voters by drawing the district boundaries. (In 2018, for example, Republicans won nearly two-thirds of the seats in the Wisconsin state assembly, despite receiving a minority of the votes.)

There are voter purges—just wiping people from the electoral rolls—and measures to make it more difficult to register. There’s denial of citizenship and therefore voting rights for up to 10 million predominantly Latino workers and denial of statehood for Puerto Rico, which means people there don’t get representation in the Congress. And there’s the disenfranchisement of those with felony convictions—more than 6 million people, disproportionately Black.

To top it all off, the federal government, the state governments, the local governments, the governorships and the mayorships are tightly controlled by a 166-year-old capitalist party duopoly dominated by corporate finance. No third party in all that time has been able to loosen the grip of the capitalist class over the machinery of “democracy”—no socialist party, no social democratic party, no labour party, no communist party.

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy”, professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page concluded in a 2014 article published in Perspectives on politics, the journal of the American Political Science Association. “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule … When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose.”

It’s no wonder that progressives in the United States talk about the need for a democratic revolution. Yet, while you have to scoff at the conceit of US politicians proclaiming their system the greatest democracy on earth, addressing the problems outlined above would not solve the underlying issue. Even countries whose electoral systems are less imperfect than the US model are beset by the same fundamental flaw: no matter who is elected to the parliament, congress or assembly— and no matter who becomes prime minister, chancellor or president—most of the consequential decisions about how society operates are made by the people who own or control the wealth. Those people are largely unaccountable and make up a small minority of the population.

For example, the top twelve U.S. billionaires have a combined wealth of more than US$1 trillion. While those people buy influence and bankroll the campaigns of politicians across the country, that’s actually not the main thing. When you look at the names on the list, you can start to see the tremendous social power they exert—not through having money, but through running companies.

There’s Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and the Washington Post, Bill Gates of Microsoft, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla’s Elon Musk, Steve Ballmer, owner of the National Basketball Association, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the Walton family, owners of the world’s largest retailer, Walmart. And there are more than 600 other billionaires, not to mention the multimillionaires who sit on corporate boards or are the CEOs of the major corporations.

They control the media, the manufacturing businesses, the transport companies, the electricity supply and distribution, the telecommunications infrastructure, agriculture and horticulture—collectively, they own and control everything needed to keep society functioning. They, and their hundreds of thousands of managers, choose what gets produced and where it gets produced. They choose who gets hired and who gets fired. Through their investment decisions, they choose whether the electricity is generated from renewable sources or from fossil fuels. They choose what is printed in the newspapers and what gets broadcast on TV. They control the development of the cities, deciding what gets built there and who gets to live where.

No-one voted to give them all this control. And regardless of who wins the next election, they will remain in charge. Whether it’s Donald Trump or Joe Biden, Walmart workers will still go to work the next day for the same shitty pay and the same shitty health care. Workers at Amazon won’t get extra breaks. Cleaners won’t get holiday pay, or a wage high enough to take one. Homeless people won’t all of a sudden find themselves in accommodation. The richest 1 percent of the population will still control about 40 percent of the wealth.

And the state over which the politicians are said to rule will not change in the least. The heavily armed police will still roam the streets, protecting the property of the wealthy and targeting the poor and racial minorities. Blacks will still be locked in prison at alarming rates. The US military will still be stationed in dozens of countries, the Central Intelligence Agency will still destabilise democratically elected governments around the world if they don’t follow Washington’s line and the national security state will continue to spy on people everywhere.

In reality, the people who do all the work to make society function—garbage collectors, cooks and cleaners, nurses and bus drivers, shelf stackers and agricultural workers, factory hands and construction workers—have almost no say over the fundamentals. If that’s to change, the U.S., and the rest of the world, need, not just a democratic revolution, but a social revolution.

That will mean extending democracy into the economy, so those who do the work get a say over what is produced and for whom. After all, the resources of the planet—the land, the minerals, the waterways, the science and technology that are the result of centuries of collective human endeavour—should be there for the benefit of all, not a privileged few.

Are there going to be more penthouses and condos for the wealthy, or more public housing and hospitals? Will there be another golf course, or a public park? Should ever more tollways be built, or should there be a massive public transit system that everyone can use? Should we keep using coal for electricity, or should those workers be given different jobs as we make more solar cells? How should cities be built in the first place? Do we need all those McDonalds and other takeaway shops, or can we turn most of them into public childcare centres and community kitchens since they already have cooking facilities and playgrounds?

All these questions and many more should be answered by the people who do all the work, not by the minority who have accumulated or been born into wealth. Only then could we say that we live in a democratic society—one totally responsive to the needs of the majority of the population, because it is run by them.

https://mronline.org/2020/11/04/119166/

If I hear/read one more person rhapsodizing about 'our democracy' I might have an aneurysm. It not 'our democracy', it is the dictatorship of capital.
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Re: Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 17, 2020 12:38 pm

What the US Constitution Specifies About Choosing the New President, How it is Stacked Against us
December 16, 2020 Stansfield Smith Biden, electoral college, Hillary Clinton, Magna Carta, Trump, US, US Presidential election
By Stansfield Smith – Dec 15, 2020

Regardless of the traditional bluster about the Founding Fathers and the world historic nature of the US Constitution, the electoral system it set up to choose a new president is far from democratic. We now find Trump attempting to use the Constitution as written to be “re-elected.” Those who laud “our great democracy,” claiming Trump is maneuvering in an illegal manner to stay in office, even alleging a “fascist coup,” base their assertions to no small extent on illusions about the US electoral system.

The first illusion we must discard is that the people’s vote determines the winner of the US presidential election. That is not true, as many were unpleasantly reminded in 2016 when, for the second time this century, a loser of the popular vote was declared president.

Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution states the winner of the Electoral College vote determines who will become the new president. Each state and the District of Columbia choose several Electors equal to the number of its senators and representatives (D.C. receives the same number as the least populous state). According to the Constitution, these Electors gather at the Electoral College after the election to choose the new president.

The second illusion is that the winner of the popular vote in each state wins the state’s Electors for the Electoral College. In fact, the Constitution states that Electors are under no obligation to honor the majority vote of the people of their state. Our vote for president is no more than a recommendation.

The Constitution Grants Full Authority to the Electoral College; Our Vote is a Suggestion

The state legislatures are given the entire right in the Constitution, under the 12th Amendment, to choose the Electors themselves. They heed the popular vote out of choice, not because it is mandated or even suggested in the Constitution. Neither does the Constitution specify that Electors must pledge their vote to any candidate. Nothing in the Constitution or federal law binds an Elector’s vote to anyone. Therefore, the people’s vote for president is not binding on the Electors, it is a suggestion.

