The Supreme Corruption of the Supreme Court

One of the most successful prosecuting attorneys in US history, Vincent Bugliosi, once said that he never understood why so many Americans place US Supreme Court Justices on pedestals, because at the end of the day, each “Justice”, is nothing more than a lawyer, and a politician. I agree. The question is not whether each Justice of the court is corrupt, but rather to what degree, as each member’s actions are often indefensible. Lifetime appointments? Please. Even the celebrated Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, allowed her ego, and the allure of a celebrity lifestyle, prevent her from doing the right thing, and resign once her health began to fail at the age of 81 (she was 87 years old, and still on the court when she died).

Knowing what has transpired in recent years, is it possible for the Supreme court of the United States (SCOTUS), to be any more unethical, and power hungry? Have you heard the latest? Shame on the so-called liberal Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, for endorsing the persecution of attorney Steven Donziger by Chevron Oil. If you are unfamiliar, Steven Donziger is a human rights and environmental attorney who was sentenced to 6 months in jail last year, after serving the previous 2.5+ years under house arrest in New York City. What was his crime? Mr. Donziger was one of the lead attorneys who sued the oil giant Chevron on behalf of thousands of Amazonian Indigenous people and won (Chevron dumped 16 billion gallons of oil into their ancestral lands)! Unsurprisingly, Chevron Oil still refuses to pay for their horrendous crimes (over $9.5 billion). In a 7-2 decision, the US Supreme Court voted in favor of the monstrous crimes of Chevron Oil, and its poisoning of poor Ecuadorians, and the Amazon (conservative Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh dissented from the majority).
Click here to learn more about how the Supreme Court allowed Chevron’s contempt conviction of Steven Donziger stand.

So, how did this happen? Did you know that Chevron Oil (formerly Texaco Oil) donates $200,000 each year to an organization called the Supreme Court Foundation (aka the Supreme Court Historical Society)? According to Steven Donziger, “The Supreme Court Foundation raises millions of dollars each year (from corporations, lawyers, and special interests) for the purpose of “preserving” the history of the court, and “promoting” the rule of law.” The millions in donations that Chevron Oil provides, allows their general counsel and other lawyers at Chevron to attend fancy dinner events, and mingle with US Supreme Court Justices. And to make matters worse, Chevron’s top lawyer sits on the board of trustees for the Supreme Court Foundation! Wow, I mean you can’t make this stuff up. Of course the Supreme Court is going to decide in favor of the crimes of Chevron Oil. There are other nefarious reasons too, but essentially, Chevron Oil owns the court.
Click here for an interview with Katie Halper and Steven Donziger.
Click here for a NY Times piece on how a charity tied to the US Supreme Court offers donors access to the Justices.

“Absolutely shocking (the decision)…what’s not shocking is our Supreme Court, as an institution, being just fine with the corporate capture of the legal system.” – former U.S. Rep. Tom Winter (D-Mont.)

As per the Steven Donziger website, FreeDonziger.com, “In a shocking setback to the rule of law, the US Supreme Court has refused to hear Steven’s appeal of Chevron’s private corporate prosecution. That means corporate prosecutions are now legal in the United States and will be used to target activists. Our campaign now goes to international courts.”

Here is a letter that Steven Donziger wrote earlier this year that explains his situation.

Friends and colleagues,
In April I was released from 993 days of detention but I am still not free. In fact, as I work to hold Chevron accountable for the dumping of billions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon, I live in a constant state of peril. Chevron confiscated my passport and took my law license to retaliate after our team helped Indigenous peoples win a historic $9.5 billion pollution judgment in Ecuador. Chevron can still seek my renewed detention through a pending civil case. In Ecuador, thousands of Indigenous peoples and farmers continue to face an imminent risk of death for being exposed to Chevron’s poisonous waste. These communities need lawyers to enforce their judgment so lives and cultures can be saved and restored. My own legal expenses are growing as I try to protect myself and my right to be a human rights advocate. While these are formidable challenges, nothing can change the fact that our team won what might be the world’s most significant corporate accountability and environmental legal case. It is our incredible success that Chevron wants to destroy by attacking me and my clients. The outcome of the Ecuador case is critically important to me and my family, environmental justice, restoring the health of the planet, and rebuilding our democracy which is being undermined by the fossil fuel industry’s insidious strategy to silence those frontline defenders who challenge its planet-destroying practices. We urgently need to fight back and hold Chevron fully accountable while sending the industry a powerful message that we will never go away until the job is finished. Please help us. – Steven Donziger
Click here to learn more about the Supreme Court decision.

