The Middle East, Felix Mendelssohn - Money, Free Speech, Corporations and People

                                             



Diplomacy in the Middle East
Is it with longing that the world looks back to the Ottoman Empire which, until the First World War, maintained a loose but relatively effective control over much of the tribal Middle East which up until then was without independent nation-states.  Their religiously-based Caliphate was benign and when rebellion raised its head, it was quickly put down.

It is an understatement to say that the nations which succeeded the Ottoman Empire are in disarray.  There is unbridled violence stemming from the historic schism between Sunni and Shiite believers in Islam, and even polarities within those branches.  Compounding this is the emergence of anti-Western, anti-Israel, violent extremism.  Right now, there are at least four “failed” nations in the Middle East, places which were far better under the heel of the Turkish Ottomans than as independent countries.  These are Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen.  With a geographic stretch, one might include Libya and Somalia in this group.

How long nations such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf States remain viable is questionable. Turkey and Egypt present much more stability, but they are far from being democratic states, and without despotism, their long-term survival is uncertain.

Israel, child of the United Nations in 1947, and with a historic precedent for its existence, is strong proof that successful nationhood in the Middle East is possible.  The Israelis have made a prosperous, technologically advanced and self-sufficient nation out of worthless desert wasteland and should be an example to the rest of the Middle East, which spends too much of its energy trying to destroy Israel rather than trying to emulate it, which would solve most of their problems.

Attempting to deal with the Middle East means approaching problems which exist separately, and in combination with one another.  The old adage that the enemy of your enemy might be your ally pervades Middle Eastern politics.  If one were to make a list of all the players in the Middle East and note who the enemies of each were, you would see what makes diplomacy there so difficult.   

For example, everyone knows that the United States and the European nations are opposed to the jihadist Sunni anti-Western Islamic State.  But so is Shia Iran, particularly in Iraq where ISIS is attempting to seize the entire country and in Syria where the ISIS would love to overthrow Bashir al Assad. But hold on, the United States and the West would just as well like to see him go!  But Iran supports al Assad’s government.  It is inconceivable that we would ally ourselves with the Islamic State in opposing al Assad and Iran, but it is also inconceivable that we would ally ourselves with Iran in opposing the Islamic State so long as Iran is supporting Bashir and its Hezbollah proxies in Syria and Lebanon, not to speak of Tehran's support of Hamas in Gaza.



Assad

The same kinds of scenarios can be drawn involving Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Jordan, Yemen, the Al Qaeda group, the Palestinians, Libya, Somalia, Egypt and Turkey.  Diplomacy is tough stuff.  And war has been defined as what happens when diplomacy fails, and up to now, "failure" has been the default position in regard to diplomacy in the Middle East.
Jack Lippman

                                                  

Felix Mendelssohn's Venture into Klezmer

Mendelssohn

I recently had the pleasure of hearing the Budapest Festival Orchestra, one of the world’s finest musical groups, perform Felix Mendelssohn’s Overture and Incidental Music for Shakespeare’s play, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”  I believe that of the fifteen pieces of “incidental” music Mendelssohn had composed for the piece, only about eight or ten are usually performed, the most famous of which of course is the Wedding March.  Last week, the conductor, however, chose to include two of the rarely played pieces.  The inclusion of one was, at least to me, very significant.

Mendelssohn was Jewish.  In order to succeed in his chosen field in Nineteenth century Germany, however, he felt it necessary to convert to *Christianity.  (His very talented sister, Fannie, remained Jewish and never achieved the fame that Felix did.)  But apparently, a bit of his Jewish heritage remained and it appears in one of those rarely played pieces of incidental music.  It was intended as background, or introductory music, for the scene in the play where a ridiculous and nonsensical version of the classic love story of Pyramus and Thisbe is presented.  This piece of Mendelssohn’s music is in the style of Klezmer musicians playing a "frailach" (Jewish "happy" music) at a wedding, including a clarinet solo reminiscent of Artie Shaw. The Budapest’s conductor, Ivan Fischer, made sure that Mendelssohn’s Jewish roots were not ignored.

*(Mendelssohn’s  devotion to Christianity might be attested to by the fact that among his compositions is included the Christmas carol, “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.”)

