Interesting overview of the modern history of the Supreme Court and of the members who make it up. It does help to explain some things. Most telling is the current court’s emphasis of exalting order over liberty, and institutional and governmental power over the individual.

In a 2006 opinion for a unanimous court written by Roberts, the former corporate litigator, the court told taxpayers they had no right to challenge the State of Ohio’s tax abatements and investment credits extended to DaimlerChrysler. Taxpayers had argued that they and their communities would sustain injury because the less money DaimlerChrysler paid, the less money the state would distribute mandated revenue to its cities.

But Roberts and his colleagues offered a short lesson in neoconservative, supply-side economics: “The very point of the tax benefits is to spur economic activity, which in turn increases government revenues.” Apparently, the conservative activists of the Bush-Roberts Court have rejected the observation of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that “A constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory.”

When the DaimlerChrysler Corp. v. Cuno case is read together with Kelo v. City of New London (2005) - a controversial case permitting private homes to be condemned so that the land on which they sit can be transferred to a private developer - the result is a population stripped of all defenses against corporate power. Workers and taxpayers cannot fight against corporations that take property for the benefit of profit-making, and they are just as powerless to seek redress in court when a town’s officials give the store away to a corporation.

Read the complete article Here from In These Times

War Crimes? Nope. We’re The Law
By Tom Blackburn
Cox News Service
November 20, 2007

At 10 a.m. in central Europe on Tuesday, it will be 62 years since the United States boldly put warmongering on trial.

The U.S. had the full support of Great Britain, the confused acquiescence of France and the cynical participation of the Soviet Union. All four countries provided judges and prosecutors.

The Soviet Union all but had the neck sizes of the accused on file for the nooses that it considered inevitable. Defeated Germany had its own view of war crimes trials: Victors’ justice. Whenever did losers get a fair shake?

A fair trial for the worst of the Nazis is precisely what the Anglo-American legal eagles had in mind. It would not be easy. The victors were going to be open to the charge that they tried people for crimes that had not been on anybody’s books before the war. They knew it, and mustered all the treaties and treatises on the laws of war they could find.

After much back and forth, they settled on four charges. The first 24 defendants, the so-called “top Nazis,” each were accused of some or all of them. The charges were “Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of crimes against peace; war crimes; crimes against humanity; and planning, initiating and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace.”

Jaded wire service reporters, unable to find the names of crimes among the generalities, began writing that the Nazis were accused of “war criminality” and let it go at that. The skeptics were wrong. The court’s rulings and sentences were not preprinted. Three of the original 24 beat the rap.

They included Franz Von Papen, the conservative politician who did as much as anyone to get Adolf Hitler past the last obstacles to power. He believed that he and his aristocratic pals could control Hitler because they knew wines and horses and the Austrian didn’t. The court decided that toxic superficiality was not a war crime.

Another problem for the tribunal was the Soviet Union. It had a judge on the bench but had done many things that Germans were in the dock for. The other victors had blots on their own records. Warriors can’t help it.

“War,” as Gen. William Sherman said, “is hell.” But there is a difference between the heat of combat and policies of states. The Nuremberg precedent was that if crimes were committed on the authority and orders of the state, leaders who held the authority and gave the orders would be at least as accountable as those who actually carried out the orders.

The post-World War II trials were intended to be only the start. The initiative to criminalize aggressive war and its brutalities was typical of the American idealism that had won a war and was determined to make a lasting peace.

It was of a piece with the United Nations, the Marshall Plan and the Berlin Airlift - all engineered by the United States in the name of peace and freedom for a world in which unimagined destructive power was making war too dangerous for humanity.

A handful of treaties are based on the Nuremberg precedent. The United States was a party at first. Then we stopped signing them. The Senate didn’t want to ratify warm-and-fuzzy treaties and international laws anymore. Americans turned into cold-and-hard testosterone tigers.

Neoconservatives say we don’t need international law because the end of the Cold War means that we are The Law. And the neocons are not the only ones.

Alas, the idea isn’t exactly working. It got us into a lot of trouble. Dealing with other World War II offenders, the United States sentenced a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, to 15 years of hard labor for waterboarding a civilian. Now we have an attorney general who couldn’t know if waterboarding is torture until he read the secret documents in which his predecessor said it isn’t torture if the president wants it.

The tigers of America - alerted by whoever puts out these talking points - say, “Yeah, but Asano did other things besides waterboarding.”

Do you doubt that if we had access to the secret records we’d find that “other things besides water boarding” have been done in our name? We don’t prosecute high-level torture anymore. Instead, we condemn Iran.

Tom Blackburn writes for The Palm Beach Post

Who Judges The Judge? Perhaps to reframe the question, ‘Who Should Elect The Judge?’

Is this “reform” movement headed in the same direction as the now stripped (or soon-to-be stripped) Sarbanes-Oxley bill that was to add oversight to corporate bad boys and girls?

