In Remembrance: Ruth Bader Ginsberg

 

This kind of topic is not my usual cup of tea.

An NPR broadcast this afternoon described one of  RBG's major influences on American law and society. NPR's Radiolab program this afternoon described her push against the all male supreme court that led them to reconsider how they treated laws that affected the sexes differently. Her argument in the supreme court led to the court's development of the intermediate scrutiny test for laws that treat the sexes unequal.

This story describes how the young ACLU lawyer Ginsburg convinced an all-male Supreme Court to take discrimination against women seriously. Before this case, the constitution was silent about discrimination against women and it allowed and justified in prior supreme court cases. She shrewdly chose a case about discrimination against men to argue that discrimination against men was no better than discrimination against women. 

That led the court to conclude that discrimination on the basis of gender, a term she intentionally chose instead of the loaded term "sex" to defuse emotions. Her tactic led to a new test of constitutionality the court created and named "intermediate scrutiny." Her tactic was brilliant, rational and convincing to the 1970s all male court. It still generally applies today.

For context, there are three tests for the constitutionality of any law. The rational basis test, the intermediate scrutiny test that Ginsberg provoked, and the strict scrutiny test. Two questions are embedded in each test, what is the purpose of the law, and how closely is the law related to that purpose?

Rational scrutiny is basically no scrutiny

The rational basis test is basically no test at all. All a law needs to do is be somehow, even trivially, rationally related to what the law is intended to do. When the authority that creates a law cannot think of any rational reason for a constitutionally challenged law, the court steps in and make a reason up to find the law rational. Very, very few laws are found unconstitutional on the basis of the rational basis test. Blithering idiots can make laws that pass this level of court scrutiny.

Strict scrutiny is almost impossibly difficult

On the other hand, when the supreme court examines a federal, state or local law that impinges on one of the live wires, e.g., race or national origin, the court applies strict scrutiny. Under that test, most laws are declared unconstitutional and invalidated. Such laws deal with affirmative action and related issues. To meet this test of constitutionality, a legislature must have passed the law to further a "compelling governmental interest," and it must be "narrowly tailored" to achieve that interest.

Courts usually can and do easily think of ways to make a law narrower and thus blow it to bits. This reflects the usual incompetence of local, state and federal legislatures to write coherent laws.

Despite its ostensible strict rationality, strict scrutiny has lead to some utterly irrational decisions. The most commonly cited disaster is the infamous Korematsu v. United States decision (1944), where the court upheld the forced relocation of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II.

The Ginsberg-inspired intermediate scrutiny test

Intermediate scrutiny applies a different test for the government. Here the government must prove that the law serves an important purpose and there is a "substantial relationship" between the law and the purpose the law is intended to deal with. The "narrowly tailored" requirement is relaxed a bit and that allows generally more laws to be found constitutional.

Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190 (1976) was the first case where the United States Supreme Court held that statutory or administrative sex-based classifications were subject to an intermediate standard of judicial review. That was directly due to Ginsberg's influence on the court. Before Ginsberg, blatant and irrational discrimination against women was legal because the constitution was mostly silent about women's rights. That was because the Founders believed that women were fundamentally different from men and needed to be "protected." That protection translated into two centuries of rationally unjustified and unwarranted discrimination.

Since the Equal Rights Amendment has failed since the 1970s, Ginsberg's influence is what mostly fills the legal void in protection for women in the US.

Since the intermediate scrutiny test, like rational basis and strict scrutiny, are judge-made laws, the Supreme Court can get rid of one, two or all of them when a five judge majority wants to do that.

Conclusion: Ginsberg was brilliant. She served the real (not partisan) public interest as best she could. She will be sorely missed.

Why do you hate/love him so much?

Hate him or love him, approve of him or disapprove of him, Donald Trump knows how to get to us to emotionally react to him.  So, I have two sets of questions, depending on what love/hate category you fall under.

 

Set one:

Trump Lovers (approvers): Why do you love him so much?

Trump Haters (disapprovers): Why do you hate him so much?

 

Set two:

Trump Lovers (approvers): Why do YOU THINK Trump haters hate him so much?

Trump Haters (disapprovers): Why do YOU THINK Trump lovers love him so much?

