President Biden recently flew off to Taiwan to assure allies there that he will fight for them. And next he’s headed over to Saudi Arabia to “repair ties” with those oil monarchs.

This flurry of foreign travel might be strategically important for international realpolitik, but – Hello – another strategically important piece of real politics is looming right here at home: The November congressional elections! Taiwan and Saudi Arabia don’t get a vote, but Texas and South Carolina do. So how about spending a bit more time flying or even whistle stopping to such places, where many hard-hit working-class families would like to see President Joe fight for and repair ties with them.

In fairness, much of Biden’s progressive agenda has been deliberately gummed up by such congressional blobs of do-nothingism as Mitch McConnell and Joe Manchin. But blaming them isn’t winning any points for him – nor does it help the families now struggling with baby formula shortages, $5 gasoline, a farm and factory depression, etc.

Instead of blame or surrender, more of Harry Truman’s feisty, can-do spirit is called for – get out of the Beltway Bubble and go straight to the people with an urgent program of Big Actions that they want and need. To hell with placating McConnell and Manchin –you’re the president Joe, not them, and you’re not powerless. For example, Rep. Ro Khanna points out that you should use the government’s emergency authority to do “preemptive buying” on the open market to stop runaway food and fuel prices. The authority to do this is already on the books, so no need to kiss McConnell’s butt – just take direct presidential action for ordinary Americans.

This is the difference between giving speeches telling voters you’re on their side… and actually being there, so they can see it for themselves. It’s honest politics.

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“Equal Justice Under Law.” That’s the noble principle carved into the marble façade of the temple-like Supreme Court building.

Today, though, six right-wing, corporate-dominated activist judges control the present Court, and they’re implementing an elitist creed mocking that ideal. By putting the interests and power of the wealthy over the rest of us. They’re turning “justice” into an antidemocratic concept of “just us.” In ruling after ruling, today’s supremes are political operatives taking power from the many to further-empower and enrich the few.

One huge change occurred in 2010, when the five Republican judges decreed that corporations be given a Constitutional right to spend unlimited sums of their cash to dominate our elections – and to pack our courts with judges who serve them. Sure enough, a majority of Supremes are now in harness to the corporate agenda.

Consider their constant push to rig the rules against workers. While the federal judiciary has aided corporate bosses for decades by chipping away at hard-won legal protections for working families, the chisel has become a jackhammer in the last few years. The Supreme Court’s Republican majority routinely pounds precedents, logic, truth, and the Constitution itself to demolish the structural pillars of labor rights and organizing.

In a 2018 case, for example, the GOP judges undermined the funding of unions by arbitrarily striking down their process for collecting dues–a practice the court itself had authorized 41 years earlier. As Justice Elena Kagan bluntly put it in her dissenting opinion, there was no reason for the court to barge into this matter of long-settled law … except that the Republican majority simply didn’t like the previous decision and overruled it “because it wanted to.”

This is not justice, it’s raw politics – yet another open-and-shut case of black-robed partisans supplanting America’s hallowed rule of law with their own anti-labor whim.

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Usurping the fundamental rights of women to control their own bodies.

Authorizing corporate giants to buy our elections.

Nullifying the right of organizers to talk to workers about unionizing.

Who is rigging America’s legal system against workaday people? The Supreme Court’s right-wing extremists, that’s who. Just a handful of aloof, unelected judges have been turning what’s supposed to be a citadel of justice into an unrestrained political instrument for instituting autocratic, plutocratic, theocratic power over us. If that sounds like a coup, it is! A slow-motion power grab has quietly been underway for years, with a core group of corporate billionaires and far-right political operatives working (with practically no media exposure) to stack federal and state courts with partisan activists.

There’s even a smoking gun revealing this plot: A confidential memo to the Chamber of Commerce, written in 1971 by Lewis Powell – a corporate lawyer and consigliere for Big Tobacco. Powell lamented that such upstanding corporate citizens as tobacco giants were not getting the respect they deserved, nor did they have enough power over the nation’s political system.

That was absurd, of course, but Powell was dead-set on returning America to pre-New Deal days when corporate barons were the supreme, domineering force over America’s government, economy, and society. To get there, Powell’s memo noted that “with an activist-minded Supreme Court, the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change” – by which he meant structural changes that empower moneyed interests over workers, consumers, et al. Just two months after Powell sent his memo, President Nixon awarded him a seat on the Supreme Court!

After decades of political maneuvering by a consortium of laissez-faire ideologues, dark-money billionaire funders, secretive front groups, and top GOP politicos, we now have the Supreme Court corporations want. Powell’s memo has literally come to life.

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When Supreme Court member Sam Alito’s secret plan for canceling the constitutional right of women to end their pregnancies leaked out to the public – Republican politicos went ballistic! Over the leak, that is.

The Court’s Republican Chief Justice, John Roberts, called the unauthorized disclosure an “affront” to the majesty of the Supremes. Likewise, Republican congressional leaders have furiously demanded to know who dunnit and why! Way beyond their political screeching and posturing, however, a Pennsylvania woman quietly wrote a letter to the New York Times that calmly posed a couple of honest, more-fundamental questions: “Why are Supreme Court votes and processes so hidden in the first place?” And “How did this grip on secrecy become so sacrosanct?”