“We must never forget it was Joe Biden who gave us Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. The Democrats are kinda quiet about that. They are two of the worst modern Supreme Court justices and Biden was their champion.”
– Pulitzer Prize winning author Chris Hedges

Is it any coincidence that the United States has the highest number of billionaires in the world, now that the corporations have taken over the mainstream media, as well as the US political, economic, and judicial systems? The Supreme Court Foundation/Historical Society is wrong on every level, and needs to be shut down. Clearly, SCOTUS needs to be overhauled, and Justice Clarence Thomas should be removed and investigated ASAP as well (Clarence Thomas’s latest transgression involves his decades long failure to disclose luxury trips and other gifts he received from a billionaire real estate magnate and conservative megadonor. These trips and gifts could amount to millions of dollars). Clarence Thomas should have been, at the very least, disbarred decades ago. In the 1970s, Thomas worked as a corporate lawyer for the agrochemical company Monsanto/Bayer, which is in the poison/GMO business, and is responsible for decades of catastrophic damage to our food system, and the environment (in addition to glyphosate, Monsanto also gave the world agent orange, which caused unimaginable devastation during the Vietnam War, and in the decades since). Over the years, multiple juries have ruled that Monsanto’s glyphosate containing Roundup causes cancer, and due to the chemical company’s countless lies and reckless actions, the courts have so far awarded billions of dollars in damages to Monsanto’s victims (over 13,000 additional lawsuits are pending). In addition, Thomas also has a long history of sexual harassment, lying under oath, and other offenses as well (not the least of which involved his wife being implicated in a coup attempt). Why wasn’t he held accountable many years ago, or even impeached more recently? Simple, the rich and powerful are above the law in the United States. Isn’t capitalism great?

“Thomas, as a crucial vote on the Supreme Court, holds incredible power over women’s rights, workplace, reproductive, and otherwise. His worldview, with its consistent objectification of women, is the one that’s shaping the contours of what’s possible for women in America today, more than that of just about any man alive, save for his fellow justices.” – Jill Abramson

Adam Cohen is a former member of the NY Times editorial board, and he has written the book, Supreme Inequality, The Supreme Court’s Fifty-Year Battle For A More Unjust America. According to Mr. Cohen, “So, what I argue in the book is that we think of the Supreme Court as being a force for equality and fairness and all that, but if you actually look back to the last 50 years, after Nixon packed the court with conservatives, it’s actually been a force for protecting rich people, for increasing inequality. So, in areas like campaign finance, where they have struck down all these often good laws that Congress passed trying to regulate the amount of money from rich people going into politics; in education, where they’ve ruled in favor of inequality in funding, and on and on and on — so, that has been the theme. We’ve had a court that for 50 years has been really fighting for rich people over poor people. That’s only gotten worse in the last few years, because now we have this 6-to-3 conservative majority. So it’s worse than it’s ever been. This is very strongly related, because think about when you have corruption, when you have financial corruption, when you have justices taking free trips for 20 years. You know, ProPublica referred to it as “island hopping.” Who is giving that? That’s being given by billionaires, people like Crow, right? Welfare recipients who might have business before the court, they can’t afford to give the justices these luxury vacations. Student loan debt holders — right now there’s a big case before the Supreme Court. If you’re in heavy student loan debt, you’re not able to — you don’t have a yacht to take Clarence Thomas on. So this is yet another way in which the balance is tipped in favor of the powerful and the wealthy. And, you know, when we talk about this friendship, as Justin was saying, it’s a friendship between Crow and Thomas that was made after Thomas became a justice, so you have to wonder about that. But you also have to wonder, if Clarence Thomas started out ruling in favor of poor people, welfare recipients, took liberal positions, would he continue to get these luxury vacations? I would say not. One of the reasons he’s getting them is because, I would argue, it seems to me, that Crow likes what he’s doing on the court. So this is a way to put one more big thumb on the scale in favor of wealthy people before the court. So it’s very ideologically corrupting.”
Click here to learn more from Adam Cohen on Democracy Now!.
Click here for more reasons why Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas needs to be investigated and impeached.
Click here to learn more from ProPublica on the corruption of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Click here for more on Clarence Thomas’s Luxury vacations, and other “gifts” he received from his Billionaire donors.
Click here for another excellent piece on the criminality of Clarence Thomas from ProPublica.