 

I realize “hate” is a loaded word, but I mean it in a very generic sense.  I’m not talking about violence here.  Having said that, identify your category, and then tell us how you see yourself, and then how you see your counterpart.

Thanks for posting and recommending.

 

Galloway:
Why do you hate them so much?

Lt. Weinberg:
They beat up on a weakling, and that's all they did. The rest is just smokefilled coffee-house crap. They tortured and tormented a weaker kid. They didn't like him. So, they killed him. And why? Because he couldn't run very fast.

Lt. Weinberg:
Why do you like them so much?

Galloway:
Because they stand upon a wall and say, "Nothing's going to hurt you tonight, not on my watch."

 

Regarding America’s Shaky Money Laundering Industry

Some of the crooks who launder dirty money 

through big banks

(source: ICIJ)

Corrupting corporate media ownership

In a rather disturbing article from Wall Street On Parade, Pam and Russ Martens report on two important aspects of the American situation, banking and news reporting. The first is that corporate-owned mainstream media, depends on financing from big banks. Presumably, most of that is in the form of advertising.   

The Martens comment that Federal Reserve Chairman, Jerome Powell, keeps telling Congress and the press that the banks are a “source of strength” in this economic crisis. That false narrative completely omits the fact that the Fed has loaned banks trillions of dollars at less than 1 percent interest. Naturally, the banks prefer the Fed’s false version of reality that big American banks are in great shape. The real reality is that in fact most or all big US banks are in bad shape. The mainstream media keeps reporting this lie because the banks want Americans to believe it and the mainstream media is willing to go along with the lie, presumably due to profit lust. 

Laundering trillions in dirty money

The Martins write about the scope of the money laundering industry and how their work is kept quiet:

“Wall Street On Parade has repeatedly written about critical reports showing serial corruption at these banks that have been censored by those Pulitzer prize winning media outlets. Yesterday provided another example: the New York Times refused to cover the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ (ICIJ) stunning report on how five of the biggest banks on Wall Street have continued to launder dirty money for fugitives and suspected criminals. The Wall Street Journal, whose name suggests that perhaps its focus should be Wall Street, failed to put the story on its front page, opting instead to bury it under an innocuous headline about HSBC’s stock hitting a new low.

The same news blackout occurred last year when the public interest group, Better Markets, published an in-depth report on “Wall Street’s Six Biggest Bailed-Out Banks: Their RAP Sheets & Their Ongoing Crime Spree.” Three days after the report came out, major news outlets were still refusing to cover the report. We wrote this in a report three days after the study was released:

‘We checked the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg News, Reuters, CNBC, and CNN. We could find no mention of the Better Markets report. (We checked again this morning. There is still a news blackout.)

We know that the Wall Street Journal was aware of the report because Lalita Clozel, a banking regulation reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Tweeted on April 10 that Democrats in the House Financial Services Committee room were handing out the report to journalists while the Chair of the Committee, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, was introducing the bank CEOs.’”

The ICIJ’s report includes this: 

“The FinCEN Files show trillions in tainted dollars flow freely through major banks, swamping a broken enforcement system.

Secret U.S. government documents reveal that JPMorgan Chase, HSBC and other big banks have defied money laundering crackdowns by moving staggering sums of illicit cash for shadowy characters and criminal networks that have spread chaos and undermined democracy around the world.

The records show that five global banks — JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank and Bank of New York Mellon — kept profiting from powerful and dangerous players even after U.S. authorities fined these financial institutions for earlier failures to stem flows of dirty money.

U.S. agencies responsible for enforcing money laundering laws rarely prosecute megabanks that break the law, and the actions authorities do take barely ripple the flood of plundered money that washes through the international financial system.

In some cases the banks kept moving illicit funds even after U.S. officials warned them they’d face criminal prosecutions if they didn’t stop doing business with mobsters, fraudsters or corrupt regimes.

JPMorgan, the largest bank based in the United States, moved money for people and companies tied to the massive looting of public funds in Malaysia, Venezuela and Ukraine, the leaked documents reveal.”

The FinCEN Files the ICIJ examined are leaked documents that include more than 2,100 suspicious activity reports filed by banks and other financial firms with the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN). FinCEN is a US federal financial intelligence unit. It is at center of the global anti-money laundering system. Apparently, FinCEN has been corrupted and/or broken down for quite some time.

