News bits: 5th Circuit vindicates free speech; Christianity’s fight for tax revenues

The federal 5th circuit appeals court (TX, LA, AL) is often said by experts to be the most radical right of all the federal circuits. A recent decision indicates that it has not yet crossed a line where non-religious speech in public places can be suppressed while religious speech is allowed. I suspect that day is coming, but it's not here yet. This will be one of the trickiest things for Christian nationalism to pull off, but it is a cherished goal. 

The FFRF writes:

The Freedom From Religion Foundation today won its case before an appeals court against the Texas governor’s censorship of its Capitol display.

After Gov. Greg Abbott and the State Preservation Board blatantly and illegally censored FFRF’s display in the Texas Capitol in 2015, Abbott and the board have fought every step of the way to delay the ultimate resolution of FFRF’s now six-and-a-half-year lawsuit, engaging in protracted, entirely avoidable litigation at taxpayer expense.

FFRF, with help from members and with requisite permit and sponsorship by a legislator, had placed a Winter Solstice display in the Capitol building in December 2015 to counter a Christian nativity there. FFRF’s whimsical exhibit depicts the Founders and the Statue of Liberty celebrating the “birth” of the Bill of Rights (adopted on Dec. 15, 1791). Abbott, as chair of the Preservation Board, while permitting the Christian exhibit, ordered FFRF’s display removed only three days after it was erected, lambasting it as indecent, mocking and contributing to public immorality. FFRF initially won its lawsuit at the district court level in 2018.

Instead of allowing secular speech, Abbott closed the Texas capitol to all private speech. This tends to be the outcome when secularists move to match Christian displays on government property with secular displays. Instead of allowing hated secularism speech in public, the radical right usually shuts down all speech. This legal tactic has also successfully been employed by The Satanic Temple.

If the day ever comes when federal courts hold that religious speech is acceptable but secular speech is not, that will mark a major blow to secularism and democracy. This is a drawing of what Abbott called indecent, mocking and contributing to public immorality. 

Not indecent, mocking or 

contributing to public immorality

The state of Texas, or preferably Abbott personally, should be forced to pay for all of FFRF's legal fees plus ~10-fold higher punitive damages for blatantly illegal and frivolous litigation. FFRF is currently petitioning the court for attorney’s fees given the outrageousness of the lawsuit.

The FFRF states that its purpose is to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church.

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A core goal of Christian nationalism (CN) is to gain access to more and more tax dollars over time. The effort has been ongoing in the courts for years. This goal ranks high along with killing abortion rights, discriminating against the LGBQT community and completely eliminating secular public education and replacing it with fundamentalist Christian education. The FFRF writes about a major CN advance in access to tax dollars and their use to replace secular public schools:

The Freedom From Religion Foundation is appalled at Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signing legislation that will funnel over $340 million in taxpayer dollars to private, mostly religious schools.

The new law is an egregious decimation of the public school system in the name of “school choice.” The “Students First Act” creates an education savings account redirecting taxpayer funds to private school education. The newly enacted law makes these funds available to families who make 300 percent of the poverty income guidelines for the first year. The following year, the availability of the funds will be expanded to families making 400 percent of the poverty income guidelines. After that, the funds will be available to all families, regardless of income. Eventually, all Iowa families can use up to $7,598 a year for private school tuition.

In short, even if a family is fully financially capable of sending their children to private schools, and even if they have always planned to utilize private schools, they will soon be eligible to receive taxpayer-funded assistance for that purpose.

In addition to being bad policy, the law runs counter to the Iowa Constitution. Article 1, Section 3 of the Iowa Constitution states, “... nor shall any person be compelled to … pay tithes, taxes, or other rates for building or repairing places of worship, or the maintenance of any minister, or ministry.”

FFRF has long held that where public tax dollars go, public accountability must follow. But there will be little public accountability for funds going to these religiously segregated and unaccountable parochial schools.

“Forcing taxpayers to pay for the religious education of others is a fundamental violation of religious liberty,” comments FFRF Co-President Dan Barker. “Public education funds should be utilized solely for secular, public education.”

The Supreme Court has continued to erode church-state separation by allowing taxpayers to support religious schools, calling religious education free speech and religious activity such as prayer protected by the free exercise clause. By employing legal tactics to subvert the establishment clause, the radical right CN movement has significantly weakened the vitality of church-state separation. The establishment clause used to have power to keep the church away from tax revenues, but it is fading into legal irrelevance in view of radical CN Supreme Court decisions in recent years.[1]

Over time, it the US Supreme Court will narrow the scope of the establishment clause to the point of it being almost completely irrelevant. That outcome is a highly cherished, long-time CN goal.