“Let’s leave aside Thomas’ more egregious rulings against affirmative action, marriage equality, reproductive freedom, and privacy and for money in politics, the death penalty, gun manufacturers, and so on. Let’s instead focus on his recent behavior.
1. Last year, Thomas did not recuse himself from cases that potentially involved his wife, Ginni’s, efforts to help overturn the 2020 presidential election.
2. He was the only justice to dissent when the Supreme Court rejected Donald Trump’s bid to withhold White House documents concerning January 6.
3. Billionaire real estate mogul Harlan Crow made a $500,000 contribution to Ginni Thomas’ organization Liberty Central, which in turn paid her $120k a year salary. Clarence Thomas did not disclose this.
4. Thanks to extraordinary work by reporters at ProPublica, we learned that Thomas has accepted luxury trips from Harlan Crow almost every year for over two decades.
5. A recent vacation included nine days of island-hopping in Indonesia on a superyacht staffed with a private chef. The value of that one trip would have cost Thomas in excess of $500,000 if he’d had to pay for it himself. His government salary is $285,000.”
– Mary Trump

And speaking of the rich and powerful, have you heard some of the personal details surrounding Clarence Thomas’s billionaire megadoner, Harlan Crow? It turns out that Crow is a far right extremist who has a Hitler memorial sculpture garden, and other “Nazi collectables”, on display in his home. Again, you can’t make this stuff up, right? This information alone deserves an entire course in psychology to try and understand, let alone a single blog post! So, what’s doin’? According to Gabriel Winant, of the University of Chicago, “It’s not credible to say Crow secretly admires figures whose icons he collects; he’s got Mao in there too. Rather, it’s that he has no real appreciation for the meaning of these histories. If he did, he wouldn’t live among them. No Jew has swastikas at home to remind us. What he’s doing is not declaring his affiliation, but rather trying to reduce these histories to something he can own, trivializing them by making them into (almost literal) hobbyhorses. By reducing them to commodities the thing he particularly does is make them indistinct, which he says explicitly is the point—“mass murder,” “totalitarianism,” whatever. Generic forms of evil without actual history, a fairly literal form of fetishism.” Wow.
Click here to learn more from The Nation.

So, why does any of this matter? Here are a few of the more recent and disastrous decisions of the United States Supreme Court, which uncoincidentally, favor the rich and powerful:

1. Dobbs vs. Jackson
As per the Center for Food Safety: “Today is a shameful day for the meaning of justice in our country. The Supreme Court’s reactionary supermajority’s ideological agenda to dismantle the right to choose safe and legal abortion harms everyone, but disproportionately harms minorities and low-income people. As the Dobbs dissent explained, today’s decision was based on “power, not reason” or law. This misguided judicial activism took away reproductive rights from those who were not represented when our Constitution was drafted and ratified. Nor is this the end of the conservative justices’ ideological campaign: next week, they could eviscerate the federal government’s ability to protect other liberties and fundamental rights, including our right to a healthy planet, and clean air, water, and food. While today is a dark day, it is a clarion call for all those who care about building a more equitable and just society. From consumers’ right to know what’s in their food to farmworkers’ rights to protection against toxic chemicals, we at Center for Food Safety have always fought for the right of all people to make safe choices for themselves. We stand in solidarity with our partners across the movement to fight the erosion of our reproductive rights, and will continue to give our all to protect the right of all species to a healthy food system and thriving planet.”
Click here to learn more from the Center for Food Safety.

