IMPEACH THESE ULTRA-CONSERVATIVE JUSTICES!

"Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob."
- Franklin D. Roosevelt -

"...in a democracy, powerful interests must not be allowed to drown out the voices of ordinary citizens."
- Barack Obama -

"The people of this country, not special interest big money, should be the source of all political power."
- The late great Senator Paul Wellstone -


For many years now, we have heard conservatives rail against activist judges, decrying their supposed "legislating from the bench." After the Warren and Burger Supreme Courts expanded civil liberties in the ares of self-expression, civil rights, consumer protection, and a woman's right to choose, these conservatives called for less judicial activism and the need for "strict constructionist" Supreme Court justices. Like most of their phrases, this was simply doublespeak for more authoritarian, pro-business, even corporatist, judges. With the narrow 5-4 conservative majority in today's Roberts court, they have at last realized their aims. The effect has been disastrous for the majority of the country, has empowered and strengthened greedy corporations at our expense, and that is why I am calling for THE IMPEACHMENT OF THESE ULTRA-CONSERVATIVE JUSTICES!

I know, I know: with the House of Representatives in conservative hands, my call will not be realized for a while yet, if ever. But it is something I believe we must push for in every new, succeeding Congress. For this court has reaffirmed the very errant notion that money is free speech, that corporations have the same rights as individuals, and has upheld the constitutionality of a number of clearly UNconstitutional authoritarian laws (the Patriot Act, the suspension of habeas corpus for those accused of terrorism). It has also generally supported an authoritarian line when it comes to cases of "executive privilege." In so doing, they have trampled all over the First and Fourth Amendments. That, my friends, is the basis for my complaint and, in my viewpoint, constitutes "high crimes and misdemeanors."


A recent issue of Fortune magazine features Chief Justice John Roberts on its cover, and does a fairly extensive article on the court. Part of the article reads:

"The Roberts Court is also widely seen as pro-business —”Supreme Court Inc.,” the New York Times Magazine called it in 2008. Since 2006, according to the Constitutional Accountability Center, the Roberts Court has ruled for business interests in 68% of the cases in which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce submitted friend-of-the-court briefs. During a comparable span (1981-1986) drawn from the Berger Court years, the Chamber’s win ratio was just 43%."

Let's look at these four main culprits who have done so much to trim your rights and aid the very richest people in the country, at your expense:

Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee, is everything Bush could have wanted in a justice: young, pro-business, anti-regulation, and socially and economically very conservative. Like many of today's conservatives, he is smug and arrogant, and once his mind is made up, no one in the world will be able to change it. An extremely bad choice for Chief Justice from an extremely bad President!


Associate Justice Clarence Thomas. We have Bush's father, George H. W. Bush, to thank for this, the most conserrvative, and arguably the worst, justice in history. On average, from 1994 to 2004, Thomas and arch-conservative Abtonin Scalia had an 86.7% voting alignment, the highest on the Court. He considtantly votes in favor of the privileged and powerful, and has followed a path of very narrow deviation from what he views as the true meaning of the Constitution and its amendments. He opposes affirmative action even though he is black.He sat idly by while his second wife Ginni actively campaigned for the Tea Party in the last election, this being a major breach of protocol.

Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. We can thank the Alzheimer's-ridden Ronald Reagan and his controversial Attorney General Edwin Meese for giving us this arch-conservative turkey. He is now the most senior Associate Justice. An argumentative and combative man, and stubborn as well, he too has broken major protocol by agreeing to address Michele Bachmann's new closed-door "Conservative Constitutional Seminar" for newly-elected Teapublican House members. Noted George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley has said, [this suggests] "an alliance between a conservative justice and a conservative member of Congress." In a letter to Bachmann, executive director of the American Constitution Society Caroline Fredrickson stated "you do not intend to provide members of Congress with a comprehensive understanding of the Constitution, but instead will offer an interpretive approach that yields results consistent with the political views of Tea Party caucus members."


