Month: July 2020

The Three Dissents in Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Sisolak

In Nevada, restaurants, bars, casinos, and gyms are allowed to operate at 50% of their capacity. However, houses of worship are capped at fifty people, regardless of their capacity. On May 22, 2020, the Calvary Chapel Church in Nevada challenged the Governor’s emergency directives. The district court denied a TRO on June 11. The church appealed to the Ninth Circuit. That appeal was denied on July 2. On July 8, the church filed an application for injunctive relief with the Supreme Court. The briefing on that case concluded on July 16. Eight days later, the Supreme Court denied the application in Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Sisolak, an unsigned per curiam opinion. Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh dissented, and would have granted the injunction. By the process of elimination, we can conclude that Chief Justice Roberts, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan voted to deny the injunction.

Two months ago, the Supreme Court decided a similar case, South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom. I blogged about South Bay here, here, here, and here. (Both cases were decided late on a Friday night; query if the Justices hold controversial per curiam orders till after the news cycle closes). In South Bay, Chief Justice Roberts wrote a opinion concurring in judgment that laid out some principles why Courts should defer to local governments during the pandemic. Justices Kavanaugh wrote a dissent in South Bay. In Calvary Chapel, however, Chief Justice Roberts did not write separately. He did not attempt to square his South Bay analysis with the facts in Nevada. And the Calvary Chapel dissenters highlight Roberts’s inconsistency.

This post will walk through the dissents. I will start with Justice Kavanaugh’s dissent, which I consider the strongest of the three.

Justice Kavanaugh’s Dissent

In the two months since South Bay, Justice Kavanaugh has done his homework. His dissent carefully explains why Nevada’s order is unconstitutional. And he builds upon his South Bay dissent in important ways. I think this opinion is his strongest effort since he joined the Court. He brings a clarity to this litigation that has been sorely lacking. Part I of his opinion is six pages. I encourage you to read the entire section. Here, I will briefly summarize it.

Kavanaugh identifies four categories of religion cases:

(1) laws that expressly discriminate against religious organizations; (2) laws that expressly favor religious organizations; (3) laws that do not classify on the basis of religion but apply to secular and religious organizations alike; and (4) laws that expressly treat religious organizations equally to some secular organizations but better or worse than other secular organizations.

The first category include relatively straightforward Free Exercise Clause cases; for example, Espinoza and Trinity Lutheran. The second category includes more complex Establishment Clause cases. Think of Walz v. Tax Commissioner and Kiryas Joel. This second category also includes cases involving the ministerial exception (Our Lady of Guadalupe) and statutory exemptions (RFRA or RLUIPA). And, there may be some cases where a facially neutral law is motivated by animus (Lukumi).

The fourth category is the most significant, and relevant to the COVID litigation. Kavanaugh explains:

Fourth are laws—like Nevada’s in this case—that supply no criteria for government benefits or action, but rather divvy up organizations into a favored or exempt category and a disfavored or non-exempt category. Those laws provide benefits only to organizations in the favored or exempt category and not to organizations in the disfavored or non-exempt category.

I have described the COVID orders in very similar terms. The decision to slot some secular activities into the favored category, and religious activities into the disfavored category, reflects an unstated value judgment.

Governors are making “value judgments” about the importance of religious worship. They have deemed it unimportant. They have decided that “Churches can feed the spirit” over Zoom. We need Amazon Prime, but receiving communion and reciting the mourner’s Kadish aren’t essential.

Those “value judgements” are far worse than any of the errant statements made in Masterpiece Cakeshop. The comparison of houses of worship to other facilities has always been a red herring. Chief Justice Roberts will be forced to confront these arguments soon enough.

Kavanaugh makes this point forcefully. He writes:

Nevada’s rules reflect an implicit judgment that for-profit assemblies are important and religious gatherings are less so; that moneymaking is more important than faith during the pandemic.

I wholeheartedly agree. Kavanaugh explains that the starting point is that religious institutions should be given the same favorable status that other organizations are given. This principle should be the default rule. To depart from this default rule, the state needs to provide a sufficient justification. Here, Kavanaugh relies on Professor Laycock’s important work:

Unless the State provides a sufficient justification otherwise, it must place religious organizations in the favored or exempt category. See Laycock, The Remnants of Free Exercise, 1990 S. Ct. Rev. 1, 49–50 (ex-plaining how this Court’s precedents grant “something analogous to most-favored nation status” to religious organizations)…. Put simply, under the Court’s religion precedents, when a law on its face favors or exempts some secular organizations as opposed to religious organizations, a court entertaining a constitutional challenge by the religious organizations must determine whether the State has sufficiently justified the basis for the distinction.

Kavanaugh provides a two-step framework. This approach crystallizes how I have long thought about the COVID cases:

First, does the law create a favored or exempt class of organizations and, if so, do religious organizations fall outside of that class? That threshold question does not require judges to decide whether a church is more akin to a factory or more like a museum, for example. Rather, the only question at the start is whether a given law on its face favors certain organizations and, if so, whether religious organizations are part of that favored group.

Here, Kavanaugh lays bare the weakness of Roberts’s South Bay decision. There are always ways you can compare and contrast different establishments. Slice and dice! Churches are like nail salons! But the Free Exercise Clause does not resemble a routine employment discrimination case, where you seek to identify comparators. I observed last month:

It is a mistake to simply assess how “comparable” businesses are treated. This method reminds me of a routine feature of employment law. For example, a hispanic female alleges that she was denied a promotion because of her ethnicity. However, the employer responds that a similarly-situated hispanic female was given a promotion; therefore, the argument goes, the plaintiffs was denied the promotion for legitimate reasons. The parties will invariably dispute about whether the individuals are similarly situated: they have different roles, different levels of experience, etc. The Free Exercise Clause should not turn on this sort of ad hoc balancing test. Cases like Masterpiece Cakeshop suggest a far more skeptical standard of review is appropriate. Comparing churches to nail salons is a red herring.

Next, Kavanaugh moves to the second step of the inquiry.

If the religious organizations are not [favored], the second question is whether the government has provided a sufficient justification for the differential treatment and disfavoring of religion.

In other words, if the religious institution is denied the favored status, the state needs to justify that denial. Kavanaugh frames the burden in terms of a “sufficient justification.” I think strict scrutiny is warranted. (And Kavanaugh joins Alito’s dissent, which applies strict scrutiny; more on that later.) But I’ll go along with his framework. He describes the burden this way:

To that end, the government must articulate a sufficient justification for treating some secular organizations or individuals more favorably than religious organizations or individuals. See Smith, 494 U. S., at 884. That point is subtle but absolutely critical. And if that point is not fully understood, then cases of this kind will be wrongly decided.

He’s right. If you don’t understand this dichotomy, then the COVID cases do not make sense. Judge Easterbrook, for example, bought into the Chief Justices’s misguided approach. Kavanaugh nailed it.

