How the Democrats Helped Create an Ultrareactionary Supreme Court- And Strip Women of Their Abortion Rights

It's long past time to call out the Democratic Party of the U.S. on one of its major con games. The one in which they claim to be the sole bulwark protecting America from a right-wing "takeover" of the Supreme Court. The one in which they claim that they are the guardians of abortion rights, rights in permanent peril from unnamed right wingers.

Before I continue, I want to bullet-point the critical facts you need to take away with you:

• Extreme reactionary Antonin Scalia was elevated to the Supreme Court by a Senate vote of 98-0. Those weren't 98 Republicans. Scalia was later one of five GOP apparatchiks on the high court who stole the 2000 presidential election for George Bush (Bush the Younger). [1]

• Democratic Senator Joe Biden (later  vice president in the regime of Barack "The Drone Assassin" Obama) functioning as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was instrumental in putting known sex offender Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. Thomas, like Scalia, voted to steal the 2000 presidential election for the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers). [2]

• EVERY reactionary elevated to the top court, with its immense power, has gotten there with the support of Democratic Party senators. Even the ones who vote against confirming them soft-pedal how awful and evil the nominees are.

• In the last year of the presidency of Hit Man Obama, a vacancy opened up on the Supereme Court. In an unprecedented power grab, the Senate Majority Leader, Republican Mitch McConnell (a venal coal industry stooge from Kentucky) announced that Obama would not be allowed to fill that vacancy. And Democratic response was- some grumbling under their breath and acceptance. Obama himself didn't give any evidence of even caring! (Yet there are still morons who think he is a "progressive" who was somehow thwarted by forces beyond his control. Now imagine if the situation was reversed, and a Democratic-controlled Senate denied a GOP president the right to fill a Supreme Court vacancy! There would be DAILY howls of outrage, even calls for a military coup "to restore the Constitutional order." That's because the Republicans are like rabid wolverines and are serious about power. That's how, with a minority of the populace behind them, they have taken over the presidency, the Congress, the Judiciary, and two-thirds of the state legislatures and governorships. (They have long dominated and controlled the military and secret police apparatus.) They have used their control of state legislatures to draw districts that allow them to elect the majority of Representatives to the national House of Representatives with a minority of overall voters. The Democrats are mainly a party of grifters, unserious about power, just looking for profitable sinecures for themselves.

Okay, that last bulletpoint was a long one, but essential. Now on to the body of the essay, which will illustrate the utter cynicism of the Democrats in manipulating people who are duped into relying on them to protect the few hard-won rights we have.

Every election "cycle," which is to say, every two years [3], Democratic political hacks running for office send out tons of political junk mail to citizens, hoping to woo their votes. One of the perennial themes of this propaganda bombardment is how the Supreme Court hangs in the balance, and the need to protect the right to abortion, which was only granted to women by a divided Supreme Court in the Roe vs. Wade decision. That decision was made under pressure from the women's movement, and only granted a limited right, in the first trimester of pregnancy, after which the government was deemed to have an "interest" in interfering in personal and medical decisions and exerting control over people's bodies.

In the years since, the organized reactionaries of the U.S., including the Republican Party (GOP), rightwing religious zealots, the Catholic Church bosses, and assorted rightwing media and political cadres, have relentlessly attacked abortion. The terrorist arm of this novement has assassinated doctors and clinic workers with bombs and guns, committed thousands of arson and other attacks on abortion clinics, blockaded clinics and much else. The legal offensive has been even more devastating, with states controlled by the GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) virtually eliminating abortion clinics by various legislative encumbrances that in effect persecute the clinics. Some states have functionally outlawed abortion drugs, which in early pregnancy are the cheapest and easiest way to terminate a pregnancy. (By the way, these same creeps who care so much about "unborn children" are the same ones who deport children fleeing gang and state violence south of the U.S. border back to their deaths, who destroy water containers left in the desert for them, who rip children and infants away from their refugee parents and separate them by thousands of miles. They have historically supported the murder of children by fascist death squads in the U.S. empire, and bombing cities and villages in Vietnam, Korea, and elsewhere that kill large numbers of children, babies, and mothers. So I have a sneaking suspicion that reverence for the sanctity of life isn't their actual motive.)
There IS no abortion provider in almost every town in the U.S. Over 90% of U.S. counties have no abortion facility. Abortion has been stigmatized and isolated, banished from the body of the medical profession. The cowardly medical schools don't even teach their students how to perform abortions,

And what has the Democratic Party been doing all the while the assault on abortion rights has continued unabated for 44 years?

Every election they yell at their voters that the right to abortion is under assault and therefore you must vote for them. And that's pretty much it.