Footnote: 

1. A 2022 Supreme Court case severely limited the vitality of the establishment clause. One source writes:

The United States Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision on June 27, 2022, that significantly affects the analysis courts use to determine whether the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment has been violated. The Establishment Clause provides that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,” and it has long been interpreted to apply to state and local governments.

The case, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, arose in Washington State. Joseph Kennedy (Kennedy), a public high school football coach, took a knee on the 50-yard line after games and prayed.

The Court then addressed the role of the Establishment Clause, and in so doing, overruled the 1971 U.S. Supreme Court case of Lemon v. Kurtzman. The Lemon Court Establishment Clause analysis calls for an evaluation of the purposes and effects of an action and whether it fosters “excessive government entanglement with religion.” The Court asserted that the Lemon test for Establishment Clause violations caused chaos in lower courts and led to differing results in materially similar cases. Also, in the Court’s view, the Establishment Clause test in Lemon overemphasizes the importance of the Establishment Clause in relation to the Free Speech and Free Exercise clauses.

China brokers deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia

The Eurasia Group's  Ian Bremmer provides a quick, multi-perspectival take on the recent peace deal between the Middle East's biggest rivals-- Iran and Saudi Arabia. Is it for real? What are the implications for the US, China, the Saudis, and Iran? How might it affect efforts at negotiated settlement between Ukraine and Russia, given China's recent 12 point "peace plan" proposal? If the US is "against" all autocracies, what role do we have left in a MENA (i.e. mid east and northern Aftica) where democracies are all but extinct (with Israel hanging on by a thread as Netanyahu does his best to extinguish it there)? These and other questions are cursorily touched on in this 10 minute update by Bremmer. Might the Chinese, even if their own plan is rejected, change the tone of global discourse on the War in such a way as to make talk of sanctions and prolonged fighting, with attendant risks of escalation less palatable?  Are we seeing a "game-change" in MENA as Bremmer suggest, or just a tempest in a teapot?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YpDYF-M2Fo&list=TLPQMTUwMzIwMjMph2hK17YBvw&index=2

The Truth Is Out There — Fox Viewers Don’t Care

 

Republican voters, especially those who get their “news” exclusively from conservative outlets, may be unique in history. While there have always been demagogues who have lied to their constituents — and in many cases used mass media to do so — what sets modern conservatives apart is that they quite clearly want to be lied to.

Never before has so much information been available to so many but used so little.

More:

https://whowhatwhy.org/cartoon/the-truth-is-out-there-fox-viewers-dont-care/

Conclusion:

None of that matters, though, to an audience of tens of millions conditioned to only accept as fact what conveniently fits into their belief that they, and their country, are exceptional.

At least they are right about that part. They are exceptionally prone to being lied to, and they are exceptionally ignorant. 

Bits about the Silicon Valley Bank failure

Among some other things, the failure of SVB is a great example of how modern politics and radical right propaganda works. The radical right spin monster is already lying through it’s teeth. The behaviors and moral rot of brass knuckles capitalists and corrupted politicians are crystal clear and undeniable. And, the corrupt nature of Republican Party brass knuckles capitalism and Democratic Party neoliberalism are also clear. Political power was no on the side of the public interest. It was on the side of unbounded greed and personal ambition driven by cynical moral rot and ideological fantasies.

The truth

The truth is needed for context. Some key points are these:

Runs on banks in the 1930s led to the creation of federal regulations and a regulatory agency, the FDIC.

Banks and Wall Street bitterly hated bank and financial regulations, attacking them as destructive, unnecessary, socialist and whatever other slander or stupid fantasy they thought would resonate with the public and idiot, incompetent and/or corrupt/cynical politicians and presidents.

Deregulation of banks and the financial sector led to the massive bank, financial and housing catastrophe of 2008-2009. Millions of people were seriously damaged, but 100% of criminal elites were untouched.

Democratic and Republican politicians bailed out some customers, but also investors in the face of the 2008 catastrophe. The regulatory system was never designed to bail investors out. It was there to protect depositors, not risk-taking investors.

New regulations to prevent bank failures due to runs on banks by panicked depositors passed in 2010 over vehement Republican opposition.

The banks lobbied relentlessly against the new regulations. Once the Republicans were back in power, they relaxed the regulations in 2018 by exempting mid-sized banks (up to $250 billion in assets) like SVB from the depositor-protecting regulations. Those banks were freed to take a lot more risk. Added risk increased profits, which led to huge payouts to bank executives. 

People like Elizabeth Warren warned that the dropped regulations would lead to bank failures due to runs on banks. Warren was 100% correct in her analysis. Greedy bankers took risks that regulations could have avoided and that led SVB to fail. The fiasco was aided by a the anti-regulation Federal Reserve under the brass knuckles capitalist Jerome Powell. Under Powell, the fed has been fully captured and neutered by banks and Wall Street, making regulations impossible or as weak as possible.

