Tag: supreme court

By Posted on Posted in Democracy, language, Media Ethics, Mindset, propaganda, Psychology, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Bothsidesim, as you might have guessed, is the mainstream media’s tendency to pretend that reporting objectively requires covering “both sides” with equal weight. But here are a few problems with that approach:Free scales of justice judge justice illustration

  1. Often, there are many more than two sides. Bothsidesism pushes other voices and more nuanced analysis to the margins, just as the two-party system that drives most US politics. Not everything can be separated into either/or, black/white, environmentally friendly/environmentally harmful. A great example would be US Supreme Court decisions in the 1970s, where Justices would frequently write concurring opinions that raised issues and perspectives outside the “official” opinion (this is less true of the current court, which disposes of many cases in the “shadow docket“).
  2. When there are just two sides, one side may be well-reasoned and make a compelling case, while the other puts forth “alternative facts“–in other words, lies–to build a case based on demagoguery or deceit. (The link goes to an NBC clip of then presidential advisor Kellyanne Conway, 2 minutes in, introducing the term in an interview early in the term of the 45th US president–and the interviewer, Chuck Todd, calling her out immediately.)
  3. Bothsidesim turns any contest of ideas into a “horse race” where the issues get swept aside in favor of who appears to be the better debater.

The current “debate” over DT’s federal indictment in the document-hiding case shows what happens when bothsidesim runs amok–and this is NOT about Republican vs. Democrat.  While some media fall all over themselves to cry, “both sides did this,” quoting hyperpartisan pols like Ted Cruz, there is a lot of similarity between the approaches of Republican former VP Mike Pence and Democratic former VP (now president) Joe Biden, and basically none between either of them and DT.

What differentiates the cases of Pence and  Biden from DT’s is simple: The two former VPs immediately notified government agencies and cooperated fully, while DT reportedly was personally involved in hiding documents and telling the government there were no more. It took Pence’s team just three days to turn over the documents; Biden’s response was even quicker, and the documents were delivered one day after discovery.

DT falsely claimed all the documents had already been turned in and stalled so long that the government sent in the FBI to retrieve them. Also, DT’s document trove reportedly includes important military secrets, and DT showed these to people who were not authorized to see them–potentially putting our country and its military at risk.

It’s interesting that some of the most sycophantic yes-men of the DT years–not just Pence but also former Attorney General William Barr and former National Security Advisor John Bolton–have broken with DT over his handling of the matter.

The astute historian Heather Cox Richardson provides an equally current example thousands of miles outside the US. She quotes Timothy Snyder, a Yale scholar of authoritarianism on the recent Russian attack on Ukraine’s Nova Kakhovka Dam:

Snyder warned journalists not to “bothsides” the story by offering equal time to both sides. “What Russian spokespersons have said has almost always been untrue, whereas what Ukrainian spokespersons have said has largely been reliable. The juxtaposition suggests a false equality,” he wrote. “The story doesn’t start at the moment the dam explodes. For the last fifteen months Russia has been killing Ukrainian civilians and destroying Ukrainian civilian infrastructure, whereas Ukraine has been trying to protect its people and the structures that keep them alive.” “Objectivity does not mean treating an event as a coin flip between two public statements,” he said. “It demands thinking about the objects and the settings that readers require for understanding amidst uncertainty.”

Let’s hope that becomes the mantra for journalists everywhere.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Ethics in Government, Mindset, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

See link in caption for a text equivalent

I’ve had a blog post percolating for several weeks about the Supreme Court and what we can do to rein them in. I had not started writing it and then I came across this from YES magazine, which says most of what I would have said. So I will let Chris Winters say it for me. As he notes, nonviolent resistance including general strikes is a powerful force for change. It has brought down some pretty repressive governments (examples: Arab Spring, the overthrow of South African apartheid and , the collapse of the Soviet Union) and forced others–even Nazi Germany–to soften their stance.

The Supreme Court’s Crisis of Legitimacy

Map key: Status of abortion laws by state[1]   Illegal   Potentially illegal   Soon to be illegal   Legal for now   Legal. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, censorship, Democracy, General Commentary, Mindset, People Helping People, Politics, privacy, propaganda, Psychology, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , ,
Muhammad Ai probably wore gloves like these. Photo by Wojciech Ner.
Our rights are under attack! Photo by Wojciech Ner.

Ever since the upcoming decision overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked, I’ve been stewing on it. Tomorrow, I am going to my second rally to uphold women’s reproductive rights. It shouldn’t be necessary, but it is. If we can prevent Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale from moving from a dystopian novel to a description of life in 2020s America, it’s our obligation to do so. I don’t know about you, but I do not want to live in anyplace resembling the theocratic dictatorship of Gilead that she describes.

