As You Deplore Trump On This MLK Day Consider The gods Of The Judiciary And The Damage To The Lives of Black People and All Of Us In Their Mild Words

The well manicured, well spoken racism of Rehnquist and Roberts, of Alito and Scalia, the twisted hatred of people of color of Thomas, was doing worse than Trump before Trump started running for president, the most damaging attacks on civil rights, on the most basic rights of The People of all races which Martin Luther King jr. gave his life for.   Trump is just catching up to what these black robed judicial klansmen have been doing with the frequent help of Kennedy and their new colleague in judicial klansmanship,  Gorsuch.  Because they've all been to elite universities and have law clerks from the same prep-ivy pipeline of servants of plutocracy their racism isn't issued in gutter talk, it's worse for being issued in anodyne, scholarly words that have real legal and political potency that all of Trump's tweeted and babbled racist language doesn't.   They are the real force behind the real attack on minorities, women, on the poor, on any group which is likely to vote for Democrats instead of the Republican party which has practiced the politics of racism for more than half a century, now.

Trump will be gone one way or another either this year or in another.  His drugged up dementia will force that if his guzzling cheeseburgers in bed and other self indulgences doesn't bring on the inevitable heart attack or stroke he's overdue for.  The elite racists on the Supreme Court will be there for the rest of our lives. 

I have come more and more to think that the reputation of the Warren court, built on Brown v Board of Education and other such rulings was made too easily.  Along with that ruling they issued other rulings that were a time bomb enabling the multi-millionaires and billionaires who are the real danger to civil rights and democracy, the lives of people in the economic underclass, including many if not most of the people the Civil Rights and Voting Rights act were passed to protect.  It is no accident that when he was murdered Martin Luther King jr. was starting a campaign for economic justice, which had always been a component of every liberation movement in American history.  Slavery was an economic injustice, the theft of the lives of Black People for the economic benefit of the slave holders and the Northern economic interests that worked with them to cement racism and slavery into the Constitution, the legal tools and implements that were put there to benefit White Men including that which gave Trump the presidency even as he lost the election.  Jim Crow was the reimposition of slavery and it benefits to the white elites as certainly as the laws favoring wage slavery were.   And what you can say about the economic oppression of Black People, you can say about the poor of any identified group. 

Many of the most liberal members of past courts, even Thurgood Marshall, were part of rulings which ended up enabling the billionaire oligarchs to propagandize the American People out of democracy, they were encouraged to do so by the American Civil Liberties Union lawyers, many of the most prominent of them from the same prep-ivy pipeline mentioned above.  As it is turning out, the Court, which gave itself the power to strike down laws based on its reading of the Constitution is the real foundation of the Republican-fascist-racist power, the modern successor of the slave power which has blighted this country since before the Constitution was written of by and for them and for the perpetuation of that power.  The law schools indoctrinate their students in the deification of that document and including all of its malign text and lore.  The history of civil rights in the hands of the Supreme Court shows that what they give so parsimoniously they take away many fold.   The real history of the Supreme Court, told as if The People matter, as if equal rights under the law, equal justice, and democracy matter would be a scandal that makes Trump look like a small time player.

I have lost any faith that things improved will not be dragged back down under the Constitution as it is and when the Court has the ability to drag it down on behalf of the billionaire oligarchs.  I have seen through the ACLU and the civil liberties industry for which what I said about the court could be said, perhaps more so.  I think the motives of many of the members of the ACLU were never really about civil rights, certainly less so the rights of poor people, I think they were a counter-productive series of stands perhaps mostly focused on attacks against religion.   Their part in the rulings such as Buckley vs. Valeo, Citizens United and other such "free speech" rulings have negated just about everything they love to put up as their emblematic stands.   What they did in those washed away the laws passed by Congress, bought with the blood of so many martyrs with lawyerly ink.   They have enabled billionaires with their "money-speech" to drown out the speech of those without billions, to turn the mass media into an industry that lies on behalf of the billionaires.   Any rational, informed liberal who puts their faith on such things is duped by their mild words and soft hands and elite credentials.  And some of the smartest among us have been such dupes.  Especially those in the media who have a financial and professional interest in the very media so enabled and so used.