Associate Justice Samuel Alito rounds out this group of hardcore conservatives. Based on his work in Ronald Reagan's Justice Department and his rulings as an appellate judge, critics claimed his views to be "outside the mainstream." They pointed, quite correctly, to Alito's dissent as a Circuit Court judge in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey case, wherein Alito voted to uphold a part of the law that required a husband be notified when his wife sought an abortion. When the case eventually came before the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court rejected Alito's reasoning. Critics have also pointed to his 1985 application for a promotion in the Justice Department, in which Alito stated that he had been motivated to go to law school by conservative writings criticizing the Warren Court's decisions in the areas of criminal procedure. He wrote that he was proud to represent the administration's legal view that "racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion." During his Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Alito explained that, while the statements were accurate at the time, they were written as part of an application for a political appointment in the conservative Reagan administration and did not necessarily reflect his views as a judge. Then why did he supposedly compromise his values in such a way? Could it be he was following the modern conservative method of saying or doing anything just so you get what you want? Alito has also issued opinions that made it much more difficult for victims of discrimination to get to court and prove their cases. Alito’s opinions on issues of religion raise real questions about his commitment to the fundamental principle of the separation of church and state. He does appear to look the other way when it comes to government unconstitutionally endorsing religion. This tendency has been especially obvious in a pair of cases dealing with fairly elaborate Christmas holiday displays in and around government buildings.

These justices have to a man endorsed decisions that uphold the status quo and authoritarianism. Just like the Chamber of Comkmerce they so often side with, they are anti-worker, anti-labor union, pro-"free trade" and and pro-establishment all the way. They side with the powerful against the powerless. They ignore important past legal precedent and try to supplant it with crazily modified opinions like last year's disgusting Citizens United v. the Federal Elections Commission. This makes them anti the overwhelming majority of the country, and is the main reason I am urging us to IMPEACH THESE ULTRA-CONSERVATIVE JUSTICES OF THE SUPREME COURT!
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OK, you got your extended Bush tax cuts for the rich, and you have established control over the House of Representatives, and you've been Speaker of the House for 20 days. NOW, WHERE ARE THE JOBS, MR. BOEHNER?
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UP NEXT: MY JOURNEY TO CUBA (PART I)!

WANTED FOR TREASON: U.S. CORPORATIONS!

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
- Thomas Jefferson -

"A corporation is an ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."
- Ambrose Bierce -

"A criminal is a person with predatory instincts who has not yet sufficient capital to form a corporation."
- Howard Scott -

"Fascism should be more properly called corporatism, for it is the merger of state and corporate power."
- Benito Mussolini -

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong it's reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
- ABRAHAM LINCOLN, in a Nov. 21, 1864 letter to Col. William F. Elkins -



I laugh every time I hear modern day conservative Republicans declaring that they belong to "the party of Lincoln." They are ignorant fools. For Abraham Lincoln was a LIBERAL who believed in a strong Federal Government. And, as the quote above proves, he correctly foresaw the dangers of concentrated capital so I believe he would have fought the influence of today's corporations tooth and nail. In fact, evidence strongly suggests that were he alive today, Lincoln would be a liberal Democrat and would undoubtedly be derisively labeled by such short-sighted and far-right Republicans as John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Jim DeMint, Eric Cantor, and John Cornyn, as a "far left liberal extremist." This is because today's Republican Party has shifted so far right, and is so -ro-big business that its beliefs about the role of business versus that of government would put it into direct opposition to the beliefs of Thomas Jefferson AND Abraham Lincoln, two of our greatest and most visionary Presidents. Surely both are spinning in their graves at the speed of light, as is Republican Teddy Roosevelt, to see the unprecedented influence corporations now have over our government and society as well. They have effectively bought control of the government and are using it for their own ends.

This unfortunate rise in corporate power got a tremendoust boost in 1886, when the government bowed to pressure from the then-huge railroad industry in the infamous Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company Supreme Court decision. A clearly out-to-lunch (and bought out by the railroad) then-Chief Justice Morrison Rennick White prefaced the proceedings with a shocking statement that "the court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution which forbids a State to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the law, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does." In one fell swoop, this very poor decision by the Supreme Court effectively gave the corporation the same rights as living persons. But this ill-fated and errant decision failed to define its responsibilities and so we have been plagued with corporate excesses to this day.

In the magnificently informative and entertaining 2003 Canadian documentary "The Corporation", this premise of the corporation being a living being is taken literally and examined closely on a number of levels. A comprehensive history of the corporation, legal decisions regarding it, and its behavioral aspects are all presented in a very revealing and thought-provoking manner. The conclusion: The corporation is a dangerous psycopath. It is anti-social, completely self-centered, callously disregards others' feelings, has no guilt, has a reckless penchant for ignoring the safety of others, and chronically lies to obtain profit. I would strongly recommend this film to everyone. A DVD of it can be bought relatively inexpensively on Amazon.com, and you also may be able to rent it, or find it at your public library. So please give it a view and even tell your friends about it. It is truly too good and too relevant to pass up.