All laws pledging Electors to vote for their party’s chosen presidential candidate originate at the state level, not the national level. The Supreme Court upheld the legality of these state laws in its 1952 ruling Ray v. Blair.

Just this year the Supreme Court ruled in Chiafalo v. Washington that states may choose to enforce state laws that bind Electors to voting for the winner of the state’s popular vote. The Supreme Court recognized that “such promises of candidates for the Electoral College are legally unenforceable because violative of an assumed constitutional freedom of the Elector under the Constitution, Art. II, section 1, to vote as he may choose in the Electoral College,” but added “it would not follow that the requirement of a pledge is unconstitutional.”

Electors not Voting as Pledged

As of 2020, only 33 states and the District of Columbia have laws requiring Electors to vote for the candidate they pledged to vote for. However, in half of these jurisdictions no legal mechanism enforces this. Only 14 of the 50 states have voided votes contrary to the pledge their Electors and replaced the respective Electors. In two of these states they may also be fined. Three other states impose a penalty on “faithless” Electors but still count their votes as cast.

In US history, through 2020, there have been a total of 165 instances of “faithless” Electors. Most, 63, occurred in 1872 when the presidential candidate died after the election but before the Electoral College convened. However, “faithless” Electors are not rare: between 1948 and 2016, Electors did not vote as pledged in ten presidential elections.

RELATED CONTENT: Let Everybody Vote, Even if They’re Incarcerated

In the 2016 presidential election, some Electors in six states (Colorado, Minnesota, Hawaii, Texas, Maine, and Washington) did not vote according to their pledge. Only Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota invalidated those votes. Washington became the first state to ever fine faithless Electors (a mere $1000 each) for their vote.

The most disputed presidential election occurred in 1876 in which rightwing forces engineered the end of Black Reconstruction, laying the basis for Jim Crow. Samuel Tilden outpolled Rutherford B. Hayes in the popular vote by a margin of 3%. He won 184 electoral votes to Hayes’ 165, with 20 electoral votes in dispute. Each party in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina reported its candidate had won the state amid various allegations of electoral fraud and intimidation of voters. Congress then stepped in and selected the president by handing 20 electoral votes to Hayes, giving him the victory with 185 electoral votes to 184.

The most recent and scandalous denial of the popular vote occurred in 2000, when the mostly Republican appointed US Supreme Court intervened in the decisive Florida vote. In a 5-4 decision, they upheld the Republican dominated Florida state legislature’s right to stop the vote recount, where “hanging chads” had arisen as a major issue. This left 178,000 votes in mostly Democratic areas yet to be counted, allowing Republican candidate George W. Bush’s 537 vote lead to stand and be selected as president.

Methods Available to States for Disregarding the Popular Vote for President

The 12th Amendment to the Constitution establishes the state legislature, not the popular vote count, as the vehicle to choose the Electors and thus the president. While state legislatures are constitutionally entitled to disregard the state popular vote, it would be politically prudent to provide a reason. A state legislature could claim that confusion over the validity of some election day votes or mail-in ballots causes it to question the validity of state popular vote, and it – in practice, the dominant party in the legislature – then directly selects the Electors.

As CNN reporter Fareed Zakaria recounted before the 2020 election, “Taking account of the confusion” over the vote, whether real, alleged, or fabricated, or claimed mobs and violence at voting stations, “legislatures decide to choose the Electors themselves.”

It was not only Trump Republicans who have tried to throw out reported state vote totals. In 2016, the CIA, FBI, and NSA concocted stories of Russian interference to favor Trump. Democrats claimed Russia had hacked into voting systems and altered votes. They worked to alter the Electoral College vote just as Trump is now doing. The Atlantic ran an article after election day 2016 and before the Electoral College met, entitled The Electoral College Was Meant to Stop Men Like Trump From Being President. It argued that it was the duty of members of the Electoral College to defy voters and elect Hillary Clinton on national security grounds because of alleged Russian interference. As Greg Palast says, both Democrats and Republicans use “fear of vote fraud to commit fraud.”

RELATED CONTENT: Elections in the US vs. 6D Elections in Venezuela: A Comparison

Zakaria continued that in 2020 eight out of nine key swing states have Republican legislatures. “If one or more decide that balloting is chaotic and marked by irregularities, the [state legislature] could send [to the Electoral College] what they regard as the legitimate slate of Electors, which would be Republican.” That would give Trump ample Electoral votes to be declared the new president.

Or, the leadership of the majority party in a state legislature could question the outcome of the state’s popular vote and claim this forces them to choose their own Electors for the Electoral College. The state minority party could counter and say they respect the validity of the popular vote and send the Electors as decided by popular vote.

If who are the valid Electors in a state is disputed, when the US Congress validates the Electors on January 6, it could exclude all the Electors from a disputed state. For instance, if in 2020, both Florida and Wisconsin submitted two separate slates of Electors, Congress could invalidate both slates and the remaining Electors from 48 states would choose the president. If this happened, neither Biden nor Trump would gain the required 270 Electors.

In that situation, the Constitution, Article II, Section 1, explicitly directs the House of Representatives to vote to determine the new president, but it does so with each state casting a single ballot. If this were to happen Donald Trump would be “re-elected” in a constitutional manner, because most state legislatures have Republican majorities.

What Does This Mean for Our Future?

This reveals that the “democratic” nature of the US election system is wishful thinking, based on – possibly deliberate – misunderstanding. Nowhere does the original Constitution nor any later amendment specify a citizen’s right to vote for president. Yet, the Constitution does provide many avenues through which to nullify a presidential vote if the winner represented a force outside of the traditional oligarchy. That helps explain why, given the every four-year much heralded “great exercise in democracy” no actual representative of the US people, nor progressive has ever been elected president, no matter how much people try.

Regardless of the popular vote for president, the two corporate parties have many constitutional maneuvers at their disposal to block a possible future working people’s party candidate who wins the national election from taking office. Given that the two parties, in their struggles even among themselves, have sought to use the Constitution to invalidate unfavorable popular vote counts – in 2000, 2004, 2016, 2020 – it can be expected they will use every means available to block any successful working people’s party.

