#louis d. brandeis

[galerymod]

Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.

Louis D. Brandeis

As long as injustice exists, resistance is the duty of every humanistically socialized person, because it is the only way to ensure that history changes for the better.

mod

[linusjf]

Louis D. Brandeis: Sin Of Neutrality

“Neutrality is at times a graver sin than belligerence.” —Louis D. Brandeis. http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/96795389

[aunti-christ-ine]

[waiting-eyez]

If we desire respect for the law, We must first make the law respectable.

(Louis D Brandeis)

[bouncinghedgehog]

[postersbykeith]

[kick-a-long]

y

Haley Cohen

September 4, 2024

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The new school year is bringing fresh protections for Jewish students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, following the administration’s announcement on Tuesday that its nondiscrimination policy will now extend to harassment or discrimination based on Jewish students’ connections to Israel and Zionism.

The guidelines are part of a new agreement with Hillel International, Illini Hillel and the Jewish United Fund, Chicago’s federation, and it comes as several elite universities have received criticism for a lack of transparency about specific messaging as to what university policies are and how they are going to be enforced.

Under the agreement, announced on Tuesday, the University of Illinois declared that the protections offered by the university’s nondiscrimination policy extend to harassment or discrimination of Jewish students, including harassment or discrimination based on Jewish students’ connections to Israel and Zionism.

UIUC published a set of examples, for the first time, of discrimination and harassment of protected classes as part of its nondiscrimination policy.

The examples include the use of antisemitic slurs and stereotypes, blaming a Jewish student for Israel’s policies, physical contact with an individual and derogatory or hostile messages on social media.

In 2020, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the law firm of Arnold & Porter filed a Title VI complaint on behalf of University of Illinois Jewish students who alleged antisemitism on campus. Also on Tuesday, a resolution agreement issued by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) was reached.

Catherine Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education, said that UIUC “has now agreed to take the steps necessary to ensure its education community can learn, teach, and work without an unredressed antisemitic hostile environment, or any other hostility related to stereotypes about shared ancestry.”

Lonnie Nasatir, president of JUF, told Jewish Insider that “the terms in this settlement are the best achieved across the country and will have a significant positive impact on the campus climate for Jewish students.”

Additionally, the university agreed to publish a summary report of bias incidents every month, commit to mandatory antisemitism training for administrators and students and hire an expert on campus antisemitism to enhance the university policies.

The agreement does not include implementation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism, a definition that mainstream Jewish groups and congressional leaders have called for universities to adopt as schools confront antisemitism on campus. .

In a statement, Robert Jones, UIUC’s chancellor, said that the university is “deeply committed to implementing the Mutual Understandings we are announcing today and to working together to provide a safe and supportive educational environment for our entire Jewish student community and for all students at Illinois.”

Erez Cohen, executive director at Illini Hillel, said in a separate statement that Hillel will “work alongside UIUC during the implementation of their new policies and to help reaffirm their promise to protect the rights of Jewish students on campus.”

While antisemitism on campuses has skyrocketed since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks and the subsequent war in Gaza, the university’s agreement with Jewish groups had already been in discussion for several years. An OCR investigation from 2015 through December 2023 found 135 allegations of anti-Jewish discrimination (compared to four related to anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian or anti-Arab discrimination). Incidents in the OCR investigation include flyers distributed around campus via plastic bags containing rocks stating, “Every single aspect of the Covid agenda is Jewish” and a student throwing a rock toward an event at the Hillel Center.

Brandeis Center President Alyza Lewin said in a statement that “UIUC’s administration began engaging in meaningful discussions with the Jewish community about how to address antisemitism on campus after we filed our OCR complaint years ago.”

Lewin called the agreement “a significant milestone,” adding that it will “when implemented, improve the campus climate for Jewish students

[antisemitism-us]

Marci Miller, director of Legal Investigation with the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law – a plaintiff in the lawsuit – said in a Thursday phone interview that efforts to keep the public out of the creation of these courses were deliberate by district officials.

“With discovery, we learned that there certainly was intent to exclude the Jewish community from any consideration of the curriculum, and it is the right of the public in general to be included in these things,” Miller said.

“There cannot be these secret meetings, secret development of curriculum behind closed doors in a legislative body, and that’s what we have here.”

The lawsuit alleges a host of antisemitic material in numerous courses. 

