Update (May 18): As solicitor general, she intervened on behalf of Monsanto’s right to contaminate non-genetically modified food with GM food, in Monsanto vs. Geertson Seed.
Update: Just to clarify the reference to neo-liberal, Elena Kagan has extensive ties to Goldman Sachs, D.E Shaw, and to Larry Summers on her resume. In other words, her so-called progressive positions are in the service of the kleptocracy.
Update (May 15 PM):
The Boston Phoenix has this, substantiating the main point of the Cockburn piece I’ve posted below it:
“On matters of executive authority — where the judicial branch has been a vital bulwark against post-9/11 “war on terror” civil-liberties violations — Kagan’s record indicates an ideological departure from Justice Stevens, who authored watershed detainee-rights opinions and organized the five-justice majorities that struck down other Bush administration power grabs.
To be sure, attempting to assess a judicial philosophy, much less a justice’s evolution once on the bench, is difficult (see David Souter). And Kagan’s tight-lipped nature regarding her personal legal philosophy, coupled with a scant paper trail, doesn’t help. But if her record — the few clues she provided as an academic, and in her tenure thus far as SG — is any indication, she’s more likely to side with the conservative bloc on matters of executive power and war-time presidential authority.
This is perhaps the signal legal issue of our day: the question of whether the nation can and will protect itself while preserving the separation of powers and fundamental individual liberties that have served the nation so well for so long.”
Alexander Cockburn points out the glaringly obvious, the Harvard-Yale eastern power-elite’s stranglehold on the Supreme Court, and Elena’s Kagan’s thorough-going neo-liberalism:
“The liberal Nation magazine runs a headline this week, “Kagan is not gay.” I seized it up, thinking to find persuasive evidence of heterosexual conduct on the part of Kagan. What this might be is hard to imagine, since I doubt we’re in for a rerun of Lewinsky’s stained dress, the most famous piece of apparel in America for a couple of years back in the Nineties when life was fun.
But no, the (gay) author of the Nation article, Richard Kim, takes cover in a postmodern thicket: “Gay isn’t some genetic or soulful essence; it’s a name you call yourself–and Kagan has not done that. So in my book, case closed. Elena Kagan is not gay. Is she straight? I don’t know, and again, I don’t care. Why does she have to have a sexuality at all?”
Carried away by this theme, Kim added, “In a way, the mystery about her sexuality mirrors the mystery about her legal philosophy. We just don’t know a whole lot.”
This is nonsense, since we actually know a lot about her legal philosophy including her support for the theory of the unitary executive (a position popular in the Clinton White House as well as Bush-Cheney’s). But liberals want to reinvent Kagan as a potential liberal martyr, as opposed to the chill neoliberal self-promoter she undoubtedly is. So where one could and should expect the liberal-left to be taking Kagan’s nomination as proof positive that Obama has destroyed the last-ditch rationale for voting any Democratic presidential ticket (“He’ll put a liberal on the Court”), we now see – a la Kim – a call to the disheartened progressives to rally round Kagan and Obama, against a right-wing witch-hunt against homosexuals.
Actually, these days the whole closet/anti-closet posture looks increasingly dated. One of America’s largest and most powerful labor unions – the Service Employees International – has just installed Mary Kay Henry as its new president, hailed by the Politico site as “the first woman, and the first openly gay leader to head one of America’s largest unions.” In fact, as Steve Early pointed out recently, both of these “historic firsts” have already been accomplished by Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, but the labor movement is scarcely on the cutting edge of sexual liberation, so the fact that being openly gay was not a problem for Henry is a sign of the times. (Henry was asked whether it is reasonable to demand disclosure of the sexual orientation of someone serving in a public office, and answered prudently, “I think we should allow people to individually decide that question and not speculate and call them out.”)
The US Supreme court is looking weirder by the year. About half of America’s 170 million Christians are Protestants, a quarter Catholic. On the US Supreme Court six of the nine are now Catholic. Jews were once reckoned to deserve one seat. Kagan’s Jewishness would have been an issue, as also would have been the fact that she’s a woman. Not any more. If Kagan is confirmed — and the betting is that she will — the non Catholics will be three Jews. There’ll be three women. The outgoing Stevens is the only Protestant, also the only one not to have gone to either Harvard or Yale. If Kagan gets Stevens’ seat the US Supreme Court will be a total Harvard-Yale monopoly. Justice Anthony Kennedy (Catholic) is the only Westerner. There are no open gays. If Kagan makes it and is in fact a closet case, she will not be alone. There is another closet gay. Let’s leave Sullivan to figure out who it is and to issue a denunciation.
http://www.namebase.org/news03.html
Hi Lila – you might find Dan Brandt’s take on things interesting. If you increment the file number you’ll get a good selection of his thoughts on a variety of complex issues. His analysis ages quite well. Enjoy!
