NPR's Sarah McCammon speaks with Bloomberg Law's Madison Alder about a push by congressional Democrats to establish a formal code of ethics for the U.S. Supreme Court. [snip]

MCCAMMON: First, many of our listeners may be surprised to learn that the Supreme Court is not subject to a code of ethics. How does the court currently operate? Do justices have any official rules that they're accountable to?

ALDER: The justices aren't bound by the same code of conduct that lower court judges are bound by. But they aren't really allowed to act unethically. There is a statute that requires any justice or judge or magistrate to decline to hear cases where their impartiality might be questioned. But other than that, the justices don't have those same code of conduct rules that lower court judges have. The court does say that they reference those code of conduct rules, but they are not bound by them in the same manner. [more]

New AFJ report outlines the consequences of having no code of ethics that applies to the justices of the Supreme Court.

Five of the conservative justices have run afoul of the ethics code that applies to all lower court judges.

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 28, 2022 – Today Alliance for Justice announced the release of a new special report entitled Accountable To None: The Urgent Need for Supreme Court Ethics Reforms, an essential cataloguing of ethical violations by current Supreme Court justices. There can be no accountability for these violations, however, because the Code of Conduct for lower-court judges is considered mere “guidance” for the justices, who are not required to actually follow its Five Canons.

“Time and time again, we’ve seen the conservative justices skirt their ethical obligations in favor of their political biases,” said Rakim H.D. Brooks, president of Alliance for Justice. “With their credibility at an all-time low, these justices are further undermining their ability to serve as fair arbiters of the law.”

The Supreme Court, however, has so far refused to adopt an ethics code. The justices may consult the code in effect for all other federal judges, but they need not do so, and the choices they make are their own. What requirements they do apparently impose on their workforce, such as a duty of confidentiality, they do not make public. President Joe Biden’s Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States noted in its final report that “most public and private entities have adopted Codes of Conduct for their organizations and employees,” and that “it is not obvious why the Court is best served by an exemption from what so many consider best practice.” (I was a co-chair of that commission, but the views here are mine alone.)

How Antonin Scalia's death (and life) exposed cracks in our so-called democratic system

This is a story I wrote for the Village Voice in March of 2016, when Donald Trump was still a running joke on late-night television and our so-called democratic system had yet to suffer the possibly fatal insult of Mitch McConnell’s unprecedented refusal to even hold a hearing for Barack Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland to replace Justice Scalia, who had died of a heart attack just two weeks before the piece was published. With the Supreme Court’s hearing of the affirmative action case yesterday, something for which I’m certain Scalia would have wished to be alive for — it is probable that Roberts would have chosen him to write the opinion sending his career-long bete noir to yet another precedent-ending grave — I thought the piece worth reprinting here. [snip]

Scalia’s benefactors were doubtlessly pleased by his career on the Court, but they sure as hell aren’t pleased with his unexpected passing. Justice All Expenses Paid heard Gabriel’s trumpet precisely one year too soon for their tastes. After all, the person tasked with appointing his successor is a black man the St. Hubertus types have no respect for and whom they do not trust; meanwhile, the person most likely to be the GOP’s nominee to replace him as president is a bloviating bivalve whom they trust and respect even less, if that’s possible.

In truth, however, they are impaled on the horns of a dilemma created nearly 250 years ago. Think about it. Practically our entire system is a series of gigantic rolls of the dice, depending on elections to fill the two main bodies through which we exercise self-governance and do stuff like nominate and confirm Supreme Court justices. And although there was a lot of high-minded speechifying and writing by the Founding Fathers about the necessity of a well-informed electorate, as we can see — daily — this concept has been completely jettisoned by at least one of our political parties. “I love the poorly educated!” burbled Trump last week. [snip]

The Republicans know there remains at least one place in our little-R republican system where scale-tipping is easy as pie. The firewall they have been working on building for about thirty years is around our third branch of government, the courts, and most importantly the Supreme Court. They have done this by appointing water carriers like Justice All Expenses Paid to do their bidding. This is why you saw the temper tantrum thrown less than an hour after Justice Scalia was pronounced dead. Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell’s pledge that the upper chamber would not take up any nominee for the Court put forth by President Obama tells you everything you need to know about the way the Republican Party intends to deal with its inevitable demographic demise. They’re going to do what they do best: put in the fix.

Atticus West
@AtticusWest
[Headline Grades]
WaPo: A+
BuzzFeed: B
NYT: D-
CNN: F

[image text follows ]

WaPo: "Trump, who as president fomented an insurrection, says he running again in 2024."

BuzzFeed News: "Trump says he's running for president again after lying about the 2020 election and trying to undermine democracy."

NYT: "Donald Trump announced a 2024 run for president, ignoring GOP warnings that his influence is harming the party."

CNN: "Donald Trump announces another run for the White House, aiming to become only the second president ever elected to two nonconsecutive terms."

9:34 PM · Nov 15, 2022

Some of the nation's largest retailers have been using soaring inflation rates as an excuse to raise prices and rake in billions of dollars in additional profit, a corporate watchdog group charged on Friday.