I will not address the valid question of when does a fetus’s life take precedence over the mother’s because I don’t have the medical qualifications to give an answer that is based on fact. But let me raise a personal liberty argument: I will bring up the extension of the upcoming court decision to other areas, because we know that is coming–and because it personally affects my family. One former National Review editor actually posted on social media, “Next stop Brown vs. Board!” That was the decision that outlawed segregation in 1954. Here’s a screenshot of that post (NOTE: the blog that shows the post is a foul-mouthed screed–but you can see a picture of the post and learn some useful information about the person who wrote that post).
There is no doubt in my mind that they will go after easier marks first: such as the LGBT community and especially the T (trans) part. But they’ve said it out loud (or at least in a Tweet): they will eventually go after interracial couples–and likely, eventually, the ability to even socialize with people of different skin colors (see this analysis from Reuters).
Alito has a long history of speaking out against same-sex marriage and cannot be trusted not to use the same twisted reasoning to go after it. He also authored the Hobby Lobby case, which could be seen as a wedge decision that could eventually be used to eliminate legal contraception. In both of these probable attacks on our rights, it gets personal for me.
  • My younger child identifies as nonbinary, uses they-them pronouns, and is five years into a beautiful relationship with someone who has the same types of body parts and chromosomes but a very different cultural and religious upbringing. I fully support them, their choice of identity, and their wonderful life-partner.
  • My older one married another lovely guy from a different cultural and religious upbringing–who is the product of a White father and a Latina mom who clearly has indigenous ancestry. He is an excellent life partner for my daughter. My wife and I love both of our kids’ partners.
  • My mother, raised in a super-observant Orthodox Jewish family, divorced my father and married a Japanese man who was raised Buddhist. She also did some pretty intense civil rights work, including serving as a tester for the Urban League to determine if those apartments declined to Black families were really “already rented.”
  • I identify as bi and have had relationships before my marriage with both men and women. And I have slept with people who were not the same color as me. If I were my kids’ age, I might well have chosen to identify as nonbinary. While I am now very comfortable in my maleness, I was very UNcomfortable with it in my teens and 20s.
  • I am a survivor of rape by a grown male stranger who literally grabbed me off the street when I was 10 or 11. Fortunately, becoming pregnant was not an issue–but what if I’d been a 15-year-old girl, and had been forced to bear a child whose every moment would remind me of the violence done to me–a violence that was extremely traumatic even without a pregnancy?
Let’s also put this into a wider context: this is the same Supreme Court that recently decided that the Centers for Disease Control does not have the right to control disease by mandating masks in public conveyances–so you could be sitting next to a superspreader on a six-hour flight with no protection other than your own voluntary mask, and a coughing fit on a rush-hour subway car could expose dozens.
In fact, two people I’m very close to, who bought plane tickets before the mask mandate was overturned but flew later, have come down with COVID. I am flying next month, and I’m not happy about it. But my 91-year-old dad no longer travels and it’s important to see him when we can.
Even before that inane ruling, it was necessary to fight for my right to protect myself and the people I pod with. I refused to sit next to someone on a plane who would not mask (while that ruling was still in effect), and he was eventually taken off the plane. And at our official Town Meeting last week, I had to call a Point of Order to demand that the inadequate separation of masked and unmasked on opposite sides of an aisle be enforced, after asking someone to either put on a mask or go sit in the no-mask section. You would think the anti-vax crowd would actually be in favor of masks in public indoor spaces, since they would have lower risk of getting a bad case of COVID–but no. I still don’t understand the way these basic public health measures have been weaponized, even after many prominent mask critics contracted fatal cases. After all, we have seat belt laws, motorcycle helmet laws,  and requirements that school children receive various other vaccines.
The same back-asswards SCOTUS logic that killed the transportation mask mandate could threaten the abilities of OSHA and EPA (and many other agencies) to protect citizens in their domains. This is the same Supreme Court that has upheld discriminatory voting rules in several decisions. Here’s a Fox News report on the decision to hear a case in Arizona where they later decided in favor of the state and against election justice activists— and here’s a report on the actual decision, from C|Net.
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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Diversity, Environment, Ethics in Government, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The man who lived in The White House from January 2017 to January 2021 took the US from respected world leader to banana republic serving the whims of an incompetent would-be dictator in an alarmingly short time. We are fortunate to have a new leader who is doing his best—though not enough—to undo the damage, and who steadies our foreign and domestic policy at a time when the need for leadership is clear.

