Dark Money, Corporate Corruption And Right Wing Networks; and The US Supreme Court And US Democracy Going Forward

Dark Money, Corporate Corruption And Right Wing Networks

We are at a pivotal moment in this country and the coming year may will decide whether we can right the course of history. Nancy MacLean’s important book Democracy in Chains revealed the Rights decades long stealth campaign to reverse engineer America back to the days when the robber barons reigned supreme and rigged the legal and constitutional rules to work in their favor.

Professor MacLean wrote that Trump and the forces of the right are actively trying to rig the conducting and counting of elections, state by state, as they create a frightening autocratic, post truth society few would have ever thought possible in America.

The January 6th insurrection was a dress rehearsal for a Trump coup attempt in 2024. If he loses the election Trump and his far right supporters are laying the groundwork in state legislatures to take control of the electoral process to reverse the loss and claim a victory.

The alliances between the corporate state, Trump, and white nationalists have seen a flood of dark money to subvert free and fair elections, block climate and economic justice legislation, push for a constitutional convention to permanently guarantee the rule of the rich, and the crippling of the federal governments ability to protect working families, the environment, and promote equity for all.

The investigative journalism published by the Center for Media and Democracy has exposed groups on the far right like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Heritage Action, and the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) which are working hard to suppress the vote, tear down the firewall to protected our democracy in 2020 and put Trump acolytes in positions of power where they can subvert future elections.

ALECExposed.org

Guest – David Armiak who is Research Director with the Center for Media and Democracy. He has conducted extensive investigations on dark money, corporate corruption, and right wing networks, and is responsible for filing and analyzing hundreds of public records request every year.

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The US Supreme Court And US Democracy Going Forward

The Supreme Court as presently constituted has six reactionary judges and three liberal minded ones. Progressive people are alarmed by its recent decisions and fearful of what it will do in the future.

One of the liberals on the court is Steven Breyer. He’ 83 years old. Should he retire, it would give the Democrats the opportunity to try to appoint a replacement who is not a reactionary. This will be an uphill battle, but it is a fight well worth it.

A right-winger will certainly get the job if a Republican president and a Republican controlled Senate in the year 2024 choose a successor to Breyer if he dies or retires

When Barack Obama was president, he hinted to the liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was 80 years old and a two-time cancer patient, to step down but she declined. Ginsburg died while still serving as a Justice of the Supreme Court. Republicans in the Senate would not allow a vote for Judge Merrick Garland, whom Obama had nominated for the Supreme Court seat. Ginsburg was then replaced by the young right-winger Brett Kavanaugh who joined two other young right-wing Trump judges.

The Trump-dominated Republican party is well aware that to topple democracy they must take over the courts. The current Roberts Court has for more than a decade consistently leveled this attack on democracy by eviscerating the Voting Right Act, unleashing unlimited corporate monies into elections, allowed clearly partisan gerrymandering of elections, and is now training its sights against reproductive choice by severely restricting abortion rights.

Yale historian Jason Stanley has recently written, There is every reason to believe that the court will allow even the simplest of democracy to crumble as long as laws are passed by gerrymandered republican state houses that make anti-democratic practices, including stealing elections, legal.

Guest – attorney Martin Garbus, a constitutional litigator who has represented Steven Donziger, Nelson Mandela, Daniel Ellsberg, and Lenny Bruce.

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