In the middle ages, some disputes were resolved by combat between the disputants. The thought process was that God would not permit the wrongdoer to prevail in battle, no matter how physically superior he might be vis-à-vis the victim. Obviously, physical prowess was at least somewhat important in that era. These days, physical prowess has been replaced by financial clout. Everybody knows that those who spend the most money have the best chance of winning in court. (Interestingly, nobody has ever claimed that God will not permit a litigant to lose if he is “in the right.”) However, not all that many understand that the system itself has stacked the deck against the little guy. One way the deck has been stacked is seen very easily by considering who is most affected by judicial delay - invariably, those who have suffered a wrong and must wait an unduly long period of time to be compensated. Very obviously, a litigant who has been wronged and needs to be compensated simply in order to remain solvent will be willing to accept less than he otherwise would to avoid incurring additional financial hardship occasioned by delay. Just as obviously, empty courtrooms are inconsonant with delay, not to mention a waste of the tax dollar.
The focus here is on the role of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) in helping to stack the deck against the little guy – specifically the worker and the homeless. For those of you who have not already done so, it is time you see the SCOTUS for what it really is: to-wit, part of the front for the money. This role has resulted in some transparently wrong and remarkably odious results. Don’t just take my word for it – you can check it out for yourselves. (And has anybody noticed how difficult it is to get an employment case heard by a jury?)
Slavery is a shameful part of America’s national heritage. It is, of course, the cheapest possible labor. Not talked about too much is that the presence of slaves increased the overall supply of labor, and thus decreased the wage of the average workers everywhere. Obviously, it also lowered the cost of growing and harvesting cotton, and thus the cost of purchasing it by the northern textile mills. In short, a lot of wealthy people liked slavery, not just southern slave owners. Everybody knows that the Dred Scott decision upheld slavery , but not many have actually read the case, maybe because the opinion is very, very long. The overriding issue in that case was whether Scott was a citizen and therefore entitled to file a lawsuit in a federal court. The high court’s exact words were:
The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen? One of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution.
Our beloved Supreme Court said no, and a lot of other things, too. One of the other things was that, at the time the U.S Constitution was ratified, African –Americans were regarded as biologically inferior in the North as well as the South, and gave more than several examples to illustrate the attitude. It says here that the alleged inferiority was obviously rubbish – the sturdiness of the race, coupled with the ability to speak two languages renders any such allegation obviously false. It says here further that allegations of inferiority were a pretext to cover the fact that the moneyed class was abusing an extreme minority and in the process lowering wages everywhere. (Funny how things don’t change much.) Compare the then-contemporaneous justification that Blacks were descended from Noah’s son Ham, who fell into disfavor with the Lord. It says here that the only reason slavery did not exist in the North is that it would have cost way more to house slaves than it did in the “sunbelt.”
What you should know is that our beloved Supreme Court could have said:
It has never been held necessary, to constitute a citizen within the act, that he should have the qualifications of an elector. Females and minors may sue in the Federal courts, and so may any individual who has a permanent domicil in the State under whose laws his rights are protected, and to which he owes allegiance
Indeed, that is exactly what the dissent said. However, there was no way that the majority was ever going to rule in a manner that would result in an increase in the average worker’s wage everywhere.
Child labor is another shameful part of America’s heritage. Child labor owed its prevalence to greed (surprise, surprise) on the part of both the employer and heads of households (generally the husband/father). Employers could pay relatively small wages to the child, and the head of the household was legally entitled to all the money earned by his child. Obviously, the big loser was the child, who not only had to work for free (any notion that the child should earn his keep is foreclosed by the indignation expressed by the courts of this era regarding "deadbeat" dads), but also had to limit or forego any educational opportunities, thus effectively consigning them to ignorance and a lifetime of menial labor. (The world needs ditch diggers, too, huh, judgie-pooh? ) “The brethren” have ruled at least two laws designed to inhibit the employment of children unconstitutional. See Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company, 259 U.S. 20 (1922); Hammer v. Dagenhart, 247 U.S. 251 (1918). Incredibly, the rationale in Dagenhart was that Congress lacked the power to pass the law because "the manufacture of goods is not commerce, nor do the facts that they are intended for, and are afterwards shipped in, interstate commerce make their production a part of that commerce subject to the control of Congress." Rubbish! Compare the case of Wickard v. Filburn, 317 U.S. 111 (1942), where the Supreme Court said that 239 bushels of wheat grown on a small farm which never left the farm did affect interstate commerce, and that Congress therefore had the power to regulate it.