This shows that the struggle to build a mass working people’s party would encounter barriers the Founding Fathers rigged in the Constitution to ensure ruling elite control. Unfortunately, the US people are still at the level where most desiring fundamental change think it can come from within the system, within the two corporate parties, within the restrictive constraints of the US Constitution.

https://orinocotribune.com/what-the-us- ... gainst-us/

The US constitution is irrelevant to a working class party which never expects to take power through constitutional means. They ain't never going to let that happen. Bourgois elections can be a measure of popular support but power will be taken in the streets, not the polling booth. Not our choice but in class war and with ecological disaster looming 'ya gotta do what ya gotta do'.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

Post by blindpig » Mon Feb 22, 2021 6:29 pm

A note on 'liberty'

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Although the phrase "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is not from the US Constitution the purpose of that document is meeting those requisites. 'Life' is self evident, that 'happiness', twice borrowed, is recognized as a euphemism for having/gaining wealth, but what of 'liberty'?

I am currently reading 'The Class Struggle In The Ancient Greek World' by G.E.M. De Ste. Croix(only after brother Dahlgren recommended it a decade ago...). As is too obvious, those 'founding fathers' were obsessed with ancient Rome, particularly the Republic and the Senatorial and Equestrian orders which comprised the ruling class of the day. They very much identified with those 'patricians' and found the ruling ideas of those times similar and suitable to their current situation. One ruling class knows another... The Roman bosses had some definite ideas about 'liberty'.

Essentially libertas was the right of the ruling class to do damn well as it pleases without the interference of any 'tyrant' or the unruly mob(that's us) either. Want to bribe a judge? Sure, if you can afford it. To have this 'right' restricted was tyranny. Or almost any other. It was this that Jefferson and the boys wanted for themselves and it is easy to see how that 'right' has been applied. In those days slavery and the genocide and appropriation of Native Americans and their land. The evil king would prevent them from full on ethnic cleansing, horrors! In these days 'right to work' and untrammeled exploitation and pollution of our environment come to mind. Nowadays any sort of labor or environmental regulation. 'Democracy', is claimed by our bosses as their ideal while in fact it is their libertas to capture markets, exploit labor and resources. It is the rankest sort of hypocrisy but our bosses believe it and the Romans in their time did too.

What those fools who rioted in DC on January 6 claim as their liberty would in the eyes of a Roman boss be seen as licentia, licence, as they don't qualify for liberty, which is scored in dollars these days. And licence is not to be allowed as it is disruptive to the boss's 'liberty'. One of these days they might figure it out.

The pertinent discussion can be found here starting on page 366:
https://libcom.org/files/06%20-%20Rome% ... zerain.pdf
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Re: Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

Post by blindpig » Tue Mar 02, 2021 3:40 pm

Two of the most powerful economic voices in America disagree on a tax for the uber-rich

By Matt Egan, CNN Business

Updated 4:39 PM ET, Mon March 1, 2021

New York (CNN Business)Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren faces an uphill battle persuading Washington to back her tax on ultra-millionaires — starting with convincing her own party's Treasury Secretary.

Janet Yellen, whom Warren praised last year as an "outstanding choice" to lead the Treasury Department, fears a wealth tax would be too messy to implement.
"Then Janet and I need to have a conversation about implementation," Warren told CNN Business on Monday after introducing her Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act.

The bill would seek to raise $3 trillion to rebuild the economy and fight inequality by imposing a 2% annual tax on the net worth of households and trusts between $50 million and $1 billion. Billionaires would face a 3% tax.
"We designed this wealth tax by building on the experiences of other countries that put together a wealth tax and weren't always successful," Warren said in the interview. "We saw where the mistakes were and made sure we tightened it up."
$100 billion for the IRS to fight tax cheats
Critics argue that taxing wealth would be challenging, if not unconstitutional. In particular, there are concerns about how to value assets and prevent the wealthy from hiding cash overseas
Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chief, said last week at a DealBook conference that she isn't planning a wealth tax like Warren's because it's "something that has very difficult implementation problems."
"People say, 'Well, rich people cheat so we shouldn't even try to use a wealth tax,'" Warren said. "But if rich people cheat, that doesn't mean we should just give up and let them pay taxes at lower rates than everyone else. That means we need to hire more enforcement and make them follow the rules."

Warren's wealth tax comes with teeth.
The legislation has a built-in audit rate of 30%, meaning every year nearly a third of all families would be audited. And the bill calls for boosting the budget of the IRS by $100 billion to build up the agency's audit firepower and modernize IT systems.
The Warren plan also proposes a 40% "exit rate" on the net worth above $50 million of any US citizen who renounces their citizen to avoid paying the tax.
"Once you've got the wealth tax in place, it's not very hard to monitor year by year. If last year you owned real estate, this year you either better own that same real estate or have a lot of cash that you took in a sale," Warren said.

https://us.cnn.com/2021/03/01/economy/w ... index.html

First thing, does this proposal pass muster with the US Constitution? Opinions vary but seem to lean to 'yes', exceptions being the ilk of self-interested assholes like Micheal Bloomberg. Yet there is some ambiguity and the current configuration of the Supreme Court, designed and functioning as the last backstop of the ruling class in all times, give any challenge to the proposal a significant boost.
Warren’s wealth tax is constitutional under the standards laid down by the Founders, as this article will demonstrate. Apportionment of a wealth or land tax by population would now require the injustice of substantially higher tax rates in poorer states: when that happens, under the Founders’ standards, the tax is not a direct tax for which apportionment is required. Apportionment was not written to protect wealth from assault, as proponents of its unconstitutionality now claim, but rather to reach wealth by what was thought to be the best then available measure of wealth.

The Constitution, Article I, section 9, clause 4, requires that a “direct tax” must be apportioned among the states by population.3 For the Founders, a necessary element to be a direct tax is that apportionment among the states by population must be reasonable and just. Thus import taxes (the impost), excise taxes, duties, carriage taxes and now real estate and wealth taxes have been expelled from the definition of direct tax, sometimes by the operation of ordinary language and sometimes by Supreme Court decision.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/taxa ... itutional/
Without an amendment, the Supreme Court has the final word on the constitutionality of the wealth tax, and Jensen believes the current court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, would likely knock it down. In 2012, the Roberts Court considered the constitutionality of Obamacare's individual mandate, which required Americans buy health insurance. Roberts upheld the mandate by declaring it a form of tax — and that led him down the path to revisiting the direct tax rule.

Roberts acknowledged the carriage tax in 1796 was upheld because the Supreme Court reasoned "apportioning such a tax would make little sense," and that this "narrow view" of what the direct tax rule applied to "persisted for a century." But then Roberts gets to Pollock, and he says while the ruling was "overturned by the 16th Amendment," the Supreme Court "continued to consider taxes on personal property to be direct taxes."

