In the case of Dukes v. Wal-Mart, the Supreme Court ruled against 1.5 million female Wal-Mart employees who were suing for sex discrimination in pay and promotions, effectively killing the biggest civil rights class action lawsuit in U.S. history. The Court’s reasoning was grounded in the principle of “commonality” in Rule 23 of Civil Procedure, which requires that all the members of a class action have a common problem, but also a common solution that can eliminate all claims in one fell swoop. In his 5-4 opinion, written by Justice Scalia, the majority held that each woman had been denied a promotion for a different reason by a different manager in a different store, and therefore there was no single “glue” that bound them together, so they couldn’t be joined as a single class. The very question, as the article notes, was equally troubling for all 1.5 million women: “why was I disfavored?” which was answered for all of us by our shared experience as women, but was not legally visible in the Court’s narrow reading of commonality.

1:
Courts can be better suited at protecting individual rights, because they are beyond political pressure; judges are not elected for keeping their jobs so they do not fear losing an election to rule against unpopular individuals or minorities. Elected officials, such as Congress or the Mayor, on the other hand, must be responsive to the majority opinion; sometimes they must sacrifice individual rights for the good of the whole. One obvious example is Brown v. Board of Education (1954), in which the Supreme Court invalidated school segregation when it was backed by many white states’ majorities something that those states’ elected officials would never have done.

2:
I do believe that in a structural way the Supreme Court is anti-democratic judges hold office for life, are not accountable to people, and have the authority to invalidate laws elected by majorities of people. This design can be traced, for example, to Madison’s concerns about “tyranny of the majority” in Federalist 10, and the potential of factions to dominate government by popular vote. The framers insulated judges from elections so that a layer of government would be controlled by educated, elite legal professionals, not by rabid public sentiment, which Parenti will argue, is the voice of those already in power. The Court, then, can advance individual rights, but it also brings an unelected, mostly upper-class institution into the power-grip.

1. A unitary system is a system in which citizens are most closely connected to the central/national government and the central/national government has almost all authority. Local governments are present but they are established by the center and serve it — citizens have little say at the local level on major policy. In a confederation, citizens primarily connect with their state or region government, which has the majority of power. The central government is weak, relying on the states, citizens have more influence at the local level but feel little of the central government in everyday life. It was the U.S. under the Articles of Confederation. Under a federal system (as it exists in the United States today), citizens are governed by both their national and state governments, and each possesses a certain degree of authority. Citizens vote both at the local and national levels and are directly affected by laws at both levels. This means that the citizens get more access points, but more complexity.
2. The concept of “division of power” involves a distribution of power between the national and state governments, with none having absolute authority. The Constitution allocates some powers to a single level of government (the federal government) in the United States, some to the states, and some to both levels of government (taxation, infrastructure-building). The concept is that power is spread out, not concentrated.
3. The impact of the federal government on NY state and local governments throughout COVID-19.
   One important example of how Washington influences state and local action during a pandemic is fiscal federalism, the three ways in which the federal government provided hundreds of billions to states through the CARES Act (2020) and the American Rescue Plan (2021). The state and city of New York were given billions in relief money, for unemployment, hospital space and local government salaries. Conditions were attached to federal money: states had to abide by federal rules as to how the money should be used. Guidance and pressure: The CDC and other federal agencies provided guidelines for public health, which New York largely adhered to (masking, social distancing, vaccination protocols). States technically could have established their own rules, but it could affect their federal funding and public legitimacy if they went against the CDC rules. Governor Cuomo worked closely with federal health officials in distributing ventilators and planning hospital surges. President Trump and then Biden declared a national emergency, which opened up federal resources and triggered FEMA, which directly coordinated with New York state and NYC on vaccine distribution, PPE supply chains and setting up field hospitals (e.g. Javits Center). When tension emerged: COVID proved the limits of federal control at the same time. New York schools, restaurants and mask mandates were decided by city and state police powers and the federal government had no case to force them open or shut. This caused some friction to be visible, especially with the Trump administration urging governors to reopen businesses more quickly than they wanted to. In sum, COVID demonstrated the power of the federal government to influence state action not through command, but through money and coordination, as is the true nature of American federalism.

1.
Faction is like social class. Madison describes a faction as a group united by a common interest that conflicts with other groups, which is exactly how Marxist theory defines classes: groups defined by their relationship to property, whose interests are in opposition to one another.

2. Madison believes that the source of wealth is the natural variety of the faculties of men (abilities and gifts of people). The ones with better faculties get more property and the ones with lesser faculties, less property. That’s why some are rich and some are poor, in his opinion.

3. Madison’s justification is ideological says inequality is natural and inevitable, not a result of exploitation, inheritance, colonization, or structural power.

4. The primary function of government, says Madison, is to “protect the rights of these faculties” — that is, protect the unequal capacity of individuals to “acquire property” — which is to secure the wealth and property of the rich. This is probably not the type of government that most people are taught today — which is to serve the common good, provide services, or protect individual rights equally. Madison is avowing that the government is meant to defend the rights of the property-owning class.