Just Thursday night, David Shuster broke an infuriating story about corporations on his show "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue" on MSNBC. It turns out President Obama has asked former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to head a new "Tax Code Review Panel" in an effort to close some dubious corporate tax loopholes. Why? It turns out that the corporations recently bailed out by us taxpayers, plus numerous others, have all been avoiding paying federal taxes for years by fraudulently listing their subsidiaries as being based out of the country in phony tax havens like the Cayman Islands, Andorra, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and even Singapore. It is estimated corporations have as much as $12 TRILLION squirreled away in these havens which keeps those funds safe from taxation. This has deprived our government, now deep in deficit, engaged in two costly wars, with a crumbling infrastructure, even bailing out these irresponsible banks and other corporations, and unable to provide health care for 47+ million (roughly 1 out of every 7) of its citizens, with an estimated $100 BILLION shortfall in revenue it could dearly use! These same corporations have employed well-paid and well-funded lobbyists to influence the abovementioned foreign governments to keep details of the tax havens secret and inaccessible. Consider this: Morgan Stanley lists an astounding 158 foreign subsidiaries; Citigroup an incredible 90 (in the Cayman Islands alone!), and Bank of America boasts a whopping 59. Unfortunately, that is just the tip of the iceberg as far as American corporations' foreign subsidiaries go. There are many, many, many others. Some are in fact legitimate, but the overwhelming majority are set up solely to keep from paying taxes to the American government. Yet they all rely on the American government to fund roads their products are transported on, a postal system to bring their mail, schools to educate their children and labor force, and defense to protect their investments overseas. These greedy corporations ask for very much, and offer to return very little. In fact, they are stealing from the very hand that feeds them!

In business practice, corporations are set up to shield their owners from individual loss or responsibility arising from unforseen market developments. If, for example, the corporation expends a large amount of capital to procure sproducts or materials and then something goes wrong resulting in the corporation's inability to pay for those materials, the corporation's owners are not held personally liable for the procured, but unpaid for, materials. In other words, the corporation and its officers can make money and have rights, but cannot be held responsible or incur personal cost. This avoidance of responsibility is wrong and can be (and is) abused. Not only that, but corporations often employ a one-sided, beneficial-mainly-to-them methodology in doing business. In the case of large insurance corporations, they cherry-pick who and who they will not cover. In health insurance, they basically dictate how treatment and medications are delivered, overruling physicians and dictating terms. They boot people out of hospitals after major surgery in many cases the very next day, and they dictate medication dosage. This is done for the profit of the corporation, not for the benefit of the patient. Pharmaceutical corporations routinely sell the exact same medications to Canada at prices far lower than those offered to the United States, even though our tax dollars underwrite up to 30% of their research and development costs! This too is done for their profit and not for the benefit of citizens living in the very same communities in which the corporation is based! In my logic, if you are classified as a living human being and are afforded the rights of a living human being, so too should you bear the responsibilities of a living human being. The Supreme Court was grievously wrong to grant living rights to corporations but to make them immune to responsibility. For all living beings have a responsibility to one another and must pay a price or be punished when injuriously deviating from said responsibility. Should a person engage in acts which damage others' property, deprive them of their rights, or cause injury or death to others, that person is justifiably and individually fined and/or punished. And so too must it be with the officers of corporations. As laws and legal decisions have many loopholes, so too must one be found to reverse that foolish, highly unjust, unfairly preferential, and dangerous 1886 Supreme Court decision.

Merriam Webster defines "treason" in one sense as "the betrayal of a trust: TREACHERY." I would suggest U.S. corporations' deliberate and deceitful actions in setting up fictitious foreign subsidiaries to deprive our government of needed funds fits that definition. In a time of war, with millions of people's basic needs in jeopardy or going unmet, with even our military underfunded and underequipped, I would say this corporate hoarding and tax evasion constitutes a direct threat to our government and its people and endangers our very security. For this reason, I propose that the officers and directors of these offending corporations be held personally liable and receive harsh punishment for tax evasion and treason, just as an individual would for tax evasion, or for stealing from the military in time of war. These people have been getting by scot-free with far too much for far too long, and their day of reckoning must come. NOW!