“Women generally are 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than an abortion, well, in Mississippi, it’s over 100 times more likely to die, in fact, nearly 180 times more likely to die, if you’re a Black woman in Mississippi and you’re coerced into carrying a pregnancy to term.” – Michele Goodwin, Professor of Constitutional Law
Click here to learn more from Michele Goodwin.
Click here for Ms. Goodwin’s powerful article, I was Raped by my Father. An Abortion Saved My Life.

2. West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency
As per the Sierra Club: “The Supreme Court’s decision in West Virginia v. EPA, released today, has effectively eliminated the US Environmental Protection Agency’s most effective tool for reducing climate pollution from existing fossil fuel burning power plants. This decision is deeply disappointing and dangerous. As scientists warn that we are running out of time to combat the climate crisis, no one should be making it harder for our government to use effective tools to protect our families and communities.”
Click here to learn more from the Sierra Club.
Click here to learn more about the history of the Sierra Club.

3. Bowman vs. Monsanto
As per the Center for Food Safety:
“Center for Food Safety (CFS) expressed strong disagreement with today’s Supreme Court ruling in the patent case Bowman v. Monsanto…CFS also issued a groundbreaking report on the broader problem of farmer prosecution, Seed Giants vs. U.S. Farmers. “This decision is a setback for the nation’s farmers,” said Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of Center for Food Safety. “The food movement will not be stopped by one misguided ruling. CFS is committed to protecting farmers from patent persecution and furthering the goals of seed independence and creating a more sustainable agricultural future.” The case involved Monsanto’s prosecution of 75-year-old Indiana farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman for alleged patent infringement because he saved and replanted soybean seeds purchased from a third-party rather than purchasing new seeds from the agrochemical giant each time. “The Court chose to protect Monsanto over farmers. The Court’s ruling is contrary to logic and to agronomics, because it improperly attributes seeds’ reproduction to farmers, rather than nature,” said Kimbrell.
Click here to learn more from the Center for Food Safety.

4. Kennedy vs. Bemerton School District
As per the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union):
The Supreme Court ruled today in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, siding with a public-school football coach who demanded the right to pray with his players after games at the 50-yard-line. The decision significantly erodes the separation of church and state in public schools…The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Washington filed a Supreme Court amicus brief in the case, arguing that Kennedy’s prayers, which he admits he delivered while on duty, are not protected by the Free Speech Clause and that the school district had a constitutional duty to stop his practice because it violated the separation of church and state. As the dissent explained, “today’s decision is particularly misguided because it elevates the religious rights of a school official over those of his students, who are required to attend school and who this Court has long recognized are particularly vulnerable and deserving of protection.” This decision is deeply disappointing and undermines the religious liberty of public school students. As the Supreme Court recognized over 60 years ago, it’s inherently coercive for school officials to pray with students while on duty. Today’s ruling ignores that basic principle and tramples the religious freedom of students who may not share the preferred faith of their coaches and teachers.”
Click here to learn more from the ACLU.

5. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC, 2010)
As per Salon.com:
“In the cringe-worthy case that spawned the phrase “corporations are people, too,” Roberts’ conservative court put the final nail in democracy’s coffin when it ruled that corporate political spending is a form of free speech. This opened the floodgates to unlimited corporate spending in the form of super PACs, which allow corporations to avoid campaign finance laws.”
Click here to learn more from Salon.com.
Click here to learn more about the disastrous Citizens United decision from Public Citizen.

