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WPCNR THE SUNDAY BAILEY. By John F. Bailey. July 1, 2007:
The damage has been done.
The Bush-loaded Supreme Court has declared it’s not ok to discriminate in terms of race, if you’re already discriminating by race opting for a don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t even think about it policy in determining racial balance in schools by their sophist decision to strike down the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. That decision in 1954 can be argued was the primary reason why segregation practices in all fields were vastly curtailed and remediated in the country painfully through the courts through lynchings over the last 53 years. Now the Supreme Court is bringing discrimination right back.
Well the court says that that decision was discriminatory because it discriminated. These guys went to law school?!? Look at this statement by Chief Justice John Roberts: and let it sink in:
“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
What judicial brilliance! Obviously Chief Justice Roberts does not wear his robes “to right wrongs,” as Judge Francis Nicolai of the 9th Judicial District here in Westchester does. He wears them to do other people’s bidding. Roberts and the “Favored Five” do not come to grips with the question of how do you stop wrong? Without the force of law, you would never have desegregated the schools in the 50s and 60s, and even with the law you needed the military to do it.
But the Bush Court is no longer the people’s court, it is the Bush Court. They do what they are told. And they followed orders very nicely.
Does anyone really think that Hispanic and Asian and Black persons were going to be chosen over white candidates in businesses in the 60s if there was no Equal Opportunity Law? Businesses were afraid of it. They started hiring the token blacks.
I remember it well what it was like for a token black hired. I was starting out in television in 1968 at WMAL TV in Washington DC. They hired a young black reporter, to add to their all-white news staff. They sent Bernie out on auto accidents to do standups. To my everlasting shame, I was editing film at the time, and would complain about his lack of cutaways, (which are stationary views shot by the cameraman to bridge from one interview to another instead of jump-cutting). Well, I know now that they never trained him. They threw him in there. He did not know.
So what happens when Dr. Martin Luther King is shot? All Washington erupts into riots. Well the white reporters are all afraid to go below 16th street. So what do they do they send Bernie in. He works like 24 hours straight. He does articulate, dramatic, intense standups and radio reports. He does Pulitzer work. He was brave. When the riots end. He goes back to doing accidents. He left the station and I often wonder where he went. He had done the best local reporting on the riots and all he got was photo ops afterwards. He knew.
I think of him often when I hear people say as the apologists for the Bush administration say we are beyond that now because businesses, schools, do not need quotas on admissions, hirings, etc. Are we really? We are going to find out!
No, we are not. You saw it this week from the mouths and pens of Justice John Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas (incredibly a Black man) and Alito.
The worst scorn I reserve for Justice Kennedy, he put in reservations in his opinion, leaving some loopholes. Hey, that does not do it. Vote it down! When Justice Kennedy is on his death bed, he will be thinking of this decision.
Don’t mask a dirty deed by semantics. Vote it down. No Justice Kenesaw Mountain Landis, he.
Where is all that equal opportunity legislation headed after this Brown/Board of Education outrage by the Supreme Court? Where does No Child Left Behind stand now? If that is not discriminating I do not know what is…it is very easy to apply discrimination by race to discrimination by test scores. The Supreme Court is using an argument to win an argument…what is known philosophically as sophism — or a lack of rational argument.
How does one achieve performance improvement in minorities in the schools now – by grades, by test scores? That should be interesting. How about lumping all the students who do not pass the absurdly curved New York State Math and English Language Achievement tests into special schools to really work on them? You could conceivably do that, using the argument that we’re not discriminating by race here…we’re using their test scores. Mr. Roberts and the “Favored Five” are living in the world of privilege where they actually believe they are good people and good people won’t discriminate because of the honor system.
If I am a crafty education lawyer I could apply this Supreme Court decision to school testing. And throw that out too on the basis it is discriminating based on performance.
The honor system does not work, guys…especially, in the judiciary.
But that’s not all the Supereme Court did. They O.K.’d oligopoly – restricted for a century, by an overturning stranglehold pricing restrictions of anti-trust legislation on the books for 100 years.
They struck down a 100 year old classic. They eviscerated the law prohibiting manufacturers from agreeing on minimum retail prices. The justices ruled that by striking down this law, it would lead to more competition and service. Right! The decision helps manufacturers combat discounters, knockoff artists, etc. How does that help competition? The law they killed was a law that defined resale price maintenance agreements (manufacturer to wholesaler) as “automatic” violations of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Judges now have to take a case-by-case approach.
So if you’re a wholesaler and retailer, unless you have deep legal pockets to fight a price rise, you are in for long legal fights. How is this constructive? We already see how the oil market fixes prices don’t we? Now the Supreme Court says every manufacturer can do it, and you have to prove they are being unfair on a case by case basis.
You need only look no further to see how prejudiced America still is at the American Senate.
By the Immigration Bill defeat, when Republican and Democratic Senators in congress voted against it said, well people back home are so against this. Well back in Revolutionary America, there were colonists who opposed the colonies rebellion against England. It would have been easy to listen to them. But an extraordinary number of persons gave up their lives (with no helicopters to take them to a state-of-the-art field hospital) because they realized tyranny was not what they could live with. Where are leaders like that today?
First equality, then fairness, then truth
These events were topped by the latest assessment of the Iraqi War effort.
The commander in Baghdad said the American casualty count last week, largest weekly death toll in the war, showed we were winning the war to control Baghdad. He said the Queda cells were bloodthirsty and that was why since we are going after them more aggressively house-to-house, our casualty count was up which he interpreted as good and a sign we are winning.
So when we watch the fireworks tomorrow night in White Plains we have to think a little harder about our role in combating those who promote the good of the few at the expense of the many; the preservation of the status quo; the exploitation of the weak; the patronization of a person without privileges.
Read the Constitution on July 4 and really think hard about it.
The Bush Administration and the infamous Bush Court has just begun to take back America for the morally superior, the politically connected, the competently-inept, the fixers and the looters.
It is not what you say, it is what you do.
This was a bad week for America.
