Jurist Prudence
The Supreme Court
Typically, when we are talking about the Supreme Court around these parts it’s because they’ve gutted regulatory oversight, stripped more civil rights from the vulnerable, or fabricated new strategies to pursue their right-wing legislative agenda via judicial fiat. The Court has made it clear it will use its conservative majority to grant every item on reactionary wish lists. But what, if anything, are the Justices getting in return?
Quite a bit, it turns out. First came ProPublica's bombshell reporting on Clarence Thomas accepting millions’ worth of luxury travel, accommodations, and gifts from right-wing megadonor Harlan Crow:
For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.
Lower court judges are held to a fairly strict ethical standard. They’d risk impeachment or worse for accepting and/or failing to disclose the gifts, as Thomas did. Problem is, the Supreme Court polices itself, and exempted itself from ethics rules.
Thomas’s initial defense was these gifts were from a ‘close friend’ and he didn’t have to disclose such things. Then, ProPublica reported on Crow paying tuition for Thomas’s grandnephew to attend a string of expensive private boarding schools. As before, Thomas did not report these payments. Thomas (via other conservative ‘friends’) then claimed ignorance, writing it off as a mistake or misunderstanding of disclosure rules.
Then, ProPublica disclosed Crow bought multiple properties on a street in Savannah, Georgia, one of which happened to belong to Thomas’s mother. Thomas was one of the owners, and profited from the deal. Crow paid for renovations and upgrades to the home, which Thomas’s mother still lives in to this day, rent free.
The bribery pipeline was not limited to the Justice himself - his wife got in on the action as well:
Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
Leo and his dark money network paid Ginni Thomas a six figure sum from one of its nonprofits for unspecified work and covered up her involvement. Later that year, the same nonprofit submitted a brief in Shelby County v. Holder, and Thomas joined a 5-4 majority to strip important protections from the Voting Rights Act.
The most generous defense of his rank corruption is that Thomas would have voted to uphold his conservative principles with or without the bribes. But there’s evidence he’s flipped at least one of his positions at the behest of his ‘friends’:
Justice Thomas was initially a defender of the Chevron doctrine. In 2005, he penned a decision upholding it — over the dissent of his fellow conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.
[…]
But within the ensuing decade, Thomas changed course to crusade against Chevron deference, eventually arguing that his own opinion in the 2005 case had been ill-advised.
All it took was a few dozen yacht trips with the boys. Normal stuff.
When presented with overwhelming evidence Thomas had violated countless ethics rules, Chief Justice Roberts simply declined to investigate his colleague. Perhaps the Chief Justice is concerned it would set a bad precedent to investigate Justices and their spouses for ethics violations because his wife has earned over $10 million dollars placing lawyers with high-powered firms who often have business before the Court.
He might also be worried for his buddy Neil Gorsuch who sold a vacation property he’d been trying to unload for years right after he was nominated to the Court. Unlike Thomas, Gorsuch reported the sale, but left off the name of the buyer - the CEO of a major law firm that regularly has business before the Court.
So what happens now? Probably nothing! The Court has made it clear it is not going to police itself, and the only way to remove Thomas would be impeachment which is never going to get through the Senate. Meanwhile, Justices are allowed to accept unlimited bribes, disclose whatever they feel like, and use legal chicanery to help their friends at the FedSoc and Club for Growth dismantle the regulatory state and strip rights from millions of Americans.
One option for Biden and a Democratic legislature if the Court continues to operate as a rogue legislative body: expand (and pack) the Court with more Justices to even the scales. A recent paper estimates that without an expansion of the Court, Dems wouldn’t regain a majority for forty years.
The Court’s largesse is not limited to corporate donors, of course. It’s issued a series of rulings blurring the lines around political corruption. In 2016 the Court reversed the conviction of former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, curtailing the government’s power to bring bribery and corruption cases against politicians. As predicted, this week the Court overturned two more corruption convictions against politicians and their staff.
We’ve got an unaccountable Court taking bribes to pervert the rule of law in America, which includes protecting corporations, politicians, and the moneyed from suffering any legal consequences for said bribes and corruption. I don’t know where we go from here, but the current outlook is bleak.