But even though DT is out of power despite every crazy attempt to maintain it, his numerous judicial appointments gave the crazies a scary degree of control that persists today.

Which seems to mean that reproductive rights, environmental protections, the right to be protected from contagious lethal diseases, and the right to vote have had big portions chiseled away, while the rights to carry and use firearms, to infiltrate others’ airspace, and the right of corporations to fund candidates and dictate favorable terms have been enshrined.

While DT’s government made up new and undid longstanding laws and regulations with no regard for precedent or separation of powers, Biden’s attempts to return to normalcy, curtail the pandemic, and govern effectively keep getting shot down by—you guessed it—the appointees of his predecessor.

These judges and Justices invent new legal doctrine out of whole cloth, undermining more than two centuries of settled law, and using truly bizarre reasoning to uphold a “new normal” where skin color, gender, sexual orientation, country of origin, and religion are once again grounds to be discriminated against.

At the Supreme Court level, they often (far more often than in the recent past) use a procedural workaround known as “the shadow docket,” which often results in rushed, unsigned decisions with little or no written documentation of the rationale. This was used to implement both the MPP and Texas abortion decisions of right-wing District Judges, explained just below along with some other examples:

  • Early in his term, Biden kept campaign promise to end the MPP Remain in Mexico program—one of several policy pieces that inflicted massive violations of human rights (and international law) in his predecessor’s immigration policy of deliberate cruelty. MPP (and several other immigration changes instituted under DT) put thousands of people at grave risk of kidnapping, rape, and murder at the hands of the cartels they were fleeing.  Even though the policy, developed by the notorious xenophobe Stephen Miller, undid generations of settled procedure without any plausible justification, A DT-appointed judge forced the Biden administration to reinstate this horrible program.
  • Texas’s criminalization of assistance to or performing an abortion and deputization of any citizen to file for redress is so blatantly against the constitution that even right-wing anti-abortionists like this conservative anti-abortion lawyer are screaming “no”—as did Chief Justice Roberts (no friend of the reproductive rights movement).
  • Just this week, another DT-appointed district judge overturned the CDC’s public transportation mask mandate, drastically increasing the risk of COVID spreading when people are next to each other in tightly enclosed spaces for hours at a time. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle is one of many DT-appointed judges (along with Supreme Court Justice Barrett) whose confirmation was rushed through with many other nominations in the closing days of his administration; she was deemed unqualified by the American Bar Association. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I’m getting on a plane again for a while—and I flew five round-trips since April 2021 when my vaccine took full effect. By what spurious reasoning do you take away the right of the Centers for Disease Control to control disease? Some lawyer should rapidly organize a class-action lawsuit on behalf of people who bought tickets with the understanding that they would be protected by a mask requirement in airports, bus and train terminals, and on the planes, trains, and buses.

Of course, this attack on US law started before Biden. As an example, after two previous attempts were overturned by various courts, the Supreme Court upheld version 3 of DT’s Muslim travel ban. And we all know about SCOTUS’s horrible pre-Biden decisions to block the recount of the Florida presidential results in 2000 (which gave us eight years of a dubiously elected president who was the worst in history until 2017)…to allow corporate donors to trample individual rights in decisions like Citizens United…

Whatever happened to “the land of the free” and “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”?

 

Is there anything we can do about this?

Yes. Before I start suggesting things, I need to state that I am not a fan of the Democratic Party, have a long history of supporting electoral reforms that would reduce both Democratic and Republican Party power (like ranked-choice voting and nonpartisan administration of elections), and have written many letters, posts, and articles criticizing the current system. Nevertheless…

The first step is to win enough elections—whether for School Board or Senator—to wrest control of every possible office from the right-wing conspiracy theorists, January 6 conspirators, climate change deniers, bigots who see themselves as legitimized by a Republican Party no longer willing to confront evil and punishing the handful of its members who are still willing to go out on a limb and do the right thing. While I wish we had a viable alternative, under the two-party system, our choice in most races must to support Democrats.

I will not personally give money to a Party that continues to enable the right-wingers—from 11 Democrats voting to confirm Clarence Thomas despite highly credible accusations of sexual harassment to the Party allowing its two most conservative Senators to control the agenda and sabotage so many of the best things Biden has tried to do.

But I do give money to groups like Movement Voter Project that funds progressive grassroots groups to influence elections in swing districts—and reminds politicians who of the promises that got MVP to support them. That creates a progressive sphere of influence in ways normally reserved for powerful corporate donors and wealthy individual contributors in the 1%.