Supreme Court rulings with regard to martial law are interesting, especially regarding the occurrence of what is at least the most colorful labor dispute in American history. In 1903, the smelter workers in Colorado City instituted a strike against their employers. The Western Federation of Miners (WFM), led by Charles Moyer and Bill Haywood, backed the striking smelters and asked all mining companies in the Cripple Creek district to refrain from shipping their mined ore to smelters in Colorado City. When the mining companies refused to do so, the 3,500 miners in the district struck the mining companies in support of the smelters.
The Mine Owners' Association responded by forming Citizen's Alliances in every city, hiring replacement workers(many of whom were convicts released for the purpose of replacing striking workers), and attempting to infiltrate the WFM membership with emmployees loyal to the mine owners. There were more than several instances of violence. The Citizen's Alliance of the Cripple Creek district requested that Colorado's governor - James Peabody - send the state militia to restore order. Martial law was proclaimed in Telluride and throughout Teller County. The militia was sent to these locations, as well as others where there had been no disturbances. Newspaper editors sympathetic to the strikers were jailed, and strikers were arrested simply for their status as such. When WMF leaders protested that the constitutional rights of the miners were being violated, General Tom McClellan exclaimed, "To hell with the Constitution!" When WFM leaders protested the suspension of habeas corpus proceedings, General Sherman Bell retorted, "habeas corpus be damned. We'll give 'em postmortems." Deputy sheriffs were shot, strikers killed, mine superintendents killed, and union leaders jailed.
Charles Moyer (president of WFM) had been jailed during the course of the strike, and subsequently filed a lawsuit in the federal district court against the James Peabody, Governor of Colorado. The suit alleged that Moyer was arrested without probable cause, that no charges to support his arrest were ever filed, and that he was denied access to the state courts during his incarceration. Peabody defended by asserting that he had declared the county to be in a state of insurrection, and that the arrest and incarceration of Moyer was therefore justified. The case, captioned Moyer v. Peabody, 212 U.S. 78, made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which, per Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, ruled that Moyer was not entitled to any damages for his incarceration. Holmes noted that the Colorado constitution provided that "when an invasion of or insurrection in the state is made or threatened, the governor shall order the national guard to repel or suppress the same." According to Holmes, that meant soldiers "may kill persons who resist, and, of course, that [they] may use the milder measure of seizing the bodies of those whom [are] consider[ed] to stand in the way of restoring peace." (Emphasis added.) That’s right. The death penalty is on the table for those who picket during martial law. Good luck maintaining a strike in this environment. Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse!
Almost as glaring as the authorization of the death penalty for picketing during martial law is the dichotomy presented by the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Sherman Act, commonly known as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. What relatively few people realize is that manufacturers were initially exempted from the provisions of the Sherman Act because their activity allegedly did not affect interstate commerce. This is the very clear holding in United States v. E.C. Knight, 156 U.S. 1 (1895). Thus manufacturers were free to form monopolies. Rubbish again! Remember Wickard v. Filburn? On the other hand, in the Danbury Hatters case (Lowe v. Lawlor, 208 U.S. 274 (1908)), the Supreme Court held that the Sherman Act did apply to labor unions and found the Hatter’s combination with the AFL in violation of it. Unbelievable! Really!
And now we come to what might be everybody’s favorite – the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, way better known as the Warren Commission. The reason everybody calls it the Warren Commission is because it was chaired by Earl Warren, then Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. I would think that very nearly everybody has heard of the “magic bullet,” and further, that of those, nearly all believe it to be a load of manure. It was necessitated by the claim that Oswald was the lone gunman coupled with two facts that nobody has ever disputed. First is that Oswald shot three times, and second is that of these three, one missed. That leaves those that insist Oswald was the lone gunman two bullets to account for all of the damage to both JFK and John Connally. Ergo, the magic bullet. And with the imprimatur of the United States Supreme Court!
It is important to understand that JFK was pro-labor. This sounds like an opinion, but, for three reasons, it is an inescapable fact. First is that by all accounts he was responsible for raising the minimum wage from $1.00 per hour to $1.25 per hour. Second is that he ensured the right of the federal employee to bargain collectively by Executive Order 10988. Third, and most significantly, he voted against the Taft-Hartley amendments to the National Labor Relations Act, said amendments banning most forms of the secondary boycott. By blaming Oswald alone, the Warren Commission avoided any allegation of the motive for the assassination being anti-labor. (So too did the House select Committee on assassinations when it chose not to investigate the assassination of RFK, and never professed any interest in that assassination of Jimmy Hoffa, who was intimately familiar with the prospects of a secondary boycott.)
