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How a Tiny Alaskan Indian Tribe Got Billions in Pentagon Contracts by Jeffrey St. Clair; Dems and Dives by Alexander Cockburn; Spooky Grants: More on the CIA's Recruitment of Campus Professors by David Price. Remember these stories are available exclusively in the print edition of CounterPunch. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
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Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY  Today's Stories March 31, 2005 Jeff Halper March 30, 2005 Gary Leupp Ralph Nader
/ Kevin Zeese Chase Madar Toni Solo Jackie Corr Ahmad Faruqui Mike Roselle Jude Wanniski Francis A.
Boyle Jeffrey St.
Clair Website of
the Day
March 29, 2005 Ralph Nader Gary Leupp Sonia Cardenas Stew Albert Mark Weisbrot Dave Lindorff Carl G. Estabrook
March 28, 2005 Jeremy Scahill Sonali Kolhatkar Sasha Kramer Kevin Zeese Tom Stephens Dr. Teresa Whitehurst Newton Garver Paul Craig
Roberts Website of the Day
March 26 / 27, 2005 Gary Leupp Peter Linebaugh Marc Robert Laura Carlsen Saul Landau
/ Puja Patel Dave Foreman Fred Gardner Jennifer Matsui Dave Lindorff Dharma Adhikari Joshua Frank Patrick Barr Christopher
Brauchli Ramzy Baroud Jackie Corr Ben Tripp Dr. Susan Block Mickey Z. Justin Taylor Richard Joseph Poets' Basement
March 25, 2005 Scott Richard
Lyons Yoshie Furuhashi Pat Williams Mark Engler Rahul Mahajan Lance Selfa Ralph Nader John R. Llewellyn Jo Guldi
March 24, 2005 Joshua Frank Talli Nauman Martin Espada Dave Lindorff Elaine Cassel Jack McCarthy Jack Random Barbara Ferguson Suzan Mazur Dorreen Yellow Bird Andrew Wimmer
and Mark Chmiel
Patrick Bond Mike Whitney Becky White Michael Donnelly Niranjan Ramakrishnan Ashley Smith David Swanson Derrick O'Keefe Paul A. Moore Dalton Walker Patrick Cockburn
March 22, 2005 William Blum Jim Vallette Greg Moses John Farley Ron Jacobs M. Junaid Alam Rep. Cynthia
McKinney Dave Lindorff James Petras
March 21, 2005 John Walsh Werther Mike Stark David Swanson James T. Phillips Mike Ferner Robert Jensen Paul Craig
Roberts Stew Albert Website of
the Day
March 19, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Tom Reeves Saul Landau Alan Maass Ron Jacobs David Green John Blair Steve Greenfield Ben Tripp Mike Roselle Joshua Frank Mark Weisbrot Dave Lindorff Sarah Schaffer Warren Hastings Poets' Basement
March 18, 2005 Dave Zirin Richard Thieme John Walsh David Swanson Ben Terrall David Boyle Dorreen Yellow Bird Mokhiber /
Weissman Greg Moses Website of
the Day
March 17, 2005 Christopher
Brauchli Bill Quigley Brian Cloughley Gary Bass / Adam Hughes Dave Lindorff Jude Wanniski Alexander Billet John Ross Website of the Day
March 16, 2005 Ralph Nader William Cook Kevin Zeese Jackie Corr Alan Maass David R. Kolker Cindy Ellen
Hill Paul Craig
Roberts
March 15, 2005 Gary Leupp Dave Lindorff Greg Moses Hadas Their
/ Katrina Yeaw Alison Weir Matt Koehler Evelyn Pringle Harry Browne
March 14, 2005 Ralph Nader David Miller Stan Cox Mike Roselle David Swanson Simona Sharoni Dave Lindorff Dorreen Yellow Bird Tom Barry Website of the Day
March 12 / 13, 2005 David H. Price Noam Chomsky Laura Carlsen Stan Goff Valentina Nicoli Michael Leonardi Saul Landau
/ Sarah Anderson Joe Bageant Manuel García,
Jr. Greg Moses James J. Brittain Ben Tripp Joshua Frank Fred Gardner Walter Brasch Ramzy Baroud Christopher
Brauchli Michael Donnelly Ron Jacobs Richard Oxman Poets' Basement
March 11, 2005 Jerry Fresia Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff William James
Martin Muqtedar Khan Kathryn Ledebur Mike Whitney Dave Zirin Website of the Day
March 10, 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts John Marc Leas, Colleen McLaughlin
and Ashley Smith Larry Birns Michael Donnelly Luis Gomez Jackie Corr Uri Avnery Website of the Day
March 9, 2005 Jeffrey St.
