http://youtu.be/Z3zwhp5-jXA
[Note: Transcript, details and discussion of this clip are here.]
Senator Chuck Grassley asks Eric Holder the names of outside consultants DOJ uses to decide whether to prosecute Wall Street banks. Matt Taibbi wrote about the issue on Monday at Rolling Stone.
If you’re a Democratic president and Wall Street and the 1% pretends to hate you, but really loves you—–the stock market has hit record levels—then your presidency is a failure. Case in point Mr. Obama. Chained-CPI, targeted assassinations by drone, systemic long-term unemployment, low wages and heading lower, massive wealth transfer up to the top 20%, increasing poverty, and so on. As a Capitalist Obama is a hugh success. But that isn’t very helpful to the other 80% of us.
The appointment lineage of those judges outright reversing the jury findings on appeal would be very telling. Laissez faire is back with a vengeance in our federal courts.
Should –could– Holder be impeached for his lack of actions? Seriously. And, since he does only what he is told and allowed to do, should Obama be impeached? Yes, that will never happen.
Charlie Pierce wrote a post about the general history of the US Supreme Court being one of favoring corporations/business over people. John Roberts is trying to return the court to that path and is well on his way to accomplishing the obliteration of the rights of actual people in favor of the rights of Big Bidness.
QUOTE
If there is a lodestar to the Supreme Court under John Roberts, it is its fealty to the rights and privileges of the American corporation. (Even Roberts’s famous decision upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act was delivered in that context.) When the Court delivered its decision in the Citizens United case, overturning a century’s worth of campaign-finance reform, it pledged that fealty quite plainly. In a deeper historical sense, however, the skepticism expressed by Roberts last week as regards the Voting Rights Act makes more sense when that skepticism is seen in the light of the legal underpinnings of Citizens United.
Two things happened in the Supreme Court at the end of the 19th century and they both had to do with the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of equal protection under the law. As Jim Newton put it in his magisterial biography of Earl Warren:
BLOCKQUOTE As applied by the Supreme Court in the late nineteenth century, the Fourteenth Amendment…came to stand for protections far different from those suggested by its plain language. Through a series of rulings after the amendment’s adoption in 1868, the Court used it to protect contrracts and corporations but withheld its guarantees from those the amendment was pointedly intended to help, Negro Americans. As the century drew to a close, the Court read into the amendment segregation itself, a finding it explicated in one of the most intellectually dishonest in its history, Plessy v. Ferguson. END BLOCKQUOTE
The bizarre doctrine of corporate personhood is inextricably bound in history to a conscious attempt by the judicial branch to undermine the post-Civil War amendments that were specifically intended to enfranchise African American citizens, and that doctrine is also inextricably bound to the construction in this country of a system of apartheid, especially in the South. In history, it has proven to be strikingly simple to guarantee rights to corporations while abridging them to individuals who happen to be black. You will have to forgive if I point out that one of the most conspicuous characteristics of the chambers of the Supreme Court is how deeply they echo, and if I also point out that it seems to be John Roberts’s goal to be Morrison Waite of the new millennium.
END QUOTE
I think we can expand the removal of rights from black peole to all people of the lower economic quintiles. Eventually, even the rich who do not toe the line will be outside the favor of the current Supreme FIve, the conservative majority.
This was a chilling post to read. Plessy became of symbol of all that was wrong with the American judiciary and judicial system. Now, it’s making a comeback under Roberts.
And, while there is currently a president who is purportedly a Democrat, he is also a Corporatist and will do nothing to upset his Corporatist donors and masters.
(My emphasis. Click through to Pierce’s site for internal links.)