“Based on the materials available to the public (and it is unclear whether this is everything), at least five ethnic studies courses approved by the SAUSD Board, including ethnic studies courses in World History, English, and World Geography, include one-sided anti-Israel screeds and propaganda that teaches students—falsely—that Israel is an illegitimate, ‘settler colonial,’ ‘racist’ country that ‘stole’ land from a pre-existing country called Palestine and engages in unprovoked warfare against Palestinian Arabs,” alleges the lawsuit. 

[eretzyisrael]

by Dion J. Pierre

The presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have been called to testify before the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce on Dec. 5 about rising antisemitism on college campuses in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.

“Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen countless examples of antisemitic demonstrations on college campuses. Meanwhile, college administrators have largely stood by, allowing horrific rhetoric to fester and grow,” the committee’s chair, US Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), said in a statement.

“College and university presidents have a responsibility to foster and uphold a safe learning environment for their students and staff,” the congresswoman continued. “Now is not a time for indecision or milquetoast statements. By holding this hearing, we are shining a spotlight on these campus leaders and demanding they take the appropriate action to stand strong against antisemitism.”

The announcement of the hearing came days after a new poll, released last week by Hillel International, found that 37 percent of Jewish college students have felt the need to hide their Jewish identity on campus since the Hamas atrocities, in which some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were murdered and 240 others taken as hostages into Gaza. The survey also found that 35 percent of respondents said there have been acts of hate or violence against Jews on campus. A majority of those surveyed said they were unsatisfied with their university’s response to those incidents.

Kenneth Marcus — founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, who recently appeared before the committee himself to discuss campus antisemitism — told The Algemeiner on Wednesday that the hearing stands to give the college presidents a “dose of reality.”

“My sense is that a lot of college leaders are working within echo chambers,” said Marcus, whose organization filed a lawsuit this week against the University of California, Berkeley alleging the school failed to respond to “unchecked” antisemitism. “They’re surrounded by ‘yes men,’ and they can lose touch with reality. The fact is that their handling of antisemitism on their campuses has been extraordinarily deficient. Considering the quality of their respective institutions, they should be embarrassed.”

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

It’s hard being a kid. In certain school districts, it’s even harder being a Jewish kid. Though antisemitism on college and university campuses is well documented, it is also encouraged, sanctioned, and even taught in some public school districts.

In February, the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Anti-Defamation League filed a complaint against the Berkeley Unified School District in California. The complaint alleged that the district “knowingly allowed its K-12 schools to become hostile environments for Jewish and Israeli…

[4libertylover]

"At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen." - Louis D. Brandeis

[cygneeclectique]

"We must make our choice. We may have democracy in this country, or we may have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

Louis D. Brandeis, as quoted by Raymond Lonergan in Mr. Justice Brandeis, Great American (1941, p. 42)

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 6.5 (before 1960)