Once you understand this framework, Nevada’s order is plainly unconstitutional:

The State has not explained why a 50% occupancy cap is good enough for secular businesses where people congregate in large groups or remain in close proximity for ex-tended periods—such as at restaurants, bars, casinos, and gyms—but is not good enough for places of worship. Again, it does not suffice to point out that some secular businesses, such as movie theaters, are subject to the lesser of a 50-person or 50% occupancy cap. The legal question is not whether religious worship services are all alone in a disfavored category, but why they are in the disfavored category to begin with.

Kavanaugh concludes:

Nevada’s 50-person attendance cap on religious worship services puts praying at churches, synagogues, temples, and mosques on worse footing than eating at res-taurants, drinking at bars, gambling at casinos, or biking at gyms. In other words, Nevada is discriminating against religion. And because the State has not offered a sufficient justification for doing so, that discrimination violates the First Amendment. I would grant the Church’s application for a temporary injunction.

Alas, Chief Justice Roberts did not confront Kavanaugh’s powerful dissent. He simply ignored it. Roberts, never one to mince words, was silent. Towards the end of his opinion, Kavanaugh twists the knife. He writes:

This Court’s history is littered with unfortunate examples of overly broad judicial deference to the government when the government has invoked emergency powers and asserted crisis circumstances to override equal-treatment and free-speech principles. The court of history has rejected those jurisprudential mistakes and cautions us against an unduly deferential judicial approach, especially when questions of racial discrimination, religious discrimination, or free speech are at stake.

The reference to the “court of history” is obvious. Here, Kavanaugh is silently assailing the Chief Justice’s majority opinion in Trump v. Hawaii. (That case was decided before Kavanaugh joined the Court.) In that case, Chief Justice Roberts purported to overrule Korematsu, a case in which the “government has invoked emergency powers and asserted crisis circumstances to override equal-treatment.” Roberts quoted from Justice Jackson’s Korematsu dissent.

The dissent’s reference to Korematsu, however, affords this Court the opportunity to make express what is already obvious: Korematsu was gravely wrong the day it was decided, has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear— “has no place in law under the Constitution.” 323 U.S., at 248, 65 S.Ct. 193 (Jackson, J., dissenting).

Kavanaugh didn’t cite Roberts’s opinion. But the reference to the “court of history” is obvious. He was calling the Chief out on his double-standard. What term should we use when a Justice references a case another Justice wrote, in a critical fashion, but does not cite it to be passive aggressive? Kind of like a subtweet. Maybe call it a subcite?

In any event, Chief Justice Roberts truly has no response to the junior justice. The limiting principle he identified in South Bay may have superficially worked in that case, but it doesn’t work as the lockdowns continue, and more businesses are allowed to open.

Justice Gorsuch’s Dissent

Justice Gorsuch did not join Justice Alito’s dissent, or Justice Kavanuagh’s dissent. Instead, he wrote a single paragraph without any case citations. It begins:

This is a simple case.

No, it’s not simple. This case is hard. I think the church wins for the reasons Kavanaugh identifies, but there is a lot of analytical work to reach that conclusion. Justice Gorsuch can’t start the case at First and Goal.

Far too often, Justice Gorsuch insists difficult cases are really easy. He used similar language in Bostock:

The [Civil Rights Act of 1967’s] message for our cases is equally simple and momentous: An individual’s homosexuality or transgenderstatus is not relevant to employment decisions.

(I wrote about Bostock, as well as McGirt, in the Atlantic).

When Justice Gorsuch says a case is “simple,” that is a tell that the case is tough. Rhetoric cannot replace rigor. Justice Gorsuch would be well-served to check his over-confidence. He should start by removing the word “simple” from his vocabulary. Issues that percolate to the Supreme Court are there precisely because they are not “simple.” This case warranted more attention than a single, citationless paragraph–even one I ultimately agree with.

Justice Alito’s dissent

Justice Alito’s dissent was joined by Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh but not Justice Gorsuch. It’s not clear that Justice Gorsuch would have disagreed with anything Alito said. Rather, Gorsuch thought the case was “simple,” and could be resolved without discussing any cases.

Justice Alito did not join Justice Kavanaugh’s dissent in South Bay. At the time I speculated why. After reading this decision, I think he needed more time to put together his own approach to these cases. And the delay was worth the wait.

First, Alito echoes a point I have made in several presentations. As time elapses, emergency measures must become more narrowly tailored. What sufficed in March and April becomes unjustified in May and June.

As more medical and scientific evidence becomes available, and as States have time to craft policies in light of that evidence, courts should expect policies that more carefully ac-count for constitutional rights. Governor Sisolak issued the directive in question on May 28, more than two months after declaring a state of emergency on March 12. Now four months have passed since the original declaration. The problem is no longer one of exigency, but one of considered yet discriminatory treatment of places of worship.

Justice Alito next considers the Free Exercise Clause. He contends that the Governor’s directive is not “neutral” under Lukumi.

Here, the departure is hardly subtle. The Governor’s directive specifically treats worship services differently from other activities that involve extended, indoor gatherings of large groups of people.

The neutrality determination is somewhat circular. “Neutral” with respect to what? Are churches and casinos analogous? The state argues that casinos are heavily regulated in ways that churches are not. Perhaps, then churches, should be compared more closely to movie theaters? I do not find this counterargument persuasive, but it highlights weaknesses in Alito’s position. Indeed Alito’s position buys into Roberts’s dichotomy. I much prefer Justice Kavanaugh’s fourth category. Indeed, I’m not sure how Kavanaugh joined this portion of Alito’s dissent.

Once Justice Alito finds the law is not neutral, he reviews the directive with strict scrutiny. And he explains, with clarity, why the directive is not narrowly tailored.

Thus, while Calvary Chapel cannot admit more than 50 congregants even if families sit six feet apart, spectators at a bowling tournament can sit together in groups of 50 pro-vided that each group maintains social distancing from other groups.

In sum, the directive blatantly discriminates against houses of worship and thus warrants strict scrutiny under the Free Exercise Clause.

Justice Alito also addresses the Free Speech Clause. Justice Alito writes that discrimination against religion is a form of viewpoint discrimination.

Laws that restrict speech based on the viewpoint it expresses are presumptively unconstitutional, and under our cases religion counts as a viewpoint, Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of Univ. of Va., 515 U. S. 819, 831 (1995). Here, the Directive plainly discriminates on the basis of viewpoint. Compare the directive’s treatment of casino entertainment and church services. Both involve expression, but the directive favors the secular expression in casino shows over the religious expression in houses of worship.

Alito directly references the recent protests, which were permitted:

Calvary Chapel has also brought to our attention evidence that the Governor has favored certain speakers over others. When large numbers of protesters openly violated provisions of the Directive, such as the rule against groups of more than 50 people, the Governor not only declined to enforce the directive but publicly supported and participated in a protest. Cf. Masterpiece Cakeshop, 584 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., at 14–16).

Here, the Governor simply find protest more important:

Public protests, of course, are themselves protected by the First Amendment, and any efforts to restrict them would be subject to judicial review. But respecting some First Amendment rights is not a shield for violating others. The State defends the Governor on the ground that the protests expressed a viewpoint on important issues, and that is undoubtedly true, but favoring one viewpoint over others is anathema to the First Amendment.

