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.

In the Self-Proclaimed "World's Greatest Democracy," the Candidate With the Most Votes Just Lost

Democrat Hillary Clinton won more votes than Republican Donald Trump, but Trump won because of one of the U.S.' peculiar institutions, the "Electoral College." Presidents are actually elected by "electors," as per the U.S. Constitution. There are 538 of these electors, apparatchiks of the two ruling political parties. Clinton may end up with 2 million more votes than Trump after California is fully counted. (Clinton currently is ahead by 1 million.) But the so-called "popular vote" isn't what elects a U.S. president. The Electoral College vote does, and Trump won there, because he won enough of the 50 states to win a majority of the "Electors." [Later in this essay I explain the system in detail.]

This is the FIFTH U.S. presidential election in which the winner lost. It happened previously in 2000, 1888, 1876, and 1824. In fact, in 1824, the "winner," John Quincy Adams, didn't win the popular vote OR the Electoral College vote.

You would think the need to change this anti-democratic system would be obvious. Apparently it's not obvious to the elites who wield power.  The Democratic Party, having lost in 2000 and 2016, you'd think would be calling for change. But it isn't. Instead its two current leader, Obama and Clinton, immediately called for all citizens to fall in line behind Trump, to respect the "democratic process" and genuflect before the nobility of "our democracy." Obama immediately rushed to invite Trump to the White House and pledged to do his upmost to achieve a smooth transition of power and help Trump have a "successful" presidency.

Needless to say, their rivals, the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) doesn't return the favor. Trump repeatedly announced his intention to claim he was cheated if he lost the election. ("The system is rigged, Folks!" was one of his repeated lines in the weeks before November 8.) And when Obama was elected in 2008, the Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, announced at the outset that his number one priority was to make sure Obama had a failed presidency. (The U.S. corporate media doesn't want anyone to remember these things, so they don't mention them.) Newt Gingrich, a smarmy opportunist who has attached himself like a barnacle to the Trump ship, practiced the same sort of "politics of destruction," trying to delegitimize the Democratic Party. But it goes back even further, to the post World War II GOP strategy of redbaiting Democrats, which is how Richard Nixon got elected to Congress and to the U.S. Senate, before Eisenhower elevated him to the vice presidency. Even earlier, in the 1930s, reactionary Republicans acted as ideological police against Democrats.

Those who genuinely oppose not just the racist, reactionary, deformed narcissist Trump and the horrible anti-human policies of the GOP, but those of the Democrats and this entire oppressive system cannot look to the Democratic Party to lead an opposition. The top Democrats have already announced their intention not to oppose Trump and the GOP agenda! (Harry Reid doesn't count as he is retiring.) They won't even block the arch-reactionaries Trump has vowed to elevate to the Supreme Court, even though the Republican Senators blocked Obama from filling the Antonin Scalia vacancy for almost a year. The Democrats in general knuckle under to every GOP power play. Plus, the Democrats are a corporate imperialist party that fundamentally opposes real changes in the U.S. system.

Why some people have a hard time seeing this is baffling. The history of the Democratic Party since the extreme racist Woodrow Wilson, who inaugurated the modern U.S. police state with the Espionage Act and the Palmer raids, makes it crystal clear that Democrats are no allies of true progressives. [In fact the Democratic Party was the party of white racism from the 19th century until the 1960s.]

I'm sure almost no non-Americans, and probably most Americans, don't understand the Electoral College. Therefore, here is an explanation.

The U.S. Constitution as originally written set up this crazy system, part of the conscious design to maintain elite class control over political power. In other words, the U.S. was created as a oligarchy, not a democracy. Originally only white male property owners could vote in the U.S.- not even all white men! Women could not vote until 1920, which means as of today they could vote during less than half of U.S. history, and Southern blacks not until the 1960s, with the exception of a few years immediately after the Civil War ended in 1865.

Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution set up the Electoral College. The Xii Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1804, tweaked the College a bit. The Constitution calls for state legislatures to choose the Electors who in turn would vote for U.S. President and Vice President. But problems, such as deadlocked legislatures that couldn't decide on Electors, caused all the states except South Carolina to allow white men generally to vote for the Electors by 1832. South Carolina finally threw in the towel on state legislators having sole voting power for president in 1860, the same year that state became the first state to secede from the U.S., in December.

