Monday, September 30, 2019

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The Right Is Taking Over the Courts, and Trump Is Making It Easy

Eleanor J. Bader, Truthout

For nearly four decades, conservative organizations like the Federalist Society, aided by deep-pocketed conservative and libertarian funders, have made filling the federal judiciary a top priority. Not surprisingly, the right has found a willing and eager ally in Donald Trump. The conservative legal movement is taking full advantage of the opportunity, ensuring that newly elected officials and newly confirmed federal judges are wined, dined and "educated" in conservative economic principles and theories.
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Neither Democrats Nor Republicans Will Admit the Problem Is Capitalism Itself

Richard D. Wolff, Truthout

Cycles of growth followed by downturns is how capitalism has functioned for 250 years. Amid recent fears of an impending recession, while there has been plenty of debate over alternative policies to limit recession, there has been no critique of capitalism itself. This taboo on what can be discussed concerning the causes of economic instability only compounds the problem.
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Trump and Giuliani's New Legal Operatives Know Their Way Around Impeachment

Heather Digby Parton, Salon

As Donald Trump and his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, are in the crosshairs following recent revelations of a phone call with the Ukrainian president, it's time to call in Republican lawyers Joe diGenova and his wife Victoria Toensing. They are all up to speed on this Ukraine situation, since they've been working with Giuliani since at least last spring.
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There Is No Economic Justification for Drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge

Dean Baker, Truthout

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of the Interior released its final environmental impact study on plans to drill for oil and gas in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, giving the go-ahead for drilling in this incredibly sensitive area. But this is not a story of tough trade-offs between the environment and the economy: It is a gratuitous act of environmental destruction.
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Trump's Executive Order to "Save" Medicare Will Likely Push More Cuts

Jake Johnson, Common Dreams

Progressives responded with a mixture of alarm and ridicule to news that President Trump is planning later this week to sign an executive order to "protect" Medicare, a government-run program, from "socialist destruction." While the full details of the executive order have not yet been released to the public, the order could call for further privatization of Medicare.
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Private Contractors Play Key Role in U.S. Intelligence's Creeping Authoritarianism

Amy Goodman and Juan González, Democracy Now!

Six years ago, Edward Snowden shocked the world when he leaked a trove of secret documents about how the United States had built a massive surveillance apparatus to collect phone calls, text messages and emails, and pry into our private lives. In this interview, Snowden describes the central role contractors play in the intelligence community.
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"Unofficial" Pro-Trump Groups Continue to Raise Cash in His Name

Karl Evers-Hillstrom and Yue Stella Yu, Center for Responsive Politics

Trump's victory in 2016 was boosted by a group of super PACs and tax-exempt organizations fundraising in his name, even though the then-presidential candidate appeared to loathe them. As the 2020 election nears, similar groups are again on the rise, adopting names with key terms that align with Trump's policies or slogans that appeal to his voters.
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Why Haven't Police Departments Investigated Cops in Extremist Facebook Groups?

Will Carless, The Center for Investigative Reporting

In June, a report identified hundreds of police officers across the country who were members of closed racist, Islamophobic, misogynistic or anti-government militia groups on Facebook. Yet only one department -- the Harris County Sheriff's Office, which fired a detective for racist posts -- has publicly taken any significant action since the report was released.
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Sea Levels Are Rising, and So Are We

Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

The new climate crisis movement is neither a flash in the pan (since global warming will ensure that our "pan" only gets hotter in the years to come), nor a movement about to die. It's visibly a movement being born.
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Stalled U.S. Citizenship Applications Prolong the Wait for Civil and Voting Rights

Ming Hsu Chen, The Conversation

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people apply for citizenship in the United States, but there are long bureaucratic delays that keep people from becoming citizens. A new report shows that there is a national backlog of more than 700,000 applications. Based on the current wait times, those who apply now will not be processed in time to participate in the 2020 elections in many parts of the U.S.
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