I made a similar point last month:

This double-standard became patently obvious in the wake of recent protests. Officials like NYC Mayor DeBlasio expressly stated that the protests were far more important than prayer.

This argument will have extra relevance in the future free speech challenges. For example, Mayor DeBlasio’s preference for certain types of public gatherings (protests) over other types of gatherings (prayer). Justice Kavanaugh’s dissent also referenced speech, briefly.

There are certain constitutional red lines that a State may not cross even in a crisis. Those red lines include racial discrimination, religious discrimination, and content-based suppression of speech.

But here he described “content-based” discrimination rather than viewpoint-discrimination.

Finally, Justice Alito explains why Jacobson v. Massachusetts is not relevant to a First Amendment case.

And in any event, it is a mistake to take language in Jacob-son as the last word on what the Constitution allows public officials to do during the COVID–19 pandemic. Language in Jacobson must be read in context, and it is important to keep in mind that Jacobson primarily involved a substantive due process challenge to a local ordinance requiring residents to be vaccinated for small pox. It is a considerable stretch to read the decision as establishing the test to be applied when statewide measures of indefinite duration are challenged under the First Amendment or other provisions not at issue in that case.

Judge Collins (CA9) expanded upon this point:

As the Second Circuit has recognized, Jacobson merely rejected what we would now call a “substantive due process” challenge to a compulsory vaccination requirement, holding that such a mandate “was within the State’s police power.” …

Jacobson had no occasion to address a Free Exercise claim, because none was presented there. (That is unsurprising, because the Free Exercise Clause had not yet been held to apply to the States when Jacobson was decided in 1905. See Phillips, 775 F.3d at 543.) Consequently, Jacobson says nothing about what standards would apply to a claim that an emergency measure violates some other, enumerated constitutional right; on the contrary, Jacobson explicitly states that other constitutional limitations may continue to constrain government conduct….

I made this point early on in the COVID litigation.

Courts should not look to cases from the Progressive Era to bolster contemporary notions of substantive due process. It is a mistake to cherry pick words from a century old opinion, and graft those words onto modern rights jurisprudence. Jacobson can be read to limit cases like Roe.

But it cannot be used to limit the First Amendment.

Justice Kavanaugh also addressed this point:

For example, courts should be extremely deferential to the States when considering a substantive due process claim by a secular business that it is being treated worse than another business. Cf. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U. S. 11, 25–28 (1905).

But Justice Kavanaugh does list several specific areas where deference is warranted.

Under the Constitution, state and local governments, not the federal courts, have the primary responsibility for addressing COVID–19 matters such as quarantine requirements, test-ing plans, mask mandates, phased reopenings, school closures, sports rules, adjustment of voting and election procedures, state court and correctional institution practices, and the like.

Yes, he mentioned “adjustment of voting and election procedures.” That inclusion was not inadvertent. I think he is saying that federal courts should not be intervene to modify election laws in light of COVID. That statement is largely consistent with how the Court’s conservatives have stayed every single COVID-related order.

***

This case is quite significant. It is regrettable that Chief Justice Roberts did not write separately. We only have a one-sided account in the end. I suspect all future COVID cases will split along the same 5-4 lines.

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No Visas for New International Students in Fully Online Program

I blogged previously about ICE’s attempt to rescind its COVID-19 related exemptions at the eleventh hour and the ensuing legal battles here, here, here, here, and here. Just when it appeared that matters had calmed down and that international students would be able to be present in the United States whatever their universities end up deciding regarding online instruction, headlines hit today that new international students would in fact not be eligible for visas if their school decided to be fully online from the start of the academic year.

In what purports to be a clarification of the exemptions proclaimed in March, ICE issued the following document mere weeks before most universities are scheduled to resume their sessions. It states that visas would only be issued to students not yet in the United States if they will take at least one class in person or if their hybrid classes have a significant in-person component. While universities like Harvard fought for international students recently, there is a sense that some of these institutions may be throwing in the towel to at least an extent when it comes to the question of new students.

This is too bad considering the fact that the arguments that gave rise to the Harvard/MIT lawsuit still apply here: many of the students involved have made financial and other investments (taking out loans, signing leases, etc.) in reliance on the March exemptions. These guidelines spoke of schools rather than students and created the appearance that all international students could attend even online-only programs within the United States as long as COVID-19 is raging. Furthermore, the issue of bad incentives remains the same I have discussed previously: universities that heavily depend on the tuition income of international students (perhaps more so than wealthy institutions like Harvard) may try to scramble to create at least one in-person course option for new international students even if public health factors would militate otherwise.

This is another move by the federal government that yields few benefits and many downsides both to physical safety and to the national economy. Whether any institution of higher learning will pick up the litigation baton that Harvard seems to have dropped remains to be seen.

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No Visas for New International Students in Fully Online Program

I blogged previously about ICE’s attempt to rescind its COVID-19 related exemptions at the eleventh hour and the ensuing legal battles here, here, here, here, and here. Just when it appeared that matters had calmed down and that international students would be able to be present in the United States whatever their universities end up deciding regarding online instruction, headlines hit today that new international students would in fact not be eligible for visas if their school decided to be fully online from the start of the academic year.

In what purports to be a clarification of the exemptions proclaimed in March, ICE issued the following document mere weeks before most universities are scheduled to resume their sessions. It states that visas would only be issued to students not yet in the United States if they will take at least one class in person or if their hybrid classes have a significant in-person component. While universities like Harvard fought for international students recently, there is a sense that some of these institutions may be throwing in the towel to at least an extent when it comes to the question of new students.

This is too bad considering the fact that the arguments that gave rise to the Harvard/MIT lawsuit still apply here: many of the students involved have made financial and other investments (taking out loans, signing leases, etc.) in reliance on the March exemptions. These guidelines spoke of schools rather than students and created the appearance that all international students could attend even online-only programs within the United States as long as COVID-19 is raging. Furthermore, the issue of bad incentives remains the same I have discussed previously: universities that heavily depend on the tuition income of international students (perhaps more so than wealthy institutions like Harvard) may try to scramble to create at least one in-person course option for new international students even if public health factors would militate otherwise.

This is another move by the federal government that yields few benefits and many downsides both to physical safety and to the national economy. Whether any institution of higher learning will pick up the litigation baton that Harvard seems to have dropped remains to be seen.

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Patriotic Dissent: How A Working-Class Soldier Turned Against “Forever Wars”

Patriotic Dissent: How A Working-Class Soldier Turned Against “Forever Wars”

Tyler Durden

Sat, 07/25/2020 – 00:05

Authored by Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon via Counterpunch.org,

When it comes to debate about US military policy, the 2020 presidential election campaign is so far looking very similar to that of 2016. Joe Biden has pledged to ensure that “we have the strongest military in the world,” promising to “make the investments necessary to equip our troops for the challenges of the next century, not the last one.”

In the White House, President Trump is repeating the kind of anti-interventionist head feints that won him votes four years ago against a hawkish Hillary Clinton. In his recent graduation address at West Point, Trump re-cycled applause lines from 2016 about “ending an era of endless wars” as well as America’s role as “policeman of the world.”

