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GELFAND’S WORLD - I once read that the courts will automatically treat it as slander if you call someone a Communist. For example, the Michigan Law Review cites a Pennsylvania case which found that very thing. That was a while back (1956), and maybe a modern court would reconsider, but the idea back then was that being thought of as a Communist was automatically going to do you damage. So if somebody called you a commie and there was any chance that it would affect your reputation, you didn’t have to prove that the allegation was slanderous. It just was. You only had to demonstrate that it was said by the person you were suing.
Admittedly there was a defense against your lawsuit if, like Ring Lardner Jr., you actually had been a communist. But if not, you had a case.
I bring this subject up because some serious modern history has been made through the use (and misuse) of lawsuits. Donald Trump has been making a whole career out of filing lawsuits. Remember when he extracted money out of the owners of CBS, ostensibly as the settlement for a lawsuit which never alleged anything that couldn’t be defended as freedom of expression? Equally to the point, Trump got by in business by threatening to drag out the legal proceedings when he refused to pay his contractors for services rendered.
Notice that we’ve got two parallel threads here. One is the misuse of the lawsuit in cases lacking merit – essentially inflicting the cost of representation in court even when the suit against you is lacking or your suit is virtuous. The other is the misuse of speech to damage someone’s reputation, using an allegation that is not factually defensible.
The take-home lesson in this modern day is for the good guys to begin using the same set of weapons, but this time for moral and defensible purposes. Wouldn’t it be nice if the good guys started using slander suits too?
I’ve got a couple of exemplary defendants in mind.
The first is, of course, the third place finisher in our recent mayoral primary election. Spencer Pratt made a concession speech which has been widely reported. In it, he refers to Karen Bass and Nithya Raman as “these two corrupt communists.” In another part of the speech, he refers to them as “commie animals.”
I suspect that both Bass and Raman have at least two separate legal actions in these remarks. The first is the word “corrupt,” which goes beyond mere matters of political opinion. It is perfectly defensible to hold an opinion that somebody is incompetent and inept, and to express that opinion either bluntly or wittily. I personally feel that Bass was a bit inept in some of her appointments when she first took office. I have a distinguished colleague who is extremely critical of Raman, both as City Council representative and as politician. We both have the right to hold these beliefs and to trumpet them in these pages.
But Pratt’s allegation of corruption is different. In this particular context it is absent of all limiting adjectives or verb forms. It is pure accusation. And it is obviously intended to do damage to reputations.
But he takes it a step further, and it is a step that really ought to be considered out of bounds in modern political parlance. To call someone a Communist suggests something that goes beyond simple corruption. It implies a desire on the part of the accused to destroy the foundations of democracy, a desire to concentrate power within a small oligarchical group, and a desire to do damage to the United States of America. At one time it referred quite specifically to holding allegiance to Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union. In an earlier era, it was right about the level of calling somebody a deviate or a molester. The word implies deviousness of purpose, lack of traditional honesty, and seething anger against your fellow Americans.
Raman ought to file that lawsuit herself, even if she can’t convince Karen Bass to join. And the suit ought to ask for zillions of dollars in damages, the same way that Donald Trump has been threatening to sue for billions. If one can play this game, then two also ought to be able to play.
Speaking of slander and political malice and lawsuits, let’s next think about accusations against our California (and particularly our Los Angeles County) election counts. Trump started the ugliness by claiming that our elections are rigged. That’s the word he used on Meet the Press. The accusation was picked up by Trump supporters in televised comments and comments made to the press. Even the Speaker got into the game partly.
Since Trump has set the bar for filing a lawsuit at $10 billion or higher, that’s where the lawsuit against Trump et al should begin. The election rigging claim is defamatory, does damage to the entire southern California economy, and damages our reputation among a wide swath of Trump supporters. There may even be an action by the manufacturers of vote counting machines used here in L.A. County, just as the owners of a voting machine business successfully extracted three-quarters of a billion dollars from Fox.
So perhaps a grand, class action lawsuit against Trump and all those sycophants who repeated his claim should be filed. The millions of Los Angeles County residents could be named as co-plaintiffs, and the damages would be estimated to be in the billions. If nothing else, it would be a response to all those Republicans in elected office who have been sitting by while Trump has abused the legal system.
Addendum: National and international news over the weekend
Donald Trump has, in only 16 months, turned the White House property into something halfway between a county fair (in a small county) and the postwar ruins of Wurzburg. The broken-off end of the East Wing is image enough. Running a for-profit cage match on the White House grounds was totally tacky. And the Trump family has some ownership in the business. Emoluments, anyone?
And then, over the weekend we got the 117th announcement of an agreement and ceasefire in the Iranian conflict. There isn’t much point in going into the details since we’ve had so many promises, so many times, starting from the initial hours. Trump was always going to settle it within a few hours or in the next couple of days, and all these promises were just smoke. So now we have an announcement that is joined by both sides.
Except we’re not getting quite the same thing from the competing nations. Paul Campos, writing for the blog Lawyers Guns & Money provides his views here. He uses the term “kayfabe” from the world of professional wrestling to signify that the whole thing is fake. His summary of the terms is that the agreement:
“1) Resolves none of the difficult issues related to Iran’s nuclear development program or its support for Hezbollah.
“(2) Does not include any agreement on the part of either Israel or Hezbollah regarding the ongoing fighting in Lebanon.
“(3) Keeps a now-strengthened Iranian regime in place indefinitely, the survival of which illustrates the fundamental impotence of all of Donald Trump’s and Pete Hegseth’s big beautiful bombs.”
Not exactly an improvement over the terms Obama got, is it?
Meanwhile, Iran is doing some boasting in its own way:
“TEHRAN — Iran’s military said Monday it had “humiliated” the United States and Israel, in a statement issued after an agreement to immediately end the conflict was announced.
Iranian forces “have, through the imposition of their divine and iron will upon the humiliated American and Zionist enemies, demonstrated with strength that the enemy has no path other than accepting defeat and surrender”, the general staff said in the statement broadcast by state television.”
I read these documents collectively as saying that Iran will get a few billion dollars released to them, that the Strait of Hormuz may eventually be opened, and that the U.S. does not have the nuclear arms agreement it set out to gain.
There is one subtle message that at least some people may have learned from this war. Those who drive electric cars weathered the oil disruptions better than those of us who don’t. Donald Trump inadvertently provided a lesson in the need for a sustainable economy in spite of himself.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at amrep535@sbcglobal.net)