It is a good idea for public hearings and revealing the federal judges’ corporate backgrounds…but why should they be appointed for life? Well, if the Constitution says so, then that’s the way it has to be forever. Can’t question that document. . .

Federal judges, like Congressmen, federal agency heads and even US presidents, sometimes take actions believed by other government officials, the public and the press to be outrageous, unethical or even criminal.

The difference for alleged victims and others complaining about federal jurists’ behavior, as opposed to other officials’ behavior, is striking. Congressmen, agency heads and presidents are not appointed to their jobs for life. Federal judges are. And justices of the US Supreme Court are not even bound by the ethics code that other federal judges are. Usually, any federal jurist can be removed only by the incredibly complex and difficult Congressional impeachment process.

- Posted by Kat Walter for USTV Media

Read The Full Article

More evidence of the corruption of a democratic society by having its powers usurped by institutional oligarchy control, in this case as incarnated by a governing body known as The Supreme Court.

The international treaty, drafted in 1963, seeks to protect foreigners, including Americans traveling or living abroad. It requires that officials notify the home-country consulate when a foreigner is arrested or held for “pending trial.”

Despite its clear terms, police and prosecutors in the United States have failed to notify foreign criminal suspects that they have a right to the help of their nation’s consulate.

Two years ago, the International Court of Justice, also known as the World Court, took up an appeal from the governments of Mexico and Germany. The court, based in The Hague, ruled that the treaty gave individuals a right to reopen their cases if they did not get the proper notification.

But the Supreme Court said Wednesday that it was not bound to follow that ruling.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. acknowledged that treaties ratified by the Senate were part of American law. Nonetheless, under the U.S. Constitution, the power to interpret the law and treaties “is vested in one Supreme Court,” he said.

They don’t reserve the right to interpret the law. They abrogate to themselves the right to make the law. The whole history of the United States is repleat with countless incidents of this handful of un-elected, unjuried judges, the majority of them eminating directly from corporate law firms directly to federal benches, simply making law, often from rationales right out of thin air.

We The People should have full sovereign rights to make the laws to guide and configure the kind of society we want to live in. Until we confront this tool of elite minority control constantly dictating to us what our laws our and who controls them, we will never have a truly democratic society.

Read the complete article from the LA Times Here

So the Supreme Court rules that Bush deliberately disobeyed the law.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Bush overstepped his authority in ordering military war crimes trials for Guantanamo Bay detainees.

The ruling, a rebuke to the administration and its aggressive anti-terror policies, was written by Justice John Paul Stevens, who said the proposed trials were illegal under U.S. law and Geneva conventions.

And you get this kind of analysis from the lawyers…

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, who has represented more than 200 Guantanamo inmates, said, “What this says to the administration is that you can no longer decide arbitrarily what you want to do with people. It upheld the rule of law in this country and determined that the executive has gone beyond the constitutional and international law.”

So reading between the lines a little bit… Congress people had recommended to BushCo to do have their military tribunals legitimately by pass such and such law in 2002… but the Bush administration decided it was better to do it illegally.

And yet…would it be any more “legitimate” to put together an already “legalized” tribunal based on laws that hypothetically had been passed in 2002 (which the Supreme Court would by now have “upheld”)? Would the laws be legitimate? And would the question of legality STILL all be based on the veto or withheld veto of nine unelected and un-juried judges? Judges appointed by an indirectly “elected” (questionable) executive?

I am asking — do we and our colleagues and friends intend to continue to give credence to this system of “justice” by debating the “merits” and weakness of such decisions, thereby giving them social legitimacy —- as if they deserve ANY respect? Is “following the rule of law?” in itself a “good,” even when that structure of law supports and creates and defends the rule of powerful minorities, some with “limited liability,”and a constitutionally and legally condoned and legitimized hierarchy of “rights” that places property “rights” above individual and human rights? Is there ANY justification for celebrating when this structure of law is upheld, defended, strengthened? Or are we instead sabotaging any hope for creating justice and democracy by acting as though “upholding the law” as it is solves anything? Aren’t we defusing the badly needed public outrage that should go off like a firecracker on the Fourth of July? Do we want to keep playing the game and jumping through the hoops?

Just my opinion, but I don’t think enough real thinking goes into the discussion of the “pros and cons” of this or any other court decisions, or the Congress’ partisan and laughable plans to “legalize” the illegitimate, by wiping up the executive’s crapping on rights with the papered proliferation of new powers. As long as the style of play is what we focus on, I don’t see how we’ll ever change the rules so the people call the shots.

One more illegitimate legality will hardly be opposed or forestalled, until people stop seeing the “legal” as equivalent to the “legitimate.” Writing laws that kill rights is easy. Getting appointed judges to uphold them is even easier. I can’t see how we can change the rules of this losing game by remaining dilettantes of political / judicial trivia. We have a court saying IT is the “decider” and an executive saying HE is the “decider.” (And a lapdog Congress saying he’s right).