Clair Ward Churchill Robert Fisk Bernice Powell Jackson Mickey Z. Dave Zirin Michael Donnelly James Reiss Vijay Prashad
March 8, 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts Robert Fisk Kurt Nimmo Suzan Mazur Evelyn Pringle Giuliana Sgrena Elaine Cassel
March 7, 2005 Dave Zirin Brian Cloughley John Chuckman Mike Whitney Mark Weisbrot Fred Gardner Richard Neville Uri Avnery
March 5 / 6, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Gary Leupp Ron Jacobs Tom Reeves Jenna Orkin Tom Barry Joshua Frank Moshe Adler Jane Stillwater Omar Barghouti / Jacqueline
Sfeir Christopher
Brauchli John Pilger Raúl
Zibechi David Krieger Three Takes on Nepal Surendra R. Devkota Bhishma Karki Joseph Pietri Ben Tripp Poets' Basement Website of
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March 4, 2005 Frederick Hudson
March 3, 2005 Pat Williams Brian Cloughley Dave Lindorff Amira Hass Greg Moses Lynne Landes Nelson P. Valdés John Ross
March 2, 2005 Saul Landau
/ Farrah Hassen Mike Roselle M. Junaid Alam Suzan Mazur Jackson Thoreau Michael Donnelly Jeffrey St.
Clair Website of the Day
March 1, 2005 Scott Richard
Lyons David Lindorff Patrick Cockburn
/ David Enders Ron Jacobs Tanya Garcia Joseph Pietri Kona Lowell Paul Craig
Roberts Website of
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Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Subcomandante
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March 31, 2005 The Bizarre Legal Philosophy of Justice Janice Rogers BrownFirst Amendment Protection for On-the-Job Racism?By MITCHELL ZIMMERMAN You've just started your new job and you're eager to fit into the workplace and make a good impression on everyone. You make a friendly comment to the person who works next to you, but she responds: "Don't bother, yid, I don't make friends with Jew Christ-killers." You're shocked, but you don't say anything to anyone. But that's only the beginning. When you return from lunch, the worker on the other side of you says, "Good afternoon, kike, did you have a nice ham sandwich?" They laugh at how uncomfortable you are - actually, your hands are shaking - and whenever they need to talk to you in connection with the job, they call you "kike," "yid" or "Jew girl." Soon they are making jokes about the Holocaust: When one of them comes back from the restroom, she asks the other, "Can we ask the company to order some of that soap they made out of Jews in Auschwitz?" "Nah," the other responds, "they stopped making Jew soap because they ran out of Jews." You complain to your boss but she says, "Nothing I can do about it. They have the right to free speech under the First Amendment." "But," you reply, "it's impossible for me to work here if people attack me this way because I'm Jewish." "Well, if you can't stand it, you can quit." You're a nervous wreck when you get home. But after a week you decide you're not going to quit. You don't think this is what free speech is about, and you're going to sue for employment discrimination. You are going to ask a court to order these employees not to attack you at work with racial or religious epithets that make it impossible for you to do your job. Will the First Amendment bar your lawsuit? Definitely not. Virtually every court that has considered the matter has concluded that racist speech can create a hostile, abusive and discriminatory work environment, and that when it does so, a court can stop it. No court in recent decades has held that the First Amendment gives people the right to use speech to harass fellow workers on racial or religious grounds at work. Just as a court can order a company to take down a "Whites Only" sign outside its employment office, even though this is "speech," so judges have consistently held that other words can constitute unlawful racial discrimination, and that when they do, the courts must step in and call a halt to such discrimination. That is the established view under American law, supported by years of precedent. But it is not the view of Janice Rogers Brown, President Bush's nominee to the D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Brown, a member of the California Supreme Court, is one of 12 judicial nominees previously rejected due to their extremist positions, whose nominations were recently exhumed by Bush. The Senate Judiciary Committee has now begun its reconsideration of these individuals. As a California Supreme Court justice, Brown dissented from a decision barring just the kind of speech discussed above. The plaintiffs in Aguilar v. Avis Rent A Car, 21 Cal.4th 121, were Hispanic workers who sought protection from racist epithets and abuse in the workplace. It was undisputed that the Avis manager had employed racial slurs and engaged in racist harassment so continual and