Remove Thomas from the Bench: Step 4

Impeach Clarence Thomas

4th Step: Watch the newspapers for an article about Clarence Thomas or the Supreme Court. When you see one, write a letter to the editor, responding to the letter by title and date. Include a call for the US House of Representatives to investigation of Clarence Thomas. You might also mention the complaint filed with the Missouri Bar where Thomas is licensed (If you haven't, contact the MO Bar, See Below) .

If you want a chance for your letter to be published, most newspapers ask that you include your phone number so they can to verify you wrote the letter.

Some grist: Article III, Section 1 of the US Constitution says,

"The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior"

Which means judges can be removed for bad behavior. Clarence Thomas' bad behavior diminishes the credibility of our highest court, which contaminates the lower courts and erodes the public belief in the fairness of our society. This can lead to vigilante justice, which civil societies naturally strive to avoid. There in lies the rational; Clarence Thomas is a destabilizing force in our society hence it is in the national interest to ask Clarence Thomas to step down or be removed.

For Your Convenience:

• Contact the Broadcast Media
• Contact the Newspapers

More:

Some of the issues regarding Clarence Thomas: Throw Clarence Thomas Off the Bench

Step 4.5, Tweet links to the Four Steps to Take Action:

http://tinyurl.com/CT-Step1
http://tinyurl.com/CT-Step2
http://tinyurl.com/CT-Step3
http://tinyurl.com/CT-Step4

See Step 1 - Contact the Missouri Bar Assn in support of the complaint against Thomas
See Step2 - Contact the media asking them follow up on the Missouri Bar complaint
See Step 3 - Contact your representative in the US House to request and investigation

PS

Go Johnny Saunders (Video)

Send Clarence Thomas Packing: Step 3

Impeach Clarence Thomas

3rd Step: Contact US House of Representatives, the people's house. Ask for an investigation of Clarence Thomas. It won't happen soon, but it's our obligation to raise the issue (the right wing always does!).

Some of the issues regarding Clarence Thomas: Throw Clarence Thomas Off the Bench

My Message to Congress:

A complaint has been filed with the Missouri Bar Association to investigate Judge Clarence Thomas for allegations regarding his taxes. Given other widely publicized partisan activities by Mr. Thomas, the association is being asked to measure the weight of broader evidence relative to rules of conduct for a lawyer.

I would like Congress to consider it's own investigation. Please add me to an interest e-mail list for people following your future investigations into this matter.

The Missouri Bar contact information follows:

mobar@mobar.org
ph: 537 635 4281
fax: 573 635 2811

For Your Convenience:

• Contact the House of Repres

Step 3.5, Twitter links to the Three Steps of Action:

http://tinyurl.com/CT-Step1
http://tinyurl.com/CT-Step2
http://tinyurl.com/CT-Step3

See Step 1
See Step2

PS

Go Johnny Saunders

Remove Clarence Thomas from Supreme Court: Step 2

Impeach Clarence Thomas

2nd Step: Contact Media outlets. Ask them to follow the Missouri Bar Association's investigation of Clarence Thomas.

Some of the issues regarding Clarence Thomas: Throw Clarence Thomas Off the Bench

My Message to Media Outlets:

A complaint has been filed with the Missouri Bar Association to investigate Judge Clarence Thomas for allegations regarding his taxes. Given other widely publicized partisan activities by Mr. Thomas, the association is being asked to measure the weight of broader evidence relative to rules of conduct for a lawyer.

I would like your organization to follow this news story. Please add me to an interest e-mail list for people following your future investigations into this matter.

The Missouri Bar contact information follows:

mobar@mobar.org
ph: 537 635 4281
fax: 573 635 2811

For Your Convenience:

• Contact the Broadcast Media

Step 2.5, Twitter this link of the story linked above:
http://yhoo.it/gYDni2

See Step 1

PS

Go Johnny Saunders

Clarence Thomas is a Corporate Operative

I could go on and on about Clarence Thomas, but anyone reading this already should know that he is not acting in good faith. He is not a fair judge and he needs to go. How he got on to the US Supreme Court... well, we know that story too.

So, how do we do that? We know that when right-wingers want to get rid of someone, they have an uncanny way of making it happen (add list here). Part of it is access to more accumulated money (they are staunchly capitalistic). Part of it is access to levers of "the liberal media," which is closely related to the first point. But, in the end it often comes down to rabid numbers of right wing ditto-heads who pick up the phone, write letters and e-mails to bring about a sense of pressure.

