Thursday, September 23, 2021
David Sirota: CATACLYSMIC CONSEQUENCES OF PROFOUND CHANGES IN THE COMPOSITION OF THE SUPREME COURT
And Barrett is asking us to believe it not merely after the court’s wildly partisan ruling on abortion rights, but also just months after she promoted climate denialism to a national audience and refused to recuse herself as she helped secure a legal victory for the fossil fuel giant that employed her father for decades.
This is a tale not just of cartoonish hypocrisy but also of deception – a frantic attempt to prevent more of the country from realizing the court is a corporate star chamber that has become one of the most powerful partisan weapons in American politics.
First, the blatant hypocrisy: in an event that seems torn out of the pages of the Onion, Barrett this weekend appeared with the Senate’s Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell at a celebration of a University of Louisville facility he named after himself. After she was introduced by the most partisan Senate leader in American history, Barrett declared that the supreme court – which now includes three people who worked directly on the Republican campaign to pilfer the 2000 election – “is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks”.
If that wasn’t absurd enough, Barrett then declared that judges must be “hyper vigilant to make sure they’re not letting personal biases creep into their decisions, since judges are people, too”.
> That demand for ethical vigilance came less than four months after Barrett discarded her own past recusal list and opted to participate in the adjudication of a major climate case against Shell Oil – the fossil fuel giant that employed her father for nearly three decades.
> Barrett declined to recuse herself even though an amicus brief was filed in the case by the American Petroleum Institute, the lobbying group that her father helped steer – and even though one prominent supporter of the case said her father could be subpoenaed for a deposition because of his potential “direct knowledge of and operational involvement in how Shell managed climate threats”.
But no recusal came – and, with Barrett’s help, the supreme court sided with Shell and other fossil fuel giants, delivering a big procedural win for the oil and gas industry.
Barrett’s participation in that case followed her Senate confirmation hearing, in which she refused to acknowledge the undisputed science of climate change (and in which flaccid Democrats decided not to bother to push her on recusal). She cast her position as an attempt to avoid being opinionated about the matter, but of course refusing to stipulate basic scientific fact is the opposite of dispassionate. It is an ideological and partisan expression of Republican orthodoxy wholly disconnected from empirical data.
And in case you thought Barrett’s zealotry, hypocrisy and conflicts of interest are germane only to one isolated case, remember that in the coming years, the fossil fuel industry will almost certainly ask the high court to shield it from legal consequences for its climate crimes.
Barrett’s motives here, though, are not just about war-is-peace-ing her way through her own ridiculously obvious conflicts of interest. She is also trying to preserve the image of the court as a transcendent fount of apolitical morality at a time when more and more Americans may be finally – belatedly – realizing that the panel is, in fact, made up of hacks.
As the Daily Poster has been reporting for quite a while, the panel has become the most conservative supreme court in modern history. This is a group of judges who now loyally rubber-stamp legal requests from the US Chamber of Commerce and other corporate groups bankrolling the politicians and the nomination campaigns that install rightwing appointees on the court. The justices have become so politically brazen that they now quietly issue landmark rulings in total secrecy through a so-called shadow docket.
Despite this, corporate media has typically portrayed the court as a moderating force above politics, and even putatively liberal or centrist pundits have periodically touted some of the most rightwing justices.
This propaganda campaign has worked – even as the court exacerbates the climate crisis, restricts abortion rights, tramples voting rights and issues ever-more-extreme rulings helping corporations crush workers, nearly two-thirds of Americans say they approve of the court’s work, according to the latest survey.
However, that’s down a sizable six points since last year – which suggests that more of the country is beginning to realize that a fetid form of corporatism and partisanship is quietly rotting the judiciary from within.
Barrett rightly senses that this realization threatens the perceived legitimacy of the justice system, and therefore could create momentum for real reform – whether it means term limits for supreme court judges or an expansion of the court.
Any of those reforms are a threat to her power, and the power of all the corporate forces that bought high-court jobs for rightwing justices. So she’s trying to do whatever she can to prevent America from understanding how nefarious the Supreme Court has become.
That’s what her speech was really all about – and we shouldn’t be fooled. We should be emboldened behind the cause of finally fixing a star chamber that is causing so much harm throughout the country and the world."
WORDS FOR THE WISE in 'Smart Cities" That Want to Snatch-Up Everything You Do
Why you need a personal laptop
Keeping work and life on one device puts your privacy at risk
"It’s a decision that may seem like a no-brainer. You’ve got a new job, and they’ve just given you a brand-new ThinkPad. Perfect, you think to yourself. It’s about time I got rid of that 10-year-old MacBook Air.
I’ve been there. Surveys have shown that over half of workers use work-issued devices for personal tasks — whether sending personal messages, shopping online, accessing social media, or reading the news. The prospect of using your work laptop as your only laptop — not just for work, but also for Netflixing, group chat messaging, reading fanfiction, paying bills, and emailing recipes to your mom — is understandably tempting, especially for folks who work from home. Keeping work tasks and personal tasks in one place may feel like an easy way to simplify your life, and it might save space on your desk. Most of all, it may seem like a good cost-saving measure.