And they ensure that the Supreme Court has a hard rightwing majority, They do this to have a scare tactic to run in elections on, and they do this because they too are fundamentally reactionaries. They serve the corporate oligarchy, which of course wants a reactionary judiciary. They believe in state power over citizens- as the repressive legislation pushed into law by their presidents Truman, Clinton, and Obama proves. Obama gave the government the power to indefinitely imprison U.S. citizens in military gulags without charges or legal representation, by government fiat. The government need only label the victims "terrorists." That is now law because of Obama.

Let's dispose of another myth. The repeated, false assertion that the court is divided into a "liberal" wing and a "conservative" one. The actual division is conservative and reactionary. The conservatives ("liberal") mostly try to preserve the status quo, which is the definition of conservatism. The reactionaries want to change the status quo to make it more repressive, and to decrease the influence of the population and give the rich and large corporations ever more power. This is a program of radical change, NOT "conservatism."

1]  In a bit of ironically poetic justice, the Democratic candidate who along with his party let the GOP steal the 2000 election, Albert Gore, was one of the Senators who voted to put Scalia on the Supreme Court.

2]  Biden made sure Thomas, an arch-reactionary black man who is an enemy of African-Americans in many ways, including his attacks on affirmative action, made it through the confirmation process by stifling witnesses who would have buttressed Anita Hill's testimony about Thomas' vulgar sexual harassment of his underlings, and more critically Biden privately assured his Democratic Senate colleagues not to believe Hill. The story of  Biden's treachery is told in the book "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas," by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. The authors were reporters at the Wall Street Journal at the time the book was written. Mayer went on to be a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine, where she is today. Abramson became the very first female to ascend to the top editor post at the oh-so-august New York Times.

Abramson's tenure as top editor was short. She accidentally discovered that the publisher and chairman, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., whose family has long owned the paper and its other properties and who inherited his job from his Daddy, was chiseling her on her pay, paying her less than her male predecessors. Sulzberger was miffed when Abramson confronted him about this, proceeded to fire her, and then engaged in a campaign of character assassination against her.

So "liberal" of him!

This sexist asshole also hired the scandalous former BBC boss Mark Thompson. After notorious pedophile and BBC star Jimmy Savile died, the BBC had an expose ready to air. That was killed, and in its place a tribute to Savile was aired. Thompson claimed to know nothing about any of this, despite being in charge. Sulzberger thinks this guy is worth paying millions for.
The result so far has been a discrimination suit against Thompson for the toxic environment he's helped create (or perpetuate) at the NY Times. Two black female employees allege in their lawsuit that Thompson introduced an "environment rife with discrimination based on age, race and gender." It further links his behavior to similar actions by him during his BBC tenure. ["New York Times chief executive accused of discrimination," BBC News, 29 April, 2016.]


3]  In the U.S., one chamber of the national legislature, the "House of Representatives" of the U.S. Congress, stands for election every two years. There are 435 Congressional districts, thus 435 representatives covering all the 50 states. Congressional districts are proportioned roughly by population.

The other chamber of Congress, the U.S. Senate, has 100 Senators, two Senator for each state. This gives grossly disproportional weight and power to sparsely populated states hard rightwing states, and greatly weakens the political weight of populous states. So California has two Senators, and the 20 least populous states, whose total population equals that of California, have 40 Senators. So arch-reactionary states like Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, the two Dakotas, Iowa, Arkansas, Louisiana, and so on, are a powerful structural and institutional factor in making the U.S. a rightwing nation, even though only a minority of the population is rightwing in this putative "democracy."

Senators are elected for six year terms. Every two years, one third of the Senate stands for reelection.
U.S. presidents serve 4 year terms. The years that aren't presidential election years are called "off-year elections."

The terms of Congresspeople and presidents is set out in the Constitution. The Republicans passed a Constitutional amendment in the 1950's limiting the president to two elected terms. This was done in reaction to the fact that the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president four times in a row starting in 1932. Ironically, Republican Dwight David Eisenhower, elected in 1952 and 1956, may well have won a third term if not for this amendment.

The Sham "Suspense" Over Trump's Second Supreme Court Nominee

U.S. corporate propaganda systems (aka "the media," as if it's the one and only media) and politicians are pretending there is something to wonder about which awful, fanatically reactionary ideologue in a judicial robe president Trump will nominate to replace the "swing vote" Justice Anthony Kennedy who announced his retirement from the high court. But it doesn't matter, since Trump long ago announced that ALL his Supreme Court picks will come from a list of career reactionaries approved  by a cabal of conspirators called "The Federalist Society." They are all the same!