In reality, since Trump took office, there’s been no reduction in the US military presence  abroad, which last year required a Pentagon budget of nearly $740 billion. As military historian and retired career officer Andrew Bacevich notes, “endless wars persist (and in some cases have even intensified); the nation’s various alliances and its empire of overseas bases remain intact; US troops are still present in something like 140 countries; Pentagon and national security state spending continues to increase astronomically.”

When the National Defense Authorization Act for the next fiscal year came before Congress this summer, Senator Bernie Sanders proposed a modest 10 percent reduction in military spending so $70 billion could be re-directed to domestic programs. Representative Barbara Lee introduced a House resolution calling for $350 billion worth of DOD cuts. Neither proposal has gained much traction, even among Democrats on Capitol Hill. Instead, the House Armed Services Committee just voted 56 to 0 to spend $740. 5 billion on the Pentagon in the coming year, prefiguring the outcome of upcoming votes by the full House and Senate.

An Appeal to Conscience

Even if Biden beats Trump in November, efforts to curb US military spending will face continuing bi-partisan resistance. In the never-ending work of building a stronger anti-war movement, Pentagon critics, with military credentials, are invaluable allies. Daniel Sjursen, a 37-year old veteran of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan is one such a critic. Inspired in part by the much-published Bacevich, Sjursen has just written a new book called Patriotic Dissent: America in the Age of Endless War (Heyday Books)

Patriotic Dissent is a short volume, just 141 pages, but it packs the same kind of punch as Howard Zinn’s classic 1967 polemic, Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal. Like Zinn, who became a popular historian after his service in World War II, Sjursen skillfully debunks the conventional wisdom of the foreign policy establishment, and the military’s own current generation of “yes men for another war power hungry president.” His appeal to the conscience of fellow soldiers, veterans, and civilians is rooted in the unusual arc of an eighteen-year military career. His powerful voice, political insights, and painful personal reflections offer a timely reminder of how costly, wasteful, and disastrous our post 9/11 wars have been.

Sjursen has the distinction of being a graduate of West Point, an institution that produces few political dissenters. He grew up in a fire-fighter family on working class Staten Island. Even before enrolling at the Academy at age 17, he was no stranger to what he calls “deep-seated toxically masculine patriotism.” As a newly commissioned officer in 2005, he was still a “burgeoning neo-conservative and George W. Bush admirer” and definitely not, he reports, any kind of “defeatist liberal, pacifist, or dissenter.”

Sjursen’s initial experience in combat—vividly described in his first book, Ghost Riders of Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of The Surge (University Press of New England)—“occurred at the statistical height of sectarian strife” in Iraq.  

“The horror, the futility, the farce of that war was the turning point in my life,” Sjursen writes in Patriotic Dissent.

When he returned, at age 24, from his “brutal, ghastly deployment” as a platoon leader, he “knew that the war was built on lies, ill-advised, illegal, and immoral.” This “unexpected, undesired realization generated profound doubts about the course and nature of the entire American enterprise in the Greater Middle East—what was then unapologetically labeled the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT).”

A Professional Soldier

By the time Sjursen landed in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, in early 2011, he had been promoted to captain but “no longer believed in anything we were doing.”

He was, he confesses, “simply a professional soldier—a mercenary, really—on a mandatory mission I couldn’t avoid. Three more of my soldiers died, thirty-plus were wounded, including a triple amputee, and another over-dosed on pain meds after our return.”

Despite his disillusionment, Sjursen had long dreamed of returning to West Point to teach history. He applied for and won that highly competitive assignment, which meant the Army had to send him to grad school first. He ended up getting credentialed, while living out of uniform, in the “People’s Republic of Lawrence, Kansas, a progressive oasis in an intolerant, militarist sea of Republican red.” During his studies at the state university, Sjursen found an intellectual framework for his “own doubts about and opposition to US foreign policy.” He completed his first book, Ghost Riders, which combines personal memoir with counter-insurgency critique. Amazingly enough, it was published in 2015, while he was still on active duty, but with “almost no blowback” from superior officers.

Before retiring as a major four years later, Sjursen pushed the envelope further, by writing more than 100 critical articles for TomDispatch and other civilian publications. He was no longer at West Point so that body of work triggered “a grueling, stressful, and scary four-month investigation”by the brass at Fort Leavenworth, during which the author was subjected to “a non-publication order.” At risk were his career, military pension, and benefits. He ended up receiving only a verbal admonishment for violating a Pentagon rule against publishing words “contemptuous of the President of the United States.” His “PTSD and co-occurring diagnoses” helped him qualify for a medical retirement last year.

Sjursen has now traded his “identity as a soldier—the only identity I’ve known in my adult life—for that of an anti-war, anti-imperialist, social justice crusader,” albeit one who did not attend his first protest rally until he was thirty-two years old. With several left-leaning comrades, he started Fortress on A Hill, a lively podcast about military affairs and veterans’ issues. He’s a frequent, funny, and always well-informed guest on progressive radio and cable-TV shows, as well as a  contributing editor at Antiwar.com, and a contributor to a host of mainstream liberal publications. This year, the Lannan Foundation made him a cultural freedom fellow.

In Patriotic Dissent, Sjursen not only recounts his own personal trajectory from military service to peace activism. He shows how that intellectual journey has been informed by reading and thinking about US history, the relationship between civil society and military culture, the meaning of patriotism, and the price of dissent.  

One historical figure he admires is Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, the recipient of two Medals of Honor for service between 1898 and 1931. Following his retirement, Butler sided with the poor and working-class veterans who marched on Washington to demand World War I bonus payments. And he wrote a best-selling Depression-era memoir, which famously declared that “war is just a racket” and lamented his own past role as “a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the Bankers.”

Reframing Dissent

Sjursen contrasts Butler’s anti-interventionist whistle-blowing, nearly a century ago, with the silence of high-ranking veterans today after “nineteen years of ill-advised, remarkably unsuccessful American wars.”  Among friends and former West Point classmates, he knows many still serving who “obediently resign themselves to continued combat deployments” because they long ago “stopped asking questions about their own role in perpetuating and enabling a counter-productive, inertia-driven warfare state.”

Sjursen looks instead to small left-leaning groups like Veterans for Peace and About Face: Veterans Against the War (formerly Iraq Veterans Against the War), and Bring Our Troops Home. US, a network of veterans influenced by the libertarian right. Each in, its own way, seeks to “reframe dissent, against empire and endless war, as the truest form of patriotism.” But actually taming the military-industrial complex will require “big-tent, intersectional action from civilian and soldier alike,” on a much larger scale. One obstacle to that, he believes, is the societal divide between the “vast majority of citizens who have chosen not to serve” in the military and the “one percent of their fellow citizens on active duty,” who then become part of “an increasingly insular, disconnected, and sometimes sententious post-9/11 veteran community.”

Not many on the left favor a return to conscription.