1086 – Tutush, brother of Seljuk sultan Malik Shah, defeats Suleiman ibn Qutalmish, the Turkish ruler of Anatolia in the battle of Ain Salm. 1257 – Kraków, in Poland, receives city rights. 1284 – Battle of the Gulf of Naples: Roger of Lauria, admiral to King Peter III of Aragon, destroys the Neapolitan fleet and captures Charles of Salerno. 1288 – The Battle of Worringen ends the War of the Limburg Succession, with John I, Duke of Brabant, being one of the more important victors. 1610 – The masque Tethys' Festival is performed at Whitehall Palace to celebrate the investiture of Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales. 1644 – The Qing dynasty's Manchu forces led by the Shunzhi Emperor take Beijing during the collapse of the Ming dynasty. 1794 – Haitian Revolution: Battle of Port-Républicain: British troops capture the capital of Saint-Domingue. 1798 – Battle of New Ross: The attempt to spread the United Irish Rebellion into Munster is defeated. 1817 – The first Great Lakes steamer, the Frontenac, is launched. 1829 – HMS Pickle captures the armed slave ship Voladora off the coast of Cuba. 1832 – The June Rebellion breaks out in Paris in an attempt to overthrow the monarchy of Louis Philippe. 1837 – Houston is incorporated by the Republic of Texas. 1849 – Denmark becomes a constitutional monarchy by the signing of a new constitution. 1851 – Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery serial, Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly, starts a ten-month run in the National Era abolitionist newspaper. 1862 – As the Treaty of Saigon is signed, ceding parts of southern Vietnam to France, the guerrilla leader Trương Định decides to defy Emperor Tự Đức of Vietnam and fight on against the Europeans. 1864 – American Civil War: Battle of Piedmont: Union forces under General David Hunter defeat a Confederate army at Piedmont, Virginia, taking nearly 1,000 prisoners. 1873 – Sultan Barghash bin Said of Zanzibar closes the great slave market under the terms of a treaty with Great Britain. 1883 – The first regularly scheduled Orient Express departs Paris. 1888 – The Rio de la Plata earthquake takes place. 1893 – The trial of Lizzie Borden for the murder of her father and step-mother begins in New Bedford, Massachusetts. 1900 – Second Boer War: British soldiers take Pretoria. 1915 – Denmark amends its constitution to allow women's suffrage. 1916 – Louis Brandeis is sworn in as a Justice of the United States Supreme Court; he is the first American Jew to hold such a position. 1916 – World War I: The Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire breaks out. 1917 – World War I: Conscription begins in the United States as "Army registration day". 1940 – World War II: After a brief lull in the Battle of France, the Germans renew the offensive against the remaining French divisions south of the River Somme in Operation Fall Rot ("Case Red"). 1941 – World War II: Four thousand Chongqing residents are asphyxiated in a bomb shelter during the Bombing of Chongqing. 1942 – World War II: The United States declares war on Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania. 1944 – World War II: More than 1,000 British bombers drop 5,000 tons of bombs on German gun batteries on the Normandy coast in preparation for D-Day. 1945 – The Allied Control Council, the military occupation governing body of Germany, formally takes power. 1946 – A fire in the La Salle Hotel in Chicago, Illinois, kills 61 people. 1947 – Cold War: Marshall Plan: In a speech at Harvard University, the United States Secretary of State George Marshall calls for economic aid to war-torn Europe. 1949 – Thailand elects Orapin Chaiyakan, the first female member of Thailand's Parliament. 1956 – Elvis Presley introduces his new single, "Hound Dog", on The Milton Berle Show, scandalizing the audience with his suggestive hip movements. 1959 – The first government of Singapore is sworn in.

[kp777]

By Thom Hartmann

Common Dreams

May 17, 2024

The ideology of the Republican Party and the stranglehold of powerful corporations of our political system overall has transformed America from a democracy into a late-stage oligarchy, and the point of no return is now visible.

The headline in this week’s Fortune reads:

“Billionaire investor Ray Dalio warns U.S. is ‘on the brink’ and estimates a more than 1 in 3 chance of civil war”

Billionaires and civil war? A billionaire-funded Supreme Court Justice flew the American flag upside down outside his house after January 6th in apparent support of Donald Trump‘s attempt to overthrow our government.

Americans for Tax Fairness reports that 50 billionaire families have, at this early stage, already injected almost a billion dollars into our political system — the overwhelming majority of it going to Republicans and in support of Donald Trump — in an effort to maintain enough control of our political system that their taxes won’t go up. And that total is just what’s reported: it doesn’t count the billions in unknowable dark money that’s sloshing around the system thanks to Citizens United.

Back in the day, the late Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis warned us:

“We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.”

The number one movie in America last month was Civil War. Right wing militias are on the march. More than half of Republicans say they are “expecting” a civil war.

How did we get here? And what does oligarchy have to do with civil war?

The clear result of five corrupt Republicans on the 1978 and 2010 Supreme Courts legalizing political bribery of politicians (and Supreme Court justices) by both corporations and the morbidly rich is that America is now well past the halfway mark of a fatal-to-democracy slide into oligarchy and the strongman autocracy typically associated with it. And the conflict that can follow that.

You can see the consequence in any contemporary survey. The majority of people want things — gun control, a strengthened social safety net, a cleaner and safer environment, quality, free education, higher taxes on the rich — that Congress refuses to do anything about because it is in thrall to great wealth.

As President Jimmy Carter told me eight years ago:

“It [Citizens United] violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. … So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.”

For example, just last week, Donald Trump solicited a $1 billion bribe from a group of fossil fuel executives in exchange for undoing all of President Biden’s climate regulations.