Jensen believes this view is a problem for wealth tax supporters. "What is a tax on wealth other than a tax on property?" he says. "If you are going to argue as Professor Ackerman and others have done that an unapportioned tax on wealth is constitutionally valid, you just have to deal with the Chief Justice Roberts' opinion."

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019 ... titutional
I am a bit surprised that the constitution is not vehemently opposed to the idea but goes to show how slick those boys were. The whole scam is constructed to protect privilege without seeming to.

Is Warren serious? This proposal brings to mind Keynes and his proposal that the rich should sacrifice for their own good. Seemingly reasonable but practically absurd this is a bridge further than that paragon of Democratic economics, Paul Krugman, has ever dared. Or is this just another exercise in Democratic Party showboating? A page from the Bernie Sanders playbook of leftish proposals which he knows will never fly, even with the Dem leadership, but serve to keep the leftish sheep in line?

I don't think that matters too much, the important thing is that it's on the table, in public view, up for discussion. In these times of dramatically increasing wealth inequality it's gonna be harder than usual to generate sympathy for that sad, put-upon minority, the rich. We should support the idea as a first step, a baby step, a foot in the door. Because if a 2-3% rate is OK then how about 20-30%? How about 90%? Sure, they will never ever accept those rates, but that's what we do, push, push, push.

Recent reading also brings to mind that one of the base reasons that the Roman Empire fell is that the very rich always exempted themselves from taxation, until the very end, so that the burden entirely fell on the working masses and eventually petty wealth too until the social fabric was finally shredded beyond redemption.
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Re: Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 10, 2021 3:07 pm

What right does the Supreme Court have to rule?
December 7, 2021 Lallan Schoenstein

Image
Women’s March in Washington, D.C., Oct. 2.

On Dec. 1, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the arguments from U.S. state attorneys supporting Mississippi ‘s 15-week abortion ban.

A state law was passed in Mississippi in 2018 that would make most abortions illegal after the first 15 weeks of pregnancy — including those caused by rape. The Mississippi law hasn’t yet been enforced due to a legal challenge by Mississippi’s only abortion provider, the Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

The Supreme Court is now considering the case.

The most conservative judges — including Donald Trump-­appointed anti-woman bigot and serial abuser Brett Kavanaugh — pressed forward to raise the stakes to possibly overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion.

Another Trump appointee, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, stated her position during the hearing: Why was abortion necessary, when women who do not want to be mothers can simply give their babies up for adoption? Thereby, Barrett was arguing for cruel legislation that bans abortion for those who have been raped, whose health or the baby’s health is at risk or a myriad of other legitimate issues, the most primary being control over one’s own body.

As a member of the Indiana religious organization, People of Praise, Barrett has served as a lay pastoral women’s leader known as a “handmaid.” Barrett is a millionaire — among the richest of rich justices, with a lush income from the Catholic Church’s Notre Dame Law School—and this removes her from the concerns plaguing most peoples’ lives.

One of three judges in the minority supporting women’s constitutional rights, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked whether the court would survive the stench of being considered a political institution, a point echoed by Justice Elena Kagan. Their attempt to defend a critical right to healthcare also implied support for the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

What right does the Supreme Court have?

The U.S. Supreme Court was established 232 years ago by the U.S. Constitution with the passage of the Judiciary Act of 1789. At that time the U.S. Constitution did not extend equal rights to people kidnapped from Africa, the Indigenous population, oppressed genders or those without property — only white men with property.

The Court was set up as one of three branches of the emerging capitalist government, which included a president and a Congress made up of a House of Representatives and the Senate, reputed to be a balance of powers. However, during a dispute in 1805 it was determined that six appointed judges held supreme authority over the elected members of Congress and the president. (The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to determine how many “justices” sit on the Court. The Court started with six, but the number has been between 5 and 10. Since 1869 the number has been set at 9.)

Fifty years later, in 1853, the Court affirmed slavery with the Dred Scott decision. If there was any doubt as to where the real power was, it was right there in affirming the rights of the slave owners as against a majority of the people opposed to slavery.

In the years following the Civil War to end slavery, there was a gradual democratization of the political process. The right to vote had previously been denied to the Native people, to Black people, to women, to the youth. But these groups have won voting rights through years of struggle. (See Sam Marcy’s “A Marxist View of the Supreme Court.”)

Supreme Court erodes rights

In the 2000 presidential election, the Supreme Court exercised its authority by selecting George W. Bush to be president. Bush appointed the conservative John Roberts who is currently Chief Justice.

Last June, the Court released a wave of decisions, as it does every year at the end of its session. Among them was a ruling giving the responsibility for decisions on partisan gerrymandering to state governments — a big attack on voting rights for Black and other oppressed peoples and all workers.

Along with reproductive rights other decisions currently on the courts docket include:

– Gun control. The political arguments surrounding this issue never take into account official U.S. policy of militarization or the violence of other armed wings of the state against Black people and other workers, employed and unemployed.

– Religious freedom. Under the guise of religious freedom the court is attacking public education by allocating funds to private institutions. This further infringes on the separation between church and state—an issue, we were taught, that laid the basis for the American Revolution.

– State secrets. This year, two lawsuits concern the kind of information the U.S. government can withhold in the interest of national security.

The first involves Guantanamo Bay detainee Abu Zubaydah, who is seeking information about U.S.-run interrogation torture sites and the Central Intelligence Agency contractors he is suing for allegedly torturing him.

The second is related to a suit from a group of Muslim men in California who allege the Federal Bureau of Investigation engaged in religious discrimination when it monitored members of their community for possible terrorism connections.

An area of concern: the Shadow Docket

The court has increasingly relied on what’s been called an emergency “shadow docket” — these are short, frequently unsigned, opinions issued without full briefing and argument — used to take significant steps in a conservative direction with less opportunity for scrutiny.

Three recent examples of the “shadow docket” trend involve Supreme Court action on (1) the extremely restrictive Texas abortion law, (2) a Trump-era policy requiring asylum-seekers to stay in Mexico and (3) throwing out a presidential-ordered temporary moratorium on home evictions.

While the court’s traditional rulings take months of work — from legal briefs to oral arguments to a decision — and this term’s big cases probably won’t be announced until May or June of 2022 — the shadow docket can unfold quickly and move in unpredictable directions.