But I’m here to be the bearer of bad news:
Don’t do that. Please, I’m begging you, don’t do that.
> The most important thing to remember is that if you’re using a work laptop, you should assume IT can see what you’re doing. Companies have all kinds of tools available to monitor their employees’ devices — keyloggers, biometric tracking, geolocation, software that tracks web browsing and social media behavior. Over half use some sort of monitoring technique, and their usage has become more popular throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
> And, of course, your company can see what you’re doing in company-run programs like Slack and G-Suite Enterprise. Your novel you’ve been writing at night? Your Slack messages complaining to your co-workers about your boss? IT can see all of that. Even if you have separate personal accounts for these services, it’s still more likely that you’ll mix them up if you’re logged into both on the same computer.
“If you’re on a work laptop, you should assume your IT can see everything,” says Ryan Toohil, who has worked in IT for 20 years and is currently CTO of Aura, a digital security firm. “It’s the company’s laptop. They own it. It’s enrolled in a corporate IT product where they’re going to be able to track where you go on the internet.” Toohil emphasized that not all IT departments are regularly digging through their employees’ web history — but there’s always a risk that they could.
> It’s not just your activity that your co-workers might be able to see — they could also get access to anything you download. . .But some companies (such as Apple) won’t actually allow you to wipe your device before handing it in, regardless of how personal the contents are.
> . . .If you’re mixing work and pleasure on one device, just one mistaken email attachment or one incorrect copy / paste could lead to scenarios that aren’t just embarrassing but could harm your relationships with co-workers and even jeopardize your job.
A personal laptop is an investment — not just in your security, but in your mental health. You should get one.
SMOKESCREEN TROLLING ATTEMPT: TRUMP THE HARASSER Alleges 'An Insidious Plot'
Trump Sues New York Times And Niece Mary, Alleging ‘Insidious Plot’ To Obtain His Tax Records
Here's his breaking news report yesterday Updated Sep 22, 2021, 06:53am EDT
Forbes | 2021-09-22
Topline
"Former president Donald Trump filed a lawsuit against the New York Times, three of its reporters and his niece Mary on Tuesday, accusing them of hatching an “insidious plot” to obtain “confidential and highly-sensitive records” for a 2018 investigative report published by the paper which detailed allegations that Trump had “participated in dubious tax schemes.”
Key Facts
The suit, filed in Dutchess County, New York alleges that the New York Times convinced Mary Trump to smuggle records out of her attorney’s office and turn them over to the newspaper.
According to the suit, Mary Trump carried out these alleged actions despite having signed a confidentiality agreement in 2001 as part of a settlement to a legal dispute around the will of Frederick Trump, the former president’s father and Mary’s grandfather.
Trump is seeking at least $100 million in damages from both his niece and the Times.
Reacting to the suit Mary Trump told the Daily Beast that her uncle was a “fucking loser,” adding: “The walls are closing in and he is throwing anything against the wall that will stick.”
In a statement, the Times said its coverage of Trump’s taxes helped inform citizens on a “subject of overriding public interest” and the suit was “an attempt to silence independent news organizations.”
Crucial Quote
In response to the lawsuit, Times reporter Susanne Craig, one of the three journalists being sued, wrote on Twitter: “I knocked on Mary Trump’s door. She opened it. I think they call that journalism.”
Tangent
Dutchess County court last year ruled in favor of Mary Trump in a lawsuit filed against her by the former president’s brother Robert. That suit attempted to stop the release of Mary’s book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, but the judge ruled that the 2001 confidentiality agreement was too vaguely defined to stop her from writing about the then-sitting president.
Key Background
In 2018, the New York Times published an article detailing allegations that the former president “participated in dubious tax schemes … including instances of outright fraud” that allowed him to obtain over $413 million from his father Fred Trump Sr. This pushed back against Trump’s electoral narrative that he was a self-made billionaire and he has long insisted that his father provided him almost no financial help.
Trump immediately dismissed the article on his now-defunct Twitter account calling it a “very old, boring and often told hit piece.”
The Times and the three reporters named in the suit—David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner—won a Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for their work on the investigative report.
In her 2020 book, Mary Trump disclosed how she helped the Times reporters obtain the records. She wrote that in 2017, she took 19 boxes of documents from Farrell Fritz, the law firm that helped her challenge the estate of Fred Trump Sr., and handed them over to the journalists. She noted that a lawyer at the firm told her she was entitled to take the documents, as long as a copy of the same was left behind."
Further Reading
Trump Sues NYT and Niece—Who Calls Him ‘F*cking Loser’ (The Daily Beast)
Trump files lawsuit against the New York Times and niece over 2018 tax records story (Washington Post)
Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father (New York Times)
I am a Breaking News Reporter at Forbes, with a focus on covering important tech policy and business news. Graduated from Columbia University with an MA in Business and
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