The connection between whiteness and racism is that it is a historically made tool in history. Gilmore says that capitalism uses a hierarchy to justify inequality, it is not just about black vs white. The root cause for Gilmore is more so the fact that capitalism requires inequality within it. You cannot have it at all unless one is below another. In my opinion, Europe has always had the upper hand in things through violence or force, which put them in the position they have been in hence why capitalism has been racist and full of inequality for years.
Gilmore says that criminals are being created by prison system as behaviors that fall under crimes are just expanding more and more. This is leading more people getting swallowed by the system as criminals. Sentences are getting longer but more importantly people have no support when released. The system has no way for people to get back on their feet. If anything all of those things people eventually going back to prison since that is all they know. I agree with her argument since I feel like reintegration into society cannot be the way we do it. Even a fish will die in open waters again if it is moved from a fish tank to a sea. You need to support people, but even more importantly make prison where people recover and better themselves not just a pure punishment.
She describes liberation struggle as being rooted in specific needs of people in a certain concentrated place. She uses the community in Portugal as an example, where the residents had organized not just for their rights but to save their neighborhood. They had practical organizing but also study groups on colonialism as well. Solidarity in her view does not exist unless you actively pursue it with ‘radical dependency” on one another. Liberation struggle is also about changing your ways and how you live around your common folk.
We can tell the difference between just and unjust laws by a couple of tests that he outlines in the letter. He says that a just law has to align with moral law or the law of god, to be rooted in eternal and natural law, have to be able to uplift human personality, affirming dignity, equality and worth, and finally it has to apply to everyone equally. No majority’s should be able to impose a rule on minority without following it themselves. An unjust law is the opposite of a just law in all respects but it is out of harmony with moral law, it degrades human personality making people feel inferior, gets imposed by a majority to a minority, and finally it creates a situation where people are treated as things rather than humans. On a side note, it is also our responsibility to not follow unjust laws, but follow just ones.
I think it is an important distinction as us as a society needs to know what law is just or not just because it directly affects us. We need to know how we are being treated compared to other parties or else things become very unfair to minorities really fast. This can affect our politics as injustice anywhere will spread, if our government can go in and kill people in other nations without remorse, that comes with the precedent that they can do that to us as well. Society needs to be aware of the laws that are passed as well as make to assess each group and if things are fair.
An example of a just law can be the ADA act of 1990, a law which affirms that people with disabilities can have full participation of public life. This uplifts their personality, and reflects natural and moral law that every person deserves equal opportunity. An example of an unjust law is fixed minimum sentencing, which gives people sentences based on the category they fall in, not the human beings they are. It is also not in moral law as punishment here is not proportional.
The Supreme Court did not rule in favor of the 1.5 million women employees. The reason for this was first of all technical issues that came from the case itself. The women had filed the case as a B2 class case, which means they wanted Walmart to fix their ways. But under the same case they asked for back pay, which is under B3. So their case contradicted. Also, the idea of commonality. A class action lawsuit is when a whole group has the same issue so all the 1.5M women sued Walmart as 1 class. The women said their cause was the same, however, Scalia said that commonality needs a shared solution as well not just a shared problem. Since all the women were denied different promotions, in different stores, by different people, there was technically nothing in commonality. The problem is with this instance that with the rhetoric the judge used, no class action can go forward as the problem and solution have to be completely identical.
The court system is better at protecting individuals than elected branches because they are not voted upon. When you say individual in that question, it can also mean a bunch of people in a group with the same ideologies. Anyhow, elected officials need to please a majority group of voters, they need support to stay in power. That does not protect individuals in the minority side. Courts on the other hand, apply the law regardless of the sentiment of the public. The famous example of this was the case that desegregated schools. An elected side would have not passed that at the time as it was not popular, however, the Supreme Court was able to. Which means that were better at protecting individuals in that case as they were not voted on.