In a testament to how today’s form of transactional oligarchy has become normalized in America, the only national news organization that reported this shocking story was MSNBC; every other news outlet thought it was entirely normal for an American politician to have their hand out in exchange for legislative or policy changes. As Media Matters reported this week:

“CNN, Fox News Channel; ABC’s Good Morning America, World News Tonight, and This Week; CBS’ Mornings, Evening News, and Face the Nation; and NBC’s Today, Nightly News, and Meet the Press” all completely ignored the story.

What we are watching is the final stage of the 40-year neoliberal transition of our nation from a forward-looking and still-evolving democratic republic into a white supremacist ethnostate ruled by a small group of fascist oligarchs.

Some years ago, Trump economic adviser Stephen Moore (before he was Trump’s advisor) was a guest on my radio/TV program. I asked him, “Which is more important, democracy or capitalism?“

Without hesitation, Moore answered, “Capitalism.” He went on to imply this was how the Founders wanted things. After all, as George Orwell said:

“Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”

That philosophy and a phony American history have held the Republican Party in its thrall for the past 40+ years and have brought America to this moment of great crisis and danger.

It has transformed America from a democracy into a late-stage oligarchy, and the point of no return is now visible. Which presents a true crisis for America, because oligarchy is almost always merely a transitional phase in the evolution to full-blown tyranny and/or fascism, and often civil war.

Oligarchies are inherently unstable forms of government because they transfer resources and power from working people to the oligarchs. Average people, seeing that they’re constantly falling behind and can’t do anything about it, first become cynical and disengage, and, when things get bad enough, they try to revolt.

That “revolution” can either lead to the oligarchy failing and the nation flipping back to democracy, as happened here in the 1860s and the 1930s, or it can flip into full-blown strong-man tyranny, as happened recently in Hungary, Turkey, and Russia, and nearly happened here on January 6th.

Oligarchies usually become police states, where any average person who dares seriously challenge the ruling oligarchs is squashed like a bug either legally or financially; the oligarchs themselves are immune from prosecution and get to keep their billions regardless of how many people’s lives are ruined or die because of their crimes.

Oligarchic governments almost always do a few predictable things, as I lay out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy:

— They change monopoly laws and regulations so their rich buddies can take control of most of the nation’s businesses and media. — They stack the courts and regulatory agencies with oligarch-friendly ideologues or outright corrupt toadies, while eliminating regulatory protections for average citizens. — They cut taxes on the rich and drive wages low on working people while criminalizing and cracking down on dissent, particularly if it involves any sort of direct action or property damage. — They distract voters from their own looting by demonizing minorities and encouraging racism, religious/gender conflict, and regionalism. — They reinvent history to argue that the country was “always an oligarchy and that’s the way the nation’s founders wanted it. It’s what works best.” — They actively suppress the vote among people inclined to oppose them (typically minorities and the young), or outright rig the vote to insure their own victory. — And they transform their nations into police states, heavily criminalizing demonstrations, nonviolent resistance, or “direct action” while radicalizing and encouraging right wing vigilante “militias” to put down the inevitable pro-democracy rebellions as people realize what’s happening.

To the end of cementing their own oligarchy here, the billionaires who own the GOP are now actively promoting the same sort of revisionist history the Confederacy did, claiming that the Founders were all rich guys who hated taxes, wanted rich men to rule America, and wrote the Constitution to make that happen. It was a story popular in the South leading up to the Civil War, now part of the “Lost Cause” mythology.

To that end, they’re purging our schools and colleges of books and history courses; professors and teachers who don’t toe their line that America was designed from its founding to be an oligarchy are being fired as you read these words. In this, they’re promoting — for their own benefit — a dangerous lie.

A lie that rationalizes oligarchy.

While there were some in America among the Founders and Framers who had amassed great land holdings and what was perceived then as a patrician lifestyle, Pulitzer Prize winning author Bernard Bailyn suggests in his brilliant 2003 book To Begin the World Anew: The Genius and Ambiguities of the American Founders that they couldn’t hold a candle, in terms of wealth, to the true aristocrats of England.

With page after page of photographs and old paintings of the homes of the Founders and Framers, Bailyn shows that none of those who created this nation were rich by European standards. After an artful and thoughtful comparison of American and British estates, Bailyn concludes bluntly:

“There is no possible correspondence, no remote connection, between these provincial dwellings and the magnificent showplaces of the English nobility...”

Showing and describing to his readers the mansions of the families of power in 18th century Europe, Bailyn writes:

“There is nothing in the American World to compare with this.”