The second step is to reject any nominee endorsed by the Federalist Society, which according to Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in a 2019 speech, openly attacks the gains made in the last 100 years on a host of issues including labor, environment, civil rights, and more, and not only supplied DT’s pick lists but trained the nominees on how to get through the hearings.

The third step is to consider major reforms like changing the judicial nomination process (perhaps through a non-partisan commission), ending lifetime appointments, and forcing the Supreme Court to apply the same Code of Ethics to itself that other courts require. This will be much more successful if we have accomplished step one.

The fourth step scares me and I wish we had a better alternative. This could come back to bite, and bite hard. But the judiciary has been running roughshod over the rights of average citizens, and especially those with less privilege.

So, reluctantly, we need to consider expanding the Supreme Court. We have to remember that the appointments of three of the six current conservative Justices (Thomas, Kavanaugh, and Barrett) were confirmed by brute force with narrow majorities, and that Obama’s nomination of current Attorney General Merrick Garland was denied by brute force—McConnell refused to even hold a hearing and 17 Republican Senators supported him in public statements.

I said at the time and still say that Obama should have pushed back, saying that failure to hold a hearing by a certain date would constitute approval. Thomas and Kavanaugh defended themselves very poorly against credible claims of sexual harassment (Thomas) and sexual assault (Kavanaugh). Barrett was confirmed on October 26, 2020, less than two weeks before the November 3 election—but for these same Senators, March to November, 2016, was too close between nomination and the election.

How little constitutional basis there was to deny the hearing was proven in 2020 when that same McConnell rushed the Barrett nomination through, ignoring his own precedent and her extreme inexperience in the appellate courts, and the Republican hypocrites (who had said in 2016 they’d do the same thing if a Republican president nominated in the last year) reversed themselves and voted her in. Susan Collins was the only Republican voting nay, while Graham, Rubio, and the others who’d spoken out against final-year nominations completely ignored their own earlier comments.

In other words, the Republicans have not earned their 6-3 SCOTUS majority. The consequences of their cheating their way to a majority will be felt for decades unless we find a way to stop them. If we can limit their power through steps 1-3, maybe this “nuclear option” is unnecessary. But given this Court’s avid willingness to throw away settled law, undermine both the legislative and executive branches, and not even bother to justify their decisions with written opinions, I’m expecting we will have to move on this.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Entrepreneurship, Environment, language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Mindset, Politics, Psychology, Social and Economic Justice, Talking to the Other Side Tagged with , , , , , , ,

I love this post from the Changemaker Institute, How to Change The World By Meeting People Where They Care. I love it because it approaches social change through a marketing lens. It starts by revisiting the famous Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court Case of 1967, which struck down longstanding bans on marrying across the color line. Pointing out how Richard and Mildred Loving got people to care, the post goes on to ask how to get people to care about what you’re doing–and answers with a business-oriented focus on outcomes of your social change action, which you arrive at through these questions (quoting directly from the post):

  • What does it take to get an investor to believe in your business and invest in your mission?
  • What does it take to get customers to believe in your product or service and invest in it?
  • What does it take to get your employees to believe in your company’s mission and invest time and energy in supporting it?
  • What does it take to get people to support your vision for a better world? [end of quote]
Seet spot and 3 words posters in Shel's office, where he sees them every day
Shel’s inspirational posters describing his “sweet spot” institutional mission and his 2020 and 2021 sets of three words to inspire his year

This intersection is so important to me that on the wall behind my computer monitor, where I see it many times a day, I have a poster that reminds me, “I help businesses find their unique sweet spot where profitability meets environmental and social progress.” It’s important enough that I’ve written four books making the profitability case for business to deeply embrace social change and planetary healing, and have also written about the success lessons activists can take from business. It’s the basis for much of my consulting and speaking.

To take it a step further: I see getting out of the silo, rubbing shoulders with people who are not like you and examining different ideas from different industries or different sectors of the same industry as crucial is testing your own ideas, sharpening them enough to really get inside someone’s head and cause enough discomfort with the status quo to embrace the brighter future you propose. Whether you’re marketing a business or a movement, that’s a pretty important thing to do.

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, censorship, Customer Service as Marketing, Democracy, Environment, Ethics in Government, language, Media Ethics, Politics, propaganda, Publishing, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“The Post” lives up to the hype. It takes a very cerebral story and builds it into high drama, spurred by strong performances from Meryl Streep as publisher Katharine Graham) and Tom Hanks (editor Ben Bradlee).Trailers for "The Post are widely available

The overall message, about the power of the free press, and the need for the press to defend its Fist Amendment freedom, despite the whims of a paranoid and dictatorial president (Nixon, in this case—a different example today).