After all, as important and enormously-powerful as this tiny body is, it’s still a governmental agency doing public business that affects every American. So the legal work that the nine members of this ultimate judicial authority do – including their internal machinations to reach such awesome decisions as nullifying fundamental human rights – ought to be transparent to all who will be affected.

The ugly truth is that today’s Third Branch of government has needlessly, dangerously, and rather ludicrously become a black-robed autocracy. Bear in mind that these nine individuals are enrobed for life, choose the cases they consider, make up their own rules of ethical conduct, operate almost entirely behind closed doors, can conspire to issue decrees – and the bare majority of only five of them can arbitrarily overrule president’s, congresses, states, other courts, voters… and your own personal life-decisions.

And now comes a six-person GOP majority of supreme justices determined to entrench corporate plutocracy, right-wing theocracy, and Republican sovereignty over all of us. That’s why we must finally lift the medieval level of secrecy the partisan judges are using to shroud their actions.

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Mitch McConnell, the perpetually sour old goose who heads the Senate Republican Caucus, had a hissy fit when the news leaked out that American women are about to have their most fundamental constitutional right taken from them by a cabal of Supreme Court judges.

What made Mitch twitch, of course, was not the bad news for women… but the leak. He huffed that revealing the right-wing Court’s scheme to the public was a “stunning breach,” spewing that it’s “an attack on the independence of the Supreme Court.” Uh, Mitch… the so-called Supremes have been meeting behind closed doors specifically to plot an all-out attack on the independence of some 170 million women to control their own bodies. Why aren’t you opposing the secrecy, rather than supporting the Court’s subversion of women’s liberty?

Perversely, the entire Republican leadership is outraged by the leak, rather than the attack on women. Right-wing blowhard Ted Cruz, for example, yapped that informing the public “will do lasting damage to the integrity of the Court.” Uh, Ted… you and your ideological ilk annihilated the Court’s integrity – and its legitimacy – when you stacked it with a covey of corporate-coddling partisan hacks like Alito, Barrett, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas.

Then came Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, a Trump acolyte, ludicrously blathering that the leak of the judicial plan is “despicable.” Why? Well, he explained to us commoners, the Court “is not a political body.” If ignorance is bliss, Mike must be ecstatic! The GOP majority on this court is so immersed in its own partisan biases that it is routinely ruling against workers, the environment, women, voting rights, local communities… and democracy itself.

No surprise then that public trust in the integrity of these “arbiters of justice” is crashing. If the Court won’t respect our democratic ideals, the people won't respect the Court.

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Here are two terms you don’t expect to see together: “The state of Alabama” and “progressive leader.” (Ok, I’m a Texan, so I have no standing to point at the rank regressiveness of any other state government … but still, Alabama?) And yet, the Camellia State has flowered as a model of strong progressive action in one area of critical public importance: Quality child care.

It’s a cliche to say “our children are our future,” but it’s also true. Why, then, do we invest so little in our littlest ones, our future? America’s childcare system is a national disgrace, failing to provide safe places for children of working parents, and failure to boost the education of pre-kindergarten tykes. Moreover, the abject failure of state and national officials to meet this basic social need is spreading inequality, rolling back opportunities for women, and severely restricting economic progress.

Yet, Alabama officials have recently been setting the national standard for effective pre-K programs by making a major investment in its 4 &5-year-olds, operating a statewide child care network in about 1,300 neighborhood and rural areas. A major factor in its success is a two-generation approach, not only educating the kiddos, but also providing support materials and coaching so that parents engage as their children’s “first teachers.”

Producing demonstrable results year after year, the state’s public network gets bipartisan support and funding from the Alabama Legislature. The program is free and available to all, with special attention devoted to enlisting often overlooked families in rural, poor, and people-of-color communities. Rather than treating teachers as low-pay babysitters, Alabama is paying (and respecting) them as the professionals they are and investing in their career development.

If one of our poorest states can rise to meet this basic human need, what’s wrong with the richest country in the history of the world?

Question: What does a packet of M&M’s and your local veterinarian have in common? Answer: Both are owned by Mars Inc., the global candy monopolist.

Since the 1980s, we’ve seen massive consolidations in industry after industry – from airlines to newspapers, the internet to candy. These monopolists run roughshod over consumers, workers, communities, suppliers, and our nation’s commitment to the Common Good. And now the corporate attitude seems to be, “what the Hell, why not let monopolization go to the dogs?”

This change has been led by “private equity groups.” They are corporate-takeover sharks that borrow billions of dollars to buy out, plunder, then sell off the remnants of established businesses. They target enterprises that can be grabbed on the cheap but have assets like a loyal customer base. Then the sharks raise prices on those customers while cutting staff and quality of service.

