Supreme Court Justice #Clarence#Thomas acknowledged for the first time in a new financial disclosure filing that 🔸he should have publicly reported two free vacations 🔸he received from billionaire #Harlan#Crow.
The pair of 2019 trips, one to Indonesia and the other to the Bohemian Grove, an all-male retreat in northern California, were first revealed by ProPublica.
Last year, Thomas argued that he did not need to disclose such gifts.
“Justice Thomas’s critics allege that he failed to report gifts from wealthy friends,” his lawyer previously said in a statement issued on the justice’s behalf. “Untrue.”
Legal ethics experts said that Thomas appeared to have violated the law by failing to disclose the trips and gifts.
The Thomas revelations helped plunge the Supreme Court into its biggest ethical crisis in the modern era.
Justice Samuel Alito also failed to disclose a luxury fishing trip that was paid for by wealthy political donors, one of whom had cases before the court.
In recent weeks, Alito has faced criticism for politicized flags that flew at two of his homes.
The public’s approval of the court has plummeted in the last few years, polls show.
In response, the court last year adopted a code of conduct for the first time in its history. The code, however, has no enforcement mechanism.
This is not the first time that Thomas has responded to public controversy about his disclosure practices by amending an old form. At least twice before, Thomas has similarly defended his failure to make required disclosures as an unintentional error or a misunderstanding of the rules.
Corruption is a system of concentrated gains and diffused costs: cheaters make a lot of money, and their victims each lose a little. The cheater has a much larger pool of money to spend on keeping the scam going, and the victims need to pay again to fight the cheater.
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This is why inequality - and its handmaiden, monopoly - is so dangerous. The more concentrated private wealth becomes, the harder it is for the state to police, and the more likely it is that this private wealth will corrupt our officials. We see this all around us - for example, when Supreme Court justices receive lavish gifts from billionaires whom they later rule in favor of:
Today in Labor History April 12, 1900: Florence Reece was born. Reece was an activist in the Harlan County, Kentucky, coal strikes, and author of the song, “Which Side Are You On?” She wrote the song in 1931, during a UMW strike, in response to Sheriff Blair’s thugs, who beat & murdered union leaders. Florence wrote the song on an old wall calendar while her home was being ransacked by Blair’s goons. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7ZHfZt4o6c