JL

                                                      
An Issue for 2016

In all likelihood, whomever is elected President in 2016 will have the opportunity to appoint one or more Supreme Court Justices.  Several of those on the bench currently are aging.  If the Senate goes the same way as the Presidency in 2016, there will be less need for compromise in the choice of new Justices.  This very well be one of the most important outcomes of the 2016 elections, for which campaigning has already begun. 

The 2010 Citizens United decision, which extended the right of free speech to corporations, and earlier decisions which equated money with free speech, have had a tremendous effect on our election campaigns.  A recent Op-Ed article in the Palm Beach Post, reproduced below, discusses this extension of the right of free speech.  It will be interesting to see if any of the candidates for the Democratic nomination, if there are any other than Hillary Clinton, have this subject on their agenda.  I do not suspect that any Republicans will.

JL

Campaign finance ruling has lasting effect

Amanda Hollis-Brusky

   Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission turns 5 this month, but the damage from the U.S. Supreme Court’s revolutionary ruling on campaign finance is just beginning to be felt.    Scholars and pundits will undoubtedly mark the anniversary with commentary on such issues as the troubling rise of “super PACs” and the proliferation of undisclosed contributions known as “dark money.” The biggest long-term impact, however, is the powerful framing effect the decision has had on other areas of the law.

   With last year’s decision in Burwell vs. Hobby Lobby Stores, the idea that “corporations are people” has spread from campaign finance law into the sphere of religious liberty. And there is no reason to believe it will stop there.

   In our legal system, the way an issue is first framed can have powerful and long-lasting consequences. Gordon Silverstein, assistant dean at Yale Law School, has described law as a game of Scrabble — the first tiles placed on the board limit the future moves of the other players. For example, in Buckley vs. Valeo (1976), the first campaign finance case of the modern era, the Supreme Court decided that “money is speech” rather than “money is property.”    Once campaign contributions were elevated to a form of political speech, election spending became increasingly difficult to regulate. Like a series of tiles on a Scrabble board, the precedent set by this one decision has determined what is politically possible and judicially permissible in the realm of campaign finance for almost 40 years.

The Supreme Court:  Front (left to right): Justices Thomas, Scalia, Roberts (Chief Justice), 
Kennedy and Ginsberg.  Rear (left to right):  Justices Sotomayor, Breyer, Alito and Kagan.

   The way an issue is framed in one area of law also can wind up having dramatic effects in other areas. Savvy litigators frame their cases in the context of previous wins. In 2012, religious liberties advocates representing a for-profit corporation, Hobby Lobby, pointed to the Citizens United decision in making their case against the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate. If for-profit corporations could engage in political speech, why could they not also practice religion?

   The strategy proved to be a winning one. The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals cited Citizens United 12 times in its Hobby Lobby decision, writing, “We see no reason the Supreme Court would recognize constitutional protection for a corporation’s political expression but not its religious expression.” The Supreme Court majority agreed and extended religious liberty protections to closely held for-profit corporations. The extension of the logic of Citizens United to Hobby Lobby was a seemingly small step. But as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing in dissent in Hobby Lobby, warned, “The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.”

   Minefield or not, the court didn’t venture into this place by accident. The Citizens United case came about through years of groundwork laid by conservative legal counterrevolutionaries connected through the Federalist Society — a network of 40,000 lawyers, judges and academics dedicated to reshaping the law to align with conservative and libertarian principles.

   So far, the most acute effects of the Citizens United decision have been on elections and campaigns over the last half-decade. Although these effects could be mitigated by statutes, a constitutional amendment or a future Supreme Court decision, the effect Citizens United has had on other areas of law could be longer-lasting and equally as troubling.

   Imagine the variety of ways for-profit corporations might use the “corporations are people” frame to reap additional protections and privileges under the law. Doesn’t antitrust regulation infringe on a corporate person’s freedom of association? Freedom of association is, after all, an essential part of free speech. And, as we have seen, if it can be linked to speech, the claim is at least in play on this Supreme Court’s Scrabble board.

   If past experience holds true, the logic behind the Citizens United decision will become increasingly accepted, authoritative and influential. As the late Justice Benjamin Cardozo said, “The power of precedent ... is the power of the beaten track.”

   If the Supreme Court continues to beat the Citizens United track, we can look forward to corporate “people” accruing more and more of the rights and privileges of “We the People.”

   (Amanda Hollis-Brusky, an assistant professor of politics at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., is the author of “Ideas With Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution” to be published this month. She wrote this for the Los Angeles Times.)


                                                            

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