Supreme Court Just Protecting White Supremacy

What have the conservatives on the Supreme Court unleashed with their stripping Muslims and non-white voters of their civil and human rights?  The same thing that always happens when the government winks at white/christian supremacy: anti-minority violence.

Think Progress:

Minersville School District v. Gobitis (1940) should have been an easy case.

Unlike many modern religious liberty cases, where religious conservatives demand the power to limit the rights of others, Gobitis involved two children who were expelled from a public school for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance. The two youths were Jehovah’s Witnesses, and they believed that “such a gesture of respect for the flag was forbidden by command of Scripture.”

As a matter of law, the Gobitis children should have prevailed. Generally, the First Amendment does not permit the government to force individuals to speak against their will. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” the Supreme Court later held in a similar case, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

And yet, Gobitis now stands as the paradigmatic example of how the Supreme Court can turn its back on a vulnerable group — and unleash the wolves of authoritarianism in the process.

A society committed to “ultimate values of civilization,” Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote, “may, in self-protection, utilize the educational process for inculcating those almost unconscious feelings which bind men together in a comprehending loyalty, whatever may be their lesser differences and difficulties.”

“National unity,” Frankfurter added, “is the basis of national security.”

The Gobitis decision was not a sweeping denial of the shared humanity of Jehovah’s Witnesses. It did not strip Witnesses of all their rights to seek protection from the law, or declare them to be enemies of American society. Yet it may as well have done so, because the public reaction to the decision was swift and harsh.

Gobitis came down in June of 1940. By the next September, according to the ACLU, more than a thousand Jehovah’s Witnesses were assaulted in 236 different incidents nationwide.

Solicitor General Francis Biddle warned that “self-constituted bands of mob patrioteers are roaming about the country, setting upon these people, beating them, driving them out of their homes.”

A lawyer who belonged to the faith lamented that hundreds of his fellow Witnesses were “beaten, kidnapped, tarred and feathered, throttled in castor oil, tied together an chased through the streets, castrated, maimed, hanged, shot, and otherwise consigned to mayhem.”

In one of these incidents, which is recounted in historian Shawn Francis Peters’ book Judging Jehovah’s Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution, Witnesses in a small Pennsylvania town were harassed, arrested on frivolous charges, set upon by mobs of fifty men or more, beaten, kicked, and dragged through the streets, then held and questioned by police for hours before they could seek medical treatment for their injuries.

In another incident, which took place just days after the Gobitis decision, vigilantes burned a Jehovah’s Witnesses’ place of worship in Maine, then rioted for days.

SNIP

One again, in other words, a Supreme Court decision making a relatively narrow incursion on minority rights fostered a much larger attack on those rights. State lawmakers’ reaction to Crawford was neither as violent as the aftermath of Gobitis and Brown II nor as transparently lawless. But Crawford may provide the biggest warning of all about what could happen in the immediate aftermath of the Muslim Ban decision.

The story of Gobitis was a story of authoritarian elements within the general populace viewing a Supreme Court decision as a license to lash out at a disfavored minority group. The story of Crawford, by contrast, is the story of anti-democratic elements who wield the official power of the government deciding to push the envelope after the Supreme Court signaled that they were likely to get away with it.

Trump v. Hawaii is a case about an authoritarian, anti-democratic president. And it is a case about a racist, who does not feel bound by the Constitution, and who likes to lash out at vulnerable immigrants.

There’s no telling what he may do if the Supreme Court emboldens him further.

KY Bill to Kill Public Education Not Dead Yet

You're not fooling anybody, Johnny boy; the minute defenders of public education relax their vigilance for a second, you'll shove that sucker down our throats.

A charter school bill backed by Gov. Matt Bevin could be in trouble in the 2017 General Assembly.

“I want to pass a version that’s best for our kids and if that means continuing to work on it in the interim, then that’s certainly a possibility at this time,” state Rep. John Carney R-Campbellsville, sponsor of House Bill 520 and chairman of the House Education Committee, said Wednesday.

“We could put something out and pass a charter bill but my goal, and I think all of our goals, is to pass what’s best for our students. Let’s don’t rush that. It would be nice to get it done. We’re still hopeful we can get it done by the end of the session, but obviously the clock’s ticking and I’m not going to rush to pass a bill that I don’t think that helps kids,” Carney told the Herald-Leader. “If we have to work on it over the interim that’s certainly a possibility.”

“There’s still some other things that we’re trying to work on,” Carney said Wednesday afternoon. He said he was working on language regarding the financing of public charter schools.

SNIP

Jason Bailey, executive director of the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, said charter schools could “divert resources from already underfunded public schools.”