I do think the Supreme Court is undemocratic in structure as it plays no role in being voted on. However, I do think that is the right way to go about this as individuals would be protected better. Looking at Federalist #10, technically the rich still sought out who gets the Supreme Court as the President and the Senate control appointing the judges. The senate and the President again are elected and they have lobbies and what not. So sadly the Supreme Court is also controlled by the rich class.
Williams says that war on terror is different from traditional wars as you are fighting decentralized, non-state groups. There is no government, no conventional military, nor any established land for terrorist groups. They can attack you from anywhere, meanwhile traditional wars are a certain setting. There is no certain endpoint with wars that are fought against these terrorist groups as there’s not any negotiating.
The fourth amendment is violated as someone’s right to privacy is at stake when the government is monitoring your device. Letting them wiretap your device means you’re also being suspected without probable cause as they do not have a warrant. Which is another part that violates the fourth amendment.
The fourth amendment is being violated with sneak and peak warrants as law enforcement is entering your home without telling you. Then they eventually tell you after the fact. The fourth amendment is violated as this is an unreasonable search and violation of privacy. the sixth amendment is also violated as the right of you being informed of charges is being violated. If you don’t know you are being searched, and do at a later time. It makes it way harder for you to defend yourself legally.
The Establishment Clause is in the first amendment and it stops the US government from relating itself in anyway with any religion. It is the idea of separation of church and state, keeping these two things apart from one another. This also means the government cannot favor a religion nor promote it as well. The Lemon Test is directly related to the cause as it evaluated whether or not something done by the government violates the Establishment Clause. It looks at whether or not there is religious intent behind something, if it stops or pushes religion, or is has any extreme ties with any religion
Burning the US flag is protected by the First Amendment as it counts as free speech. The case relating to this is Texas v. Johnson in 1989, Johnson was convicted for burning the flag but the Supreme Court put down and Texas law and ruled that burning the flag was a symbolic speech which is a form of political expression. Therefore, that is not illegal, but protected.
It is your fifth amendment right to stay silent as the court can you anything against you during your case. You are refusing to speak so you protect yourself in court, and prevent any evidence (you talking) getting administered against you.
The main difference between roles in the citizens in government between federal, confederation, and unitary systems is how everyone has power in them. In a federal system, powers are distributed between the Federal government and the state like they are in current US. Citizens vote for who they want in power. In the confederation system, there are state governments which the citizens vote for. There is barely any influence for the central government here. The unitary system has one federal central government where citizens directly vote for them. However, local governments have little to no power.
Division of power is when the responsibilities as well as authority is split between local and centralized governments. In our case, the state and federal. Some powers are given to the state and some to federal and this also comes with checks and balances. This make sure there is national security and a sense of local authorities in the country.
During situations like the covid19 pandemic the federal government gave local authorities in NY support like CDC, which gave mandates as well as guidance on how to handle the pandemic. The federal government also gave funding to the state to help support it in many ways. This could mean the hospitals or the small businesses at the time who were struggling. With guidance and money the federal government helped New York state stay afloat during covid.
The social classes that wrote the constitution were the wealthy. By wealthy I mean people who own land, slaves, people in control of banking, and any general means of production at the time. On the other hand, the people who were not in political position to write the constitution was the working class with nothing to their name. This can be farmers, laborers, servants, and slaves. In the second reading, it says the white men with land were the only ones who could vote. People who did not have these powers were so called disenfranchised. It makes sense the wealthy made the constitution as since voting powers were limited to only white men who were landowners. That would ensure that things always stayed under their control.
I think the structure is very similar today only in the sense when it comes to economic status. First and foremost, there is nothing stopping anyone from any race, economic background, or gender from voting so that is one significant difference. However, when it comes to who we are voting for as well as the policies those people push out. Those people we vote for as well as the policies are mostly in the interest of the wealth owning class. As I have mentioned before, no politician today has any campaign without any financial support, of which would only come from the wealthy. Similarly, but in a different way, in that time policies were shaped by the wealthy class as well.