While the Founders and Framers had achieved a level of literacy, creativity, and a depth of thinking that rivaled that of any European states or eras, nonetheless, Bailyn notes:

“The Founders were provincials, alive to the values of a greater world, but not, they knew, of it – comfortable in a lesser world but aware of its limitations.”

As Kevin Phillips describes in his masterpiece book Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich:

“George Washington, one of the richest Americans, was no more than a wealthy squire in British terms.”

Phillips documents that it wasn’t until the 1790’s — a generation after the War of Independence — that the first American accumulated a fortune that would be worth one million of today’s dollars. The Founders and Framers were, at best, what today would be called the upper-middle-class in terms of lifestyle, assets, and disposable income.

In 1958, one of America’s great professors of history, Forrest McDonald, published an extraordinary book debunking Charles Beard’s 1913 hypothesis that the Constitution was created exclusively of, by, and for rich white men. McDonald’s book, titled We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution, bluntly states:

“Economic interpretation of the Constitution does not work.”

Over the course of more than 400 meticulously researched pages, McDonald goes back to original historical records and reveals who was promoting and who was opposing the new Constitution, and why. So far as I can tell, he is the first and only historian to do this type of original-source research, and his conclusions are startling.

McDonald notes that a quarter of all the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had voted in their own state legislatures for laws that would have helped debtors and the poor and thus harmed the interests of the rich.

“These [debt relief laws] were the very kinds of laws which, according to Beard’s hypothesis, the delegates had convened to prevent,” says McDonald. He adds: “Another fourth of the delegates had important economic interests that were adversely affected, directly and immediately, by the Constitution they helped write.”

While Beard theorizes that the Framers were largely drawn from the class of wealthy bankers and businessmen, McDonald shows that wasn’t true at all:

“The most common and by far the most important property holdings of the delegates were not, as Beard has asserted, mercantile, manufacturing, and public security investments, but agricultural property.”

Most were farmers or plantation owners and, as noted earlier, owning a lot of land did not always make one rich in those days, particularly compared to the bankers and mercantilists of New York and Boston.

“Finally,” McDonald concludes, “it is abundantly evident that the delegates, once inside the convention, behaved as anything but a consolidated economic group.”

After dissecting the means and motivations of the Framers who wrote the Constitution, McDonald goes into an exhaustive and detailed state-by-state analysis of the constitutional ratifying conventions that finally brought the U.S. Constitution into law.

For example, in the state of Delaware, which voted for ratification:

“[A]lmost 77 percent of the delegates were farmers, more than two-thirds of them small farmers with incomes ranging from 75 cents to $5.00 a week. Slightly more than 23 percent of the delegates were professional men – doctors, judges, and lawyers. None of the delegates was a merchant, manufacturer, banker, or speculator in western lands.”

In other states, similar numbers showed up. Of the New Jersey delegates supporting ratification, 64.1 percent were small farmers. In Maryland, “the opponents of ratification included from three to six times as large a proportion of merchants, lawyers, and investors in shipping, confiscated estates, and manufacturing as did the [poorer] delegates who favored ratification.”

In South Carolina it was those in economic distress who carried the day: “No fewer than 82 percent of the debtors and borrowers of paper money in the convention voted for ratification.” In New Hampshire, “of the known farmers in the convention 68.7 percent favored ratification.”

But did farmers support the Constitution because they were slave owners or the wealthiest of the landowners, as Charles Beard had guessed back in 1913?

McDonald shows that this certainly wasn’t the case in northern states like New Hampshire or New Jersey, which were not slave states.

But what about Virginia and North Carolina, the two largest slave-holding states, asks McDonald rhetorically. Were their plantation owners favoring the Constitution because it protected their economic and slave-holding interests?

“The opposite is true,” writes McDonald. “In both states the wealthy planters – those with personality interests [enslaved people] as well as those without personality interests – were divided approximately equally on the issue of ratification. In North Carolina small farmers and debtors were likewise equally divided, and in Virginia the great mass of the small farmers and a large majority of the debtors favored ratification.”

After dissecting the results of the ratification votes state by state — the first author in history to do so, as far as I can determine — McDonald sums up:

“Beard’s thesis — that the line of cleavage as regards the Constitution was between substantial personality interests [wealth and slave ownership] on the one hand and small farming and debtor interests on the other — is entirely incompatible with the facts.”

