DRANT #296: SERVANTS OF THE LEECHOPOLY

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Just take a minute to think about this.
We expect our Congressmembers and governmental representatives to be on the take. Natch.
We barely grunt when a scummy pimp like Senator Richard Shelby is up to his corrupt cojones in real estate financed with Federal Loans, then acts to destroy legislation that might save the homes of millions of people, but might conceivably scratch the fenders on his limousine of rapacious accumulation.
But this time- its the goddam SUPREMEs that are the goddam BRIBEES.
So many of them are in bed with fleas, they can't walk the dog. And not the first time neither.
These people are supposed to be, are constitutionally required to be- unimpeachable.
That's the job description. These ain't the cops who take a twenny and forget the ticket.
JUDGES.
Supreme Court.
Yah know what I mean ?
Conflict of interest ?
Yeah, between what they own and what the law says.
Between what's good for their IRAs and what serves Justice.
Between what is right and what makes them a buck or two.
Victims of Apartheid get no Justice because the Judges' brokers called ?
What this does is pull back the covers on what really goes on in ALL the Courts, including the Supreme one.
Just remember this when you go to court or expect We (The Group formerly known as) The People, to be EQUAL UNDER THE LAW-
They ALL have untold huge personal vested interests in the capitalist wall street hedgefundfuckem war profiteering subprimesucking Leechopoly.
Diogenes my ass.
We need a goddam mile long roto rooter, and NO lube.
These people must be Impeached immediately.
But of course, that would require Democrats to get vertebrae implants, and we know whassup with that.
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Supreme Court Conflicts Stop Apartheid Case
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/washington/13scotus.html?_r=1&hp&oref

The New York Times
May 13, 2008
Justices’ Conflicts Halt Apartheid Appeal
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON — Financial and personal conflicts of interest affecting four Supreme Court justices left the court without a quorum last week and unable to decide whether to hear an appeal brought by more than 50 companies that did business in apartheid-era South Africa.
As a result, the Supreme Court announced on Monday that a lower court’s judgment allowing the high-profile lawsuit against the companies to move forward was automatically affirmed.

A quorum of six of the nine justices is necessary for the court to conduct business. While the recusal of four justices is unusual, so was the case that provoked it, a consolidation of 10 lawsuits filed in the name of everyone who lived in South Africa from 1948 to 1994 and who was injured by the official system of racial separation. The dozens of corporate defendants represented a who’s who of American business.
The outcome calls attention to the occasionally uncomfortable consequences of the justices’ ownership of stock in individual companies. With solitary recusals being much more frequent, a 4-to-4 deadlock is a more common outcome than an inability to proceed with the case at all.

That happened on March 3, when nonparticipation by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. resulted in a 4-to-4 tie in a case on the permissibility of damage suits against the makers of federally approved pharmaceuticals. According to his most recent financial disclosure form, the chief justice owns stock in Pfizer Inc., the corporate parent of the defendant in that case, Warner-Lambert Company v. Kent, No. 06-1498.

It remains to be seen whether the absence of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. from the Exxon Valdez punitive damages case, argued on Feb. 27, will result in a tie vote. His ownership of Exxon Mobil stock led to his recusal from that case, Exxon Shipping Company v. Baker, No. 07-219. In a tie vote, the lower court’s decision is upheld but it has no effect as precedent in other cases.

Federal law makes it mandatory for judges to remove themselves from cases if they own even a single share of stock in a company that is a party in a case. Judges, unlike some executive branch officials, are not required to divest themselves of their stock holdings. Nonetheless, Congress acted in 2006 to deal with the recusal problem by making divestiture more appealing. It extended to the federal judiciary the relief from capital gains tax liability that it had already granted to executive branch officials who sell individual stocks and reinvest the proceeds in government securities or approved mutual funds.

Whether the apartheid case, which seeks $400 billion in damages from the corporate defendants, ever gets to trial remains highly uncertain, despite the Supreme Court’s inability to act on the companies’ request to dismiss it. The government of South Africa strongly opposes the litigation, and the Bush administration supported the companies’ appeal on the ground that the case “is causing present injury to important interests of the United States and the Republic of South Africa.”

The Supreme Court’s order in the case, American Isuzu Motors, Inc. v. Ntsebeza, No. 07-919, listed Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito along with Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Stephen G. Breyer as having taken “no part in the consideration or decision of this petition.”

“Since a majority of the qualified justices are of the opinion that the case cannot be heard and determined at the next term of the court, the judgment is affirmed,” the order said.