Trump has repeatedly announced that when he packs the high court with reactionaries, Roe vs. Wade, the 1974 Supreme Court decision that decreed that women had a limited right to abort pregnancies, would be "automatically" overturned.

What the U.S. corporate media REFUSES to report is the ultra-reactionary nature of the so-called "Federalist Society." As always with reactionary organizations, "the" media disguises their actual political nature and presents them as legitimate and respectable. ("The" media does the same with criminal state arms like the CIA, FBI, NSA, U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, the murderous Immigration and Customs Enforcement, et al.)

Meanwhile, politicians, mainly Democrats, but also one or two "moderate" Republican Senators claim they're going to "protect" Roe v. Wade by... oh, I don't know, it's so vague what they say. They'll urge Trump to appoint someone who won't overturn it. (That's a joke. They're pretending to be divorced from reality when they say that.) Or they'll closely question the nominee about it. (All nominees these days refuse to answer such questions during their confirmation hearings. And the Senators know it.)

The phoniness of these political hacks is unbearable.

Here's Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, speaking July 1st on the NBC Sunday morning political propaganda show "Meet The Press:"

"Well, we, well I would love President Trump to pick somebody in the mainstream of American views who are going to hold up years, and years and years of precedent. The one great thing about our nation is an independent judiciary. In times of intense political debate, the fact that we have that independent judiciary that will uphold the law is key to what is so great about our country. We're a 51/49 Senate. And if he wants to throw an extreme conservative who basically says, "I'm not going to follow precedent -- "

What mealy-mouthed gibberish.

While we're demystifying ruling class rubbish, let's dispose of a myth. The repeated, false assertion that the court is divided into a "liberal" wing and a "conservative" one. The actual division is conservative and reactionary. The conservatives ("liberal") mostly try to preserve the status quo, which is the definition of conservatism. The reactionaries want to change the status quo to make it more repressive, and to decrease the influence of the population and give the rich and large corporations ever more power. This is a program of radical change, NOT "conservatism."

Israel Eradicates Another Arab Village- U.S. Media Aids and Abets the Crime By Blacking it Out

And not just U.S. media either.

Continuing a tradition dating back to 1948, the self-proclaimed "Jewish homeland" has violently depopulated and bulldozed yet another Arab village, Khan al-Ahmar. The Bedouin villagers had the misfortune to be living in a "strategic location." That is, it was situated until today between two Jewish-only "settlements" (colonies) in the West Bank (which is called "Judea and Samaria," by Jewish imperialist zealots, using the language of religious fanatic cism) and was thus in the way of the ongoing Israeli project of colonization of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, a project begun in 1948 and pursued relentlessly ever since. [1] Israeli soldiers assaulted the residents for refusing to leave, injuring 35, four of whom were hospitalized.

Israel's judiciary has ruled the existence of the village "illegal." (Under Israeli law, Arabs functionally have no rights, and in fact are unlawful squatters in "the land of the Jews.") As in every repressive state, including the U.S., Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and many others, much repression in Israel is carried out under color of law. Thus Arabs are never permitted to build houses. So their "illegal" homes are routinely bulldozed.  In 2003 American humanitarian activist Rachel Corrie was murdered by the Israelis while protesting a home demolition, assassinated by a bulldozer river who undoubtedly was acting on instructions. Other foreign activists and Palestinians protesting home demolitions have been maimed and killed over the years.

Israeli general Moshe Dayan once boasted of how 450 Arab villages were wiped off the map during and after the 1948 creation of the state of Israel. We can take him as an authoritative source on that, as he was part of it.

At the same time that "law" is used as an instrument of repression, as in the case of depopulating "the land of Israel" of non-Jews, the laws of the repressive state are themselves transgressed with impunity by the government to carry out yet more repression. Only the oppressed and the average citizen is bound by law, not those in power, who use law as a weapon. [This is true all over the world. See for example the Trump-Sessions regime's current war on refugees fleeing violent U.S.-created Central American hellholes, a violation of refugee law, or U.S. government policies of torture and assassinations.]