George Santos
Surprisingly absolutely no one, George Santos done got himself got. This week he was arrested and arraigned on 13 federal fraud and corruption charges briefly summed up thusly:
In 2020, Santos applied for unemployment benefits despite being very much employed by an investment firm (which was probably a Ponzi scheme).
Santos lied on multiple financial disclosures related to his failed Congressional run in 2020.
He did it again in 2022, because of course he did.
Santos collected contributions to a nonprofit connected to his Congressional run, then used that money on personal expenses.
Not great! Listen, some of these are understandable for a person like Santos. Taking campaign donations to spend on personal shit is literally Trump’s current business model. Lying on disclosure forms doesn’t get you in trouble if you’re a Justice or former president or whatever, so he might have been alright if he stuck to campaign crimes. But defrauding unemployment? Come on, dude! That is some broke boy shit.
We often discuss people who are addicted to fraud. They are constitutionally incapable of not running schemes when presented with the opportunity. Santos spent the last decade writing bad checks, stealing a little here and there, creating fake dog charities, etc. He was nibbling around the edges. Then, somehow, he stumbled across the easiest scheme of all: getting elected to the United States Congress. ‘Charismatic liar willing to do light financial fraud’ is probably a checkbox Republican consultants use to vet candidates.
Problem is, a scammer like Santos can’t turn it off. He was earning $120k a year doing Ponzis and thought wow, there’s this new super unemployment, and I’m hearing how easy it is to file and get paid since the government’s systems are totally overwhelmed and hell, why shouldn’t I get another $27 grand? He couldn’t help himself! And now he’s going to end up in prison.
Proving my point re: GOP candidates and fraud, his party has refused to condemn him or call for his resignation, because duh. McCarthy is holding onto a slim majority in the House, and Santos’s vote is the reason he’s Speaker at all. So they’ll stick with their boy probably right up until the moment he’s used up all his appeals and heads to jail. If Santos is able to find enough moneyed backers to get him the good Rich People Lawyers he can probably drag the whole thing out for years, on the vain hope Trump wins next year and he can catch a pardon. Or maybe by then the Supreme Court will have decided lying on campaign finance forms isn’t against the law.
Our political system has been rotten for a long time, but it’s taken a sharp turn towards openly acknowledging and even celebrating crime amongst the elite. Federal politicians and their enablers in the Beltway press have made themselves the stars of the show, and when you’re a star, they let you do it.
Journalism
One might wonder: how did a George Santos get elected in the first place, when his lies and fraud were not particularly well hidden? It turns out, one local paper on Long Island was all over it, but none of the larger press outlets ran with the story:
The North Shore Leader wrote in September, when few others were covering Santos, about his “inexplicable rise” in reported net worth, from essentially nothing in 2020 to as much as $11 million two years later.
The story noted other oddities about the self-described gay Trump supporter with Jewish heritage, who would go on to flip New York’s 3rd Congressional District from blue to red, and is now under investigation by authorities for misrepresenting his background to voters.
The North Shore Leader is not a left-wing liberal rag, it’s Hannity’s local paper from a conservative area of the New York. It’s run by a local attorney and staffed by part-time students and retirees. Despite its biases, its staff found myriad inconsistencies with Santos and printed them, and other journalists ignored them, and Santos won.
That didn’t stop the NYT’s Maggie Haberman from taking credit for breaking the Santos story, though. She told her million-plus Twitter followers her paper ‘started the long saga of George Santos’ when it published follow-up reporting in December. The same Times that ignored the North Shore Leader’s calls for them to investigate Santos when it could have made a difference in the election.
Haberman has been criticized for her own journalistic practices - she is accused of withholding information on Trump’s attempted coup, among other things, so she could publish multiple books on his presidency. Her chummy relationship with Trump and others in power is unfortunately all too common among journalists expected to cover the country’s political elite.
Sometimes big scoops come in the form of leaked documents - such as the NYT gaining access to Trump’s tax records. Often, though, the corruption is hiding in plain sight, like Santos’s case. To uncover Thomas’s decades of graft, ProPublica used…public records and dozens of interviews with people associated with Crow - in other words, old fashioned reporting. Outlets like ProPublica seem to be breaking crazy stories on a practically daily basis not because they’ve got some sort of special inside access, but because they don’t, and rely on time worn journalistic practices like asking questions and looking through publicly available data.