But Sjursen makes it clear there’s been a downside to the U.S. replacing “citizen soldiering” with “a tiny professional warrior caste,” created in response to draft-driven dissent against the Vietnam War, inside and outside the military. As he observes:

“Nothing so motivates a young adult to follow foreign policy, to weigh the advisability or morality of an ongoing war as the possibility of having to put ‘skin in the game.’ Without at least the potential requirement to serve in the military and in one of America’s now countless wars, an entire generation—or really two, since President Nixon ended the draft in 1973–has had the luxury of ignoring the ills of U.S. foreign policy, to distance themselves from its reality.”

At a time when the U.S. “desperately needs a massive, public, empowered anti-war and anti-imperial wave” sweeping over the country, we have instead a “civil-military” gap that, Sjursen believes, has “stifled antiwar and anti-imperial dissent and seemingly will continue to do so.” That’s why his own mission is to find more “socially conscious veterans of these endless, fruitless wars” who are willing to “step up and form a vanguard of sorts for revitalized patriotic dissent.” Readers of Sjursen’s book, whether new recruits to that vanguard or longtime peace activists, will find Patriotic Dissent to be an invaluable educational tool. It should be required reading in progressive study groups, high school and college history classes, and book clubs across the country. Let’s hope that the author’s willingness to take personal risks, re-think his view of the world, and then work to change it will inspire many others, in uniform and out.

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Canada Approves “Glory Holes” For Safe Sex During Pandemic 

Canada Approves “Glory Holes” For Safe Sex During Pandemic 

Tyler Durden

Fri, 07/24/2020 – 23:45

The British Columbia Centre for Disease Control’s website has an entire section dedicated to sex education during the virus pandemic. Deep within, government leading health experts suggest “glory holes” could be the safest technique to minimize virus spreading during sex. 

“Use barriers, like walls (e.g., glory holes), that allow for sexual contact but prevent close face-to-face contact,” the Canadian CDC wrote. 

As defined by Urban Dictionary, a “Gloryhole is a hole made in a thin wall or other type of partition where a man can insert their penis for sexual stimulation by an anonymous person on the other side.”

The crowdsourced online dictionary for slang words also said these holes “can be found in bathrooms in the stall wall, in private rooms found in adult bookstores, and in dark rooms and labyrinths in bathhouses. Open rooms in bathhouses with many gloryholes are called a sucktorium and often have a raised level on one side of the holes to allow everyone to stand.”

Canadian CDC also suggests “masturbation” and “virtual sex” are the best methods for getting turned on during the pandemic. Still, at the same time, it allows one to practice safe sex social distancing. If one is to “masturbate with a partner(s), physical distancing will lower your chance of getting COVID-19,” health officials added.

Of course, the internet went crazy, here’s what people had to say about top Canadian officials  advising the public to use “glory holes.” 

The world is a whack place…

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The Biden Campaign: Disease, Depression, & Racial Discord

The Biden Campaign: Disease, Depression, & Racial Discord

Tyler Durden

Fri, 07/24/2020 – 23:25

Authored by Jonathan Cohen via AmericanThinker.com,

As the presidential election draws closer, the Biden campaign’s strategy has increasingly focused on blaming Trump for disease, depression, and racial unrest. Presidents, like coaches of sports teams, get too much credit during good times and too much blame when troubles occur. The last six months have brought a motherlode of bad luck on Trump’s campaign; the worst pandemic in a century; a massive lockdown of the economy; public health measures resulting in 40 million people out of work and living in extreme social isolation; weeks of rioting with widespread looting, unopposed attacks on police and the burning down of many businesses. While Trump is responsible for none of it, the Biden campaign strategy has become the party of disease, depression, and racial violence in order to aggravate all three crises.

  1. On the pandemic they have transformed the Chinese Communist Party’s role in the origin and internationalizing of the disease into the claim that Trump is a racist. They have transformed the FDA and CDC’s initial testing screwup into a Trump failure that caused the disease to take hold in the U.S. They attacked one possible treatment, hydroxychloroquine, as a dangerous drug simply because Trump suggested it might be helpful. They claimed that the few hundred people demonstrating against the lockdown were going to kill thousands while ignoring the fifteen million people violating social distancing norms to attack police. And worst of all, they offered little support for the administrations’ guidelines on slowing the spread.

  2. On the economy, they have encouraged overly restrictive lockdown policies that deepen and prolong the economic deterioration. They insisted on putting financial incentives into the supplemental appropriations to incentivize people to remain on unemployment rather than return to work.

  3. Worst of all, in response to the death of George Floyd, they have played down the demonstrators demands to abolish the police, refused to condemn rampant vandalism, opposed attempts to control rioting, and above all celebrated the massive turnouts at Black Lives Matter rallies even though they clearly created a serious contagion risk.

With disease, depression, and chaos in the streets on Trump’s watch, it simply makes no sense for the Democrats to have Biden out at press conferences forced to take positions on lockdown measures, reopening the economy, and violence in the streets.

What does the Biden campaign have to gain by having to answer questions about what he thinks about tearing down statues of Washington and Jefferson?

While I agree that Biden was never too smart to begin with and does show signs of reduced mental capacity, his debate with Sanders showed that he is still capable of managing a debate. Given the current predicaments that the Trump administration is facing, if Biden makes it out of the debates without drooling, it may be enough to push him over the finish line.

The real danger for the Democrats is that this could backfire. If the violence continues abetted by the Democratic officials demonizing police, imposing selective shutdowns of businesses, churches, and gatherings of more than ten people while enthusiastically promoting anti-police rioting that violates social distancing guidelines, prosecuting people for defending their homes and businesses against rioters while letting tens of thousands of violent criminals out of jail, then the public may grow weary of the chaos and shift the blame from Trump to the Democrats.

Law and order is not a Trump electoral strategy. Basic safety is something that people desperately want and the radical Democratic mayors, governors, and city councilors are actively promoting crime and violence by their anti-police policies. CNN and MSNBC do their best to hide the deterioration of social order in our cities but people know what is happening and as they realize that it is their local official’s fecklessness that is making them unsafe, they may turn against the Democrats.

The election is still three months away and the Democrats playbook comes with a lot of risk. While the current polling shows that promoting disease depression and racial discord may in the short run help Biden, in the long run it may well backfire as the public wises up to the Democrat’s destructive policies.  

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Young Americans Have Used 33% Of Their Total Savings During COVID-19

Young Americans Have Used 33% Of Their Total Savings During COVID-19

Tyler Durden

Fri, 07/24/2020 – 23:05

The coronavirus shutdowns have had a dramatic impact on the broader economy (if not the stock market, which is almost back to all time highs) and few have been hit as hard as young Americans such as Millennials and Gen Zers. A recent survey from Travis Credit Union seeking to learn more about the money-saving habits of young Americans and how Covid-19 and the looming recession has impacted their savings, polled nearly 2,000 Millennials and Gen-Zers and here’s what they found:

  • 99% said that saving money is important to them.

  • 39% of young Americans have had to dip into their savings during Covid-19 and have used an average of one-third of their total savings

  • The top reasons for using savings during Covid-19: Food, utilities, mortgage or rent, credit card debt, and student loans.