Now it's our turn with Clarence Thomas. We can contact our members of the US House of Representative for starters and call for impeachment hearings. We can also contact media outlets asking that they invest more in the back story on and current unfolding stories on Thomas.

For Your Convenience:

• Contact the Broadcast Media
• Contact the House of Representatives

Thoughts Turn to Corporate Power

I'll confess to posting without a concept in mind. I do this on rare occasion when I feel behind on my blogging and remember it IS a web log originally intended to be an on-line diary of sorts.

What's on my mind that anyone else would care about? Getting arrested in the Senate hearing chambers to further expose the elephant in the room on Health Care; Congress has literally been taken over (captured) by corporate power... the corporations have become more powerful than our legislative and executive branches.

Some folks believe the judicial branch is similarly corrupted, for instance many of the people engaging with the Program on Corporations, Law and Democracy (POCLAD). They have researched, organized and documented strong historical evidence, mostly since the US Civil War (1860s), explaining how the corporations have accumulated powerful constitutional rights that undermine human rights... literally "undermine," as in land subsidence.

In Pennsylvania Coal Co. v. Mahon, 260 U.S. 393 (1922), the US Supreme Court ruled that coal corporations must be compensated for property value lost [mineral rightst profits] due to laws protecting homes from mine subsidence. [43]

The list of Supreme Court decisions granting incremental increases in corporate power have accumulated over 100 years, amounting in what we have today. This potential state of affiars was summed up well by former US president Franklin Roosevelt.

"The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism - ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt

Psssst... Do Something

• Contact the Broadcast Media
  
• Contact the Newspapers
  
• Contact the US Senate
  
• Contact the House of Representatives

"Set Back" Takes on Meaning in High Court's Exxon Decision

Mother Jones Magazine's blog sums up the US Supreme Court's recent decision on cutting the Exxon Valdez oil spill damage penalty to nearly nothing:

After spending hundreds of millions of dollars fighting the $5 billion punitive damage award handed down by an Alaska jury in 1994 for its role in the massive oil spill in Prince William Sound, Exxon today landed a major victory at the Supreme Court. In a 5-3 ruling, with Alito sitting out, the court overturned a lower court decision that had reduced the verdict to $2.5 billion, and sent the case back saying that the punitive damage award was excessive and should not exceed about $500 million, the same as the compensatory damages.

$500 million sounds like a lot, rather than "nearly nothing," until the amount is put into perspective by DemocracyNow:

Last year Exxon Mobil made just over $40 billion in profits. This means the oil company will be able to pay the punitive damages in about four days.

Exxon caused the catastrophic damage over 6,500 days ago (March 1989), and will now pay a scant four days of profits as a damage penalty. The principle of punitive damages is that the penaly is supposed to be large enough to deter similar behavior in the future (the spill wasn't an accident, it was gross negligence). Exxon can easily budget 4-days of profits into its business plan to allow for future a Valdez-like crime and feel no pain. We can see that the US Supreme Court has dashed the principle of punitive damages against Bligh Reef of Prince William Sound.

Regarding the why this is a "set back" a little background on the long-term fate of corporations is in order. The corporate business form is a doomed concept, just like "slavery" was known to be doomed for a long time before slavery finally collapsed. Similarly with corporations, which have become profit-seeking monsters that do more harm to society than good (keep in mind that businesses can exist without having the special protections of being a corporation). If you accept this, we can say that some year, off in the future, corporations will be pronounced as dead as slavery is today. Perhaps this will be in 2108, or sooner, or later.

The Supreme Court's recent decision in the Exxon Valdez case is a precedent that applies to all corporations. Their decision has likely set back the date when corporations will be eradicated. Corporations will continue interfering with our freedom and self-governance for more decades than would have been the case without this Court decision. As a result, many more people will suffer, and even die, because of the harsh edges of greed that are inseparable from the corporate business form.

Sources:

DemocracyNow, Supreme Court Slashes Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Fine to One-Tenth of Original $5 Billion Ruling, June 26, 2008.

Mother Jones Blog, Supreme Court Overturns Exxon Valdez Verdict, June 25, 2008.

