June, 29 2012, 10:24am EDT

Health Care and Immigration Rulings End Supreme Court Term and Begin Political Debate
The Supreme Court virtually guaranteed that it will be an issue in the upcoming presidential election by upholding both the key provision of President Obama's health care law and the key provision of Arizona's anti-immigrant law in a busy last week to the 2011 Term.
"The Supreme Court may have ended its Term, but it is a safe bet that the political debate over its role and its rulings has just begun," said Steven R. Shapiro, the ACLU's national legal director.
WASHINGTON
The Supreme Court virtually guaranteed that it will be an issue in the upcoming presidential election by upholding both the key provision of President Obama's health care law and the key provision of Arizona's anti-immigrant law in a busy last week to the 2011 Term.
"The Supreme Court may have ended its Term, but it is a safe bet that the political debate over its role and its rulings has just begun," said Steven R. Shapiro, the ACLU's national legal director.
The decision in the health care case, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, was perhaps more anxiously awaited than any decision by the Supreme Court since Bush v. Gore. Defying many post-argument predictions, Chief Justice Roberts held that Congress had not exceeded its constitutional authority when it enacted the so-called individual mandate, requiring everyone either to purchase health insurance or make an additional payment on their federal taxes. Unfortunately, the Court's decision does make it easier for states to reject federal dollars intended to extend Medicaid coverage.
"We welcome the Court's decision, although we are disappointed by the Medicaid ruling," Shapiro said. "Health care is a national problem and the national government must be empowered to address it. It would have been a major step backward for the Court to rule otherwise."
The Court also reaffirmed the ultimate authority of the federal government to regulate immigration in Arizona v. United States when it struck down 3 provisions of Arizona's S.B. 1070 on the theory that they were inconsistent with federal law. Significantly, however, the one challenged provision of S.B. 1070 that the Court did not strike down was the "show-me-your-papers" provision that has generated so much attention and controversy. The Court acknowledged that the provision raised legitimate concerns about racial profiling and detention but chose not to address them pending the outcome of further litigation.
"S.B. 1070 reeks of racial discrimination," Shapiro said. "The Court's unwillingness to confront that reality in this decision is disappointing and will have real human consequences. At the same time, the Court correctly anticipated that the discrimination issue can and will be litigated in other cases, including ongoing litigation brought by the ACLU and other civil rights groups."
Indeed, the ACLU announced this week that it had amassed a war chest of almost $9 million to fight discriminatory immigration laws at the state and local level throughout the country.
In another major decision issued at the end of the Term, the Court ruled that the Stolen Valor Act violates the First Amendment. The Act makes it a federal crime to lie about receiving military honors. Justice Kennedy's plurality opinion emphatically rejected the government's contention that false statements of fact are categorically unprotected by the First Amendment. "The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true," he wrote. "This is the ordinary course in a free society."
Some other major rulings that were expected this year fizzled out for one reason or another. In FCC v. Fox Television, the Court declined to decide the constitutionality of the FCC's indecency rules for radio and television, holding instead that CBS and Fox Television could not be penalized for violating a ban on "fleeting expletives" that was not announced until after their shows were broadcast. In Magner v. Gallagher, the Court granted review to decide whether the anti-discrimination provisions of the Fair Housing Act require proof of discriminatory intent or merely discriminatory impact, but the case was dismissed prior to argument. And, in Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Petroleum, the Court heard argument on the question of whether corporations can be sued for human rights abuses under the Alien Tort Statute, but instead of resolving that question the Court scheduled the case for reargument next Term to decide whether the Alien Tort Statute applies at all to human rights abuses committed abroad.
The Court did issue a number of important decisions this Term recognizing the rights of criminal defendants. In Jackson v. Hobbs and Miller v. Alabama, the Court held that juveniles convicted of murder cannot be subject to a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Before condemning a child to die in prison, the Court said, a sentencing judge must be allowed to take the defendant's youth into consideration. The Court also expressed its view that such sentences should be "uncommon."
In United States v. Jones, the Court held that the placement of a GPS device on a suspect's car constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment. In Missouri v. Frye and Lafler v. Cooper, the Court held that the Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel applies at the plea bargaining stage. In Maples v. Thomas, the Court reinstated the habeas corpus petition of a death row inmate, excusing his late filing on the ground that he had been effectively abandoned by his lawyers. In Dorsey v. United States, the Court ruled that the Fair Sentencing Act, which substantially reduced the disparity in federal sentences between crack and powder cocaine, applied to anyone sentenced after the law went into effect, regardless of when the crime was committed.