How are you defining ‘neo-liberal’ in this instance?
Neo-liberalism is the economic face of the Bushian neo-conservatives as well as of the Clintonian (establishment) liberals.
“Now that Obama has nominated the former Harvard law dean, Silverglate’s article contains the most detailed analysis yet published of Kagan’s judicial philosophy. He writes:
On matters of executive authority — where the judicial branch has been a vital bulwark against post-9/11 “war on terror” civil-liberties violations — Kagan’s record indicates an ideological departure from Justice Stevens, who authored watershed detainee-rights opinions and organized the five-justice majorities that struck down other Bush administration power grabs.
To be sure, attempting to assess a judicial philosophy, much less a justice’s evolution once on the bench, is difficult (see David Souter). And Kagan’s tight-lipped nature regarding her personal legal philosophy, coupled with a scant paper trail, doesn’t help. But if her record — the few clues she provided as an academic, and in her tenure thus far as SG — is any indication, she’s more likely to side with the conservative bloc on matters of executive power and war-time presidential authority.”
Read the full article here, including a case-by-case analysis of briefs Kagan argued or filed on behalf of the government. Silverglate will be discussing Kagan’s record tonight at 6 pm on New England Cable News’s “Broadside with Jim Braude.”
Read more: http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/phlog/archive/2010/05/10/harvey-silverglate-on-why-elena-kagan-is-a-problematic-scotus-nominee.aspx#ixzz0o8gHDGP3
Neo-Liberalism and the role of Government.
May 23, 2010 by politicalsnapshots.wordpress.com
Neo-Liberalism and the role of Government.
When a government abdicates its responsibility in regulating the economy (as did the U.S. government), capitalist greed accompanied by all sorts of illegal amassing of wealth by the few, at the expense of the majority in society takes place. In other words, policies of neo-liberalism compel governments to abandon regulation of the economy, so that only profit- making becomes the law of the land. Society be damned. The citizen is only a consumer. The government is only a facilitator of business exploitation.
A government as a body that has the power to enforce environmental, labor and consumer laws was required by neo-liberal philosophy to abandon its most critical responsibility of social policy to “market forces”. While it is true that Democracy gives ordinary people a significant voice in government, at the end of the day, who makes the policies that the U.S. government pursues, is what matters. When that question is properly answered, then, we will find out who has power in America.
If a government relinquishes its central and essential duty of protecting the poor. If it fails to tackle unemployment, poverty, and income disparity in society, then, who is it working for? When the government makes it its religious duty to propagate privatization and market deregulation, then we see the sleeper hold neo-liberalism has on government. “Under Neo-liberalism everything either is for sale or is plundered for profit”. Giroux.
Explaining the danger of neo-liberalism on society, Henry A. Giroux writes,
“Neo-liberalism has become one of the most pervasive, if not, dangerous ideologies of the 21st century. Its pervasiveness is evident not only by its unparalleled influence on the global economy, but also by its power to redefine the very nature of politics itself. Free market fundamentalism rather than democratic idealism is now the driving force of economics and politics in most of the world”.
Unlike president Reagan who believed that the “government was a problem, not a solution”, President Obama says, “ that the real issue was not whether government ought to be big or small but whether what it did actually worked”. President Obama in his speech on overhauling financial regulation, seems to have understood the failure of neo-liberalism and the economic destruction it has brought on the U.S. in specific, and the world in general. Moreover, he has made the government’s ceding its responsibility as one of the main culprits for the United States’ financial meltdown. Obama said:
“Now, one of the most significant contributors to this recession was a financial crisis as dire as any we’ve known in generations — at least since the ’30s. And that crisis was born of a failure of responsibility — from Wall Street all the way to Washington — that brought down many of the world’s largest financial firms and nearly dragged our economy into a second Great depression. A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it. That’s what happened too often in the years leading up to this crisis”. (Neo-Liberalism, Anarcho-Capitalism).
For the first time in the last thirty years, the bankruptcy of neo-liberalism is so obvious that neither sorcery nor religion could save it. According to Naomi Klein, Neo-Liberalism “has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back. This should be an indictment of an ideology. Ideas have consequences. Wall Street crisis should be for neo-liberalism what fall of Berlin Wall was for Communism”.
Professor Mekonen Haddis.