The unfortunate reality is that as our country’s media landscape decays - an average of two US newspapers close per week - and ‘journalists’ become more concentrated in the seats of power like New York and DC, the quality and quantity of actual reporting decays alongside. Many of the highest profile reporters have huge salaries, massive social media followings, and questionably cozy relationships with the people they are expected to cover.
This is not new, and it is not surprising - it is human nature to want to connect with people you spend time around, even if you may disagree politically or it’s in violation of norms. The problem is our journalists have become an extension of the elite, and the elite are more than happy to invite them to the same parties, dinners, and other events to maintain that friendly relationship. Fancy parties are nice, and fun, and I’m sure I’d want to attend them if the alternative was sitting in a cubicle in a newsroom sending out ten thousand FOIA requests I might hear back on in a year or two.
The good news (sorry) is we do have a few outlets still doing real journalism. For now, at least. The elites, especially the right-wing, have spent years in an aggressive campaign to stifle journalistic speech and access, and with a friendly Supreme court we may see those rights curtailed even further. I won’t regurgitate any of the old cliches about a free country needs a free press or whatever, but if the stories above are not evidence of how badly our mainstream news institutions are failing the hold the country’s powerful accountable, I don’t know what is.
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter!
After all that, I think we could use a palate cleanser. How about a couple sprays of butter flavored oil? According to the label, it’s zero calorie!
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Spray’s labeling indicating a serving has zero calories or grams of fat is not misleading because it is classified as a spray, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week.
This week in food lawsuits, an appellate court decided that ICBINB fits within the ‘fats and oils’ category for regulatory purposes rather than the ‘butter’ category which, sure, it says it’s not right on the label! Duh.
What’s at issue in the suit is the company claiming the product is low in fat and calories when it’s not - the entire bottle has 771 calories and 82 grams of fat. However! One spray is only 0.2 grams, which contains a tiny number of calories, to the point you can round it down to zero. Which begs the question - who is lightly dusting their food with .2 grams of butter spray? Are we treating toast like a Sazerac now, just misting it with wisps of flavor?
One judge dissented:
One of the judges on the appellate panel dissented, writing the idea that a bottle of oil laden with calories and fat could be transformed into something with zero calories or fat grams by replacing the bottle cap with a pump device is “ludicrous.”
They’ve got a point - you can’t turn 771 calories into zero calories by making the serving sizes small enough. There’s a fraction of a calorie in there, damnit! Also, listing the serving size as ‘one pump’ on the nutritional facts is stretching the concept of what the average person is going to do with a (not) butter spray they’ve picked up in the cooler next to the actual butter.
Food lawsuits are often both fun and dumb, and this one sits squarely in both categories. Butter spray is not butter, it is oil. Butter spray is meant to be dispensed in barely perceptible amounts. Butter spray is, therefore, zero calories and non-fat. What a world.
Short Cons
FT - “The investigation led to allegations by Vanuatu that the Panama company, which is linked to Greek shipping magnates, had acquired the islands’ mackerel fishing rights “in perpetuity” for a fraction of their market value.”
WSJ - ““Most of crypto was a pyramid scheme,” said Ryan Kirkley, a local businessman who runs and advises early-stage blockchain and artificial-intelligence companies and helps connect them with venture capital.”
Bloomberg - “Danish police arrested eight employees at an energy trading company who will face charges of manipulating prices on the Nordic electricity exchange.”
KRON 4 - “Officials said between 2013 and 2020, Chu raised $39 million using several companies by soliciting investments for the purchase and resale of basketball tickets and luxury suites at Oracle Arena in Oakland, the Staples Center in Los Angeles and the Chase Center in San Francisco.”
Rest of World - “Machine translations of Pashto and Dari, in particular, are riddled with errors that have introduced confusion into already complex immigration processes, and led to the rejected asylum claim of at least one Afghan refugee.”
Bloomberg - “It’s difficult to determine exactly how many repossessions occur each year, but Cox Automotive estimates that there were 1.2 million in 2022, up about 5.3% from 2021 but still down from 1.68 million in 2019.”
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