SVB failed because it had held too much asset in the form of low interest rate bonds, not because it was woke. When the fed started raising interest rates, those bonds had to be sold at a loss if there was a run on deposits. There was a run on deposits, $42 billion on one day, which caused SVB to collapse. 

A few hours before bank regulators took over SVB, the executives paid themselves one last big bonus for a job well done for themselves. Those morally rotted executives had no concern whatever about pain and damage their failure caused to depositors. That problem was no longer their problem once the regulators closed the bank down.  

This is a story about the essence and soul of unregulated brass knuckles capitalism and incompetent politicians who are corrupt, ruthlessly cynical and/or idiotically ideologically deluded into a belief that unregulated capitalism is best for everyone.

The radical right spins its poison lies and slanders

It seem fit to point out that the radical right propaganda Leviathan and the shameless jaw-dropping lies and slanders it routinely poisons American society with. Business Insider writes:

• Some Republicans blamed “woke” investment strategies for Silicon Valley Bank's downfall.

• The GOP has increasingly portrayed itself as against “wokeism” in all aspects even when the definition is unclear.

Conservatives are blasting their new boogeyman of wokeism after the second-largest bank collapse in US history, eschewing the more straightforward story of problematic balance sheets in favor of raw politics.

“SVB = too woke to fail,” Senator Josh Hawley tweeted (R-MO) on Monday.

To Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, the culprit was “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.” The bank website says it was building a global workforce celebrating “greater dimensions of diversity.”

“This bank, they're so concerned with DEI and politics and all kinds of stuff, I think that really diverted from them focusing on their core mission,” DeSantis said on Fox News' “Sunday Morning Futures.”

Rep. Jim Comer, head of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, blasted "Democrat inflation" and called Silicon Valley Bank “one of the most woke banks in their quest for the ESG-type policy and investing,” a reference to environmental, social, and governance policies. 

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, himself a former presidential candidate, announced last week that he’s penning a new book titled “Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America.”

That bullshit speaks for itself. SVB clearly failed due to the wrong assets on its balance sheet, not wokeism. The radical right blames wokeism and the left for its own failed policy choices. This is standard radical right authoritarian propaganda. 

Other commentary

The Financial Times writes:

It may stick in some throats that the US and UK financial authorities have had to engineer an emergency rescue for an institution, and an industry, that is so fond of railing against government intervention and lobbying against stricter regulatory oversight. 

The SVB fiasco also shines an unforgiving spotlight on the hypocrisy of some of the biggest venture capital players on both sides of the Atlantic, who privately urged their portfolio companies to pull their money from the bank and then later publicly called for government support. SVB collapsed on Friday as a result of a classic bank run after customers withdrew $42bn of deposits.

Well as we all know, hypocrisy does not faze the radical right or its brass knuckles capitalist supporters. Money is the only thing that counts. Democracy, truth and civil liberties can all go to hell as far as the radical right is concerned. 

Slate comments:

As the startups that make up Silicon Valley Bank’s customer base scrambled to figure out whether they would be able to make payroll, a group of extremely online venture capitalists spent four days emoting on Twitter, ginning up confusion and hysteria about the threat of a systemic risk if depositors didn’t get all their money back, pronto. All weekend, they screamed that there would be an economic collapse, that they were concerned about the workers, that the Federal Reserve was responsible, that-that-that … until finally, on Sunday evening, they got what they wanted: the government promising full account access to all Silicon Valley Bank depositors.

By now, it is relatively clear what happened at Silicon Valley Bank. A pandemic bull run inflated the value of tech startups and the funds of investors, resulting in a tripling of deposits at the regional bank that specializes in the industry’s fledgling companies, from $62 billion at the end of 2019 to $189 billion at the end of 2021. SVB wanted to put that money to work, so it bought up U.S. Treasury and mortgage bonds that would take years to mature but serve as a relatively safe place to park its cash—as long as interest rates didn’t rise. They did rise, however, multiple times.

Again the point is clear. Brass knuckles capitalists hate regulation. But when lack of regulation leads to a preventable disaster caused by unregulated greed, hypocrite capitalists scream to be bailed out by the government they hate so much. 

By now, it should be clear to everyone that brass knuckles capitalism is all about deregulated risk-taking and demands for bailouts when unregulated greed causes trouble. Capitalist dogma is clear and simple: Maximize wealth accumulation by privatizing and concentrating profits with the elites, but socializing risk and damage to the masses, the government and/or the environment, i.e., anyone or anything but lying, corrupt, hypocrite capitalist elites.

The NYT comments on the ongoing fallout: “Across the country, banks of various sizes are battling market turmoil as customers rushed to withdraw their deposits and investors, worried about more bank runs, dumped bank stocks.”