In an article titled, “Texas lawmakers: Why you gotta be so cruel?” Gloria Verdieu writes about the Texas abortion law that the Supreme Court supported through the shadow docket: “‘The Heartbeat Law’ bans abortion after five-and-a-half to six weeks of pregnancy, before most women are aware that they are pregnant. The law threatens any individual or entity who ‘knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets,’ including paying for or reimbursing the costs of an abortion through insurance or otherwise, with a civil lawsuit. Any civilian who sues that person will be awarded $10,000 plus court costs and attorney fees.”

Invalidating the rights the people

A clear majority of people in the U.S. support upholding Roe v. Wade, guaranteeing a constitutional right to abortion. According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll, some 60% say Roe v. Wade should be upheld. Three out of four Americans say that the decision of whether or not a woman can have an abortion should be left to the woman and her doctor.

It’s no accident that the power to make a legal decision on reproductive rights is ultimately exercised by the Supreme Court. It’s the most reliably conservative, anti-democratic arm of the government, responsive only to those who have appointed them.

During the Depression the Roosevelt administration was forced to institute the National Recovery Act in order to save capitalism. It granted workers the right to organize — union rights — and established some forms of social insurance including social security and unemployment benefits, all under pressure from the working class actions countrywide.

As soon as it became clear that the capitalist recession was slowly ending, in one day the Supreme Court nullified this whole mass of legislation in the infamous Schechter case of 1935 and began to roll back the progressive legislation. To this day the Supreme Court has upheld the anti-labor strike-breaking policies of the National Association of Manufacturers, of the multinational corporations and of the banks. The plight of labor today, at least from the point of view of legality, can be shown to come from this — that in the last resort the ruling class relies on the Supreme Court, an instrumentality that is as undemocratic as it is reactionary.

Concerning the court ‘s decision in the 1989 to upheld a Missouri law prohibiting the use of public facilities to provide abortion services and to restrict physicians who provided abortions, Sam Marcy wrote: “The abortion decision confirms that whenever the bourgeoisie is in a crisis, they will let nine people, unelected, appointed for life, decide the most critical issues concerning life in the United States.”

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2021/ ... e-to-rule/
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Re: Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

Post by blindpig » Wed May 18, 2022 3:45 pm

The Supreme Court Just Streamlined the Process for Bribing Senators
Ted Cruz manufactured a case to upend anti-corruption provisions, and it worked.
By John NicholsYESTERDAY 10:30 AM

Image
US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) speaks during a news conference outside the US Capitol on April 29, 2021. (Photo by Stefani Reynolds / Getty Images)

Bribing members of Congress is generally thought of as a bad thing. That’s why there was widespread support for the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, which contained a provision specifically designed to crack down on corruption. The act set a cap on the amount of money a member of Congress can collect from special-interest donors to pay off personal debates that were accumulated while running for office.

But in a jarring 6-3 decision issued Monday in the case of Federal Election Commission v. Ted Cruz for Senate, the US Supreme Court eliminated the cap and cleared the way for a new age of campaign corruption.

Promoted by Senators Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.), the 2002 law set a $250,000 limit on loan repayments that candidates could obtain from donors after they were elected. The law didn’t stop wealthy individuals from financing their own campaigns, unfortunately. But it did say that candidates could not run up big debts financing their bids and then turn to big donors to replenish their personal funds.

The “Brutal Solidarity” Between Buffalo and Palestine
Makes sense, right? Because a candidate who went into heavy personal debt in order to get elected might feel beholden to the billionaires and political action committees that, though their contributions, effectively eliminated that debt.

But sensible strategies to fight corruption of elected officials have for decades been under attack by an increasingly conservative US Supreme Court, going back to the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision that struck down limits on campaign spending. More recently, the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission struck down restrictions of corporate spending to influence elections and the 2014 McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission decision removed limits on the number of campaigns a wealthy donor could finance. The last of those rulings summed up the philosophy of the court’s conservative majority in asserting that “the proper focus is on an individual’s right to engage in political speech, not a collective conception of the public good.”

What the court has now done can and should be seen as the most glaring example yet of just how far it will go to upend democracy.

The decision represents “another victory for right-wing donors in their assault on our campaign finance system, and another step toward unlimited special-interest spending in our elections,” declared Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.).

It also rewards the kind of politician who should never get anywhere near a US Senate seat. Faiz Shakir, the former political director for the American Civil Liberties Union who managed the 2020 Bernie Sanders for President campaign, explained the scenario succinctly when he said:

SCOTUS decided today that if you want to run for office, do this:
1) find a really rich person to back you,
2) take out a giant loan to pay for campaign
3) get that rich person to pay you back later.

I wonder what kinds of candidates this might generate

Meet Ted Cruz.

The scandal-plagued Republican senator from Texas, who has made it his mission to upend campaign and ethics laws, manufactured the latest case. In 2018, when he almost lost his seat to Democrat Beto O’Rourke, Cruz lent his reelection campaign $260,000 on the day before the election. The campaign repaid him up to the $250,000 cap, but he was out $10,000. So he sued to get it back.

Just as the Citizens United case was managed by foes of corporate influence on politics to give a sympathetic conservative majority an opportunity to weigh in, the Cruz case was a setup. And it worked.

Chief Justice John Roberts Jr., a driving force behind the Citizens United and McCutcheon rulings, wrote for the majority in the Cruz decision that provision of the 2002 law that placed limits on the repayment of campaign loans “burdens core political speech without proper justification.” As in the past, Roberts and the conservative justices who aligned with him—Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett—embraced the notion that the Constitution is primarily a rich man’s document that “safeguards the ability of a candidate to use personal funds to finance campaign speech.”

Never mind the fact that this decision, like so many before it, privileges candidates who have the ability to loan themselves more than $250,000. And never mind the obvious openings it creates for self-dealing donors, who bundle contributions and direct political action committees, to buy influence with candidates who win elections and then declare themselves to be open for business.

Arguing that the chief justice and his allies have been working for many years at “destroying the foundational anti-corruption laws in our country,” law professor and longtime anti-corruption campaigner Zephyr Teachout said Monday, “Roberts is still on his reckless course, untying the knot between the public and the elected, legalizing bribery.”

Justice Elena Kagan made much the same point in a scathing dissent that began:

A candidate for public office extends a $500,000 loan to his campaign organization, hoping to recoup the amount from benefactors’ post-election contributions. Once elected, he devotes himself assiduously to recovering the money; his personal bank account, after all, now has a gaping half-million-dollar hole. The politician solicits donations from wealthy individuals and corporate lobbyists, making clear that the money they give will go straight from the campaign to him, as repayment for his loan. He is deeply grateful to those who help, as they know he will be—more grateful than for ordinary campaign contributions (which do not increase his personal wealth). And as they paid him, so he will pay them. In the coming months and years, they receive government benefits—maybe favorable legislation, maybe prized appointments, maybe lucrative contracts. The politician is happy; the donors are happy. The only loser is the public. It inevitably suffers from government corruption.