The people who wrote the constitution were afraid of democracy because it puts them at an adverse disadvantage with the minority population. Not everyone is rich and there are more poor people than rich, and when you mix it with democracy where majority wins. The class with less people is always gonna lose and this can get all things to be blown out of their proportion and favor, leaving them with less control and wealth. Wealth will disintegrate if democracies always prevailed.
The concept of a faction reminds me of social classes and as we discussed in our last module, how social classes interact with one another. A faction is category of people with same ideals or situations at hand. And again tying it back to or last module there’s a labor class and wealth owning class who are always in contradiction with each other as well. Also, it reminds me of the MCM and CMC diagram we had as everything is in competition with one another when it comes to these classes.
According to federalist #10, there is kind of a survival of the fittest type of theory when it comes to wealth. James Madison says that it is all contingent on what abilities one has which would lead to how much wealth that person has. The idea of “diversity in the faculties of men”, which is wealth is obtained easier by some rather than others. Again kind of going off go off survival of the fittest but in wealth. That whether you’re rich or poor is simply because you have or lack something. By faculties, James Madison means natural mental and physical capabilities of human beings.
I do not agree with this explanation as it contradicts what we learned in our Module about wealth. We looked over at the fact that a lot of wealth is inherited and grown using MCM system. It has nothing to do with ones personal ‘faculties’ but more so how the system is set up. The rich get richer and the poor stay poor. And if you do go down that root, there are surely a lot of poor people who have way brighter minds than our wealth owning counterparts, but they are poor for reasons other than their so called faculties. I think James Madison’s theory makes no sense.
The core mission is to protect wealth, property and be able to grow it. That sounds quite capitalist and shows that James Madison wanted to make sure our financial assets were protected more than anything. Honestly, this does not surprise me because though yes today we do believe that freedoms, rights, democracy, are our core mission. Underlying that is something much deeper, that has everything to do with economics. Whether it’s our foreign policies of bombing other countries for their oil. Or monopolies that protect ‘American’ interests. America is still built on the idea of protecting wealth and now even growing it since most of our budget is military.
I am not surprised as the wealth owning class was at a disadvantage as we mentioned earlier, when it came to democracy. There are simply more poor people and a democracy puts you at a disadvantage if you are wealthy since there is less of you. A representative form of government would lead to the labor class having less power and influence over the wealth of rich. Again, it really shows the true colors rooted deep in our history of wealth being put over pure democracy,
The statistic that bothered me the most was the fact that the top 1 percent own 40-50% of the nations wealth is extremely jarring. The last sentence which said if you are not rich it is because you chose the wrong parents shows the lack of economic mobility here in America. This was the land of opportunity until capitalism made the gap deeper and deeper. It is quite sad having seeing this as there are ways to run society on a better merit. Looking back in history, if you looked at Libya during Muammar Gaddafi you can see how a socialist system with a distribution of wealth is better for everyone. There was free housing, healthcare, transportation for all. Not to mention people complain about socialist society reducing innovation in society yet Libya was working on the world’s biggest irrigation project. That all ended with the Arab Spring incited by the US in 2011, but it really goes to show the control they have over us.
The implications of this is the idea that the working class is weak and has everything cut off. They don’t have any power nor do they have any say in anything. If you think elections for the people are really “for the people” you really do have to think deeper as to who you are voting for. Specifically, these political parties which are funded by and paid for by lobbies and wealthy capitalists. There’s a dividing line with their ideologies, but no matter who you chose, you get their ideas. This is how this dynamic gets played out in relation to our lives. Though respectfully I think many people are just stuck in their realm without knowing so, and that’s exactly what they want. No normal person will just get rich out of nowhere. But even this idea of dreaming to be rich is stupid as, if we had a society with all the basic human needs, we would not dwell on being rich. The American idea of being rich is plagued by thinking rightful human needs make us rich.