  • 73% of respondents said Covid-19 will shape their financial habits moving forward.

Some more details: on average, respondents began saving at the age of 19 and 90% have taken the first step and opened a dedicated savings account. While men have more saved than women on average ($16,631 and $11,649, respectively), over half of all respondents add to their savings on a monthly basis.

Looking into the future, 1 in 4 young Americans say that the most important thing they’re planning for is retirement, with just over half saying they have a savings account dedicated to their retirement goals. The most popular type of retirement account: 401(k) (34%), followed by a Roth IRA (20%) and separate personal savings account (20%).

Even with good saving habits in place, 8 out of 10 respondents said that they’ve felt stress or anxiety when it comes to saving money. That’s no surprise, given the current economic climate – but they’ve learned to plan for times like these. In addition to a nest egg, 2 in 5 have and work to maintain an emergency fund. When asked what they are preparing for, many said potential job loss (33%), while others cited family emergencies (32%), medical emergencies (27%), and major home or car repair (8%).

As the survey concludes, in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic and an economic recession, Millennials and Gen Zers are learning the importance of having these funds tucked away for a rainy day. Three out of four say that the impact of coronavirus has changed their saving habits and that it will continue to shape their financial habits going forward.

This is not the first time a crisis has changed young adults’ relationship with money. Many point to the 2008 economic recession as a financial influence, and one in three say it changed how they approach their saving habits. When asked, 42% said they began saving sooner, 21% became more aware of their spending, 19% began saving for retirement earlier than planned, and 18% pursued a career with job security.

Of course, no matter how optimistic of a spin the poll creators want to put on it, if a third of young America’s savings has indeed already been wiped out, that means that a tremendous amount of future purchasing has been pulled into the future. And in an economy that has been notoriously hostile to young workers, it is unclear just how or where all these Millennials and GenZers will find the funds to replenish their savings funds. Worse, it also means that if four months of living under the pandemic is all it took for a third of their savings to be gone forever, we dread to think what will happen in 8 months if there is still no vaccine or cure, and the economy is still barely functioning as it is today.

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Escobar: Brazil’s “Money Laundering Scandal From Hell” That No One Wants To Talk About

Escobar: Brazil’s “Money Laundering Scandal From Hell” That No One Wants To Talk About

Tyler Durden

Fri, 07/24/2020 – 22:45

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Two decades after the fact, a political earthquake that should be rocking Brazil apart is being met with thunderous silence…

What is now described as the Banestado leaks and the CC5gate is straight out of vintage WikiLeaks: a list, published for the first time in full, naming names and detailing what is one of the biggest corruption and money laundering cases in the world for the past three decades.

This scandal allows for the healthy practice of what Michel Foucault characterized as the archeology of knowledge. Without understanding these leaks, it’s impossible to place in the proper context the sophisticated Hybrid War unleashed by Washington on Brazil initially via NSA spying on President Dilma Roussef’s first term (2010-2014), all the way to the subsequent Car Wash corruption investigation that jailed Lula and opened the way for the election of neofascist patsy Jair Bolsonaro as President.

The scoop on this George Orwell does Hybrid War plotline is due, once again, to independent media: the small website Duplo Expresso, led by young, daring Bern-based international lawyer Romulus Maya, which first published the list.

An epic 5-hour podcast assembled the three key protagonists who denounced the scandal in the first place, back in the late 1990s, and now are able to re-analyze it: then Governor of Parana state Roberto Requiao; federal prosecutor Celso Tres; and police superintendent, now retired, Jose Castilho Neto.

Previously, in another podcast, Maya and anthropologist Piero Leirner, Brazil’s foremost analyst of Hybrid War, briefed me on the myriad political intricacies of the leaks while we discussed geopolitics in the Global South.

The CC5 lists are here, here, and here. Let’s see what makes them so special.

The mechanism

Way back in 1969, the Brazilian Central Bank created what was described as a “CC5 account” to facilitate foreign companies and executives to legally wire assets overseas. For many years the cash flow in these accounts was not significant. Then everything changed in the 1990s – with the emergence of a massive, complex criminal racket centered on money laundering.

The original Banestado investigation started in 1997. Federal prosecutor Celso Tres was stunned to find that from 1991 to 1996 no less than $124 billion in Brazilian currency was wired overseas. Between 1991 and 2002 that ballooned to a whopping $219 billion – placing Banestado as one of the largest money laundering schemes in history.

Tres’s report led to a federal investigation focused in Foz do Iguacu in southern Brazil, strategically located right at the Tri-Border of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, where local banks were laundering vast amounts of funds through their CC5 accounts.

This is how it worked. U.S. dollar dealers in the black market, linked to bank and government employees, used a vast network of bank accounts under the name of unsuspecting ”smurfs” and phantom companies to launder illegal funds from public corruption, tax fraud and organized crime, mainly through the Banco do Estado do Parana branch in Foz do Iguacu. Thus the Banestado case.

The federal investigation was going nowhere until 2001, when police superintendent Castilho ascertained that most of the funds were actually landing in accounts at the Banestado branch in New York. Castilho arrived in New York in January 2002 to turbo-charge the necessary international money tracking.

Through a court order, Castilho and his team reviewed 137 accounts at Banestado New York, tracking $14.9 billion. In quite a few cases, the beneficiaries had the same name of Brazilian politicians then serving in Congress, cabinet ministers and even former Presidents.

After a month in New York, Castilho was back in Brazil carrying a hefty 400-page report. Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence, he was dropped out of the investigation, which was then put on hold for at least a year. When the new Lula government took power in early 2003, Castilho was back in business.

In April 2003, Castilho identified a particularly interesting Chase Manhattan account named “Tucano” – the nickname of the PSDB party led by former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was in power before Lula and always kept very close ties to the Clinton and Blair political machines.

Castilho was instrumental in the set up of a Parliamentary Inquiry Commission over the Banestado case. But once again, this commission led to nowhere – not even voting a final report. Most companies involved negotiated a deal with the Brazilian Internal Revenue Service and thus ended any possibility of legal action in regard to tax evasion.

Banestado meets Car Wash

In a nutshell, the two largest political parties – Cardoso’s neoliberal PSDB and Lula’s Workers’ Party – which never really faced down imperial machinations and the Brazilian rentier class, actively buried an in-depth investigation. Moreover Lula, coming right after Cardoso, and mindful or preserving a minimum of governability, made a strategic decision of not investigating “tucano” corruption, including a slew of dodgy privatizations.

New York prosecutors duly prepared a special Banestado list for Castilho with what really mattered for criminal prosecution to go though: the full circle of the money laundering scheme, with (i) funds first illegally remitted out of Brazil using the CC5 accounts, (ii) passing through the New York branches of the Brazilian banks involved, (iii) reaching offshore bank accounts and trusts in tax havens (e.g., Cayman, Jersey, Switzerland) and then finally (iv) going back to Brazil as – fully laundered – “foreign investment”, for the actual use and enjoyment of the final beneficiaries who first got the not accounted for money out of the country using the CC5 accounts.