The latest demolition of the guardrails against corruption of our politics and our governance creates a new road map for how campaigns will be run. In the past five election cycles, Senate candidates made 588 loans to their campaigns, while House candidates made 3,444 campaign loans. You can bet that those numbers will spike in 2020, and that the loans that are for more than $250,000—historically only a small percentage of the overall number of loans—will jump dramatically, as candidates and their fund-raising managers chart a new course for filling campaign coffers with special-interest money.

Kagan’s dissent, in which she was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, spells out where things are headed: “It takes no political genius to see the heightened risk of corruption—the danger of ‘I’ll make you richer and you’ll make me richer’ arrangements between donors and officeholders.”

https://www.thenation.com/article/polit ... term=daily

**********************************

Supreme Court makes it easier for rich donors to bankroll candidates

Lachlan Markay

Image
Illustration: Natalie Peeples/Axios

The Supreme Court has boosted high-dollar donors' abilities to personally enrich candidates — including ones like the wealthy individuals pouring millions into their own campaigns this year — if they prevail on Election Day.

Why it matters: The court's ruling Monday is one more decision bypassing post-Watergate and other campaign finance restrictions. A 6-3 majority struck down rules limiting candidates from raising funds after their elections to repay the money they loaned to their campaign.

Wealthy candidates who lend millions to their campaigns can secure public office, then go to their top donors for sums that could reach the millions.
They can seek contributions to repay themselves and then deposit the money directly into their personal bank accounts.
While the donations are capped at the amount of the candidate's campaign loan, the risk of corruption is "self-evident and acute," according to the Campaign Legal Center.
The good-government group filed an amicus brief in the case.
Between the lines: The current midterm cycle has seen a huge number of wealthy self-funders.

Ninety-five House and Senate candidates have already loaned their campaigns more than $250,000, according to Federal Election Commission records.

In Tuesday's U.S. Senate primary in Pennsylvania, celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz faces off against hedge funder David McCormick and former Trump administration official Carla Sands.
Oz has loaned nearly $15 million to his own campaign. McCormick has loaned $11 million and Sands has chipped in $3.9 million for her race.
In Arizona, Republican businessman Jim Lamon has loaned his Senate campaign $13 million.

In Alabama, Republican Mike Durant has loaned about $2.6 million to his Senate campaign.
In Wisconsin, Democrat Alex Lasry has loaned his Senate campaign more than $7 million. His primary opponent, Sarah Godlewski, has loaned hers nearly $3 million.
The big picture: Under prior campaign finance rules, candidates could only raise up to $250,000 after an election to reimburse themselves.

On Monday, the high court struck down that cap.

Under the court's ruling, a candidate who lends millions to his or her campaign is now in a position to solicit that — plus far more in traditional donations — after they've been elected and hold office.
While individual donors are still bound by the per-election contribution cap — $2,900 in 2022 — the Supreme Court decision means candidates can collect far more from them on aggregate to repay their own loans.
Wealthy candidates often argue they will avoid any conflicts of interest while in office by self-financing their campaigns. Now, they have an unfettered way to make themselves whole after voters have gone to the polls.
Between the lines: The Supreme Court disagreed with any concerns as it ruled in a case brought by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

The Harvard Law graduate argued the $250,000 cap violated the First Amendment without addressing legitimate corruption concerns.

"The Government is unable to identify a single case of quid pro quo corruption in this context," wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in his majority opinion.
The key question is what constitutes that sort of conduct.
Under Supreme Court precedent, it requires an explicit quid pro quo; buying access and influence generally isn't considered a corrupt act in itself.
What to watch: The court's decision is retroactive.

Campaigns this cycle that have candidate loans on the books will be able to take advantage of the new rules after their elections.
What they're saying: Tara Malloy, Campaign Legal's senior director for campaign finance litigation, called the court's decision "disappointing but not surprising."

"The court didn't really change its position, but it is extremely blinkered view of corruption," Mallow told Axios in an interview.
The one "silver lining," she said, was that the court "ruled relatively narrowly" and did not strike down broader restrictions on campaign contributions.

https://www.axios.com/2022/05/17/suprem ... candidates

The Supreme Court is just doing the job it was designed for: Ensuring the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, forever.
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Re: Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

Post by blindpig » Sat Jun 18, 2022 3:15 pm

Letters: What the real intent of the Second Amendment’s militias was
June 17, 2022

Comments

Image
An attendee at a gun rights rally openly carries his pistol at the state Capitol in Olympia, Wash., on Jan. 18, 2019.
Ted S. Warren/Associated Press 2019

Regarding “Militias were the intent” (Letters to the Editor, June 16): As a historian of the Second Amendment, I agree with historian Joe La Sala’s letter about its intent and the fallacy of originalism, but not that its misinterpretation today is the fault of identity politics.

Identity politics were embedded in the Constitution, written by white men, excluding Indian, Black people and women, plus Mexicans once the U.S. had forcibly annexed half of Mexico. Each group would experience oppression and struggle for citizenship and formal equality.

La Sala also fails to mention research about what the white militias codified in the Second Amendment were for: killing Indians to occupy their land and to guard against slave revolts.

The Second Amendment needs to be abolished for the white supremacist entity that it is.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, San Francisco

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Attempted U.S. coup televised: House hearings conceal more than they reveal
June 18, 2022 Struggle - La Lucha

Voting rights still being eliminated

Image
Trump coup supporters – fascists carrying the Confederate battle flag of slavery – stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The public hearings of the House Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack have dramatically confirmed that Donald Trump, former president of the United States, attempted a coup d’état.

Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, head of the committee and member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said clearly: “Any legal jargon you hear about ‘seditious conspiracy’, ‘obstruction of an official proceeding’, ‘conspiracy to defraud the United States’ boils down to this: Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup.”

Thompson added: “It represented Trump’s last, most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.”

This is unprecedented. An overt coup attempt has not happened in any of the imperialist powers in the last century and exposes the bare threads of democracy in the U.S. The coup attempt also revealed the sharp instability in the U.S. ruling class.

The House hearings, however, conceal more than they reveal.

Pentagon played key role

The Pentagon played a key role in the Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt, but the hearing has been silent on that.

