The decisions of the Supreme Court today are notification to the rest of the country that individual rights, and fairness in business, have no place in America. The Supreme Court has shown today that price fixing and racial segregation can now be protected by the highest court in the land. Black children will now attend black schools and the historic 1954 decision in Brown vs. Board of Education that outlawed segregation in public schools, is now sitting on top of the dustbin of history. It was a noble attempt at justice and equality for all, but today it is no longer the law of the land and Americans can now look to the past to see what the future holds.
Capitalism, the system that Republicans “revere”, took it on the chin today also, with the ruling that “price fixing” does not constitute a violation of the 96-year-old rule that resale price maintenance agreements were an automatic part of the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Supreme Court no longer believes that the market should set its own prices and that an arbitrary price set by manufacturers should be the law of the land. Personally, I don’t see where that is going to help the people of the United States or the manufacturers. If an item has an artificially fixed price that discounters cannot break, the items that are in question will end up sitting on shelves, overpriced. Regardless of the courts mandating a bottom line, if the item will not sell above the fixed price, stopping discounters from selling it at a lower price will not be in anyone’s interest.
Both of these decisions were brought to the court backed by the Bush Administration. In the case of the price fixing case, According to the New York Times, “The Bush administration, along with economists of the Chicago school, had argued that the blanket prohibition against resale price maintenance agreements was archaic and counterproductive because, they said, some resale price agreements actually promote competition”. As far as the racial make-up of school districts case, “The Bush administration participated as a “friend of the court” on behalf of the plaintiffs who challenged the diversity plans”.
So it begins. As more cases come onto this Roberts Court, expect to see our nation’s laws sent back to antiquity. Clarence Thomas, the only person of color on the bench should be ashamed of himself and what he has done to his own people. As a young student, Thomas entered the College of the Holy Cross, a Jesuit institution in Massachusetts, after the school began a black recruitment program. Thomas was the beneficiary of a similar minority program a few years later at Yale Law School. This is how he repaid the people that put him where he is now. Martin Luther King I believe is turning over in his grave. All of the pain and heartache of the Civil Rights Movement has been negated because of this one man’s vote. He should be ashamed, very ashamed. If there is a God, I would like to be a fly on the wall when Thomas goes to meet his maker. I’d want to be a little teensy, itsty, bitsy fly, because when God explodes on him, I wouldn’t want to suffer the consequences.
Of course it wasn’t just Clarence Thomas, four other men voted to set back the Civil Rights of minorities. The votes were the same, 5-4 on both cases. We can expect to see more of the same in the future. People often ask why should we impeach Bush and Cheney? After all they only have a year and a half left on their terms. First of all, God forbid another Supreme Court Justice dies or is incapacitated in the next year and a half. It will take decades to get the Supreme Court balanced again. There is another reason, with everything that is happening, unless we get the Bush Administration out of the White House, we can expect more of the same types of cases to be backed by the administration as a “friend of the Court”. The other thing that we have to consider is that if Bush will turn Civil Rights on its head, our democracy is in jeopardy also. Will he leave after his term is up? This remains to be seen. Now that he has the Supreme Court in his pocket, what’s to stop him from instigating another 9-11? Think about it.