That's the whole point.  Charter schools are nothing but a vacuum sucking tax dollars away from public schools and pouring it into the pockets of corporations and freakazoids.

OK, class. Because Johnny Carney and his greedy friends are hiding the facts, let's review:

When Betsy DeVos, your new Secretary of Education, forced charters on Detroit, those struggling schools went from struggling to catastrophic.

By 2015, a federal review of a grant application for Michigan charter schools found an “unreasonably high” number of charters among the worst-performing 5 percent of public schools statewide. The number of charters on the list had doubled from 2010 to 2014.

“People here had so much confidence in choice and choice alone to close the achievement gap,” said Amber Arellano, the executive director of the Education Trust Midwest, which advocates higher academic standards. “Instead, we’re replicating failure.”

And of course they're cheating and abusing students of color and poverty, because denying good education to poor and minority children is another major charter goal. 

Wonkette:

Hope you’re ready for some edu-outrage this morning, because the good folks at investigative journalism nonprofit ProPublica have published a damning look at how some school districts have found an ingenious way to raise test scores and graduation rates at their top schools: All they have to do is nudge the academically weakest students out of the good schools into private charter schools where they can be warehoused until they drop out. The “good” schools win awards for excellence, the charters turn a healthy profit for the companies that plop the low achievers down in front of computers all day, and everyone’s happy, except maybe the low-achieving students who, instead of getting extra help and a second chance for academic success, get shunted off to a dead-end school where they’re allowed to quietly fail. It’s OK! Those losers would have just dragged everyone else down anyway!

To illustrate how this nationwide problem plays out, the ProPublica report looks closely at two high schools in the Orlando, Florida, school system: the high-achieving Olympia High School, which “offers more than two dozen Advanced Placement courses, even more afterschool clubs, and an array of sports from bowling to water polo,” and Sunshine High School, a for-profit charter located in a strip mall, just a couple doors down from a liquor store. Olympia High wins awards, attracts scholarships, and got listed in US News and World Report’s top 1,000 high schools. Sunshine High has its students sit at computers for four hours a day, and they’re lucky to ever see any live teaching. Big surprise: More than 85 percent of Sunshine High’s students are black or Hispanic. You know, disposable kids. ProPublica explains the sick symbiotic relationship between the prize-winning public school and the charter dumping ground:

Sunshine takes in cast-offs from Olympia and other Orlando high schools in a mutually beneficial arrangement. Olympia keeps its graduation rate above 90 percent — and its rating an “A” under Florida’s all-important grading system for schools — partly by shipping its worst achievers to Sunshine. Sunshine collects enough school district money to cover costs and pay its management firm, Accelerated Learning Solutions (ALS), a more than $1.5 million-a-year “management fee,” 2015 financial records show – more than what the school spends on instruction.

But students lose out, a ProPublica investigation found. Once enrolled at Sunshine, hundreds of them exit quickly with no degree and limited prospects. The departures expose a practice in which officials in the nation’s tenth largest school district have for years quietly funneled thousands of disadvantaged students — some say against their wishes — into alternative charter schools that allow them to disappear without counting as dropouts.

There is one thing and one thing only that improves public education for children of poverty: Money.  Lots and lots and lots of money.  Money to eliminate poverty. Money to build new schools.  Money to hire outstanding teachers and get class sizes down to 20. Money invested in schools, not corporate profits and freakazoid indoctrination.

This Is The Resistance, Too

Ninja Onion Choppers Alert!

Political Animal

If your faith in humanity has taken a hit lately, you’ll want to watch this as a way of restoring it just a bit. But fair warning: grab a kleenex first.

Karim Sulayman - I trust you from Meredith Kaufman Younger on Vimeo.

Repugs Care Only About the Economic Issues of Straight, Xian White Men

And their allies are the Blue Dog, surrendering "Democrats" who think the way to the White House goes through those same racist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic piece-of-shit white men.

 

Via Political Animal:

* Rebecca Traister writes, “Identity Issues Don’t Distract From Economic Issues — They Are Economic Issues.”

The postelection period has seen an enormous amount of pushback against so-called identity politics — specifically the campaigns for social justice and representation for women and people of color — as a frustrating distraction from the serious economic concerns that affect a broad swath of Americans. If only we could get away from divisive “social issues,” goes this line of thinking, Democrats could win elections and be able to enact progressive economic policies that would help far more people. But the idea that fights over reproductive freedom, sexual assault and harassment, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, criminal-justice reform, and gender and racial bias can be somehow separated from larger progressive economic stances is a fiction. As most people engaged in this argument know perfectly well, economic inequality is deeply wrapped up with gender and racial bias. The impending rollback of social progress in a Trump administration will have a staggering economic impact on this country’s women, especially women of color, and regressive economic policies will take a disproportionate toll on those same populations.