As usual, the banks respond to this with lies and propaganda intended to deceive. For example, JPMorgan claimed it has assumed a “leadership role” in pursuing “proactive intelligence-led investigations” and developing “innovative techniques to help combat financial crime.” If JPMorgan is the anti-corruption leader, one can only wonder how corrupt and inept the followers are.

One can also wonder who leaked those FinCEN documents, how they are hiding and how much more sleaze and corruption FinCEN is hiding. When the president makes comments about Americans who are suckers and losers, maybe it applies to all of us who are kept in the dark and fed bullshit. 

Sanctions evaders in the ICIJ database

‘Now or never’

 

Former Trump staffers press others to speak out ahead of election

By Jill Colvin The Associated Press

https://globalnews.ca/news/7361185/trump-former-staffers-speak/

Elizabeth Neumann wrestled with the decision for weeks. She worried about the backlash, the impact it would have on her career, potential threats to her family.

But the former Department of Homeland Security official, who had resigned in April, reached a breaking point after President Donald Trump deployed Homeland Security agents to Portland, exacerbating tensions there. She decided it was worth the risk to speak out against Trump, whom she had come to view as a threat to the country.

“Enough is enough,” said Neumann, the former assistant secretary of counterterrorism and threat prevention. “People need to understand how dangerous a moment we are in.”

There are plenty of others weighing the same decision.

With just weeks left before the Nov. 3 election, now is the moment of truth for current and former Trump administration officials debating whether they, too, should step forward and join the chorus of Republican voices trying to persuade on-the-fence voters to help deny Trump a second term.

“It’s now or never,” said Miles Taylor, former chief of staff at DHS, who has been working to recruit others to join the effort. In interviews, Taylor has accused Trump of routinely asking aides to break the law, using his former agency for explicitly political purposes, and wanting to maim and shoot migrants trying to cross the southern border.

“Those who witnessed the president’s unfitness for office up close have a moral obligation to share their assessment with the electorate,” said Taylor, who launched the group REPAIR — The Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform — to bring together concerned former officials.

A related group, Republican Voters Against Trump, has compiled nearly 1,000 video testimonials from Republicans across the country who want Trump out. Strategic director Sarah Longwell said her goal was to provide a “permission structure” to help wavering Republicans feel comfortable opposing Trump.

The effort, she said, grew out of research on “soft” Trump voters.

“While these voters disliked Trump intensely, they didn’t trust the media, they didn’t trust Democrats, they didn’t trust the leaks,” she said. “Who’s a credible messenger? It was people like them.”

Other prominent “formers” have spoken out independently — or are considering it.

Former national security adviser John Bolton wrote a scathing book in which he said Trump “saw conspiracies behind rocks, and remained stunningly uninformed” on how to run the government. Former Defence Secretary Jim Mattis broke a self-imposed vow of silence in June with an op-ed slamming Trump’s response to racial justice protests. He and former director of national intelligence Dan Coats also were quoted extensively in a new book by journalist Bob Woodward calling Trump dangerous and unfit for office.

But Mattis and Coats, like former White House chief of staff John Kelly and former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, have refrained from more explicit condemnations, often citing a “duty of silence” or a long tradition of military officials staying out of politics, according to people who’ve spoken with them.

Efforts to draw them out are ongoing. While former Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen appears disinclined to step forward, there are hopes that former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson might be persuaded to comment and that Coats might be urged to say more. And Kelly, a retired four-star general, is said to be on the fence and torn about the decision.

“I think that he loves his country and he wants to do what’s best for the country,” said Neumann, who served as Kelly’s deputy chief of staff at DHS and is hopeful he’ll speak out, even as others don’t think it will happen.

Officials like Kelly, with long careers and hefty pensions, would seem to have less to lose by doing so than more junior staffers like Olivia Troye, a former counterterrorism adviser to Vice-President Mike Pence who last week joined the campaign against Trump and said she’d be voting for Biden.

In a video and interviews, Troye has accused Trump of mishandling the coronavirus and being more concerned about his reelection prospects than saving lives. The White House punched back with an aggressive attack campaign aimed at discrediting her through a barrage of statements, interviews and denunciations from the lectern in the White House briefing room.