By the way, for 125 years state legislators picked their states' U.S. Senators, until 1913, when the XVII Amendment switched to "popular" election of U.S. Senators.

Today there are a total of 538 Electors. The Democratic Party and Republican Party choose the Electors. The American people are actually voting for these rival slates of Electors, unbeknownst to them.

These 538 party loyalists actually elect the president. Each state is apportioned a minimum of 3 electors. The number of electors per state corresponds to the number of a state's U.S. Congress people. As each state has two Senators and at least one Representative in the House, each has at least 3 electors. California, the most populous state and thus the state with the most House Representatives in the U.S. Congress, has 55 Electors. With 435 Representatives and 100 Senators (2 per state), that equals 535 Electors. The 3 remaining Electors were granted to the District of Columbia in 1964, 188 years after the United States was declared, when the residents of the capital city of the "World's Greatest Democracy" were finally allowed to vote.

The reason the "popular" vote and the Electoral College votes can differ is quite simple. All but two states gives 100% of their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote in the state. They don't have to do this, they could apportion the electoral votes according to the popular vote percentages, as this is entirely up to the individual states. But that is what they do. So say one candidate gets 55% in enough states to win a majority of electoral votes, but only 35%, say, in states he/she loses. They would have fewer "popular" votes nationwide, but a majority in the Electoral College.

The actual election by the Electoral College will occur this December, when the Electors meet in their respective state capitals and in the District of Columbia to vote. Not all of themn are legally bound to vote according to their state's popular vote, but since they are disciplined party hacks, they will. Trump is expected to receive 290 votes (270 required to win) and Clinton 228. The over 7 million votes that went to other candidates (including write-ins not on the ballots) get zero Electoral Votes, as if they don't exist. (The establishment media never mentions these votes, contributing to their invisibility.)

The U.S. territories Puerto Rico, Guam, U.S. Virgin Islands and Northern Mariana Islands, get no votes from the Electoral College because they aren’t states and they don’t have a special Constitutional amendment to recognize them. 4.4 million U.S. citizens live in the territories, a population almost equal to the total of 6 states.  (There are 4.5 million combined in North and South Dakota, Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, and Delaware.)

Other people who can't vote are millions of people convicted of felonies in states that strip such people (mostly blacks) of the right to vote permanently.

If no candidate wins a majority in the Electoral College, the House of Representatives votes for the next president, and the U.S. Senate for the vice-president. Which in practice would mean the controlling party in each chamber would pick its own party's candidate, barring some weird political deal. This happened just once, in 1824.

In the very first U.S. presidential election in 1789, there was only one candidate- George Washington. See how "democratic" the U.S. was even at the very beginning? I found an interesting article that describes how U.S. presidential politics has really been a battle between competing elites from the very start- and indeed is still today. [1] Rival gangs of rich people and corporate interests cluster around the two oligarchic parties and compete with each other for state power. They use demagoguery and dishonest propaganda slogans and
"ideas" to psychologically manipulate various sectors of the populace to vote for them.

Here is the breakdown of the "popular" vote and the prospective Electoral College tally. Notice that over 7 million voters who voted for someone other than the two candidates of the two-party dictatorship don't count at all, as they get zero Electoral College votes.

http://uselectionatlas.org/RESULTS/national.php

Here is a useful historical timeline from Wikipedia.org ["Voting rights in the United States." Footnotes at Wikipedia.]

                                            Milestones of national franchise extension

Abolition of property qualifications for white men, from 1792 (Kentucky) to 1856 (North Carolina) — see: Jacksonian democracy.[5]

Citizenship in both the United States and U.S. States by birth or naturalization, 1868 — see: Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Non-white men, 1870 — see: Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Direct election of Senators, 1913 — see: Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution gave voters rather than state legislatures the right to elect senators.[11]

Women, 1920 — see: Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Native Americans (for all who did not already have the vote, which nearly two-thirds did[12]), 1924 — see: Indian Citizenship Act.[13]

Residents of Washington, D.C. for U.S. Presidential Elections, 1961 — see: Twenty-third Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Poll tax, 1964 — see: Twenty-fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution, prohibiting imposition of poll tax in federal elections.