When will The People DECIDE?

- Posted by BenGPrice@aol.com, CELDF

As if we ever had “free speech rights” at the workplace to begin with, the corporation’s, er the government’s Supreme Court has once again clearly spelled out our lack of rights at work, this time for government workers. And what’s the difference between corporate or government workers in this country where corporations run the government, the Supreme Court - even sitting on it, and our most fundamental laws of the land?

The Supreme Court declared today, in a ruling affecting millions of government employees, that the Constitution does not always protect their free-speech rights for what they say on the job.

Yet another blatant example of just how screwed We the People are, and unless and until we target the structure that denies We People from the getgo, weπre running up a hill of sand with the boulder that even Sisyphus wouldn’t attempt. How absurd must this get?

Read the full New York Times article Here

- Posted by Kat for USTV

The Supreme Court rules (and reigns) again.

In a unanimous decision Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a lower court ruling that would have invalidated massive taxpayer giveaways to Corporate America. The Supreme Court has long been the victim of a hostile takeover by Big Money interests. It is a court now headed by a corporate lawyer that has repeatedly gone out of its way to protect Corporate America’s ability to bleed the middle class dry. Today’s ruling, though, is particularly egregious. Not only did the court strike down an important ruling, but it essentially emasculated taxpayers’ ability to bring any such lawsuits against their own government in the future.

The details are as shocking as they are disgusting. As the Associated Press reports, “two years ago, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Ohio’s tax credit on new equipment, saying the practice hinders interstate commerce because the incentives are available only to businesses that invest in Ohio.” In other words, plaintiffs correctly noted the credits are creating a race to the bottom that violate interstate commerce laws by forcing states and cities to compete with each other to give away more and more taxpayer cash to Big Business. In the Ohio case, the tax credit was used to give DaimlerChrysler roughly $300 million in taxpayer cash - cash that Toledo’s county auditor says was siphoned away from local schools, forcing the city to close up to nine schools or fire 380 school workers.

Let’s get to the bottom line here…

Bought-off politicians giving away our hard-earned taxpayer dollars to already wealthy corporations without demanding anything in return. We see this with the Medicare bill and how it gives away more than $1 trillion to the health care/pharmaceutical industries without demanding these industries lower their prices (in fact, the bill prohibits the government from negotiating lower prices for medicines). We see it with the energy bill and how it gives away billions in new tax breaks to oil companies without asking them to lower their prices. And we see it with corporate welfare.

So much for the rights of the people. The law is owned by the welfare queens of the corporatocracy.

Read the full report by David Sirota Here

Good to see more attention being focused on this issue through media. David Sirota lays it out on the real significance of the Roberts and Alito appointments to the Supreme Corp. Forget all the hot air about abortion and gay rights. Those are side shows to the real motivating factors being these moves.

Regardless of the argument about the history of the role of the courts, its healthy to enlighten people in increasing awareness of the fact that the courts are not being used to protect their rights, but are agents of corporate power and tools of elite control.

Read his complete post on HuffPo Here

A title well worth checking out on 1st Amendment issues is John Denvir’s, “Democracy’s Constitution: Claiming The Privileges of American Citizenship”.

Among other things, Denvir argues that the 1st Amendment not only gives us the right to speak, but also to be heard.

- Posted by Greg for USTV Media

(Look for Greg Boozell’s column regarding these issues and how their meaning in the context of access television and the internet in an upcoming issue of ‘Community Media Review’. You can write him at gb@cantv.org )

We are living in Brazil - the movie that is. That point seems more and more disturbingly real. This editorial by The New York Times doesn’t allay those concerns at all.

This has been our nightmare since the Bush administration began stashing prisoners it did not want to account for in Guantánamo Bay: An ordinary man with a name something like a Taliban bigwig’s is swept up in the dragnet and imprisoned without any hope of proving his innocence.

A case of mistaken identity’s turning an innocent person into a prisoner-for-life was supposed to be impossible. President Bush told Americans to trust in his judgment after he arrogated the right to arrest anyone, anywhere in the world, and toss people into indefinite detention. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld infamously proclaimed that the men at Guantánamo Bay were “the worst of the worst.”

But it has long been evident that this was nonsense, and a lawsuit by The Associated Press has now demonstrated the truth in shameful detail. The suit compelled the release of records from hearings for some of the 760 or so men who have been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay. (About 490 are still there.) Far too many show no signs of being a threat to American national security. Some, it appears, did nothing at all. And they have no way to get a fair hearing because Gitmo was created outside the law.

This is just sick. If this kind of stuff is allowed to stand, America is dead. And Lincoln was right.

“At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher”.”

It didn’t come from without. We did it to ourselves.