But then Brazilian Justice Minister Marcio Thomaz Bastos, appointed by Lula, nixed it. As superintendent Castilho metaphorically puts it, “this, deliberately, prevented (him) from going back to Brazil with the murdered body”.

Well, whereas Castilho never got hold of this critical document, at least two Brazilian Congressmen, two Senators and two Federal Prosecutors – who would later on rise to fame as Car Wash investigation “stars”, Vladimir Aras and Carlos Fernando dos Santos Lima – did get it. Why and how the document – call it the “body bag” – never found its way into the criminal proceedings back in Brazil is an extra mystery wrapped up inside the whole enigma.

Meanwhile, there are “unconfirmed” reports (several sources would not go on record on this) that the document might have been used for outright extortion of the individuals, mostly billionaires, featured on the list.

Extra sauce in the judicial sphere comes from the fact that the provincial judge in charge of burying the Banestado case was none other than Sergio Moro, the self-serving Elliot Ness figure who in the next decade would rise to superstar status as the capo di tutti I capi of the massive Car Wash investigation and subsequent Justice Minister under Bolsonaro. Moro ended up resigning and is now de facto already campaigning for President in 2022.

And here we hit the toxic Banestado-Car Wash connection. Considering what is already public domain about Moro’s modus operandi on Car Wash, as he altered names in documents with the single-minded objective of sending Lula to jail, the challenge now would be to prove how Moro “sold” non-convictions related to Banestado. With a very convenient legal excuse: with no “body” found (or formally brought back to criminal proceedings in Brazil), no one could be found guilty of murder.

As we plunge into excruciating details, Banestado increasingly looks and feels like the Ariadne’s thread that may reveal the beginning of the destruction of Brazil’s sovereignty. A tale full of lessons to the learned by the whole Global South.

The Black Market Dollar King

Castilho, in that epic podcast, did ring alarm bells when he referred to $17 million that had transited in the Banestado branch in New York and then was sent, of all places, to Pakistan. Castilho and his team found that out only a few months after 9/11. I sent him some questions about it, and he answered, through Maya, that his investigators would dig it all up again, mentioning that a report did indicate the origin of these funds.

This is the first time such information has surfaced – and the ramifications may be explosive. We’re talking about dodgy funds, arguably from drugs and weapons operations, leaving the Triple Border – Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay – which happens historically to be a top site for CIA and Mossad black ops.

Financing may have been provided by the so-called King of The Black Market Dollars, Dario Messer, via CC5 accounts. It’s no secret that black market operators at the Tri-Border are all connected to cocaine trafficking via Paraguay – and also to evangelicals. That is the basis of what Maya, Leirner and myself have already described as Cocaine Evangelistan.

Messer is an indispensable cog in the recycling mechanism inbuilt in drug trafficking. Money travels to fiscal paradises under imperial protection, is duly laundered, and gloriously resurrects on Wall Street and the City of London, with the extra bonus of the U.S. easing some of its current account deficit. Cue to Wall Street’s “irrational exuberance”.

What really matters is free circulation of cocaine – why not hidden in the odd soya cargo, something that comes with the extra benefit of securing the well being of agro-business. That’s a mirror image of the CIA heroin ratline in Afghanistan I detailed here.

Most of all, politically, Messer is the notorious missing link to judge Moro. Even mainstream O Globo newspaper was forced to admit, last November, that Messer’s shadowy businesses were “monitored” nonstop for two decades by different U.S. agencies out of Asuncion and Ciudad del Este in Paraguay. Moro for his part is an asset for two different U.S. agencies – FBI and CIA – plus the Dept. of Justice.

Messer may be the joker in this convoluted plot. But then there’s the Maltese Falcon: There’s only one Maltese Falcon, as the John Huston classic immortalized it. And it’s currently lying in a safe in Switzerland.

These happen to be the original, official documents submitted by construction giant Odebrecht to the Car Wash investigation which have been undisputedly “manipulated”, “allegedly” by the company itself. And “maybe”, in collusion with (then) judge Moro and the prosecution team led by Deltan Dallagnol. Not only, possibly, for the purpose of incriminating Lula and persons close to him, but also – crucially – deleting any mentions of individuals who should never be brought to light. Or Justice. And, yes, you guessed it right if you thought about the (U.S.-backed) Black Market Dollar King.

The first serious political impact after the release of the Banestado leaks is that Lula’s lawyers Cristiano and Valeska Zanin have finally, officially requested for Swiss authorities to hand over the originals.

Governor Requiao, by the way, was the only Brazilian politician to publicly ask Lula, back in February, to go for the documents in Switzerland. It is no surprise that Requiao was the first public figure in Brazil to now ask Lula to make all this content public once the former President gets hold of it.

The real, not adulterated Odebrecht list of people involved in corruption is crammed with big names – including the Judiciary elite. Confronting the two versions, Lula’s lawyers may finally be able to demonstrate the falsification of “evidence” that led to the jailing of Lula but also, among other developments, the exile of Ecuador’s former President Rafael Correa, the imprisonment of his VP, Jorge Glas, the imprisonment of Peru’s former President Ollanta Humala and wife and, most dramatically, the suicide of Peru’s former two time President Alan Garcia.

The Brazilian Patriot Act

The big political question now is not to uncover the master manipulator who buried the Banestado scandal two decades ago.

As anthropologist Leirner detailed it, what matters is that the leaking of the CC5 accounts focuses on the mechanism of the corrupted Brazilian bourgeoisie, with the help of their political and judicial partners – national and foreign – to solidify itself as a rentier class, but still always submissive to and kept in check by “secret”, imperial files.

Banestado leaks and the CC5 accounts should be seen as a political opening for Lula to go for broke. This is all-out (Hybrid) War – and blinking is not an option. The geopolitical and geoeconomic project of destroying Brazilian sovereignty and turning it into an imperial sub-colony is winning – hands down.

A measure of the explosiveness of Banestado leaks and CC5 gate has been the reaction by assorted limited hangouts: thundering silence, and that encompasses Leftist parties and alternative, supposedly progressive media. Mainstream media, for whom judge Moro is a sacred cow, at best spins it as “old story”, “fake news” and even a “hoax”.

Lula is facing a fateful decision. With access to names so far shadowed by Car Wash, he may be able to unleash a neutron bomb and pull off a reset of the whole game – exposing a rash of Car Wash-linked Supreme Court judges, prosecutors, district attorneys, journalists and even Generals who received funds from Odebrecht overseas. Not to mention bring back Black Market Dollar King Messer – who controls the fate of Moro – to the frontline. This means directly pointing a finger at the U.S. Deep State. Not an easy decision to make.

It’s now clear that creditors of the Brazilian state were, originally, debtors. Confronting different accounts it’s possible to square the circle on Brazil’s legendary “fiscal imbalance” – exactly as this plague is brought up, once again, with the intent of decimating the assets of the ailing Brazilian state. Finance Minister Paulo Guedes, a neo-Pinochetist and Milton Friedman cheerleader, has already warned he’ll keep selling state companies like there’s no tomorrow.

