News and commentary for understanding and coping with the years ahead...
Our nation's dishonorable top court
Justice Thomas has accepted lavish gifts from billionaires with business before the Court for almost his entire tenure as a justice. Since his confirmation to the Supreme Court in 1991, Justice Thomas has accepted millions of dollars in gifts from wealthy benefactors, several of whom had business before the Court, and nearly all of whom first met Thomas after he joined the Court. The number, value, and extravagance of the gifts accepted by Justice Thomas have no comparison in modern American history.
After ProPublica published a series of articles detailing corruption at the Supreme Court, Congressional Democrats did some of their only serious investigations while they controlled one or more chambers. And the report from the Senate Judiciary Committee (Democrats only) leaves no doubt that Clarence Thomas – widely believed to have lied to the Senate to get confirmed in the first place – is the most corrupt member of the nation's highest court in our lifetimes, maybe ever. He's not alone in sleaze – Antonin Scalia did a lot of the same stuff earlier – but seems to have gained more from it than his colleagues. With Trump elected, no doubt Thomas will retire and continue to live in the laps of his rich right-wing benefactors – in the luxury he plainly believes he deserves whether he earned it (in any traditional sense) or not. This is all just another exhibit in why the public now holds the judicial system in contempt – a scary situation that boosts the anti-democracy people that is moving to replace a system based on the rule of law with a kleptocracy based on who's most competent at stealing, bribing, and extorting. Moreover, the court all but legalized bribery during its last session, and since it has no meaningful internal ethics policy, this situation is likely get a lot worse.
Bezos and Musk are rivals in the space-shot business, but they share a vastly more important bond. Two of their companies—Amazon and SpaceX—are the companies that are currently making the case, before NLRB bodies and federal courts, that the NLRB is unconstitutional; that the body established by Congress in 1935 and declared constitutional by the Supreme Court in 1937 is all of a sudden in violation of the Constitution because its rulemaking process vests authority in a governmental agency rather than, say, the courts. Of course, every NLRB ruling can be, and frequently is, challenged in courts, and courts haven’t hesitated over the subsequent 87 years to overturn hundreds of those rulings, in the process cumulatively stripping tens of millions of American workers of their right to collective bargaining, which the NLRA established. Musk has gone on record as opposed even to “the idea of unions,” and while Bezos has made no such pronunciamentos, his actions make clear that he joins with Musk—thereby, a duo of the world’s richest and second-richest persons—in opposing even a modicum of worker power.
The most intriguing element in this Prospect story is the role of Teamsters head Sean O'Brien. His trucking members went on strike against Amazon last week, and, according to the piece, whether they succeed may be the linchpin to any hope for American workers during the next Trump regime. The logic is somewhat tenuous, but keep an eye on this strike. (Disclosure: I own a small amount of Amazon stock that I bought almost 20 years ago. I was once a fan of Jeff Bezos, whom I got to know in my technology-journalism days, but he and his company have become an exhibit of how awful Big Tech has become in a business and ethical sense.)
America is giving the virus a lot of chances to infect people. Although efforts to control the virus, such as regular testing of herds and bulk testing of raw milk, are under way, they have clearly not been enough. The spread of the virus geographically and across mammalian species is unprecedented, Pitesky said. He believes that more efforts should be directed toward shifting waterfowl—ducks, geese, and other wild birds responsible for spreading H5N1—away from commercial farms, where the virus is most likely to be transmitted to humans. A shot for bird flu exists, and experts have urged the government to vaccinate farmworkers. “Farmers need help,” Pitesky said. As of this month, the Biden administration has no plans to authorize a human vaccine, making it likely that that choice will fall under the purview of Donald Trump.
California is the US’s top milk producing state, and three-quarters of the infected herds in the country, about 650 of them, are located in the state. The state has been looking for bird flu in large milk tanks during processing, and the virus was detected in four southern California dairy farms earlier this month after being found in the state’s Central valley since August. The detection in the southern California farms made clear the state needed “a shift from regional containment to statewide monitoring and response”, the California governor, Gavin Newsom, said in his emergency declaration.
One of the Biden administration's most perplexing failures has been in a key area of public health – its decision to all but give up on slowing the spread of covid several years ago, and since then its loud inaction to deal with the spreading bird flu. If the worst happens with the latter, covid could end up looking like a mild problem in comparison. The administration has done almost nothing to even measure, much less contain, bird flu. At least California has taken the vital first step of moving to a statewide response. Even if that helps, of course, viruses don't know anything about political boundaries. It's baffling.
I have a number of quibbles with this annual list of "censored" stories, but it's always worth a look. My main issue is that these stories haven't been censored in any formal sense, much less blocked by government, which is the traditional definition of how censorship happens. In most cases, a small or medium-sized news outlet or advocacy group has published the story – but the rest of the news media has, for all practical purposes, not followed up. That's not censorship. Why don't important stories get wide attention? The main reason, I strongly believe, is the old-fashioned "not invented here" syndrome. Journalists are pathetically loath to boost others' reporting. So they tend to ignore all but the most sensational work that others do. As I've said before, if I ran a news organization and saw important work elsewhere – competitor or not – I would do everything in my power to makes sure the people in my community knew about it.
How I put this together
This newsletter is a compendium of the reporting and commentary that best explains the America's political, economic, and social conditions – and, most important, how we can find a way back from the dark days ahead. You will rarely find anything here from the New York Times or Washington Post or any of the other Big Journalism companies that failed us so completely during the 2024 elections and are now sucking up – even more than usual – to Donald Trump, his cult, and corporate oligarchs. My focus will be on smaller, more honorable outlets (and individuals). I hope you'll support them with your attention and your money. For more details, please read my About page.
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Harold Meyerson
Yasmin Tayag
Guardian staff and agency
Kate Horgan