Excerpt from a proposed constitutional amendment: “The We the People Amendment ends corporate constitutional rights after the Supreme Court’s flawed ruling in Citizens United. This decision established political spending as protected speech, further prevented limits on campaign spending, and allowed outside groups to accept unlimited political donations. In the election cycle immediately following this 2010 decision, independent spending increased by more than 600% compared to the previous election cycle. This created an enormous imbalance in power in which the average American’s ability to influence elected officials is dwarfed by large corporations. The ruling also enabled corporate personhood, granting the freedom of expression to corporations.”
Click here to learn more about Pramila Jayapal’s bill to reverse Citizens United.

*Dishonorable Mention from the Iowa Supreme Court: Residents in Iowa have now Lost the Right to Sue Animal Factories
(which shows how corrupt and broken our judicial systems are at the state level as well)
As per Sentient Media: “Iowa Supreme Court Sides With Factory – An essential right of landowners in America is the right to utilize and enjoy one’s property as one wishes. Seems simple enough. But not so if the land you own is downwind or downstream from a hog farm in Iowa. In a 4-3 decision last month, the Iowa Supreme Court overturned a 2004 precedent that had allowed landowners to sue neighboring farming operations that were a nuisance, as long as the plaintiff could meet certain criteria. The new decision backtracks from what was an important protection for Iowa citizens. Landowners were at least afforded a sliver of protection from an industry that inherently harms not only animals and the environment, but also its own neighbors, and now that protection has been wiped out.” The only concern for Big Ag (animal agriculture) is to maximize profits at all costs, and the US political and judicial systems are replete with spineless agents of corruption who are eager to accommodate.
Click here to learn more from Sentient Media.

“The Supreme Court is more than a legal tribunal, ruling on disputes between parties—it is also an architect. The Court’s interpretations of the Constitution and other laws become blueprints for the nation, helping to determine what form it will take and how it will continue to rise. For the past half-century, the Court has been drawing up plans for a more economically unequal nation, and that is the America that is now being built.” – Adam Cohen

I am not an expert, but here are three common suggestions for reforming the US Supreme Court that seem to make sense.
1. Restore balance by adding four seats to the Supreme Court.
2. Depoliticize the Supreme Court by creating term limits for justices.
3. Create a binding code of ethics and recusal standard for Supreme Court justices that requires disclosure of lobbying and dark money interests. This measure could also prevent federal judges from owning individual stocks, commercial real estate, etc.

Lastly, five out of nine of the current SCOTUS Justices were appointed by two republican presidents who lost the popular vote, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. Four of the Justices have lied under oath, and two have been credibly accused of sexual assault. Clearly, our political, and judicial systems are broken. Unfortunately, I don’t see help arriving anytime soon, as the democrats are hardly any better. There is however, power in numbers, and hopefully, the majority of the US population will wake up, and fight to make their voices heard. Despite the damage that is too often wrought by these so-called “Justices”, they too remain above the law, while also enjoying a life of exalted status. There appears to be a very real misconception by many Americans that equates a Supreme Court Justice, to some type of divine monarch (perhaps due in part to our irrational obsession with celebrities). As a result, once you are in the SCOTUS club, you are forever lionized, and automatically precluded from being responsible for your actions (no matter how damaging, or monstrous the crimes may be).

A United States Supreme Court Justice is indeed, nothing more than a politician and a lawyer. We need to keep that in mind as we try and fix the court, move away from American capitalism, and hold each “Justice” accountable.

Until next time…

Update (6.21.23) – And the supreme corruption on the US Supreme Court continues. I don’t know what’s more nauseating, three rich, racist, white men posing for a picture after defiling the planet, and taking 3 innocent lives (see below), or the billionaire funded “fishing trip” itself, which included $1,000 bottles of wine, a private jet, and an audience with the “dishonorable” US Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Alito. Apparently, Judge Alito will sell his soul for a pittance (at least to a billionaire). So far, this is what we know (imagine what we don’t), and yet another example of how rotten the US Supreme Court has become. Kudos to ProPublica for another excellent piece (the US corporate media gave up on true investigative journalism decades ago).
Click here to learn more about the corrupt Justice Samuel Alito.

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