The Pentagon was deeply involved. Members of the U.S. military, both active and veterans, as well as from numerous police forces across the country, were leading participants.

The “Insurrection Timeline – First the Coup and Then the Cover-Up,” published at “Moyers on Democracy,” details the central role played by Donald Trump and his new Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller.

Miller had been put at the head of the Pentagon on Nov. 9, 2020, six days after the election, in a departmental “regime change” that embedded three fierce Trump loyalists as top Defense Department officials.

Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser asked Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy — who reports to Miller — for more federal help to deal with the mob that had broken into the Capitol. McCarthy and Miller denied the mayor’s request and blocked deployment of the National Guard until hours later, after the insurrection had already been put down.

The New York Times reported: “President Trump initially rebuffed and resisted requests to mobilize the National Guard to quell violent protests at the Capitol, according to a person with knowledge of the events.

“In the end, it was Vice President Mike Pence, defense and administration officials said, who approved the order to deploy. It was unclear why Mr. Trump, who is still technically the commander in chief, did not give the order.”

How then was it possible for Pence to deploy the troops, in opposition to Trump? That could only have been done if Trump had been secretly removed as commander-in-chief.

However, Trump and the Pentagon’s coup attempt shows that a section of the ruling class supported a presidential dictatorship. This is confirmed by the fact that Trump’s actions continue to have the overwhelming support of the Republican Party.

Promoting anti-Trump right wing

The House hearings on the Jan. 6 attack are a media spectacle through which they hope to restore some belief in the U.S. government.

The Democrats have presented a program that’s primarily given voice to right-wing opponents of Trump. As one cartoonist put it, these hearings are biased; we’ve only heard from the Republicans.

At the head of the committee, side-by-side with Representative Thompson, is Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney, who sold out her lesbian sister, opposing gay marriage in order to win the Senate seat.

Previously Liz Cheney held a patronage post in the State Department where she promoted her father Vice President Dick Cheney’s lies for invading Iraq.

The hearings have exalted Mike Pence, William Barr, Judge J. Michael Luttig and other Republican operatives.

What about voting rights?

The hearings are about a coup attempt. But they do not confront the grave issue of voting rights that the coup attempt played upon and which continue to be under assault.

Jan. 6 was at root an attempt to eliminate voting rights. The 2020 presidential election had set the record for the highest voter turnout in 120 years – a massive popular vote to throw out Trump.

That was a real Constitutional crisis. The U.S. Constitution was written by wealthy landlords and bankers, many of them slaveholders, to insure their class rule. The Constitution declares that enslaved peoples are not fully people and excludes the Indigenous Peoples.

At the time, voting rights were given only to white men who owned property. Not until 1919, with the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, women won the right to vote.

To protect the slavocracy, the Constitution imposed an Electoral College that chooses the president, not the popular vote. The slavocracy’s Electoral College was a form of voter suppression that’s continued to this day. In fact, the coup attempt used the legal vagaries of the Electoral College as part of its tactics.

Why has there been no call by the Democrats to abolish the anti-democratic Electoral College?


While staging of the House hearings has been an engrossing TV show, Congress is doing nothing about the crises of war, racism, racist police murder, sexual and gender repression and immigrant oppression. The economy is in crisis, with the threat of a recession or worse.

The hearings appear to have no goal other than to expose what is already known about Trump. They are devised to distract from the failure to implement any of the mildest solutions promised by the Biden campaign in the struggle for food, housing, healthcare, reproductive rights, education, livable incomes and the right to organize workers’ unions.

https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2022/ ... ey-reveal/


If that was a 'coup' attempt it was the sorriest in modern history. Sure, there was intent on the part of some parties, but coordination, planning and communications were lacking or nonexistent. Trump wanted it to work but kept just enough 'distance' for barely 'plausible deniability'. In other words he didn't put his ass on the line, a marker of a serious leader. So call it a riot, bust them all, including Trump, but enough of the histrionics.
Besides, what passes for 'democracy' in this country ain't no great shakes, a 'democracy of dollars'.

Italics added.
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Re: Controversy #2 - The U.S. Constitution Sucks

Post by blindpig » Thu Jul 07, 2022 3:10 pm

The Declaration of Independence sucks too.

*******************************************

Slaveholders Who Signed the Declaration of Independence: Washington, Jefferson, and the People they Owned
Ann Garrison, BAR Contributing Editor 06 Jul 2022

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Red dots cover the faces of slaveholders who signed the Declaration of Independence (Image: Twitter @arlenparsa)

Black Agenda Report editors Margaret Kimberley and Ann Garrison discuss the personal and institutional hypocrisy which allowed those who said, "All men are created to equal," to be slaveholders.

"Americans like to think of themselves as an exceptional people bound together by noble ideals. This belief is challenged, however, when history is taught more honestly and fully, without omitting facts or telling outright lies. Presidents are outsized characters in America’s narrative about itself. Children attend schools named after them; there are monuments dedicated to them in every state. They have their own national holiday, Presidents’ Day, which presents an opportunity for the country’s virtues to be celebrated. We are conditioned to feel a deep connection to these men hundreds of years after some of them have died."

That's a paragraph from "Prejudential ," Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Margaret Kimberley's book about the racial prejudice manifested by every single US president in history.

I spoke to Margaret Kimberley about George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, 246 years after they signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

Ann Garrison: Let's begin with the first paragraph of your first chapter, which is about our first President George Washington. Tell us about George Washington's false teeth.

Margaret Kimberley: There's a lot of mythology surrounding Washington that we're indoctrinated with from the time we're in grade school—the cherry tree, cannot-tell a-lie, and so on. And one of the favorites is that he had false teeth, but they were made of wood. Well, they were not made of wood, he had dentures that at that time were made of ivory and metal. But there was also, at the time, tooth transplantation. And some of the dentures were actual teeth that were taken from enslaved people that he held. And I opened with this because I think it's important for people to understand the brutality of slavery. I mean, tooth extraction is painful now, with anesthesia with modern medicine, so that was just torture. There's no other way to describe what it had to mean at that time. I thought it was important for readers to understand what Washington demanded, and the system of slavery, which he was very much a part of.

AG: Now tell us why Washington, quoting your book, “rotated his human property for six month intervals between Pennsylvania and Virginia.”

MK: Well, the US capital, before Washington DC was built, kept moving further south. It was first in New York City, where Washington was inaugurated, then it moved on to Philadelphia while this new city was being built.

