2022 Archives

The Best of the Rest of the News. - Louisiana wants to be the first state to execute a woman for getting an abortion - How badly will Fed Chair and Trump appointee Jerome Powell damage the economy? - Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott has an election-year strategy: go after the children of refugees and immigrants. - Speaking of the Supreme Court again (how can we avoid it?), they've opened a new can of worms around religion (surprise!). - Neoliberalism is hated, even in France. - Is Putin at peak desperation? - Geeky Science! If Meatless Mondays could save the world's forests, would you participate? - Crazy Alert! a lion, a bear, and a tiger cub were rescued from an abandoned house belonging to a drug dealer and were adopted by an animal sanctuary. For the next fifteen years, they lived together as best friends.

It’s time to discuss religion, because it’s no longer knocking on our door: Sam Alito just sent it into the house with a no-knock warrant and stun grenades that threaten to catch the place on fire. Democrats are generally disinclined to discuss religion, much less debate it. They like to point out that Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin were famously atheist, Jefferson and dozens of other high-profile people in the Founding generation were deists (a close cousin to atheists and certainly not Christians), and that in two different places the Constitution explicitly rejects religion interfering with government or vice-versa. But it’s time to discuss religion whether we like it or not, because it’s no longer knocking on our door: Sam Alito just sent it into the house with a no-knock warrant and stun grenades that threaten to catch the place on fire.

Abortion can be re-legalized if Democrats in Congress choose to set aside the filibuster and either pass a law codifying Roe or, with a more long-term strategy, add new members to the Court. Politico is reporting that the Supreme Court has already voted to strike down Roe v Wade and Planned Parenthood v Casey, and possibly even Griswold v Connecticut. The decision is in draft form, but expected to be released this summer. The GOP first set this as a goal in 1981 with the election of Ronald Reagan who, prior to cutting a cynical deal with Jerry Falwell for church help in the 1980 election, had signed the most liberal abortion law in the nation as California governor. Now it appears their 41-year campaign has reached its fruition. This is the first time in the lifetime of anybody living today that the Supreme Court has removed from our law a major “right” that directly or indirectly affects all Americans.

Jane Anne Morris is a corporate anthropologist and writer in Madison, Wisconsin, and she is affiliated with the Program on Corporations, Law, and Democracy (POCLAD), one of the leading organizations doing research and work in illuminating the story of corporate personhood. Morris discovered that on the eve of his becoming chief justice of Wisconsin's Supreme Court, Edward G. Ryan said ominously in his 1873 address to the graduating class of the University of Wisconsin Law School, "[There] is looming up a new and dark power…the enterprises of the country are aggregating vast corporate combinations of unexampled capital, boldly marching, not for economical conquests only, but for political power….The question will arise and arise in your day, though perhaps not fully in mine, which shall rule—wealth or man [sic]; which shall lead—money or intellect; who shall fill public stations—educated and patriotic freemen, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital…."