The least sensational but most impactful Supreme Court screwing of the worker is the difference between the intended meaning of the freedom of assembly clause (see https://odiousness.com/Articles/firsta.html ) and the meaning the Supreme Court has assigned it. (see https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/first-amendment-freedom-of-assembly-and-petition.html and https://constitution.findlaw.com/amendment1/first-amendment-freedom-of-association.html )My, my, my! Acting like they’re doing the general population a favor by “creating” a right to association, even as it is screwing them.
Finally, everybody in America knows that homelessness has become a serious problem. Although the way-too-high cost of housing contributes to some of the homelessness problem, most of the economics of homelessness lies beneath the surface. Employers are the beneficiary, and their greed is by far the biggest reason for homelessness. Note first that the housing industry has assisted employers before by increasing the cost of housing in order to effectively require both parents to work, resulting in an increased supply of employees and corresponding lower wages. (NAM family values) They are assisting employers again. Obviously, the threat of homelessness is conducive to lower wages. More people work for less since the alternative is homelessness. It would be way better if employers were required to increase wages in order to induce employment. The same analysis applies to work stoppages - workers will refrain from striking to avoid homelessness. Bottom line – lower wages! Compare the threat of relocation of jobs abroad. This is the reason that thus far, even though the life expectancy of a homeless guy is almost twenty years shorter than that of a housed guy, the federal courts have ruled that homelessness is not a suspect class, and accordingly laws which impact them are not subject to closer review. I’d call that inhumane, but you have to be human just to be that.
Many assert that the homeless are homeless because they are either mentally ill, drug addicts, or alcoholics. With regard to the first, it is incredibly interesting that they are only accepted into the mental health system if they agree to medication. There’s a lot of money for the pharmaceutical companies involved there. With regard to the second, see the case of U.S. v. Doud, 19-cr-00285, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan). In that case, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company was convicted of illegally trafficking opioids. The prosecution said that he “disregarded strict laws making it illegal to sell the drugs without controls preventing them from being diverted to illegal uses…. [and] also ignored red flags such as unusual sales volumes, a high proportion of cash purchases, buyers traveling from out of state to buy from suspected drug stores, and prescriptions from doctors on opioid watch lists.” The CEO received a sentence of two-and-a-half years, not even a slap on the wrist when compared with low-level dealers convicted of dealing resulting in death. The case will be appealed and might even be reversed. That will not change the fact that when faced with a choice of making the shareholders (many of whom are the same alpha hotels that say the homeless all have drug problems) happy or not contributing to the drug mess, the CEO chose to make the shareholders happy and to contribute to the drug mess. And of course every brewery and distiller in the US profits from the sale of alcohol to the homeless. Excuses, excuses!
Here comes some boring but important lawyer stuff. The fourteenth amendment to the US Constitution states that no state can “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” When a law discriminates, equal protection becomes an issue. Relatively few laws are discriminatory on their face. Most of the time, it is disparate impact that raises the issue. For example, a law prohibiting sleeping in public parks is neutral on its face, but affects homeless people more than any others because they have a much higher tendency to sleep in the park than Joe the Plumber. The homeless have in fact raised equal protection challenges to just such laws, but have always lost. The biggest reason the homeless have always been on the losing end of an equal protection challenge is the court have consistently held that the homeless do not constitute a “suspect class.” Accordingly laws such as those prohibiting sleeping in the park are given moderate scrutiny by the courts. Under this standard, a law is constitutional if it is rationally related to a legitimate governmental interest. If the homeless were a suspect class, laws adversely affecting them would be subject to strict scrutiny, and any such laws that were not closely related to an important governmental interest would be held unconstitutional. The paradigm example of a suspect class is that comprised by African-Americans. It has been thought that they are unable to adequately ensure equality in law due to the fact that they are a minority, which calls into question the workability of the political process model. Under this model, if one does not like a law, simply vote the bum who made it out of office and elect one who will repeal the objectionable law and replace it with one more palatable. The painfully obvious fact is that excepting only slaves there has never been a class of people less able to fend for itself under the political process model than the homeless. Any assertion that they are not “discrete and insular” is precluded by the class in Craig v. Boren. (Hardy har har, RBG!) SCOTUS has thus far deliberately avoided the issue. See Joel v. City of Orlando, 232 F.3d 1353 (11th Cir. 2000) cert. denied 149 L.Ed.2d 480 (2001). (ftnt Rodriguez)
The Supreme Court of the United States is full of it, and deserves nothing but the contempt of the worker. There will, however, be no meaningful changes unless and until gated communities are outlawed, and the so-called justices are required to live with the mess it did so much to create.