Fuck the White Working Class

Let's concentrate on uniting the coalition of people who share our values and stop chasing after racist motherfuckers who don't.

Rude Pundit:

My friend Duke from West Virginia said something that had crossed my mind but had shoved aside as bitterness: "Fuck the white working class. Obama gave them health insurance and a chance to get new jobs and they hated him. Fuck them."

Without thinking, I immediately agreed, and as soon as I did, it made total sense. "You're right. Democrats need to abandon the white working class." By "abandon," I mean not trying to desperately court the votes of people who always vote against their best interests and against those who are trying to help them. See, Democrats don't have a working class white people problem. Working class white people have the problem. When you vote against those who are trying to help you for the very people who have harmed you, then you are not dealing with rational thought.

Yeah, that's patronizing and elitist. But nearly half of the voters in a presidential election chose the man who regularly lied to them. So you'll have to forget it if you want me to romanticize and normalize their ignorance.

By the way, that ignorance is a product of years of Republican fuckery at the local level to assure them that they do not get educated. That long game has finally paid off big time.

This is my solution, fantasy though it may be.  Devote even more resources to making sure a coalition of non-whites is united. Devote less to the hurt feelings of angry whites. Let's have this fuckin' fight for what the country is. They won this battle. Let's win the war.

"They will help make our communities stronger and more vibrant."

A noble goal, Mr.President.  But you're putting the burden and onus of doing research and presenting proof on the impoverished communities who need government lawyers to enforce government laws.  You want to help communities develop fair housing?  Sue the asses off of their rich, white, motherfucking officials to force them to follow the goddamn law they've been ignoring for 50 years.



Full transcript here.

Crime Rates Down Permanently; That's Why We Have to Arrest So Many Minorities for Nothing

Seriously, not even Exxon-Mobil and the Kochs have the stranglehold on public policy in this country that the private prison industry has.

Kevin Drum:

(Last month) the Bureau of Justice Statistics released the latest numbers on incarceration rates, and the headline news is that we're sending fewer people to prison. But there's an interesting wrinkle in the numbers that few news outlets have picked up on, even though it's a trend that's been obvious in the numbers for a long time. Here it is:

That's from Rick Nevin, and you know what's coming next, don't you? Lead. It explains a lot of what's going on here.

The US started phasing out gasoline lead in 1975, which means that children born after 1975 were exposed to steadily less lead. And the effect was cumulative: the later they were born, the less lead they were exposed to and the less crime they committed when they grew up. However, children born before 1975 were unaffected by all this. They were born in a high-lead era, and since all that matters is exposure during early childhood, the damage had already been done.

In 2013, this means that the statistics show a reduction in crime rates in adults under the age of 40, and the younger the cohort the lower the crime rate. Unsurprisingly, this also means they're incarcerated at lower rates. The chart above shows this fairly dramatically.

But it also shows that incarceration rates have stayed steady or increased for older men. Those over the age of 40 had their lives ruined by lead when they were children, and the effect was permanent. They're still committing crimes and being sent to prison at the same rate as ever. It's hard to explain both these trends—lower prison rates for kids, higher prison rates for the middle-aged—without taking lead into account.

This is one of the reasons that the lead-crime hypothesis is important. In one sense, it's little more than a historical curio. It explains the rise and fall of crime between 1960 and 2010, but by now most environmental lead has been cleaned up and there's only a limited amount left to worry about. So it's interesting, but nothing more.

But here's why it matters: if the hypothesis is true, it means that violent crime rates aren't down because of transient factors like drug use or poverty or harsh penal codes. The reduction is permanent. Our children are just flatly less violent than the lead-addled kids who grew up in the years after World War II. And that in turn means that the decline in incarceration rates is permanent. We don't need as much prison space as we used to, and we don't need punitive penal codes designed to toss kids behind bars for 20 years at the first sign of danger.

In other words, we can ease up. Our kids are less violent and our streets are less dangerous. Nor is that likely to change. The lead is mostly gone, and it's going to stay gone. We're safer today not because of broken windows or three-strikes laws or 20-year sentences for dealing cocaine. We're safer because we're no longer poisoning our children in ways that turn them into hair-trigger thugs. And guess what? If we cleaned up the ambient lead that still remains, we'd be even safer 20 years from now.