Looking ahead to next Term, he Court has already granted review in Fisher v. University of Texas, an important affirmative action case involving university admissions. Petitions for certiorari are expected soon from lower court decisions striking down Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California, and the Defense of Marriage Act, which excludes same-sex couples from federal marriage benefits. It is also highly likely that the Court will be asked to review the preclearance provisions contained in Section 5 of the Voting Rights, thrusting the Court into the national debate over voter suppression.
"Controversy has a way of finding the Court," Shapiro said, "and next Term is shaping up to be another blockbuster year."
A summary of all the Court's major civil liberties cases from this Term is online at:
www.aclu.org/organization-news-and-highlights/aclu-summary-2011-supreme...
Shapiro is available for television interviews using the ACLU's in-house studio facility, which has an outbound fiber line for standard definition (SD) video. Contact the ACLU Media Line at (212) 549-2666 for bookings.
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
(212) 549-2666LATEST NEWS
Tens of Thousands of LA Teachers to Strike in Solidarity With Support Workers
"How do we properly service our students when we are being overworked and underpaid and disrespected?" asked one special education assistant.
Mar 20, 2023
Demanding "respect and dignity" for tens of thousands of school support workers who help the Los Angeles Unified School District run, the union that represents 35,000 teachers in the city has called on its members to join a three-day strike starting Tuesday as school support staffers fight for a living wage.
Members of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99 "work so hard for our students," said United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) on Monday. "They deserve respect and dignity at work. We will be out in force tomorrow to make sure they get it."
Roughly 65,000 teachers and support professionals including bus drivers, cafeteria workers, teaching aides, and grounds workers are expected to walk out from Tuesday through Thursday this week, nearly a year after SEIU Local 99 entered contract negotiations with LAUSD, the second-largest school district in the United States.
The union is calling for a 30% pay increase for its members, who earn an average of $25,000 per year, or roughly $12 per hour. According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, a living wage in the Los Angeles area is more than $21 per hour for a single person with no children and far more for people with children.
"I am a single mother and for the past 20 years I have worked two and sometimes three jobs just to support my family," Janette Verbera, a special education assistant, told In These Times Monday. "How do we properly service our students when we are being overworked and underpaid and disrespected?"
The school district offered a 20% overall pay increase spread over several years on Friday, along with a one-time 5% bonus.
Liz Shuler, president of the AFL-CIO, noted that LAUSD has a $4.9 billion surplus and said the district must use those funds to "invest in staff, students, and educators."
SEIU Local 99 members voted to authorize a strike in February, and said the limited three-day action is a protest against the district's negotiating tactics.
LAUSD has claimed the strike is unlawful and that workers are actually staging the walkout over pay without having exhausted all bargaining avenues. A state board over the weekend denied the district's request to block the strike.
As In These Timesreported, negotiations between the district and SEIU Local 99—as well as separate ongoing talks with the teachers' union about educators' contracts—are being led by Superintendent Alberto M. Carvalho, "whose $440,000 salary is nearly 10 times that of a starting salary for a LAUSD teacher."
"LAUSD won't get away with underfunding our schools," tweeted UTLA last week. "This is for our students, for our communities and for our lives."
Keep ReadingShow Less
20 Years Later, the Stain of Corporate Media's Role in Promoting Iraq War Remains
"It should not be forgotten that this debacle of death and destruction was not only a profound error of policymaking; it was the result of a carefully executed crusade of disinformation and lies," said one prominent critic.
Mar 20, 2023
As the world this week mark the 20th anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, journalism experts weighed in on the corporate media's complicity in amplifying the Bush administration's lies, including ones about former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's nonexistent nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons upon which the war was waged.
"Twenty years ago, this country's mainstream media—with one notable exception—bought into phony Bush administration claims about Hussein's stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, helping cheerlead our nation into a conflict that ended the lives of thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis," Los Angeles Times columnist Robin Abcarian wrote Sunday.
That "one notable exception" was a group of journalists at the Washington, D.C. bureau of Knight Ridder—which was acquired by McClatchy in 2006—who published dozens of articles in several of the company's papers debunking and criticizing the Bush administration's dubious claims about Iraq and its WMDs. Their efforts were the subject of the 2017 Rob Reiner film Shock and Awe, starring Woody Harrelson.
"The war—along with criminally poor post-war planning on the part of Bush administration officials—also unleashed horrible sectarian strife, led to the emergence of ISIS, and displaced more than 1 million Iraqis," Abcarian noted.
She continued:
That sad chapter in American history produced its share of jingoistic buzzwords and phrases: "WMD," "the axis of evil," "regime change," "yellowcake uranium," "the coalition of the willing," and a cheesy but terrifying refrain, repeated ad nauseam by Bush administration officials such as then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice: "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
"Of course," wrote Abcarian, "there was never any smoking gun, mushroom-shaped or not."