severe as to create a hostile and discriminatory environment for the Hispanic workers. The only issue before the California Supreme Court was whether they were entitled to a court order that the manager could not subject them to racist invective at work in the future. Contrary to the majority of the California Supreme Court - and to virtually every federal court that has considered such issues since the U.S. Supreme Court's decisions upholding injunctions against harassing speech that creates a hostile work environment - Justice Brown voted to leave the workers unprotected. Issuing an injunction, in her unusual view, would amount to censoring and suppressing "disfavored ideas from the popular discourse." Never mind that nothing stopped the supervisor from making racist speeches anywhere outside the workplace. And never mind that racist diatribes are the kind of "discourse" calculated to drive ethnic or racial minorities from the workplace. The views of President Bush's nominee are not only contrary to common sense; they contradict a long line of U.S. Supreme Court and lower court rulings that have never supported a right to abuse workers with racist language on free speech grounds. Revealingly, free speech concerns received different treatment by Justice Brown in Intel v. Hamdi, 30 Cal.4th 1342, where Brown's dissent asserted that the corporation had a First Amendment "right not to listen." Hamdi was a 2003 case involving the intersection of property rights, free speech and the hoary tort of "trespass to chattel." Used in bygone eras to address such wrongs as having your cow chased by mischievous persons, trespass to chattel has been reborn in the Internet era as a possible source of relief against persons who access a Web site for unauthorized purposes. Hamdi was a former Intel employee; on six occasions he dispatched e-mails to thousands of Intel workers criticizing the company's employment practices. Intel objected to the contents of the messages and demanded that Hamdi cease sending e-mail to its employees at their Intel addresses. When he refused, Intel sued for trespass to chattel, arguing that it was harmed because its employees were distracted by the messages. The California Supreme Court denied Intel's claim. The majority held that Hamdi's use of the open Intel e-mail system for its intended use, e-mail communication, resulted in no harm to Intel's system and did not cause the kind of "damage" required for trespass to chattel. Since, moreover, Intel's real concern was the e-mails' content, the lead opinion in Hamdi warned that enjoining Hamdi's communications might impair First Amendment interests. Not so, however, according to Justice Brown's dissenting view. Intel's property rights in its unaffected computer system were paramount, and indeed reinforced, in Brown's view, by a First Amendment "right not to listen" - notwithstanding that the corporation was not itself the audience for Hamdi's speech, and that Hamdi removed from his e-mail list anyone who objected to his e-mails. Curiously, though Justice Brown was vociferous in asserting the unqualified right of the corporation not to listen to Hamdi's speech, she somehow neglected to notice this important constitutional right in the case of the Avis employees who had been subjected to racist epithets in the workplace. Intel had a far-reaching constitutional right not to listen. But Hispanic employees assailed with personal, racist invective in the workplace, invective that actually created a hostile work environment, apparently had no right not to listen. Indeed, any effort to protect those workers represented "censorship" in Justice Brown's view, and the availability of injunctive relief against such workplace harassment meant "the Legislature is now free to prohibit the expression of ideas it dislikes." In another dissent consistent with Brown's hostility to anti-bias plaintiffs, in 2000, Brown reached back to a Civil War era federal banking law in order to assert that California was barred from granting relief to a bank branch manager for employment discrimination - on the theory that the 1864 federal act pre-empted California's Fair Employment and Housing Act. (Peatros v. Bank of America, 22 Cal.4th 147.) The federal enactment originally gave bank directors complete discretion to fire officers, based on the ever-present risk (at that time) that banks could be destroyed by a "run on the bank," if depositors lost confidence in their bankers' integrity and raced to withdraw their savings before it was too late. In asserting that the 136-year-old federal banking law pre-empted the state antidiscrimination law, the anachronistic Justice Brown ignored the fact that subsequent federal antidiscrimination enactments had (as many courts had recognized) already