Whites As A Minority

Via PZ Myers:

Getting Rich Off the Poor

The real reason repugs are successfully destroying the social safety net to keep poor people poor is so their corporate buddies can make millions off them.

From the Nation:

Ford left the parking lot with tickets for no proof of insurance and driving without a license, which would come to $745 with court costs. She didn’t know it yet, but they would also cause her to spend years cycling through court, jail and the offices of a private probation company called Judicial Correction Services. JCS had contracted with the town of Harpersville several years earlier to help collect on court fines, and also to earn a little something extra for itself. It did this by charging probationers like Ford a monthly fee (typically between $35 and $45) while tacking on additional fees for court-mandated classes and electronic monitoring.

Ford tried to meet her mounting debt to Harpersville, but as the months passed and the fees added up, she fell behind and stopped paying. In June 2007, the company sent a letter telling her to pay $145 immediately or face jail. But the letter was returned as undeliverable—a fact that did not stop the Harpersville Municipal Court from issuing a warrant for her arrest. Almost two years later, in January 2009, Ford was arrested on that outstanding warrant and promptly booked in the county jail—where, to offset costs, the town charged her $31 a day for her stay.

Ford spent seven weeks in jail, during which time her debt grew into the thousands. She did not, however, see the inside of a courtroom. All the lawyer hired by her family managed to do was to eventually get her transferred to a work-release program, which stopped her jail fees from growing and allowed her to live in a closed facility, the Shelby County Work Release Center, while going to work. Ford found a minimum-wage job at a local thrift store, but after buying food and handing a cut to the work-release program—40 percent of her gross earnings—there wasn’t much left to pay off the fines that kept her there. What had started as a simple traffic violation had become an indefinite sentence in a debtors’ purgatory—one that would take years to pay her way out.

“It shouldn’t have been that much punishment,” Ford recalled later. “I was guilty—no license and no insurance—but I was trying to fix it. I was trying to make my wrong right, and there was no way they was
gonna let me.”

SNIP

JCS is considered a significant player within the private probation universe. Founded in Georgia in 2001 by a group of locals with backgrounds in law enforcement and the finance industry, the company has since expanded its operations to Florida, Mississippi and Alabama. Business has been good. Between 2006 and 2009, JCS more than doubled its revenue, to $13.6 million, according to a profile in Inc. magazine. And while recent revenue statements for the privately held company aren’t available, what is known is that JCS operates in some 480 courts across the country. In larger courts, JCS can net as much as $1 million in probationers’ fees each year, according to an estimate from Human Rights Watch.

Actually, stealing from the poor is the only way the rich can stay rich.  It's not like they do actual work. Parasites never do.

Voter Suppression Prevents Democratic Policies

To all you white, middle-class Democratic voters who don't understand why voter ID is a big deal because you don't know anyone who doesn't have a driver's license:  your ignorance, apathy and neglect is why Democratic candidates always lose.

Steve M. at No More Mister Niceblog:

The Daily Caller asked Bill Scher of the Campaign for America's Future to offer conservatives some advice on how they can be taken seriously when they talk about poverty. Here's one of Scher's recommendations:

3. Give Up The Voter ID Nonsense

Brilliant! Stop trying to make it difficult for poor people to vote and maybe the next pious poverty speech from a Republican like Paul Ryan will be given real consideration.

So, um ... how likely is that advice to be taken? Not likely:

Today a federal court decided Kobach v. United States Election Assistance Commission. The upshot of this opinion, if it stands on appeal, is that states with Republican legislatures and/or Republican chief election officials are likely to require documentary proof of citizenship for voting, making it harder for Democrats to pursue a relatively simple method of voter registration.

More:

Judge Eric F. Melgren of United States District Court in Wichita ruled that the federal Election Assistance Commission had no legal authority to deny requests from Kansas and Arizona to add state-specific instructions to a national voter registration form. The states sued the agency to force the action after it had turned them down.

The Supreme Court ruled last June that Congress holds full power over federal election rules, but indicated that states could require proof of citizenship in state and local elections. Federal rules require prospective voters only to sign a form attesting to their citizenship, a procedure favored by Democrats who want to increase participation of minorities and the poor in elections, but that Republican officials say fosters voter fraud....

There has been little evidence of in-person voter fraud or efforts by noncitizens to vote, but the poor and minorities are likely to be affected. Studies have shown that the poor and minorities often lack passports and access to birth certificates needed to register under the laws in question.

Republicans don't really want poor people and non-whites to think of them as friends. Republicans know that poor people and non-whites can see exactly what they're up to. Republicans don't care.