Protection of voter registration and voting for racial minorities, later applied to language minorities, 1965 — see Voting Rights Act of 1965; this has also been applied to correcting discriminatory election systems and districting.

Poll Tax, 1966 — see: Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966), prohibiting imposition of poll tax or property requirements in all U.S. elections.

Adults between 18 and 21, 1971 — see: Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution,[14] were granted the vote in response to Vietnam War protests which argued that soldiers who were old enough to fight for their country should be granted the right to vote.[11]

Requirement that a person reside in a jurisdiction for an extended period — 14th Amendment; Dunn v. Blumstein, 405 U.S. 330  (1972).[15][16][16]

Washington, D.C., for restoring local elections such as Mayor and Councilmen, after a 100-year gap in Georgetown, and 190-year gap in the wider city, ending Congress's policy of local election disfranchisement started in 1801 in this former portion of Maryland, 1973, — see: D.C. Home rule.

United States Military and Uniformed Services, Merchant Marine, other citizens overseas, living on bases in the United States, abroad, or aboard ship, 1986 — see: Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.[17]
Finally, here's an interesting paragraph from the Federal Government's National Archives and Records Administration webpage on the Electoral College:

Reference sources indicate that over the past 200 years, over 700 proposals have been introduced in Congress to reform or eliminate the Electoral College. There have been more proposals for Constitutional amendments on changing the Electoral College than on any other subject. The American Bar Association has criticized the Electoral College as “archaic” and “ambiguous” and its polling showed 69 percent of lawyers favored abolishing it in 1987. But surveys of political scientists have supported continuation of the Electoral College. Public opinion polls have shown Americans favored abolishing it by majorities of 58 percent in 1967; 81 percent in 1968; and 75 percent in 1981.

Well, so much for democracy and the "will of the people."

For more details on the Electoral College, see the following:

"U.S. Electoral College: Frequently Asked Questions," National Archives and Records Administration.

"Electoral College, (United States)," Wikipedia.org.

"Breaking down the US elections: Your biggest questions answered," RT, November 8, 2016


1] "Presidential Elections," History.com, website of the History Channel cable TV channel. Oddly for a corporate entity, I've found the articles there mostly pretty objective.

Trump Hires Christie Hatchetman/Fall Guy For His Presidential Campaign

Former henchman to New Jersey Republican Governor and corrupt bully Chris Christie, Bill Stepien, who became one of Christie's fall guys when it was revealed that the Christie regime vindictively caused massive traffic jams in the town of Fort Lee, NJ, has been hired by demagogic narcissist Donald Trump to a top position in Trump's campaign for president.

Stepien is to be the Trump campaign's national field director.

Stepien was one of the Christie soldiers who ordered traffic lanes leading from Fort Lee onto the George Washington Bridge to New York City blocked for several days, causing traffic blockages and a possible death due to a delayed ambulance response to an emergency. This was done because the Democratic mayor of the town declined to endorse Republican Christie for reelection as Governor. (Talk about a totalitarian mindset! Even the rival party has to endorse the Emperor of New Jersey.) Christie scapegoated his underlings to save his own political hide when the conspiracy was revealed. A criminal trial is pending, but Stepien has not been indicted, oddly. Nor are the two defendants, Bill Baroni and Bridget Anne Kelly, being threatened with long prison sentences in order to move up the chain to Christie, a common practice in the U.S. when dealing with the non-elite. [1]

Stepien is the latest in a series of recent unsavory hires by Trump to his campaign, including the editor/executive chairman of the racist, dementedly reactionary, and libelous website Breitbart.com, Stephen Bannon, as chief executive of the campaign. [2]

And the New York Times reported that sex fiend and arch reactionary propaganda czar Roger Ailes would help Trump prepare for debating Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party nominee for president. Ailes is a master of demagogically attacking opponents "weak points." He and Trump should make a good fit. (The Trump campaign denied the Times' report, but he and his campaign have a history of issuing false denials.) Rupert Murdoch just paid his former Fox "News" boss Ailes $40 million to go away after Ailes' despicable history as a grotesque sexual extortionist finally exploded into public view after decades hidden under the rug. (You can do an Internet search if you want the details.)