Here we find the explanation for James Madison sealing his notes on the Constitutional Convention until every man who participated was dead (they were finally published more than 50 years later in 1840). He and many others at the convention were essentially betraying their own economic class in favor of democracy. Something today’s wealthy Americans apparently can’t imagine doing.

No matter how hard Republicans try to reinvent the Founders and Framers of this nation in the image of their libertarian billionaire patrons, and no matter how imperfect and even brutal their time was, the simple reality is that in 1770’s America this nation’s Founders undertook American history’s first truly great progressive experiment.

And they all put their lives on the line to do it: when they signed their names on the Declaration, a death warrant was issued against each one of them by the largest and most powerful empire in the world.

And then, four generations later, we backslid.

The only other time in American history when an entire region of America was converted from a democracy into an oligarchy was the 1830-1860 era in the South. It’s why Republicans are so fond of the Confederate flag and Civil War memorial monuments.

The invention of the Cotton Gin made a few hundred families of southern planters richer than Midas; they seized political control of the region and then destroyed democracy in those states. Even white men who dared stand up to them were imprisoned or lynched, ballot boxes were stuffed, and social mobility came to a standstill.

By the 1840s, the South had become a full-blown police state, much like Trump and his acolytes would like America to become in the near future.

Offended and worried by the democratic example of the Northern states, the Confederacy declared war on the United States itself with the goal of ending democracy in America altogether. Almost 700,000 people died defending our form of government.

And now, for a second time in American history, we’re confronted with a near-complete takeover of about half of our nation by America’s oligarchs.

And with it has come not just the threat of political violence, but the reality, from the death of Heather Heyer to the George Floyd protests to January 6th and the assault on Paul Pelosi.

All driven by oligarchs determined to pit us against each other so we won’t recognize how they’re robbing us blind.

Unless and until our tax laws are changed and the Supreme Court’s legalization of political bribery is reversed, we’ll continue this disintegrative slide into fascism and the danger of domestic armed conflict.

This fall we’ll have the opportunity to elect politicians who actively oppose oligarchy and fascism while embracing the true spirit of American egalitarianism.

President Biden is the first president in 80 years to consequentially raise taxes on both rich people and corporations. That political bravery has brought him powerful enemies: this fall’s election will be hard fought.

Make sure everybody you know is registered to vote, and if you live in a Republican-controlled state double-check your voter registration every month at vote.org.

America’s future — and the integrity of our history — depend on it.

[hezigler]

How Much Wealth Is Too Much? | Robert Reich

"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

Louis D. Brandeis (early 20th century US Supreme Court justice)

[xtruss]

How The ADL’S Anti-Palestinian Advocacy Helped Shape U.S. Terror Laws

Long Before 9/11, “Zionist 🐖 🐷 🐗 Groups” Like the “Anti-Defamation League 🐖 🐷 🐗 ” Lobbied For Counterterror Legislation That Singled Out Palestinians, A New Report Reveals.

— By Alice Speri | February 21 2024 | The Intercept

Students from Hunter College chant and hold up signs during a Pro-Palestinian demonstration at the entrance of their campus in New York on Oct. 12, 2023. The organization Students for Justice in Palestine held protests in colleges across the nation to show solidarity with Palestine. Photo: Michael Nigro/Pacific Press/LightRocket Via Getty Images

Last October, as protests against Israel’s war on Gaza swept U.S. campuses, two prominent pro-Israel groups wrote to nearly 200 university and college administrators urging them to investigate their students for possibly violating federal law by promoting pro-Hamas, anti-Israel messaging.

The Anti-Defamation League, or ADL, and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law suggested that members of Students for Justice in Palestine, the largest Palestine solidarity campus organization in the country, may have been violating a law that prohibits people from providing “material support” — a broad category that includes money as well as services or other assistance — to U.S.-designated terror groups. “We certainly cannot sit idly by as a student organization provides vocal and potentially material support to Hamas, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization,” the ADL and the Brandeis Center wrote.

There is no evidence SJP has ever provided material support to Hamas, and the letter prompted widespread condemnation. The American Civil Liberties Union called on leaders in higher education to “reject baseless calls to investigate or punish student groups for exercising their free speech rights.”