Guns: We Might Need them

The US Supreme Court decision striking down the District of Columbia law prohibiting possession of hand guns is likely to have far reaching implications. On a simple level, it means more guns in the hands of "the people." In view of the dictatorial direction of the US Government, driven by Bush's principles of unitary presidency, we might all need the guns to protect our constitution from internal threats. My attitude toward the elite Court's decision is "let us have guns.... if you're that stupid."

And, reading in the July/August 2008 issue of Mother Jones (pre-Court decision) we see that it has become easier to get an assault rifle, and .50-caliber sniper rifles in the US (a single .50-cliber round can cut a person in half). For only $89 you can be the proud owner of an oldie but goodie Soviet army SKS. No problem shooting through they type of body armor typically used by police officers. Now we're really talking protection of the constitution. Message? Don't be a stooge trooper for the elite minority that seeks to undermine the US constitution... 'cuz thar's guns in the hands of them thar people.

This commentary would have little meaning if I was your regular gun-toting Republican or Libertarian. But I'm originally from the Democratic Party fold, and more recently the Green Party fold. Society-watchers might want to take note. Things they are a change'n and it ain't 'cuz of Obama.

Pakistan's Supreme Court Decision

Sound familiar?

A Supreme Court, hand-picked by President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, swiftly dismissed legal challenges to his continued rule on Monday, opening the way for him to serve another five-year term — this time solely as a civilian president.

CNN reported, December 12, 2000:

the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in Saturday to stop the [Florida Supreme] court-ordered manual count of tens of thousands of presidential election ballots in Florida.

Seven of the nine Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republican presidents.

Justice Stevens wrote that "preventing the recount from being completed will inevitably cast a cloud on the legitimacy of the election." To say nothing of the legitimacy of the US Supreme Court and so-called democracy in the United States.

Sources:

CNN, Sharply divided high court stops Florida recount, December 10, 2000.

Speak Out Against Abuse of State Secrets Privilege

As the attorney-client privilege unravels, the state secrets privilege tightens and the shining beacon of the republic grows dimmer.

Today we live in an Orwellian America where a three judge panel of the federal 6th Circuit Court of Appeals says, on the one hand, you cannot challenge the government's use of warrantless searches unless you know they have used it in a way that harms you directly. On the other hand, the panel says, you cannot find out if the government has conducted a warrantless search due to the evidence being excluded from the legal process due to state secret privilege.

The 6th Circuit three-member panel has determined, in a vote of 2-to-1, that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) cannot show that it, or its clients, have been harmed by the US Government's use of warrantless infringements on their 4th Amendment rights. The district court judge, Anna Diggs Taylor, found that the US Government had committed a violation of our Constitutional protections from infringements by the federal government. By my count, it's a tie, two federal judges against two federal judges.

At issue is the privilege of private attorney-client communications. If the US Government may intercept attorney-client communications, but doesn't have to reveal whether or not it is doing so, then we must assume that it is doing so in all cases. Not only does this undermine attorney-client confidentiallity, it undermines the legitimacy and stability of the entire democratic experiment. It will, by the natural doctrine of need, legitimize citizen-based counter-espionage directed at the federal government to determine if they are being spied upon. This decision, if it is allowed to stand, risks leading us down a very dark path.

CLICK HERE to Contact the US federal Court Public Affairs Office.
CLICK HERE to Contact the 6th District Court (Send an E-mail to the Library - Ask them to foward it to the Clerk).
Share your concerns. The judicial branch, not the executive branch, makes the decision on whether to grant the state secrets privilege.

If the United States government had an honest history in the use of state secrets privilege, citizens might have reason to give it the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, the 1953 legal case that solidified the doctrine of state secrets privilege was a fraud on the American people:

The privilege was first recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 1953 decision, United States v. Reynolds (345 U.S. 1). A military airplane, a B-29 Superfortress bomber, crashed. The widows of three civilian crew members sought accident reports on the crash but were told that to release such details would threaten national security by revealing the bomber's top-secret mission. [1]

... in 2000, the accident reports were declassified and released, and it was found that the argument was fraudulent, and there was no secret information. The reports did, however, contain information about the poor state of condition of the aircraft itself, which would have been very compromising to the Air Force's case.

All hope is not lost. The 6th Circuit issue can be appealed to a larger panel of judges in the 6th Circuit (that is why pressure NOW is so important... see link above). In addition, similar cases are before the federal 9th Circuit Court, which is not bound by decisions of the 6th Circuit.

Sources:

1. Read more about the State Secrets Doctrine.