The fake poverty talk is aimed at two groups of not very bright people: swing voters and mainstream journalists, nearly all of them white. The point of the poverty talk is to persuade both groups, in the run-up to 2016, that Republicans are genuinely compassionate and eminently reasonable and wouldn't hurt a fly. (The talk is also aimed at partisans, the hope being that liberals will respond with attacks and the attacks can then be added to GOP base voters' long list of grievances, because grievance drives GOP base voters to the polls.)

Republicans know that swing voters don't see the problem with voter ID -- they can't imagine having difficulty obtaining proper identification, so they figure it's easy for everyone, and so voter ID talk doesn't make them look at Republicans with suspicion. They don't see the problems with Paul Ryan's poverty talk, either. The people who are actually affected by these Republican policies, on the other hand, know better. But Republicans aren't talking to them. They're talking to white voters, with an eye toward 2014 and 2016.

Voter suppression doesn't just prevent "those people" from voting; voter suppression prevents Democratic candidates from getting elected.

Voter suppression ensures that repugs remain in power in Congress, in the General Assembly and in the fiscal court. Voter suppression ensures that your tax dollars go to enrich corporations and the wealthy. Voter suppression ensures that austerity rules and public services disappear.

Paul to Minorities: Vote for GOP, Then Get Back to the Fields, Ni**ers

He really doesn't hear his own words, does he?  It's always "We need diversity!" But never "This is how we need to change our policy proposals to give minorities a reason to vote for us."

James R. Carroll at the Courier:

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul on Monday completed his tour of three early primary states, urging his fellow Republicans to broaden their party if they want to win back the White House.

“We need to be like the rest of America,” Paul told a sold-out New Hampshire Republican Party unity dinner attended by nearly 500.

“We're going to win when we look like America,” he told he an enthusiastic, almost entirely white crowd. “We need to be white, we need to be brown, we need to be black, we need to be with tattoos, without tattoos, with pony tails, without pony tails, with beards, without."

Paul added that the party needed to convey its belief in limited government in a positive way. “We need to be a party that proclaims our message like the man coming over the hill singing ... then we'll be a great party again,” he said.

But of course he's not speaking to minorities. He's speaking to repug whites who are slightly embarrassed by the GOP's blatant racism, and want to be reassured that all they have to do is talk about how much they want diversity, and people will stop calling them nasty names.

It would be pure political suicide, if not for the voter suppression that will prevent all those minorities from voting for Democratic candidates.

Transportation Bill a Fucks-Liberals Three-fer for Repugs

It's obvious now: the sole purpose of all legislation passed by repugs is to fuck over everyone who is not white, male, hetero, rich, freakazoid repug.

The transportation bill is a three-fer, combining in one bill measures that back-stab unions, destroy the environment and sabotage urban centers.

Pat Garofalo at Think Progress:

House Republicans have released a transportation bill that would eliminate the government’s dedicated funding stream for mass transit, instead counting on a plan that the Congressional Budget Office found would cover just 5 percent of transit costs. The New York Times called the bill “uniquely terrible,” while Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, a Republican, called it “the worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen during 35 years of public service.”

Cuts to mass transit fall hard on low-income people who count on public transportation to get to work, go to school, and go about their lives. And they fall hardest on low-income minorities, who, as the research organization PolicyLink noted, as disproportionately likely to not own an automobile:

As housing and jobs have moved farther apart, the distance has created employment barriers for anyone without unlimited ability to drive. Nineteen percent of African Americans and 13.7 percent of Latinos lack access to automobiles, compared with 4.6 percent of whites. Poverty complicates the problem: 33 percent of poor African Americans and 25 percent of poor Latinos lack automobile access, compared with 12.1 percent of poor whites. Cars owned by low-income people tend to be older, less reliable, and less fuel-efficient. This makes commuting to work unpredictable and more expensive, at best.

“Communities of color, low-income Americans and people with disabilities will be disproportionately impacted since they are the most transit dependent communities and negotiate their daily lives on mass transportation to reach employment, health care, and educational centers,” said the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. “These funding provisions will impact the millions of Americans who rely on public transit systems to get to work, to school, or to the doctor,” agreed the American Transit Association.

In addition to shortchanging transit and those who depend on it, the bill would also open up nearly all of America’s coastal waters to oil drilling. “It is really just one more attempt to promote the Republicans’ drill-now-drill-everywhere agenda and the interests of their industry patrons,” the Times editorialized.

In the end, neither the House GOP’s nor the Senate’s transportation bills do enough to help the country’s crumbling infrastructure. But for the House in particular, the bill is simply an excuse to drill-baby-drill and make it that much harder for people without cars to go about their lives.