The federal material support law has been the most frequently cited law in prosecutions throughout the U.S-led war on terror. And its invocation by the ADL was a full-circle moment for the group, which helped pass it three decades ago largely to undermine support for Palestinians in the United States. Long before 9/11, U.S. terror laws were shaped by a distinctly anti-Palestinian agenda and often promoted by pro-Israel organizations, a new report published on Wednesday reveals.

“In the history of U.S. terrorism law, Palestine is the elephant in the room,” said Darryl Li, an anthropologist and legal scholar at the University of Chicago and author of the report.

The legal analysis, co-published by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Palestine Legal, a group that fights the legal harassment of pro-Palestine activists, draws on five decades of legislative history to trace how moments of upheaval in Israel and Palestine were exploited by Israel advocates in the U.S. to expand counterterrorism legislation and enshrine antidemocratic principles in a range of domestic laws.

“Many foundational antiterrorism laws arose during or were adapted to pivotal moments in the Palestinian liberation struggle, often pushed by Israel-aligned groups to reflexively cast the veil of ‘terrorism’ almost uniquely on Palestinians,” the report notes. “The same Zionist organizations that pushed for expanded antiterrorism laws — most notably the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) — now brazenly tar all advocacy of Palestinian liberation as support for terrorism.”

Todd Gutnick, a spokesperson for the ADL, disputed the characterization as “false and a complete distortion of our position.” In an email to The Intercept, he wrote that the group’s advocacy of antiterrorism legislation was aimed at different organizations it was monitoring at the time, including the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, and Hamas. “This advocacy did not extend to the Palestinian movement or its supporters broadly — unless those supporters were providing material support to a terrorist organization in violation of federal law,” Gutnick added.

He also dismissed criticism of the ADL and Brandeis Center’s letter to campus leaders. “We fully recognize and support students’ First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, even odious speech, and have made that clear,” he wrote. “But at a time when some SJP leaders were echoing the position of Hamas so closely and with such intensity, and in a manner that was tinged with threats of violence, we strongly believe that an investigation is warranted.”

Emma Saltzberg, the U.S. strategic campaigns director for Diaspora Alliance, an organization that fights “antisemitism and its instrumentalization,” told The Intercept that the ADL’s call for terrorism investigations is contrary to its stated mission as a civil rights group.

“Advocating This Kind Of Investigation, Criminalization Against Activists For Palestinian Rights, Is Laying The Groundwork For Future Repressive State Activity.”

“It’s an active attempt to deny Palestinian students and students who are in solidarity with them — many of whom are Jewish — their civil rights to free expression and free speech,” Saltzberg said, “and to smear legitimate political activism as outside the bounds of acceptable discourse and to attach real material penalties to that.”

She added that the effort, while focused on advocacy for Palestinians, could have far-reaching implications. “Advocating this kind of investigation, criminalization against activists for Palestinian rights, is laying the groundwork for future repressive state activity,” Saltzberg said. “And that is something that should scare people.”

🐖 🐷 🐗 Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and National Director of the Anti-Defamation League 🐖 🐷 🐗, Speaks at the ADL’s “Never is Now” Conference in New York City at the Javits Center on Nov. 10, 2022. Sipa USA Via AP

An Anti-Palestinian History

U.S. counterterrorism legislation and policies since 9/11 have predominantly targeted Muslims abroad and at home, but earlier efforts to codify terrorism in U.S. law specifically singled out Palestinians, according to the new report.

The earliest reference to “terrorism” in federal legislation dates back to the 1969 Foreign Assistance Act and involves the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, which is once again under attack amid Israel’s current war on Gaza. Congress stipulated at the time that no UNRWA funding should go to “any refugee who is receiving military training as a member of the so-called Palestine Liberation Army … or who has engaged in any act of terrorism,” the report notes. The main sponsor of the provision, late New York Rep. Leonard Farbstein, singled out U.N.-run refugee camps, claiming — not unlike some legislators today — that “these camps are being used for training purposes and the young children for whom the schools are being built and who are being fed and clothed are being trained as terrorists in these refugee camps.”

While the bill offered no definition of terrorism, the reference “set down a decades-long pattern that legally inscribed the Palestinian — and especially the refugee — as the default terrorist,” the report notes.

Throughout the 1970s, Congress passed a series of laws aimed at restricting assistance to states that were hosting or otherwise supporting members of the Palestinian resistance movement. Zionist groups advocated for those laws, according to the report, and pushed for creating a mechanism to trigger such sanctions. In 1979, those efforts culminated in legislation that endowed the secretary of state with the authority to designate foreign countries as “state sponsors of acts of international terrorism.” Since then, the U.S. has repeatedly applied the label to countries in the Middle East and North Africa, excluding them from aid and trade and isolating them from the broader international community.