5. Pure democracy would allow for the direct exercise of power by the majority, in this case, the working poor, who could vote to cancel the debts or redistribute the land, or even to take the wealth away from the elite. A republic is a government that represents popular will through elected representatives, who are usually wealthier, more educated, and in harmony with the prosperous interests. The bigger, the further the republic is dispersed, the more difficult it will be for the poor majority to organize and act as a whole.

A.

Wealthy landowners, merchants, creditors, slave owners and speculators, prepared the Constitution. By 1760, fewer than 500 men, in five cities, dominated most of the commerce on the eastern seaboard, and these were the sort of men who came to Philadelphia. Beard confirms this, presenting evidence that the delegates had personal interests in land speculation, government securities and manufacturing.

The poor farmers, artisans, indentured servants, slaves and women were completely left out. They were excluded from voting, were banned from holding office and could not afford to spend four months in Philadelphia.

It’s both similar and different. The basic division between a wealthy ownership class and a working majority still exists today — the bourgeoisie/proletariat distinction that Beard and Parenti describe maps onto modern billionaires vs. wage workers. But formal legal exclusions have been eliminated. Campaign finance, lobbying, and the absence of third-party options are the more common methods of disenfranchisement today, rather than legal barriers. The class structure remains and the rules and processes of exclusion have simply grown more covert.

3.

The framers feared the wealthy, as they feared the political power of the majority class (the proletariat). Since the working class had direct material interests opposed to the wealthy (cancel debts, redistribute land, abolish servitude), real majority rule threatened the entire economic order on which the framers had built their wealth. Madison’s Federalist #10 makes this explicit: the goal was to prevent the propertyless majority from acting in unison against the propertied class. To wrap up, democracy was a threat to their class interests.

1. The most impactful statistic is that the top 1 percent owns more than 40-50 percent of the country’s total wealth, while the bottom 90 percent have less than that. The interesting thing about this is the magnitude of the imbalance: one per cent has more than 9 times as many as they ought to have according to the size of the population. It also helps dispel the popular myth that the United States is a great middle-class nation where prosperity comes to the diligent. When debts and mortgages are taken into account, 90 percent of families have little or no net assets, indicating the financial fragility of most Americans. This statistic sticks with you because it makes inequality seem less like an exception and more like the way the system is intended to function.

2. Living in a society where so much of the wealth is unequally distributed means that access to essentials – housing, health care, education – is largely dependent on which class you are born into, rather than your own work. This is seen daily in New York City. The subway ride to the same neighborhood takes two people who live completely different lives, one a Goldman Sachs banker and the other with three jobs and still unable to afford rent. In neighborhoods such as Lower Manhattan, where the cost of renting has been climbing, working families are being pushed farther away, and richer families are moving in, directly because of the concentration of wealth and its impact on rent prices. Parenti’s “wealth creating poverty” isn’t a theoretical construct; it’s real, as seen in the disparity between glittering luxury towers and those living on the street below.

1. Tools, resources, and facilities used in the production of goods, for example, machines, factories, raw materials, etc., are called means of production. A good example is a McDonald’s restaurant where the building, food inventory, and the fryers are all part of the means of production and not the workers. Labor is the human psychological and physical energy that is applied to the resources in order to produce something of value. Someone who works at McDonald’s, cooking and putting the food together, is performing labor; without any human labor, the means of production make nothing. These two are what make both making and consumption demand.

2. The Labor Theory of Value says that value is not in the price or in the money that goes into the product. Rather, value is defined by how much human labor is needed to produce an item with normal labor. The value of a thing is the socially necessary labor time which is contained in it, the average labor time necessary to produce it by a given society. Handmade furniture is more expensive than mass-made furniture since a lot of work was put into making the furniture. Money doesn’t create that underlying labor value; it is just a symbol of it.

3. Labor and value are directly related since labor is the first source of any economic value. As long as no effort is made to work the raw material, there is no value in it; a forest is worthless until it’s cut, milled, and hauled by people. The more social labor that is required to produce it, the higher the value of the commodity. Marx and Parenti make this point because they believe that all wealth in society is created by workers. However, under capitalism, most of the value goes to capitalists instead of workers in the form of wages.

4. Labor is the physical and mental exertion a worker puts into his or her job — the work itself. Labor power, which is the capacity to work, is the power that a worker sells to an employer in exchange for wages. The first time you get hired, the employer pays you a wage price for your ability to work, but he/she also gets from you more value than the wage price indicates. Profit comes from that difference between your labor power cost to the employer and your production of labor. This is an important distinction to understand to grasp how capitalism works out of sight.

5. Surplus value is surplus wealth appropriated by the owner and not returned to the worker in the form of wages. The worker, for instance, makes $500 worth of goods in a day, but earns only $100, the other $400 being surplus value which the owner pockets as profit. The importance of this concept is evident, as it elucidates the fact that the capitalist does not generate profits, but instead pockets them from the workers’ labor. It answers as to why the owners get richer and richer without working their whole lives, while the workers get paid meager wages and little at the end of their lives. Once we can grasp the concept of surplus value, we can see the undercapitalist structural source of class inequality.