According to the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit investigative journalism organization, Bush and top administration officials—including then-Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Rice—"made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq."
Those lies were dutifully repeated by most U.S. corporate mainstream media in what the center called "part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."
"It should not be forgotten that this debacle of death and destruction was not only a profound error of policymaking; it was the result of a carefully executed crusade of disinformation and lies," David Corn, the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for Mother Jones, asserted Monday.
Far from paying a price for amplifying the Bush administration's Iraq lies, many of the media hawks who acted more like lapdogs than watchdogs 20 years ago are today ensconced in prestigious and well-paying positions in media, public policy, and academia.
In a where-are-they-now piece for The Real News Network, media critic Adam Johnson highlighted how the careers of several media and media-related government professionals "blossomed" after their lie-laden selling of the Iraq War:
- David Frum—Bush's lead writer who coined the term "Axis of Evil" to refer to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—is "a well-paid and influential columnist for The Atlantic and a mainstay of cable TV."
- Jeffrey Goldberg, then a New Yorker reporter who pushed conspiracy theories linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11 and al-Qaeda to Iraq, is now editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.
- MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, an erstwhile Iraq War hawk, rebranded himself as a critic of the invasion and occupation, and is a multimillionaire morning show host on that same network.
- Fareed Zakaria hosts "Fareed Zakaria GPS" on CNN and writes a weekly column for The Washington Post.
- Anne Applebaum, a member of the Post's editorial board at the time who called evidence of Iraq's nonexistent WMDs "irrefutable," now writes for The Atlantic and is a senior fellow at the Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies.
"The almost uniform success of all the Iraq War cheerleaders provides the greatest lesson about what really helps one get ahead in public life: It's not being right, doing the right thing, or challenging power, but going with prevailing winds and mocking anyone who dares to do the opposite," wrote Johnson.
Other journalists not on Johnson's list include MSNBC's Chris Matthews—who infamously proclaimed "we're all neocons now" as U.S. forces toppled Hussein's statue while conquering Baghdad—and "woman of mass destruction"Judith Miller, who although forced to resign from The New York Times in disgrace over her regurgitated Bush administration lies about Iraq's WMDs remained an influential media figure over the following years.
In an interview with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft—which is hosting a discussion Wednesday about the media's role in war and peace—Middle East expert Assal Rad noted:
Rather than challenging the narrative of the state, calling for evidence, or even humanizing the would-be victims of the war, the Iraqi people, reporters such as Thomas Friedman with significant platforms like The New York Times most often parroted the talking points of U.S. officials. There was little critical journalism to question the existence of WMDs and little reflection on important issues, such as the U.S. role in supporting Saddam Hussein in the 1980s against Iran, international law, or the humanity of Iraqis.
While there was some contrition from outlets including the Times as the Iraq occupation continued for years and not the "five days or five weeks or five months" promised by Rumsfeld, journalist Jon Schwarz of The Intercept noted that media lies and distortions about the war continue to this day.
"Perhaps the most telling instance of the media's acquiescence was a year after the Iraq invasion," said Rad, "when President Bush's joke at the White House Correspondents' dinner about finding no weapons of mass destruction was met with uproarious laughter from an audience of journalists."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Climate Groups Reject 'Risky, Untested' Technofixes in IPCC Report
"Solving the climate crisis is not about what works on paper but what delivers in practice. There is no time to waste with false solutions."
Mar 20, 2023
Longtime critics of "false solutions" to the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency responded to a United Nations report released Monday by reiterating their warnings about relying on underdeveloped and untested technologies that could enable major polluters to continue producing massive amounts of planet-heating emissions.
Noting the 2015 Paris agreement's two primary temperature targets for this century, the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report states that "all global modeled pathways that limit warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot, and those that limit warming to 2°C, involve rapid and deep and, in most cases, immediate" greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reductions in all sectors this decade.
"We must heed the IPCC's urgent messages, without falling into the trap of assuming that carbon dioxide removal will save the day."
Modeled mitigation pathways, the report continues, "include transitioning from fossil fuels without carbon capture and storage (CCS) to very low- or zero-carbon energy sources, such as renewables or fossil fuels with CCS, demand-side measures and improving efficiency, reducing non-CO2 GHG emissions," and carbon dioxide removal (CDR).