“These are not profiles in courage, but these are profiles in cowardice,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said of Troye and Taylor, dismissing them as part of a “fringe club of, quote, `Never Trumpers’ who are desperate for relevancy.”

Taylor said it was clear the White House was “coming after” those who speak out as a warning to others who are considering doing likewise.

“The White House knows if they show this is a very costly thing to do they will scare people from going forward,” he said.

He added that while more people are still considering coming forward, the White House tactics have worked to some extent _ dissuading one senior official who had been on the cusp of speaking out.

Rick Wilson, a longtime Republican strategist who co-founded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, stressed that time is running out.

“There will be a cottage industry when Trump is out of office of people who say, `Oh, I fought from the inside, I fought the good fight, I kept so many bad things from happening.”’ he said. “It doesn’t matter. There’s only one moment in time where it matters. And that’s now.”

For Neumann, who describes herself as a conservative Christian and voted for Trump in 2016, the considerations were deeply personal, including what it might mean for her career in a city that puts a premium on loyalty.

“This is a town based on relationships,” she said. “And what we have done is, you know, usually not done in this town. Usually you stab people in the back and do it quietly. You do it as an anonymous source. You don’t actually put your name to it.”

Neumann is still out of work and notes that many companies fear making hires that might seem political. But she still said she’s been pleasantly surprised by the response overall.

“It was more positive than I expected,” she said, adding, “No serious threats, haven’t had to call the police or anything, so that’s good.”

Anthony Scaramucci, who turned against the president last year after a short stint as White House communications director, has also been in discussions with those on the fence and is using every channel he can find to spread his message, including a new anti-Trump documentary.

“We have to keep the pressure on, and so for me it’s a multimedia approach. It’s radio, it’s podcasts, it’s Twitter, it’s television and it’s movies,” he said. “As a citizen all I’ve tried to do is provide a surgeon general’s warning. … This guy is a threat to the institutions of democracy, and I worked for him and I think it’s important to send a signal to other people,” he said, that it’s OK to speak out.

How Big Oil Deceived The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

This ~5 minute NPR broadcast this morning is just a reminder about how some or most big business operates in America and has operated for decades. Companies who directly or indirectly profit from plastic reacted when there was a growing public backlash in the 1990s against widespread plastic litter in the environment. The industry mounted a massive public relations (propaganda) ad campaign to convince the public that plastic was recyclable. At the time the industry knew that most plastic was not recyclable for economic and practical or technical reasons. That remains true today. Over 90% of plastic is still not recycled.

The industry lobbied almost 40 state governments to require them to put recycling symbols on plastic products. That propaganda campaign worked. The public was deceived into believing that plastic was recyclable when the industry knew that was not true. The ad campaign cost a paltry $50 million/year for several years before the public was deceived into a false belief that the problem had been taken care of.

In fact the problem had been taken care of. The public had been deceived and millions of tons of plastic waste flowed into the environment. Today, the industry is once again facing a public backlash. And once again it is mounting a propaganda campaign to again deceive the public into thinking that the millions of tons of plastic waste is recyclable when that is simply another self-serving industry lie.

Symbols of deceit - ~90% of it isn't recyclable, 

arguably making 100% of it a lie

Landfill workers bury all plastic except soda bottles 

and milk jugs at Rogue Disposal & Recycling in southern Oregon

(maybe there's more than a just a few rogue soda bottles and milk jugs in that pile)

This topic has been discussed here recently, so this is just a reminder.

Public Service Announcement for mail-in voting…

 

Do you wonder if/when your mail-in ballot will be officially registered/cast?

For U.S. Citizens voting in the upcoming presidential election (November 3^rd, 2020), this link shows the individual states' “vote-processing rules," and will give you some insight into what happens to your ballot once it is received by your Board of Elections.

Also, this link will help you determined if you can track your ballot and make sure it has been received and cast.  (Once on that screen, click on the “After I vote can I track my ballot?” link to check out your state.)

And finally, this link will tell you whether or not you are a “no excuse needed for mail-in ballot request” state.  (Once on that screen, click on the interactive state map to see additional information about your state.)

Thanks for passing it along (i.e., recommending) and for voting... (early!!).

Helpful hint: Bookmark / Icon these links, for easy future access. :)

Note: BTW, if your signature doesn't match the one on file, you're screwed! (and will have to take other action to get to vote). 😱