The outcome has the same effect as a tie vote — it makes no law and does not set any precedent. As is usual, the court did not give reasons for the justices’ recusals. Exxon Mobil is a defendant, as is another company in which Justice Alito owns stock, Bristol-Myers Squibb. Justice Breyer owns stock in several of the companies. Chief Justice Roberts owns the stock of another defendant, Hewlett-Packard. Justice Kennedy’s reason for recusal does not appear to be stock, but rather a son’s employment with another defendant, Credit Suisse, a situation that has previously led the justice to disqualify himself.

The plaintiffs have invoked one of the oldest federal laws, the Alien Tort Statute, which was enacted as part of the Judiciary Act of 1789. It is a jurisdictional statute that does not by itself convey any substantive rights. Rather, it authorizes the federal courts to decide “any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States.”

The Alien Tort Statute, sometimes called the Alien Tort Claims Act, lay dormant for most of two centuries until it was rediscovered as a way to seek redress in United States courts for human rights violations committed overseas.

The Supreme Court, while not foreclosing the use of the statute for that purpose, has been notably skeptical. A footnote in a 2004 Supreme Court decision on an unrelated Alien Tort Statute case referred specifically to the South African lawsuit, noting that there was “a strong argument that federal courts should give serious weight to the executive branch’s view of the case’s impact on foreign policy.”

In its ruling last October allowing the case to proceed, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ordered the district court to consider defenses it had not previously addressed. These include whether the suit presents a “political question” that is beyond the institutional capacity of a federal court to resolve.

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DRANT #295: HAMBURGERS

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Further to my previous DRANT (294) -
Please read this.
The cancer that is American Culture metastasizes- not the least of which are globally insatiable agribusiness, devastatingly rapacious wall street speculation, and - not at all the least destructive- pet food and hamburgers.

"...If it weren't for the little dog in the picture, and if it weren't a
Purina ad, you might think this was an ad for human food. Just look at
that lucious heaping plate -- a white dinner plate -- of red
meat and vegetables. Who would turn that down?
Personally, I feel certain that this Purina ad is aiming to sell dog
food not only to Fido's master, but also to those impoverished U.S.
citizens who must seek food aid each year to alleviate their hunger --
25 million people in 2006 and rising. So maybe we're not spending
$16.9 billion merely to feed our pets. Maybe we're actually spending
part of $16.9 billion providing dog food to some of the tens of
millions of U.S. citizens who otherwise could not afford a meal.
Perhaps this is a thinly-veiled free-market answer to hunger in
America."

From: Rachel's Democracy & Health News #958, May 8, 2008

THE GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS

By Peter Montague

Global food prices have risen 83% in the last 3 years. This spring,
as prices rose steeply, food riots broke out in Haiti, Egypt,
Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, Yemen, the
Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia and Italy, among other places.
Because U.S. energy policy subsidizes farmers to grow corn to make
ethanol (alcohol that can supplement gasoline), the U.S. is being
accused of feeding its sport utility vehicles (SUVs) instead of
feeding people. There is some truth to this charge, but it's more
complicated than that.[1]

The global food crisis has been created by a combination of things,
among them:

** Climate changes, perhaps related to global warming, such as the
recent large tornado in Myanmar, the epic drought going on now in
Australia, floods last year in North Korea, and years of low rainfall
in the western U.S., among other costly weather changes. Australia
used to export enough rice to feed 20 million people, but six years of
drought have cut their rice yield by 98%. Australia used to be the
world's second-largest exporter of wheat, but the drought has changed
that, too. "A big reason for higher wheat prices... is the multi-year
drought in Australia, something scientists say may become persistent
because of global warming," according to the Washington Post.

** U.S. farmers have been growing less wheat since the mid-1990s in
favor of more-reliable soybeans and better-subsidized corn. "Wheat's
biggest problem is its susceptibility to disease, which has turned
many farmers against it," explains Dan Morgan in the Washington
Post.

** Rising oil prices, caused partly by rising demand for oil in
China and India (and in U.S. SUVs), and partly by diminished supply
caused by the Iraq war. Because of rising oil prices, the cost of
transporting food has doubled in the last year alone. Furthermore,
the price of fertilizer is tightly linked to the price of oil and
has been rising for about five years. Use of fertilizer in the third
world increased 56% between 1996 and 2008.

Increasingly it is looking as though the "peak oil" moment has arrived
-- the moment when half the Earth's available oil has been extracted.
After that "peak oil" moment, oil prices are expected to zig-zag
upward more or less steadily.