As the document details:
CCS is an option to reduce emissions from large-scale fossil-based energy and industry sources provided geological storage is available. When CO2 is captured directly from the atmosphere (DACCS), or from biomass (BECCS), CCS provides the storage component of these CDR methods. CO2 capture and subsurface injection is a mature technology for gas processing and enhanced oil recovery. In contrast to the oil and gas sector, CCS is less mature in the power sector, as well as in cement and chemicals production, where it is a critical mitigation option. The technical geological storage capacity is estimated to be on the order of 1000 GtCO2, is more than the CO2 storage requirements through 2100 to limit global warming to 1.5°C, although the regional availability of geological storage could be a limiting factor. If the geological storage site is appropriately selected and managed, it is estimated that the CO2 can be permanently isolated from the atmosphere.
"Implementation of CCS currently faces technological, economic, institutional, ecological environmental and socio-cultural barriers," the report notes. "Currently, global rates of CCS deployment are far below those in modeled pathways limiting global warming to 1.5°C to 2°C. Enabling conditions such as policy instruments, greater public support, and technological innovation could reduce these barriers."
The report further says that "biological CDR methods like reforestation, improved forest management, soil carbon sequestration, peatland restoration, and coastal blue carbon management can enhance biodiversity and ecosystem functions, employment and local livelihoods. However, afforestation or production of biomass crops can have adverse socioeconomic and environmental impacts, including on biodiversity, food and water security, local livelihoods, and the rights of Indigenous peoples, especially if implemented at large scales and where land tenure is insecure."
While the world's top scientists—and the governments that signed off on the report—recognized issues with CCS and CDR, climate campaigners expressed frustration that such technologies were featured as partial solutions.
"It's very alarming to see carbon dioxide removal featuring so centrally in the IPCC report," declared Sara Shaw at Friends of the Earth International (FOEI). "We can't rely on risky, untested, and downright dangerous removals technologies just because big polluters want us to stick to the status quo."
"A fair and fast phaseout of oil, gas, and coal needs to happen in this decade, and it can, with the right political will," she stressed. "We must heed the IPCC's urgent messages, without falling into the trap of assuming that carbon dioxide removal will save the day."
Fellow FOIE leader Hemantha Withanage explained that "in my country, Sri Lanka, the impacts of climate change are being felt now. We have no time to chase fairy tales like carbon removal technologies to suck carbon out of the air."
"The IPCC evidence is clear: Climate change is killing people, nature, and planet," he said. "The answers are obvious: a fair and fast phaseout of fossil fuels, and finance for a just transition. The fantasy of overshooting safe limits and betting on risky technofixes is certainly not a cure for the problem."
Lili Fuhr at the Center for International Environmental Law agreed that "the takeaway of the IPCC synthesis is irrefutable: An immediate, rapid, and equitable fossil fuel phaseout is the cornerstone of any strategy to avoid catastrophic levels of global warming."
"Building our mitigation strategies on models that instead lock in inequitable growth and conveniently assume away the risks of technofixes like carbon capture and storage and carbon dioxide removal ignores that clarion message and increases the likelihood of overshoot," Fuhr warned. "The most ambitious mitigation pathways put out by the IPCC set the floor, not the ceiling, for necessary climate action.
Research shows that overshooting Paris temperature targets, even temporarily, could dramatically raise the risk of the world experiencing dangerous "tipping points," as Common Dreamsreported in December. The IPCC report notes that "the higher the magnitude and the longer the duration of overshoot, the more ecosystems and societies are exposed to greater and more widespread changes in climatic impact-drivers, increasing risks for many natural and human systems."
As Corporate Accountability director of climate research and policy Rachel Rose Jackon put it Monday: "Breaching 1.5°C is not an option. Governments will be effectively signing millions of avoidable death warrants for those who contributed least to the crisis."
While arguing that the IPCC document "demands a last and final reckoning" that leads to Global North governments "doing their fair share," the campaigner also emphasized that "the report should have actually named the solutions that will keep us below 1.5°C instead of leaving the door open for an inadequate suite of industry-backed removals and dangerous distractions."
Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter targeted U.S. lawmakers and President Joe Biden in a statement Monday.
"The IPCC is sending one key message above all else: We must stop burning fossil fuels, drilling for fossil fuels, and building new infrastructure to deliver fossil fuels," Hauter said. "Unfortunately, policymakers continue to lock in new dirty energy schemes—most notably the Biden administration's approval of a massive new oil drilling project in Alaska."
"Tragically, Congress and the White House continue to waste money on carbon removal technologies that have been a failure. Relying on these scams instead of taking actions to stop fossil fuel expansion will only lead to further climate catastrophe," she added. "President Biden's actions to expand oil and gas drilling and ramp up fossil fuel exports undermine his professed climate goals and invite further catastrophe. The IPCC's message is clear, and political leaders must answer the call with actions to match the moment."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular
SUPPORT OUR WORK.
We are independent, non-profit, advertising-free and 100%
reader supported.
reader supported.