It tracks Daniel Ellsberg’s smuggling out massive quantities of classified documents from the Rand Corporation, where he worked, and releasing them first to the New York Times, and then to the Washington Post. The movie also dramatizes the frenetic effort throughout the newsroom to absorb the information and turn it into stories on very tight deadlines, not even knowing if the presses would run, while the Times suffered under the first pre-publication censorship of journalism in the history of the United States. Known as “The Pentagon Papers,” these documents proved that US high officials knew by the early 1960s that the war was unwinnable, and that presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon all lied to the American people about it.

And it covers the legal battle: the government’s attempt to shut them down and the papers going all the way to the Supreme Court to secure their rights. The timing of these events happened to threaten The Post’s long-awaited IPO, which adds to the drama and the sense of what’s at stake for Graham, Bradlee, and their journalists.

BTW, just as the movie gives lessons on how to survive a paranoid, media-hating president facing serious doubts about his honesty, the Nixon link above focuses on some very interesting parallels between his presidency and that of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC. However, let’s remember the differences. Nixon had a very impressive record on the environment—I describe him as the president with America’s second-most environmentalist track record (behind Obama but ahead of both Jimmy Carter and Teddy Roosevelt) also, despite the Vietnam war, did much to break down the barriers between the US and both the Soviet Union and China.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

One one level, I’m pleased that DT has chosen a very smart guy for his first Supreme Court Justice nominee.

Supreme Court, 2009 (Photo)
In this 2009 portrait of the Supreme Court, Scalia is third from the right.

But on the other hand, Neil Gorsuch is as much of a right-wing ideologue as his late mother Anne, who attempted to eviscerate the Environmental Protection Administration when she ran it for Ronald Reagan. And then there’s the little matter of timing: A nominee was already selected by President Obama when his term still had nine months left. I thought Obama was making a huge mistake in not pushing hard on this. Even if Clinton had won in November, it was a terrible precedent. Merrick Garland is every bit as smart as Neil Gorsuch, and is not an ideologue for either side. He belongs on the Court.

Thus, I wrote the following email this morning to my Democratic Senators, both of whom have already made public statements opposing this nomination—feel free to use it as the basis for a personalized letter to your own Senators:

Thanks for Opposing Gorsuch nomination–Please Organize Other Democratic Senators

Dear Senator Warren (Senator Markey):

Thank you for being such a strong advocate of justice in the opening weeks of the Trump era. As a constituent and a citizen, I’m very grateful–and I ask you to step to the plate again to lead the fight against Neil Gorsuch. I see that you’ve already said publicly that you will not support this nomination, and thank you for that as well. I urge you not only to publicly oppose this nomination, but to build opposition among your fellow Democratic and Independent Senators. This latest unacceptable nomination must be stopped. Here are two talking points that may help:

1. There is already a nomination on the table: the moderate centrist Merrick Garland. The Senate’s disgraceful failure to act on that nomination should not invalidate it, and the horrible precedent that a president in his last year isn’t entitled to nominate has to be undermined.

2. Trump did not even get a majority, or anything close to a majority. There is no mandate to install SCOTUS justices with a radical right-wing ideology such as Judge Gorsuch’s. He is obviously very smart and scholarly, but has been an adamant champion of some of the worst judicial decisions while regularly sharing his view that the courts should not be used to expand the rights of ordinary citizens. As examples, he has written decisions that favor Christianity against other religions, and has called corporate campaign contributions (presumably including those allowed under Citizens United) “fundamental right” that should be afforded the highest standard of constitutional protection. All of this is well-documented in his Wikipedia profile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Gorsuch . I repeat: there is no mandate to appoint a right-wing ideologue.

Shel Horowitz – “The Transformpreneur”(sm)

If you feel as I do, please contact your Senators. Again, I freely give permission to modify what I’ve written to send your own message.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, General Commentary, Politics, Social and Economic Justice, Uncategorized Tagged with , ,

I went to my first same-sex commitment ceremonies around 1979 and 1980, never dreaming that the day would come when such unions would be recognized in every state of the United States of America.

Thank you, Justice Kennedy for your beautiful opinion, and the other four Justices who added their names. And thank you, President Obama, for being consistent in your support since the day you announced that your thinking had evolved on this issue.

And thanks to the activists who brought the country forward, including those who were brave enough to do this long before it was legal.Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail