Republican Supreme Court Rules "Death To Workers!"

  Very predictably, the Republican Supreme Court denied the Biden regime permission to have OSHA [1] require companies employing 100 or more workers to require their employees to  be vaccinated against Covid-19 OR wear masks and get tested weekly. Hardly an onerous requirement, and no one is being forced to get vaccinated. You could see this one coming a mile away. HOWEVER The Supremes aren't taking any chances with their OWN health! They gave the executive branch a permission slip to allow Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra to require all health care workers at institutions that receive Medicare and Medicaid funding to be vaccinated, unless they get a medical or religious exemption.

After all, one of THEM might wind up in a hospital or clinic or doctor's office sometime!

The vote to emasculate OSHA was 6 to 3. The 6 Republican apparatchiks voted as a bloc. Disingenuously they said it was up to Congress to empower OSHA to mandate this, knowing full well that such a thing is impossible in the U.S. Senate as currently constituted. This is a ploy these cynics have pulled before, for example when they screwed Ledbetter out of a lifetime of stolen wages with an absurd decision. (That time Congress did act, unlike when the Republican Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights act in two decisions and erased the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law from the books, opening the way to the stranglehold that reactionary billionaires currently have over U.S. electoral politics.)

The 3 Democratic appointed justices don't matter, despite media propagandists pretending they do, pretending there's some mystery about how the reactionary bloc will decide issues. The power establishment's propaganda system has made strenuous efforts to maintain the absurd fiction that this court is some kind of neutral judicial body when it is patently purely political, very partisan, and with an extreme rightwing ideology. The 6 reactionaries are mislabeled as "conservatives." The ACTUAL conservatives, that is, those who want to preserve the status quo, are the 3 mislabeled as "liberals."

The U.S. Supreme Court has been a Republican court since the regime of Richard Nixon (1969-1974). Nixon filled four of the nine seats on the court with reactionaries. Reagan in 1986 gave us the extreme reactionary Antonin Scalia, with 100% approval from the Democrats. The Senate voted to confirm Scalia 98-0! I was sick to my stomach when he was nominated, just reading The New York Times whitewashing version of how reactionary he was. (Ironically, then-Senator Al Gore voted to confirm Scalia, who later repaid the favor by cheating Gore out of the presidency in 2000 with four GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) accomplices on the high court. (Reagan had previously put Scalia on the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the most important appeals court in the Federal system. That was 1982, again with no obstruction from Democrats.)

After Reagan, Bush the Elder gifted us with sex offender Clarence Thomas, a black man with the mind of a white bigot. Here again the Democrats made sure to confirm this bitter right-wing fanatic to a lifetime appointment to one of the most powerful posts in the U.S. government. The Democrats controlled the Senate, and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee was none other than Senator Joe Biden (the same Joe Biden who is now president of the U.S.). Thomas used to sexually harass the women working for him. (Bush had made him head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, for the purpose of sabotaging government anti-racial discrimination efforts- perversely, Thomas despises affirmative action even though he is black.) One of his victims, Anita Hill, testified to this, only to be savagely smeared in hearings by the Republicans, which Chairman Biden allowed. Privately Biden told the Senate Democrats not to believe Hill, and he blocked a number of corroborating witnesses from appearing. This is told in damning detail in the book Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, by Jill Abramson and Jane Mayer. They were reporters at the Wall Street Journal at the time, and later climbed higher up the media hierarchy ladder. Mayer became a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine, and Abramson the first female top editor at The New York Times, both publications being at the pinnacle of U.S. media prestige and influence.  Abramson then discovered she was being paid less than her predecessors and confronted her boss, publisher and scion of the Sulzberger family (that owns controlling interest in the corporation) Arthur Ochs "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr., about this, it peeved him, so he fired her and trashed her after that.

One other side note: Thomas' video porn viewing habits were revealed during his confirmation process by the simply expedient of getting his video store rental records. This prompted Congress to rush through a law protecting the privacy of such records. Congress can act when it's an emergency!

Then we come to the Obama rollover. In the last year of his presidency, a vacancy occurred on the court. The Senate boss at the time, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky (the Gang Of Plunderers held the Senate then) refused to allow confirmation hearings to even occur for Obama's nominee. This went on for eleven months. Then Trump was "elected." (Hillary Clinton beat him by 2.9 million votes total, but the Electoral College, the real electorate, elected Trump. Democracy as practiced only in America. That was the FIFTH time in U.S. history that the winner lost and the loser won.(The previous time was 2000, when the Republican Supreme Court robbed Al Gore of victory.) So the Democrats proceeded to blame Vladimir Putin for the outcome.)

What did Obama and the Democrats do during this outrageous subversion of the Constitutional duty of the president to fill court vacancies? Nothing much. Did you hear any outrage? Imagine if Democrats blocked a Republican president from filling a vacancy! They'd be threatening civil war- or starting one! It wasn't even a campaign issue in that year's presidential election (2020). So much for making sure the Supreme Court doesn't abolish the right to abortion! (Not to mention dozens of other ways the Supreme Court messes with people's lives.)

"Uhhh, you really thought I cared about YOU?"

Next we got the sociopathic, narcissistic con man Trump getting to fill FOUR seats on the court. He openly proclaimed that he would appoint people to overturn Roe vs. Wade. Yet during Senate confirmation hearings for these far-right-wing extremist ghouls, Democratic Senators went along with the pretense that this wasn't necessarily so. And in another example of a Democrat protecting a sex offender nominee, rightwing California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein hid from her colleagues the fact that nominee Brett Kavanaugh attempted to rape a teenage girl (as well as having committed sexual offenses in college). His Federalist Society-approved picks included a fundamentalist religious fanatic, Amy Coney Barrett.

"Baby, it's back to coat hanger abortions for YOU!"

So we've got Scalia/Thomas/Kavanaugh/the Obama Rollover, and all the other reactionaries the Federal judiciary has been crammed with on all three levels (District, which try cases, Appeals, and the Supreme Court, which rejects 90% of attempted appeals, agreeing to review only a small number of cases a year so as not to interfere with the four months they're on vacation). You've probably noticed a pattern here. For at least the past 30 years or so, the Democrats have been accomplices to the Republicans in creating an arch-reactionary Supreme Court, indeed a revanchist one that is driving the U.S. back to a 19th century legal regime. Why does the "liberal" Democratic Party keep aiding and abetting the Republican packing of the virtually all-powerful Supreme Court with reactionaries? The fact that they are doing it is undeniable on the evidence. Their motives are two:

First, just as the awful reactionaries the Republicans run for president provide convenient bogeymen for the Democrats to run against, forcing many people to vote for the Democrats while holding their noses  (political extortion), so the specter of the Supreme Court overturning the Roe vs. Wade decision of 1973 which finally granted women a limited right to terminate pregnancies, has been a perennial fright campaign the Democrats trot out at every election. I've received years of fund-raising letters from the Democrats, such as from Nancy Pelosi, and their various committees, telling me how the Supreme Court "hangs in the balance" and thus so does "a woman's right to choose"- maybe if they weren't allergic to the word "abortion," the procedure wouldn't still be so stigmatized that most women still refuse to stand up and defend it. But now it looks like the Democrats cut it too close, as the high court they have helped create is about to strip women of the right to control their own bodies. NOW what, Democrats? Fucking assholes!

Second, and more fundamentally, the Democratic Party IS a right-wing party. It is just as imperialist as the Republicans, and just as dedicated to the perpetuation of corporate oligarchy as is the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers). It is not "better" than the GOP. It is merely somewhat less awful. Having a rightwing court is a useful backstop for when the Democratic politicians feel compelled to give in to pressure from their voters and actually pass some progressive legislation. They can rely on the reactionary Supreme Court to cancel the legislation by declaring it "Unconstitutional." There is always a slew of corporate and billionaire-funded reactionary dogs to bring legal challenges to such laws. So reactionary rich people pay reactionary anti-social freaks to sue and reactionary judges do the rest. It's a neat system. Reactionaries working hand in hand, in an organized system of repression and economic rapine. Works for the ultra-rich and their neo-fascist attack dogs. For the rest of us, not so much.

"We're one big happy SUPREME court!'

1] OSHA is the Occupational Safety and Health Agency, part of the Department of Labor. OSHA is a mostly toothless regulatory agency that is deliberately extremely underfunded and understaffed by Congress so it is unable to do its putative task of regulating all the workplaces in the U.S. for health and safety violations. Typically, when it happens to discover a violation (it only discovers a tiny percentage of them, we can safely assume, since it can rarely inspect most workplaces) the company is merely told to correct the violation. Sometimes a small fine is "proposed," which the company typically challenges and gets reduced. If a worker or workers are killed on the job, things are taken a bit more seriously, but the companies and their managers and executives still get away with what in many cases is murder. (For example, criminally negligent homicide, and depraved indifference homicide charges would apply in many cases.)

The sorry history of how U.S. companies are allowed to get away with maiming, killing, and sickening workers has been well documented in numerous books and articles, including in outlets like Mother Jones and The Nation magazines, and even in the rare major media story about a particular company.

Speaking of vicious businessmen, some years back there was a case in New York City, the Pymm Thermometer company. It made glass thermometers which are filled with mercury. It knowingly exposed its uneducated and naive workers to mercury vapors without respiratory protection. The result was a number of them were permanently maimed with holes in their brains. The local district attorney in Brooklyn brought criminal charges against I believe the company owner, and the jury convicted. The trial judge immediately threw out the convictions, and the criminals got away with it. This in "liberal " New York City, where the Democratic Party appoints its party hacks and  wired insiders as judges. (There is a charade of democracy in that the judges are on the ballot in elections but they never have any opposition candidates so like in China or the Soviet Union or Iraq under Saddam Hussein there is only one "choice.") 