In 1987, weeks after the outbreak of the largely nonviolent First Intifada, Congress for the first and only time designated a nonstate group, the Palestine Liberation Organization, a “terrorist organization.” The move was part of an effort to oust the PLO from the U.S., including from the United Nations headquarters in New York City, where it had a mission as a nonstate “observer.” While the ouster endeavor failed, the congressional legislation also created the State Department’s “foreign terrorist organization” list, requiring the executive branch to make annual designations of terror groups. Within a year, the State Department added dozens of groups, many pro-Palestinian ones, to the list, which has since ballooned to include a wide range of primarily Muslim groups.

In the following years, U.S. lawmakers inscribed “terrorism” provisions in immigration and civil law, primarily in an effort to target members of the Palestinian resistance movement. In 1990, Congress amended the Immigration and Nationality Act to list “terrorism” as a basis for deportation and the denial of entry into the United States. The legislation once again singled out the PLO, noting that any “officer, official, representative, or spokesman” for the group would be considered to be engaging in terrorist activity.

Two years later, Congress passed the Antiterrorism Act, incentivizing U.S. citizens to file civil suits over acts of international terrorism abroad. The law came on the heels of the 1985 killing by members of the Palestine Liberation Front of Leon Klinghoffer, a U.S. citizen who had been onboard the hijacked Achille Lauro cruise ship. A small conservative think tank drafted the bill, and several Zionist groups, including the ADL, advocated for it. The Klinghoffer family twice testified in favor of the bill on the behalf of the ADL, according to the new report. In the first decade after the law was passed in 1992, some 63 percent of the lawsuits citing it were related to Palestine, with the vast majority brought by dual Israeli American citizens in the aftermath of the Second Intifada, the report notes.

Material Support

The ban on material support to foreign terrorist organizations alone accounted for more than half of federal terrorism prosecutions brought in the aftermath of 9/11, according to an Intercept analysis.

Federal courts have interpreted the material support statute broadly, chilling efforts to provide humanitarian aid in areas, like Gaza, where groups that the U.S. government deems to be terrorist entities operate. But while the legislation exclusively applies to support for foreign groups, it originated domestically, in the aftermath of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing by the white supremacists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.

The bombing — the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil at that time — prompted calls for sweeping counterterrorism legislation that would give the government ample powers to target domestic and foreign actors. And it was shaped heavily by the ADL.

“Responding to a deadly mass-casualty attack perpetrated by two white men with radically scaled up repression of Black, Brown, and Muslim communities is an all-too-American response.”

The Clinton administration supported a version of the legislation that included several elements from the ADL’s “counterterrorism agenda,” including bans on entry and fundraising for “members and supporters” of terrorist groups, the report notes. Members of the ADL testified in Congress in favor of the legislation, and when Republicans concerned about government overreach struck many of the terrorism provisions in the draft legislation, the ADL condemned legislators for “gutting” it. As Democrats and Republicans disagreed over expanded federal law enforcement authorities, the ADL led a campaign by a dozen pro-Israel groups to fuel fears that Hamas would fundraise in the U.S. and convince legislators to reintroduce the terrorism provisions aimed at foreign groups. In the end, the Oklahoma City bombing led to no legislative action against domestic extremism, but it set the legal foundations upon which U.S. prosecutors have targeted hundreds of people since 9/11.

“Responding to a deadly mass-casualty attack perpetrated by two white men with radically scaled up repression of Black, Brown, and Muslim communities is an all-too-American response,” said Li.

Understanding that history, he added, is essential to keeping the current war in Gaza from engendering even more draconian legislation. Already, in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks, the Biden administration has stepped up surveillance of Palestine supporters, while state governments have cited their own terrorism statutes in crackdowns against critics of Israel’s war. At the federal level, legislators have floated extreme proposals like expelling Palestinians from the U.S. and setting up a committee to investigate antisemitism.

“Since October 7, members of Congress have been trying to out-grandstand each other by proposing racist anti-Palestinian bills,” said Li. “While we must push back against the most outrageous initiatives, the proposals that seem innocuous may end up doing the most harm.”