 One important note about Breitbart.com: the U.S. broadcast media especially has hidden the nature of this "news" site, by never accurately describing its content and employing deceptive euphemisms like "conservative" or the anodyne, meaningless "alt-right." The purpose is to make it seem legitimate and respectable. This is vile. As most Americans are too lazy to make an effort to get information from written sources and instead merely absorb what they see and hear from broadcast media, this practice of camouflaging the actual nature of various dementedly reactionary and even fascist organizations and individuals is particularly malign. Whereas they take the reverse attitude toward "leftists" who actually challenge the power system politically or ideologically, smearing them as "radical," "extremist," "pro-communist" or sympathetic to/supportive of "terrorism."

The Utterly Loathsome Stephen K. Bannon

 Hard core GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) Apparatchik Bill Stepien

Sex fiend Roger Ailes in photomontage with serial rapist and cloyingly unfunny ex-comedian Bill Cosby. 

[From the satirical piece "Roger Ailes, Bill Cosby To Embark On Joint Speaking Tour."] 

1]  See "Key Player in Bridgegate Scandal Hired by Donald Trump Campaign," WNYC radio (New York City), August 26, 2016.

2]  "Trump Campaign Hires Breitbart Chief Stephen Bannon," Slate, August 17, 2016. A former Breitbart editor-at-large describes Bannon as a bully and a totalitarian type. For more detail on the tawdry behavior of Bannon and staff defections his abusive ways have caused, see "The G.O.P.’s Civil War Comes to Breitbart: A staff rebellion at Breitbart suggests all is not well in Trumpworld," Vanity Fair, .March 14, 2016. Bannon infamously abandoned one of his own female reporters who was assaulted by Trump minion Cory Lewandowski (subsequently hired by the execrable, ethics-free CNN as a "commentator" and "analyst" of the presidential race!).

 

Republican Politicians Aided Trump 'University' Fraud

One fact about the scam Donald Trump ran, his so-called "university" that defrauded thousands of suckers for millions of dollars, has gotten very low-key coverage by the U.S. media. That is the fact that at least two politicians of the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) aided and abetted his frauds, in return for donations to their political campaigns by Trump.

As a result of numerous complaints from victims,in 2010 the Better Business Bureau rated the phony "school" (in actuality a high-pressure sales "seminar," a type of hustle all too common in America) D-minus, its second-lowest grade.

Republican Greg Abbott, at the time Texas Attorney General, opened a civil investigation of "possibly deceptive trade practices." Then in 2010, Abbott killed the investigation, betraying Trump's victims in his state, and Trump "University" pulled out of Texas. Next, Trump gave $35,000 to Abbott's successful gubernatorial campaign.

Abbott's spokesman refused to talk to the Associated Press news organization about it. Abbott is currently the governor of the benighted state of Texas, succeeding an equally corrupt Republican, the moronic Rick Perry [1]

Then there's Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi. She toyed with the idea of joining with New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in a multi-state suit against Trump's scam. Three days after Bondi's spokeswoman popped up in Florida media reports mentioning that Bondi's office was "reviewing" the New York lawsuit, the Donald J. Trump Foundation plopped down $25,000 on a political fundraising committee backing Bondi's re-election campaign. Bondi quickly dropped her investigation and didn't join with other state AG's pursuing civil action on behalf of Trump's numerous victims, falsely claiming there were insufficient grounds to sue the Trump operation.

Currently civil suits are going forward against Trump's racket in California and New York, including by NY State Attorney General Schneiderman. (Trump claims Schneiderman tried to shake him down for a donation- an obvious lie, since Trump would have just given him one, considering Trump's pattern of "legal" bribery, not just in this matter, but throughout his "business career." )

I haven't seen these facts reported in either the New York Times or Washington Post, just in the AP piece referenced below. In general, "the" media protects the system of "legal" bribery in the U.S. This system enables corporate interests and filthy rich individuals to exercise near-hegemonic control over politics in the U.S. Since "the" media are organs of the very same corporate oligarchy, it is logical that this same media gives scant attention to this type of corruption most of the time.

Certainly this time.

1]  "Trump University model: Sell hard, demand to see a warrant," AP, 6/2/16.

For the recent articles on Trump "University," just do an Internet search. Or go to the New York Times (click that for search results at NY Times), where you can read such articles as "Former Trump University Workers Call the School a ‘Lie’ and a ‘Scheme’ in Testimony," May 31, 2016.