And Pennsylvania had a law which said that any enslaved person who was in Pennsylvania for more than six months could petition for their freedom. And this created a problem for George Washington, because that meant the people he held could potentially be freed. So he never allowed any of them to be in Philadelphia for that six-month period, which was a violation of the spirit and the letter of that law, because the authors of the law had realized that such a loophole would allow people to do what Washington did. And so this rotating people in and out was forbidden in that statute. Washington consciously and deliberately broke that law.

AG: So the father of our country broke the law to hold on to his enslaved people.

MK: Yes, he did. He and his wife Martha owned more than 200 human beings. Most of those were people who were called dower slaves. That is to say, they belonged to the estate of Martha Washington's first husband, Daniel Parker Custis. And the fact that Washington and his wife owned so many people is very, very significant. It explains a lot about this country.

AG: Can you tell us the story of Oney Judge, one of Washington's enslaved people?

MK: Yes. Oney Judge was a young woman who managed to escape from Washington when they were in Philadelphia. She escaped with the help of some people in the small free population there. She managed to make her way to New Hampshire but the Washingtons never gave up trying to get her back.

They found out she was there. They tried to lure her back. Washington wrote a letter to someone seeking their assistance and calling her ungrateful. “The ingratitude of the girl who was brought up and treated more like a child than a servant,” he wrote. That tells you a lot, that despite having more than 200 people, this one young woman escaping was a threat to their entire enterprise.

And they were also lying to her because they could not legally free her, as she was one of these people referred to as dower slaves. So they lied to try to get her back. She was smart enough to know that she shouldn't, and she managed to remain free the rest of her life.

AG: Okay, let's move on to Thomas Jefferson, the American president most often quoted for his erudite writing and scholarship about the foundation of the new republic. Tell us about Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase.

MK: Well, the Louisiana Purchase, which is now roughly half of the United States, was, obviously Louisiana, Arkansas, states in the Upper Midwest, the Dakotas, New Mexico, what's now Texas, and so on.

These territories came into the US after the Haitian Revolution and France’s loss of Haiti. Losing this very profitable French territory meant that France needed money, and so they chose to sell their territories on the North American continent to the United States.

These territories came into America's possession when Jefferson was president, and he had a lot of power over what happened in them. But he was also a slaveholder, and though he would claim he thought slavery was evil, that it was wrong, he never freed one person, not even one.

And he could have. Had he been telling the truth about wanting to end slavery, this was his opportunity. There were suggestions about gradual emancipation, and so forth, but he was obviously not interested in that.

These new territories instead allowed the US to expand slavery, and this just goes to show you how much of a hypocrite he was. This was the continuation of the settler colonial project, the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population, stealing their lands, and spreading slavery as far and wide as they possibly could.

AG: Did you in your research ever come across Jefferson's relationship with Lafayette, the French aristocrat who eventually abandoned his aristocratic status and became known simply as Gilbert du Motier ? During the American Revolutionary War, he led a battalion of soldiers who had escaped from Haiti, then devoted the rest of his life to abolition and often urged Jefferson to free his enslaved people. It doesn’t seem surprising that so few of us know his story.

MK: I did not focus on Lafayette. I did, however, write about General Tadeusz Kosciuszko , the Polish Army officer who fought on the side of the US in the Revolutionary War, who had been a slaveholder but gave up the practice and urged Jefferson to do the same.

Jefferson always claimed he couldn't afford it. So Kosciuszko collected money and left it to Jefferson in his will, his argument being ‘okay, if you say you can't afford it, I will give you money and it'll compensate you.’ But to make a long story short, that did not happen, despite the fact that Kosciuszko died first.

As far as Black people fighting in the revolution goes, most of them fought for the British, because the British promised freedom to an enslaved person who fought for them. And there were many Black troops on the side of the British; many of them made their way to Canada after the war, to Nova Scotia in particular, and there are Black communities in Nova Scotia to this very day because of that,

AG: Is there anything you'd like to say about Sally Hemings?

MK: Sally Hemings was one of the 600 people that Jefferson held in slavery. She was his wife's half sister. Her father was a white man, and so was her grandfather. She and Jefferson had five children together, the first one when, I believe, she was only 15 years of age. He never freed her. He never freed any of those children he had with her. And I think it's important for people to know that too.

That's not just salacious gossip. It says a lot about him as a person, about slavery, and about the way that Black women were victimized by men like Jefferson. I think it's important to keep in mind and I'm glad it's something that has come into wider knowledge over the years, that it's gone from being gossiped about to being actually proven to be true, with DNA testing and other evidence.

AG: He didn't free his own children?

MK: No, he did not. And that was not uncommon.

There were some exceptions. There were men who would free their own kids and provide for them in some way. But there were a lot like Thomas Jefferson. And it's ironic that “Jefferson” is considered a “Black name.” I think most people with the last name Jefferson are Black, which is one of those ironies and slight mysteries of history.

But no, he did not free his own children.

And that shows you the extent of his hypocrisy, it shows you the extent of his own personal immorality, and the true nature of the people called founding fathers, who we are taught even at this late date in history, to admire and respect. They committed genocide against the indigenous population and against Black people as well.

AG: According to the Monticello tourist history idealizing Jefferson, “Beverly and Harriet were allowed to leave Monticello in 1822; Madison and Eston were released in Jefferson's 1826 will,” but he never freed Sally Hemmings.

MK: Does "allowed to leave" mean they were freed? If 2 of them were freed in his will, they weren't freed in his lifetime. I'm comfortable saying he didn't free them.

AG: Okay, is there anything else you'd like to say about these presidents whom Glen Ford called “them sons of bitches”?

MK: Well, on the Fourth of July holiday, I think it's important to understand why they declared independence from Britain. They were concerned that the British might end slavery. They were also concerned that the British were impeding their efforts to settle further west, beyond the eastern seaboard.

But Britain had a problem with France; there’d been the Seven Years War , from 1756 to 1863, which was called here the French and Indian War because it was the British against the French and their indigenous allies.

Just to be clear, Britain and France were both trying to steal Indian land. But in any case, after that war ended, Britain wanted to make peace and forbade settlements west of the Appalachians, which inconvenienced people like George Washington who had already purchased land past the Appalachians.

So that was in 1763. And it was one of the biggest reasons that there's a Fourth of July holiday at all. They wanted the entire continent. They did not want Britain to stand in their way. They had other arrangements with France, which allowed them to claim territories and what's now the US Midwest. And in order to complete and really fulfill the settler colonial project, they had to have an independent nation that was free from the British crown.

I think it's important to have that information and understand why there was an independence movement at all.

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