The story was reported in The Village Voice weekly newspaper, a publication that reported what the "mainstream" media systematically hid, and it was gradually destroyed. But that's a long story. An internet search on "Pymm Thermometer" turned up a civil suit filed on behalf of Pymm's crippled working class victims, who can no longer earn a living and are reliant on the crumbs that poor unemployed people can squeeze from the government. The victims lost, and their case was dismissed, as the so-called "Workers Compensation" law barred them from suing. The NY state courts ruled that what Pymm did was NOT an "intentional tort"- BULLSHIT!- therefore the victims could only collect crumbs from Workers Comp. Thus do capitalist courts protect criminal businesspeople, in the U.S. version of capitalism.

How the Democrats Helped Create an Ultra-Reactionary Supreme Court- And Strip Women of Their Abortion Rights

It's long past time to call out the Democratic Party of the U.S. on one of its major con games. The one in which they claim to be the sole bulwark protecting America from a right-wing "takeover" of the Supreme Court. The one in which they claim that they are the guardians of abortion rights, rights in permanent peril from unnamed right wingers.

Before I continue, I want to bullet-point the critical facts you need to take away with you:

• Extreme reactionary Antonin Scalia was elevated to the Supreme Court by a Senate vote of 98-0. Those weren't 98 Republicans. Scalia was later one of five GOP apparatchiks on the high court who stole the 2000 presidential election for George Bush (Bush the Younger). [1]

• Democratic Senator Joe Biden (later  vice president in the regime of Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama) functioning as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was instrumental in putting known sex offender Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. Thomas, like Scalia, voted to steal the 2000 presidential election for the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers). [2]

• EVERY reactionary elevated to the top court, with its immense power, has gotten there with the support of Democratic Party senators. Even the ones who vote against confirming them soft-pedal how awful and evil the nominees are.

• In the last year of the presidency of Hit Man Obama, a vacancy opened up on the Supereme Court. In an unprecedented power grab, the Senate Majority Leader, Republican Mitch McConnell (a venal coal industry stooge from Kentucky) announced that Obama would not be allowed to fill that vacancy. And Democratic response was- some grumbling under their breath and acceptance. Obama himself didn't give any evidence of even caring! (Yet there are still morons who think he is a "progressive" who was somehow thwarted by forces beyond his control. Now imagine if the situation was reversed, and a Democratic-controlled Senate denied a GOP president the right to fill a Supreme Court vacancy! There would be DAILY howls of outrage, even calls for a military coup "to restore the Constitutional order." That's because the Republicans are like rabid wolverines and are serious about power. That's how, with a minority of the populace behind them, they have taken over the presidency, the Congress, the Judiciary, and two-thirds of the state legislatures and governorships. (They have long dominated and controlled the military and secret police apparatus.) They have used their control of state legislatures to draw districts that allow them to elect the majority of Representatives to the national House of Representatives with a minority of overall voters. The Democrats are mainly a party of grifters, unserious about power, just looking for profitable sinecures for themselves.

Okay, that last bulletpoint was a long one, but essential. Now on to the body of the essay, which will illustrate the utter cynicism of the Democrats in manipulating people who are duped into relying on them to protect the few hard-won rights we have.

Every election "cycle," which is to say, every two years [3], Democratic political hacks running for office send out tons of political junk mail to citizens, hoping to woo their votes. One of the perennial themes of this propaganda bombardment is how the Supreme Court hangs in the balance, and the need to protect the right to abortion, which was only granted to women by a divided Supreme Court in the Roe vs. Wade decision. That decision was made under pressure from the women's movement, and only granted a limited right, in the first trimester of pregnancy, after which the government was deemed to have an "interest" in interfering in personal and medical decisions and exerting control over people's bodies.

In the years since, the organized reactionaries of the U.S., including the Republican Party (GOP), rightwing religious zealots, the Catholic Church bosses, and assorted rightwing media and political cadres, have relentlessly attacked abortion. The terrorist arm of this novement has assassinated doctors and clinic workers with bombs and guns, committed thousands of arson and other attacks on abortion clinics, blockaded clinics and much else. The legal offensive has been even more devastating, with states controlled by the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) virtually eliminating abortion clinics by various legislative encumbrances that in effect persecute the clinics. Some states have functionally outlawed abortion drugs, which in early pregnancy are the cheapest and easiest way to terminate a pregnancy. (By the way, these same creeps who care so much about "unborn children" are the same ones who deport children fleeing gang and state violence south of the U.S. border back to their deaths, who destroy water containers left in the desert for them, who rip children and infants away from their refugee parents and separate them by thousands of miles. They have historically supported the murder of children by fascist death squads in the U.S. empire, and bombing cities and villages in Vietnam, Korea, and elsewhere that kill large numbers of children, babies, and mothers. So I have a sneaking suspicion that reverence for the sanctity of life isn't their actual motive.)
There IS no abortion provider in almost every town in the U.S. Over 90% of U.S. counties have no abortion facility. Abortion has been stigmatized and isolated, banished from the body of the medical profession. The cowardly medical schools don't even teach their students how to perform abortions,

And what has the Democratic Party been doing all the while the assault on abortion rights has continued unabated for 44 years?