** The demand for meat is growing in the third world as our own
meat-heavy diet is increasingly adopted world-wide. It takes about 700
calories of animal feed to produce a 100-calorie piece of red meat, so
a shift to a meat-rich diet requires large increases in grains, which
in turn requires greater use of expensive fertilizers, which in turn
raises the demand for oil.

** As the soaring price of oil has increased the cost of tansporting
food, economies as diverse as Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, India, Vietnam
and the Ukraine (among others) have been feeling inflationary
pressures, and have restricted food exports in an attempt to hold
down domestic food prices. This has reduced food available on the
global market.

** So-called "free trade" policies have caused some previously
self-sufficient nations to become food importers. This occurs in
several ways. First, the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund require loan recipients to make "structural adjustments" in the
way they do business. For example, they must open their grain markets
to competition from U.S. farmers, who are subsidized by Uncle Sam to
the tune of $300 billion per year). Competition from cheap,
subsidized U.S. crops tends to drive small local farmers out of
business and off their land. Second, "structural adjustment" often
demands a reduction of social safety nets, so when a food crisis hits
the remaining infrastructure can't manage. Third, stockpiling food is
officially discouraged (a mountain of available food interferes with
the "free market"). Thus an important cushion against hunger has been
eliminated. A classic case is Haiti, which used to be
self-sufficient for its main staple crop -- rice -- but now is a rice
importer, increasingly subject to the whims of commodity speculators
and agribusiness corporations.

** Commodity speculators. Food has become "the new gold." "Investors
fleeing Wall Street's mortgage-related strife plowed hundreds of
millions of dollars into grain futures, driving prices up even more,"
the Washington Post reported April 27. Rising food prices have
attracted hedge fund speculators, who have helped create a "bubble" in
food prices. "As financial markets have tumbled, food prices have
soared," acknowledges Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank.

** The U.S. Department of Agriculture's land conservation program pays
farmers to not grow crops on some of their land. About 8% of U.S.
cropland -- some 37 million acres, larger than the state of New York
-- lies fallow as a result of this program. This is good for ducks and
pheasant and it reduces soil srosion, but it also reduces available
crops, holding crop prices higher than they might otherwise be (which
is one purpose of the program).

** And lastly, in the U.S. at least, we spend huge amounts of money
feeding our pets. I know I am touching the third rail here, but
someone has got to mention this 900-pound gorilla in the room.

The American Pet Products Manufacturers Association expects Americans
to spend about $43.4 billion on their pets in 2008, up from $41.2
billion in 2007. About $16.9 billion of that will be spent on pet
food.

Meanwhile President Bush has proposed that Congress should dedicate
$770 million for food aid to a hungry world. "The American people
are generous people, and they're compassionate people," Mr. Bush said,
announcing his new food aid plan. "We believe in a timeless truth: to
whom much is given, much is expected."

The President's gift of $770 million to the world's 100 million
hungriest people represents 4.6% of what we spend each year feeding
Fido and Kitty. (And, by the way, we are spending $770 million every
42 hours in Iraq.)

But maybe our pet food priorities are not as skewed as they may first
appear. Take a look at the ad (above), which I noticed recently in a local
Supermarket.

If it weren't for the little dog in the picture, and if it weren't a
Purina ad, you might think this was an ad for human food. Just look at
that lucious heaping plate -- a white dinner plate -- of red
meat and vegetables. Who would turn that down?

Personally, I feel certain that this Purina ad is aiming to sell dog
food not only to Fido's master, but also to those impoverished U.S.
citizens who must seek food aid each year to alleviate their hunger --
25 million people in 2006 and rising. So maybe we're not spending
$16.9 billion merely to feed our pets. Maybe we're actually spending
part of $16.9 billion providing dog food to some of the tens of
millions of U.S. citizens who otherwise could not afford a meal.
Perhaps this is a thinly-veiled free-market answer to hunger in
America.

==============

[1] The U.S. is currently putting 20 to 25% of its corn acreage into
ethanol production, producing roughly 8 billion gallons of ethanol
in 2007, but the entire U.S. ethanol industry is still small, valued
at only $40 billion total -- equivalent to one years's net profits
of a large oil company like Exxon, which reported netting $40.6
billion in 2007. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization
estimates that ethanol from corn (in the U.S. and Europe) is
responsible for 10 to 15% of the rise in global commodity prices. The
International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C.
says 25% to 33% of the rise in global food prices can be explained
by ethanol production from corn.
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