Companies such as CVS Health, Kroger and T.J. Maxx parent company TJX appear to have raised their prices unnecessarily in 2020 and 2021 at a time when Americans were dealing with the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, Accountable.US said in a new report. Instead of keeping prices stable for struggling families, corporations have overcharged Americans and prioritized profit, the group claims. [snip]

The new figures comes as companies enjoy their most profitable year since the 1950s. Pre-tax profits last year soared 25% from 2020, far outpacing the increase in consumer prices. The report highlights an ongoing debate about the causes of inflation, with some consumer advocates arguing that corporations are using inflation as a justification for passing on even higher price hikes to consumers.

Corporations and their industry groups spent big to defeat various bills to crack down on price gouging, according to a report from the Groundwork Collaborative and Public Citizen released Thursday.

Corporate interests deployed lobbyists to oppose bills taking aim at prescription drug costs, bank overdraft fees and sky-high gas prices more than 2,600 times since 2020, outnumbering the bills’ supporters 9-to-1, the progressive groups’ report found.

Opponents of those bills spent $751 million on lobbying over that period, compared to $82 million by supporters. [snip]

While economists initially rejected that idea, noting that prices are primarily driven by supply and demand, more economists are pointing to huge profits as a factor now that demand for products has slowed and supply chains have somewhat recovered in recent months.

Today I am requesting the Committee on Foreign Investment — which reviews acquisitions of U.S. businesses by foreign buyers — to conduct an investigation into the national security implications of Saudi Arabia's purchase of Twitter.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-10-21/us-weighs-security-reviews-for-musk-deals-including-twitter-buy
We should be concerned that the Saudis, who have a clear interest in repressing political speech and impacting U.S. politics, are now the second-largest owner of a major social media platform.

There is a clear national security issue at stake and CFIUS should do a review.
If this deal goes through, two of the most important U.S. social media platforms will be owned, in whole or in part, by China (TikTok) and Saudi Arabia (Twitter).

This is a dangerous trend, and we don't have to accept it.

Biden administration officials are discussing whether the US should subject some of Elon Musk’s ventures to national security reviews, including the deal for Twitter Inc. and SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, according to people familiar with the matter.

Twitter shares fell 5.1% as the market opened in New York on Friday.

US officials have grown uncomfortable over Musk’s recent threat to stop supplying the Starlink satellite service to Ukraine -- he said it had cost him $80 million so far -- and what they see as his increasingly Russia-friendly stance following a series of tweets that outlined peace proposals favorable to President Vladimir Putin. They are also concerned by his plans to buy Twitter with a group of foreign investors.

The discussions are still at an early stage, the people familiar said on condition of anonymity. Officials in the US government and intelligence community are weighing what tools, if any, are available that would allow the federal government to review Musk’s ventures.

There's not been enough scrutiny of the fact that Elon Musk's Twitter takeover has been propped up with cash from Qatar & Saudi Arabia [more]

Elon Musk is a self-declared “free-speech absolutist” who might let Donald Trump and various Nazis return to action on Twitter. “The bird is freed,” he triumphantly tweeted to his approximately 112 million followers when he officially took over one of the most popular social media sites on Thursday. Musk’s idea of open debate apparently entailed his trolling Hillary Clinton Sunday by tweeting a reply to her with a fake news story positing a made-up theory about the recent attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul.

But Musk’s commitment to absolute freedom of speech is not always so robust. Musk’s biggest partner at Twitter is Saudi Arabia—specifically the country’s Kingdom Holding Company and the private office of Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a billionaire and member of the kingdom’s large royal family. The Saudis, who helped to finance Musk’s takeover, announced Friday that they are now the second biggest Twitter investor, with a stake worth $1.89 billion. [snip]

Back in 2018, Musk said that because of Khashoggi’s murder, he “probably would not” accept investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. As it turns out though, he did. The Saudi fund owns 16.9 percent of the Kingdom Holding Company, Musk’s new partner at Twitter.

Musk’s reversal may be explained by the fact that his previous criticism was part of his feud with the Saudi fund because they had failed to publicly back his bid to take Tesla, his car company, private. In a text message to the head of the fund, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, in August 2018, Musk said that due to the fund’s lack of vocal support, “We cannot work together.” That was before Khashoggi’s death. Apparently, money, not the murder of a journalist, was Musk’s main beef with the Saudis. [more]

It's been standard from Nixon on for presidents and presidential candidates to let the public see what they've paid, but not everyone has handled it the same way. Gerald Ford, Nixon's successor, provided a summary of his taxes. Some candidates have just turned over a couple of years' worth of documents. Others have provided returns for many years. But none has totally stonewalled the way Trump has.

As Jen Senko tries to understand the transformation of her father from a nonpolitical Democrat to an angry Republican fanatic, she uncovers the forces behind the media that changed him completely: a plan by Roger Ailes under President Richard Nixon for a media takeover by the Republicans, the 1971 Powell Memo urging business leaders to influence institutions of public opinion (especially the media, universities, and courts), the 1987 dismantling of the Fairness Doctrine under President Ronald Reagan, and the signing of the 1996 Telecommunications Act under President Bill Clinton. The documentary aims to show how the media and the nation changed, which leads to questions about who owns the airwaves, what rights listeners and watchers have, and what responsibility the government has to keep the airwaves fair, accurate, and accountable.

Ms Senko’s groundbreaking film examines the rise of right-wing media through the lens of her father, whose immersion in its daily propaganda had radicalized him. His new fanaticism rocked the very foundation of their family. She discovered that this phenomenon was occurring with alarming frequency in living rooms across America. The film reveals the consequences that this radicalized media is having on people, families, America, and the world.