amended the old law in a way that precluded any inconsistency with anti-discrimination law. In her final departure from reality, Justice Brown asserted that the original rationale for unfettered corporate power to fire bank employees was just as compelling in the 21st century as it had been in the 19th, notwithstanding the fact that the New Deal's deposit insurance program had essentially ended the phenomenon of the run on the bank. Justice Brown's refusal to notice that New Deal legislation (among other developments since the middle of the 19th century) had undermined the basis of her argument was not entirely surprising because Brown believes that the New Deal was part of what she terms "the reign of socialism" and that Americans have been living under "collectivism" since the New Deal. Indeed, in an April 2000 speech to the Federalist Society, Justice Brown paired "the Revolutions of 1917 and 1937." 1917, of course, is the date of the Russian Revolution. "The latter date," Justice Brown explained "marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution." What happened in 1937 that, to Justice Brown, was comparable to that the Bolshevik Revolution? After decades in which the Supreme Court invalidated social welfare measures, regulatory laws and New Deal enactments, two Supreme Court justices switched sides. Thereafter, a new majority of the high court permitted legislative majorities to address pressing social and economic problems notwithstanding possible effects on the supposed rights of property owners. It's all been downhill since then. In the degraded, collectivist society we now inhabit as a result, according to Brown, "senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren" by seeking more government benefits, "most of us no longer find slavery abhorrent" but "embrace it," and our democracy has been "transformed into a Kleptocracy - a license to steal, a warrant for oppression." Just what were the New Deal enactments that Justice Brown reviles as "collectivism," giving rise to these horrors? - Social Security, unemployment insurance, wage and hour and child labor laws, pure food and drug regulation, bank deposit insurance, the right to form unions, welfare benefits for the handicapped, regulation of financial institutions and stock markets, and, of course, taxation. These measures formed the foundation for a social contract that endured for generations in America, but is now under attack by the right, in which corporate supremacy was essentially unchallenged, in exchange for limited consideration of the needs of society as a whole, reasonable living standards for most Americans and minimal protections for the most desperate and needy. Justice Brown's bizarre view that this social contract constitutes "collectivism" is much more than a curiosity because her appointment to the important D.C. Circuit (and possibly thereafter to the U.S. Supreme Court) would give her the power to try to reverse these "socialist" triumphs. Brown certainly means to try. She has advised that conservative judges need not be concerned with the "activist" label and urges judges to be "audacious enough to invoke higher law," by which she means a judge-imposed vision of so-called natural law that protects property from the will of the majority. Brown's openly expressed nostalgia for the Lochner era, in which judges imposed their laissez-faire economic philosophy and thwarted democratic decision making, is more than idle theorizing. The largely Republican judiciary has already deployed what amounts to a new Lochnerism, imposing an aggressive and baseless theory of federalism and the takings clause to strike down national and state regulatory efforts, at the same time that they curtail individual liberties in service of the national security state. The Republican judges' war on democracy has only begun, but one is reminded of Iran, in which the powers of freely elected leaders and an emerging democracy have been nullified by unelected religious leaders. If the federal judiciary comes to be dominated by the likes of Janice Rogers Brown, it may turn out to matter little who wins control of the legislative and executive branches in future elections. President Bush's ultra-conservative judicial ayatollahs will be in a position to guide and chastise the unruly majorities who fail to understand the need to elevate the interests of property in the name of the higher law. Mitchell Zimmerman, a former SNCC organizer and co-author of Dr. Spock on Vietnam, is a partner at a high-tech firm in Mountain View, California and focuses on intellectual property. He can be reached at m@mitchellzimmerman.com. This article first appeared
in March 18, 2005 issue of The Recorder.
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