Every election they yell at their voters that the right to abortion is under assault and therefore you must vote for them. And that's pretty much it.

And they ensure that the Supreme Court has a hard rightwing majority, They do this to have a scare tactic to run in elections on, and they do this because they too are fundamentally reactionaries. They serve the corporate oligarchy, which of course wants a reactionary judiciary. They believe in state power over citizens- as the repressive legislation pushed into law by their presidents Truman, Clinton, and Obama proves. Obama gave the government the power to indefinitely imprison U.S. citizens in military gulags without charges or legal representation, by government fiat. The government need only label the victims "terrorists." That is now law because of Obama.

Let's dispose of another myth. The repeated, false assertion that the court is divided into a "liberal" wing and a "conservative" one. The actual division is conservative and reactionary. The conservatives ("liberal") mostly try to preserve the status quo, which is the definition of conservatism. The reactionaries want to change the status quo to make it more repressive, and to decrease the influence of the population and give the rich and large corporations ever more power. This is a program of radical change, NOT "conservatism."

1]  In a bit of ironically poetic justice, the Democratic candidate who along with his party let the GOP steal the 2000 election, Albert Gore, was one of the Senators who voted to put Scalia on the Supreme Court.

2]  Biden made sure Thomas, an arch-reactionary black man who is an enemy of African-Americans in many ways, including his attacks on affirmative action, made it through the confirmation process by stifling witnesses who would have buttressed Anita Hill's testimony about Thomas' vulgar sexual harassment of his underlings, and more critically Biden privately assured his Democratic Senate colleagues not to believe Hill. The story of  Biden's treachery is told in the book "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas," by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. The authors were reporters at the Wall Street Journal at the time the book was written. Mayer went on to be a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, where she is today. Abramson became the very first female to ascend to the top editor post at the oh-so-august New York Times.

Abramson's tenure as top editor was short. She accidentally discovered that the publisher and chairman, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., whose family has long owned the paper and its other properties and who inherited his job from his Daddy, was chiseling her on her pay, paying her less than her male predecessors. Sulzberger was miffed when Abramson confronted him about this, proceeded to fire her, and then engaged in a campaign of character assassination against her.

So "liberal" of him!

This sexist asshole also hired the scandalous former BBC boss Mark Thompson. After notorious pedophile and BBC star Jimmy Savile died, the BBC had an expose ready to air. That was killed, and in its place a tribute to Savile was aired. Thompson claimed to know nothing about any of this, despite being in charge. Sulzberger thinks this guy is worth paying millions for.
The result so far has been a discrimination suit against Thompson for the toxic environment he's helped create (or perpetuate) at the NY Times. Two black female employees allege in their lawsuit that Thompson introduced an "environment rife with discrimination based on age, race and gender." It further links his behavior to similar actions by him during his BBC tenure. ["New York Times chief executive accused of discrimination," BBC News, 29 April, 2016.]


3]  In the U.S., one chamber of the national legislature, the "House of Representatives" of the U.S. Congress, stands for election every two years. There are 435 Congressional districts, thus 435 representatives covering all the 50 states. Congressional districts are proportioned roughly by population.

The other chamber of Congress, the U.S. Senate, has 100 Senators, two Senator for each state. This gives grossly disproportional weight and power to sparsely populated states hard rightwing states, and greatly weakens the political weight of populous states. So California has two Senators, and the 20 least populous states, whose total population equals that of California, have 40 Senators. So arch-reactionary states like Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, the two Dakotas, Iowa, Arkansas, Louisiana, and so on, are a powerful structural and institutional factor in making the U.S. a rightwing nation, even though only a minority of the population is rightwing in this putative "democracy."

Senators are elected for six year terms. Every two years, one third of the Senate stands for reelection.
U.S. presidents serve 4 year terms. The years that aren't presidential election years are called "off-year elections."

The terms of Congresspeople and presidents is set out in the Constitution. The Republicans passed a Constitutional amendment in the 1950's limiting the president to two elected terms. This was done in reaction to the fact that the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president four times in a row starting in 1932. Ironically, Republican Dwight David Eisenhower, elected in 1952 and 1956, may well have won a third term if not for this amendment.