The U.S. government has invariably backed Israel's crimes, with very few exceptions. The U.S. media has been a reliable arm of Israeli propaganda efforts over the years,

If you call this obviously racist state, which separates groups by law, and which wipes out Arab villages to make way for Jewish only towns, an apartheid state, which it is, Israel's propaganda chorus in "the West" smears you as "anti-Semitic." In the U.S., virtually the entire establishment media is part of this chorus. U.S. politicians and government officials sycophantically bray the Israeli propaganda line of the day. We just saw that again after Israeli snipers spent two months murdering and maiming thousands of protesters along their fortified border with Gaza, the world's largest prison camp, holding almost two million souls, half of them under the age of 18. Medics, journalists,
children, even a disabled man in a wheelchair (crippled as a result of earlier Israeli violence) were all shot dead by Israeli snipers "in self-defense," according to Israeli propaganda, propaganda amplified by U.S. media, politicians, and government. Hamas was officially blamed for Israel's massacre, by Trump regime apparatchiks like his hand-picked UN ambassador, the horrid GOP (Gang Of Plunderers) career politicial Nikki Haley, who has distinguished herself in that post by her hate-filled demagoguery aimed at Palestinians and at the UN and its various bodies. Not to be outdone in slavish devotion to Israel's "defense," leading Democratic Party politicians like U.S. Senator Charles "Wall Street's Valet" Schumer denounced Hamas and exonerated Israel for its mayhem.

The two political parties that form a cartel an monopolize political power in the U.S. try to outdo each other in hysterical fealty to Israel and endorsement of its every crime. We see that each time Israel launches one of its periodic wars on Gaza, which it calls "mowing the lawn," destroying the laboriously-created infrastructure of Gaza- the power plant, the waterworks, greenhouses, shops, factories, hospitals, apartment buildings. Now there is no potable water in Gaza, literally. This concentration camp for almost two million people will soon be the site of pandemics and mass die-offs. That seems to be Israel's mass murderous plan for the Palestinians, which will get the usual full-throated approval from U.S. politicians and a complicity U.S. media.


1]  Or we could date the project of colonization to the birth of the Zionist movement itself around the beginning of the 20th century. 1948 is the year the UN, dominated by the U.S. and with Soviet concurrence, decided to give most of the land of Palestine to the minority Jewish population. The Jewish "settlers" then waged a terror campaign against defenseless Palestinian inhabitants, driving out hundreds of thousands illegally, and illegally barring their return as required under international law. The Palestinians' insistence on their right of return is painted as an unreasonable demand, when it is in fact their due under international law. At the same time, Israel, its Western backers, and the propagandists pretend that they are the lawful ones, and the Palestinians nothing but international terrorists.

Then Israeli propagandists invented a story as to why hundreds of thousands of Palestinians all up and fled their homes simultaneously. The legend they invented was that a Muslim Imam broadcast an order to the Palestinians to leave, to make way for invading Arab armies. The Palestinians, being obedient sheep, all heeded this fictive radio message. Western media stooges of Israel dutifully repeated this mythological tale for years. Years later, researchers examined recordings of radio broadcasts from that time and found that no such broadcast existed. Of course, Western media has never retracted the disinformation they repeated for years, issued no corrections to "the record." That is typical Western media behavior. [In what seems odd for privately owned, allegedly independent media. Western media often functions just like state-controlled media in places like China and Russia. Witness the frenetic war propaganda in "the" media leading up to the U.S.-UK invasion of Iraq in 2003. There were even purges of media personalities who didn't jump on the pro-war bandwagon, such as of Phil Donahue and others at MSNBC.]

The Holocaust is frequently invoked as justification for the dispossession, immiseration of, and violence against Palestinians. But the Germans are the culprits in the Holocaust. So if justice demanded a homeland for Jews- Jews unsatisfied with their current homelands all over the world, that is- then the State of Israel should have been carved out of Bavaria, heartland of the Nazi movement.

As for the rationalization that Jews- and here we must pause to note the ironic fact that both Zionists and Nazis agree that all Jews belong to a single entity, "the Jewish people," and their bonds to and loyalty to this group supersedes any and all other ties, a super-conspiratorial idea that is clearly false, and indeed, while there are Jews of numerous stripes, including atheists, "the Jewish people" as an entity is as fictive as "the white race," for example. Both things, and other such "races" and "peoples" exist only as delusions in the minds of various chauvinists- but as for the rationalization that "Jews," ALL Jews, need a "homeland" to which to retreat at some future moment of peril when no other place on earth is safe for Jews, this is such an absurdity that it cannot bear the most cursory analysis- which is why the propagandists who promulgate it make sure that such cursory analysis never occurs. Because how could Israel survive if the entire world wanted to kill Jews? Israel is powerful because of Western and ESPECIALLY U.S. backing! If the U.S. wasn't a safe haven for Jews- and today Jews are prominent, powerful, and rich far beyond their numbers in the U.S.- Israel would not be a refuge but a concentration camp for Jews.

But propaganda is successful because the propagandists can monopolize the media systems that target the populations they wish to indoctrinate and brainwash. That is certainly the case in the U.S., where the establishment media is almost uniformly, and relentlessly, Zionist.