Lula’s plan B would be to clinch some sort of deal that would bury the whole dossier – just like the original Banestado investigation was buried two decades ago – to preserve the leadership of the Workers’ Party as domesticated opposition, and without touching on the absolutely essential issue: how Guedes is selling out Brazil.

That would be the line favored by Fernando Haddad, who lost the presidential election to Bolsonaro in 2018: a sort of Brazilian Bachelet (Chile’s former President), an ashamed neoliberal sacrificing everything to have yet another shot at power possibly in 2026.

Were Plan B to happen it would galvanize the wrath of trade unions and social movements – the flesh and blood Brazilian working classes which are on the verge of being totally decimated by neoliberalism on steroids and the toxic collusion of the U.S.-inspired Brazilian version of the Patriot Act with the military schemes to profit from “Cocaine Evangelistan”.

And all that after Washington – successfully – nearly destroyed national champion Petrobras, an initial objective of NSA spying. Zanin, Lula’s lawyer, also adds – maybe too late – that the “informal cooperation” between Washington and the Car Wash op was in fact illegal, according to decree number 3.810/02.

What will Lula do?

As it stands, as a development of the Banestado leaks, a first Banestado “VIP list” was gathered. It includes the current President of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, who also serves as a Supreme Court Justice, Luis Roberto Barroso, bankers, media tycoons and industrialists. Car Wash prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol happens to be very close to the neoliberal Supreme Court Justice in question.

The VIP list should be read as the road map for the money laundering practices of the Brazilian 0,01% – roughly estimated to be 20,000 families who own the close to one trillion dollar Brazilian internal debt. A great deal of those funds had been recycled back to Brazil as “foreign investment” through the CC5 scheme back in the 1990s. And that’s exactly how Brazil’s internal debt exploded.

Still no one knows where the Banestado-enabled torrent of dodgy money actually landed, in detail. The “body bag” was never formally acknowledged to have been brought back from New York and never made its way into the criminal proceedings. Yet money laundering is still in progress – and thus the limitation period does not apply – so somebody, anybody would have to be thrown in the slammer. It doesn’t seem that will be the case anytime soon, tough.

Meanwhile, enabled by the U.S. Deep State, transnational finance and local comprador elites, some in uniform, some in robes, the slow motion Hybrid War coup against Brazil keeps rambling on.

And day by day inching closer to full spectrum dominance.

Which bring us to the key, final question: what will Lula do about it?

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Supreme Court (by 5-4 Vote) Declines to Exempt Nevada Churches from Gathering Size Limits

You can see the dissenting opinions of Justices Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh here; Justice Alito’s opinion is joined by Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh. The Justices in the majority (Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan), who decline to issue an injunction pending appellate review, haven’t written an opinion (though note that injunctions from the Supreme Court pending appellate review are extraordinary remedies). But you can see the District Court opinion, which the dissenters would have blocked, here.

From Justice Alito’s dissent:

The Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion. It says nothing about the freedom to play craps or blackjack, to feed tokens into a slot machine, or to engage in any other game of chance. But the Governor of Nevada apparently has different priorities. Claiming virtually unbounded power to restrict constitutional rights during the COVID–19 pandemic, he has issued a directive that severely limits attendance at religious services. A church, synagogue, or mosque, regardless of its size, may not admit more than 50 persons, but casinos and certain other favored facilities may admit 50% of their maximum occupancy—and in the case of gigantic Las Vegas casinos, this means that thousands of patrons are allowed.

That Nevada would discriminate in favor of the powerful gaming industry and its employees may not come as a surprise, but this Court’s willingness to allow such discrimination is disappointing. We have a duty to defend the Constitution, and even a public health emergency does not absolve us of that responsibility.

And from the state’s argument against issuing an injunction:

[G]aming establishments face numerous additional restrictions and regulatory oversight not faced by houses of worship, making them dissimilar activities. Failure for gaming establishments to follow the Emergency Directive risks significant punishment. There is no comparable basis on which non-compliance can effectively be enforced against a house of worship. Instead, houses of worship and other entities impacted by Directive 021 are subject to enforcement by local law enforcement, subject to their prioritization of resources.

Choosing to reopen a highly regulated industry, that is subject to significant regulatory control that allows for a rapid shutdown if a second COVID-19 outbreak arises, makes sense. This policy determination warrants deference from a court, as “[o]ur Constitution principally entrusts ‘[t]he safety and the health of the people’ to the politically accountable officials of the States ‘to guard and protect.'” Under these temporary circumstances, Nevada is entitled to deference on its regulated, limited reopening of gaming establishments.

There’s a lot more going on here, but I’m afraid I don’t have the time to post on it now; if you’re interested, have a look at the opinions, and the parties’ filings.

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Supreme Court (by 5-4 Vote) Declines to Exempt Nevada Churches from Gathering Size Limits

You can see the dissenting opinions of Justices Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh here; Justice Alito’s opinion is joined by Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh. The Justices in the majority (Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan), who decline to issue an injunction pending appellate review, haven’t written an opinion (though note that injunctions from the Supreme Court pending appellate review are extraordinary remedies). But you can see the District Court opinion, which the dissenters would have blocked, here.

From Justice Alito’s dissent:

The Constitution guarantees the free exercise of religion. It says nothing about the freedom to play craps or blackjack, to feed tokens into a slot machine, or to engage in any other game of chance. But the Governor of Nevada apparently has different priorities. Claiming virtually unbounded power to restrict constitutional rights during the COVID–19 pandemic, he has issued a directive that severely limits attendance at religious services. A church, synagogue, or mosque, regardless of its size, may not admit more than 50 persons, but casinos and certain other favored facilities may admit 50% of their maximum occupancy—and in the case of gigantic Las Vegas casinos, this means that thousands of patrons are allowed.

That Nevada would discriminate in favor of the powerful gaming industry and its employees may not come as a surprise, but this Court’s willingness to allow such discrimination is disappointing. We have a duty to defend the Constitution, and even a public health emergency does not absolve us of that responsibility.

And from the state’s argument against issuing an injunction:

[G]aming establishments face numerous additional restrictions and regulatory oversight not faced by houses of worship, making them dissimilar activities. Failure for gaming establishments to follow the Emergency Directive risks significant punishment. There is no comparable basis on which non-compliance can effectively be enforced against a house of worship. Instead, houses of worship and other entities impacted by Directive 021 are subject to enforcement by local law enforcement, subject to their prioritization of resources.

Choosing to reopen a highly regulated industry, that is subject to significant regulatory control that allows for a rapid shutdown if a second COVID-19 outbreak arises, makes sense. This policy determination warrants deference from a court, as “[o]ur Constitution principally entrusts ‘[t]he safety and the health of the people’ to the politically accountable officials of the States ‘to guard and protect.'” Under these temporary circumstances, Nevada is entitled to deference on its regulated, limited reopening of gaming establishments.

There’s a lot more going on here, but I’m afraid I don’t have the time to post on it now; if you’re interested, have a look at the opinions, and the parties’ filings.

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