This has been happening to thousands of local vet practices and hospitals, which have quietly been plucked by Wall Street entities bearing non-descript acronyms like IVC, JAB, KKR, and VCA. At first locals don’t notice the takeover, because the corporate outfit not only buys your friendly “Dr. Barry Bones” vet service, they also buy the Doc’s name. As an IVC takeover consultant confided: “People like to take their dog to local vets and not feel like it’s a corporate machine.”

But increasingly, it is. Solo practitioners who became veterinarians to provide friendly, community-based service now must answer to bean counters at headquarters – and, foremost, they must serve profit over animals. Veterinary Center of America (VCA), for example, is one of the most aggressive monopolizers, controlling access to and prices charged by 1,000+ vet facilities in 43 states. In 2017, VCA was taken over by Mars Inc.

One feisty group battling monopolizers is the National Veterinary Professionals Union – Get info at natvpu.org.

For many people, the animals they adopt and love become more like family members than pets. We have deep relationships, with cats, dogs, parrots, goats, horses, and other fellow critters – who at least pretend to love us back, providing comfort and joy all around.

Sadly though, life for all of us animals is a spin around the wheel of fortune, so illness and injuries happen. That’s why one of the most valued members of every community are the staffers in our local veterinarian office. Practically all vets, nurses, technicians, and support staff are there chiefly because they love animals and get personal satisfaction from providing care for them.

When I say they are “there,” I not only mean 9 to 5, but this group of independent health providers are committed to being there when needed – including off hours and days off, for animal misfortune and suffering don’t go by clocks and calendars. Local practitioners also try to be there for low-income people, offering deferred payment plans and even discounted fees so their animals can get the treatment they need.

But wait – sound the ambulance sirens! Something is going horribly wrong! This venerable profession has recently been collapsing into a corporate model of Wall Street owned chains. They are monopolizing markets, reducing staff, gutting service, and prioritizing the love of money over the love of animals. It’s not uncommon these days for franticly-worried customers to bring an ill or injured pet into their old reliable vet office only to find it has quietly come under chain ownership, is understaffed, and is unwilling to accept the patient, forcing a desperate scramble to find emergency care, often out of town.

This is Jim Hightower saying... The same profiteering corporate mentality that has proven disastrous for human health care is now rapidly locking down pet care – and that’s an act of animal cruelty.

What is so supreme about the Supreme Court?

I mean besides being housed in an imposing marble building, being the final stop on America’s judicial train, and having its nine members look photogenically authoritarian in those full-body black robes. And, yes, its existence is written into the Constitution – but so is Congress, and no one thinks of it as anything supreme.

We 330 million Americans are told we must obey “the law,” as defined by a half dozen unelected lawyers on this court. Why should we democratic citizens do that? After all, these legalistic elites have no actual power to force their personal beliefs on us – there’s no Supreme Court army. In fact, their sole source of power is one that is intangible, extremely fragile, and easily frittered away: Public trust.

We should go along with their rulings only if they appear to be fair and honest, not based on personal whim or partisan ideology, and not meant to extend plutocratic power over the people. As Justice Elena Kagan rightly put it, “The only way we can get people to do what we think they should do is because people respect us.”

That’s where the present majority of far-right-wing appointees have failed so abjectly. Rather than meeting a lofty standard of judiciousness, all six have pulled the court down into the mire of crass Republican politics. They’ve corrupted the system and jiggered the law to decree that corporate campaign cash is “free speech,” that the state can take over women’s bodies, that the Republican Party can unilaterally shut millions of voters out of America’s voting booths… and so awful much more that enthrones the few over the many.

Respect? Trust? The Republican court is already down to 40 percent public approval rating, having surrendered its legitimacy to be a governing authority over us.

Ralph Waldo Emerson told about a guest who came to dinner and spent the entire evening prattling about his own integrity: “The louder he talked of his honor,” Emerson wrote: “the faster we counted our spoons.”

Today, America has not one, but six guests in our national home babbling about their integrity. They are the six extremist Republican judges who now control our Supreme Court, and it’s a bit unsettling to hear them go on and on, almost frantically pleading with us to believe in their judicial impartiality. For example, the Court’s newest members, Amy Coney Barrett, suddenly blurted out at a public forum in September that “this court is not comprised of a bunch of partisan hacks.”

Whoa – better count our spoons!

In fact, each of the six were installed on the court by right-wing Republicans specifically because they had proven to be devout partisan hacks. Interestingly, Barrett made her unprompted and strained assertion of judicial integrity at the McConnell Center – named for Mitch McConnell, the rabidly-partisan GOP senator who pulled a fast one last year, rushing Barrett onto the bench on a party-line vote just before Republicans lost control of the senate. Indeed, old Mitch himself, introduced Barrett at the forum where she gave her “we-are-not-partisan-hacks” speech. He grinned proudly at the pure hackery of his partisan protégé.

Another hard-core partisan on the court, Sam Alito, whined in October that critics accuse the Court’s GOP majority of being “a dangerous cabal that resorts to sneaky and improper methods to get its way.” Well golly Sam, yes, we do think that, because again and again you partisans sneak up on the Constitution and We The People to twist the law to fit your political bias and personal whims. If you don’t want to be considered political hacks – stop being political hacks.