A pair of new investigative reports from ProPublica about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas are a testament to not only the importance of good journalism in a democracy, but also Thomas’s unfitness on the court, and the need for better guard rails against moneyed influence. The first bombshell story, “Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire,” highlighted how a wealthy man named Harlan Crow befriended Thomas after he became a Supreme Court justice and treated him (and often his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas) to luxurious vacations on a near-annual basis. Thomas did not disclose the trips as he was required to. Although he at first refused to speak with ProPublica about the initial story, he eventually made a statement saying he was advised he didn’t need to disclose the gifts.

ProPublica followed that up just days later with another story whose title says it all: “Billionaire Harlan Crow Bought Property From Clarence Thomas. The Justice Didn’t Disclose the Deal.” The property in question “wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the road.” Like the vacations, Thomas also did not publicly disclose the sale. His mother has lived in the home and continues to do so after ownership passed to Crow. The billionaire has been busy making expensive renovations to it.

There is no question that Thomas broke the law by failing to disclose his financial transactions with Crow. Every American should read the ProPublica reports on how one of the nine Supreme Court justices, whose jurisdiction covers the entire nation, appears to be in the pocket of a billionaire. The relationship between Crow and Thomas is a cozy one that has borne fruit for wealthy elites: the justice has routinely sided with moneyed interests and their influence on policymaking.

Before ProPublica’s April 2023 investigations, most reporting on the  Black justice had focused on his white conservative wife. Ginni Thomas has been an activist spouse, overtly reflecting the conservative political sensibility that her husband affirms in his judicial decisions. During Barack Obama’s presidency, she founded a “Tea Party” nonprofit called Liberty Central, a move the New York Times described as “the most partisan role ever for a spouse of a justice on the nation’s highest court.”

She then went further, becoming a political lobbyist and leading a small and secretive organization called Liberty Consulting. A 2011 Politico report points out that she touted “her ‘experience and connections’ to help clients ‘with governmental affairs efforts.’” She made headlines last year for having pressured former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows via text messages to try to overturn the 2020 election results in favor of Donald Trump. More recently, the Washington Post published an investigation into anonymous donations totaling $600,000 made to yet another organization she leads called Crowdsourcers for Culture and Liberty. The donations helped fund the right’s vicious culture wars.

When asked about the conflicts of interest that her activism present for her husband’s work on the Supreme Court, Ginni Thomas has brushed them off, telling the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, “It’s laughable for anyone who knows my husband to think I could influence his jurisprudence… The man is independent and stubborn.” She also said in an interview with the 

conservative outlet the Washington Free Beacon, “Like so many married couples, we share many of the same ideals, principles, and aspirations for America.” She added, “But we have our own separate careers, and our own ideas and opinions too. Clarence doesn’t discuss his work with me, and I don’t involve him in my work.”

Well, that’s a relief. The sanctity of the nation’s highest court and its freedom from partisan influence rests on the word of a person who promises there’s no undue influence between a wife and her husband. This is a person who still believes that the 2020 election was stolen—a view that makes her even worse than Trump toady and former U.S. Attorney General William Barr, who said he would vote for Trump in 2024 but was at least able to admit that his election fraud claims were false.

In 2021, when Chief Justice John Roberts filed his year-end report on the federal judiciary, he stressed the importance of “impartial decision-making,” and that “[t]he Judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence and is crucial to preserving public trust in its work as a separate and co-equal branch of government.” Apparently, Roberts was either ignorant of the Thomases’ doings or confident that Ginni’s promise of insulation from marital influence was good enough.

Although Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni, offer arguably the most explicit examples of corruptive influence on the Supreme Court, they are not alone. In December 2022, the New York Times revealed that an innocently named charity called the Supreme Court Historical Society has “become a vehicle for those seeking access to nine of the most reclusive and powerful people in the nation.” The organization has raised millions of dollars from secret donors. The majority of the money that the New York Times was able to identify came from “corporations, special interest groups, or lawyers and firms that argued cases before the court.” Justices attend the Supreme Court Historical Society’s annual dinner, offering a tantalizing chance for individual attendees to influence them—as the leader of an anti-abortion group apparently took advantage of.

Notwithstanding the liberal minority that includes Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, this is a court that loves wealth and has protected it for more than half a century. It’s no wonder there is growing public disapproval of a body that is so influential that its highly anticipated decisions impact nearly every aspect of our lives, from abortion to guns, to labor unions, to LGBTQ rights, and more.

Supreme Court justices have lifetime tenure—ostensibly a mechanism to protect them from “partisan pressures.” But that only works if the regulations preventing corruptive influence are watertight and if there are actual consequences for violating such regulations. In the wake of the Nixon Watergate scandal, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act (EIGA) to ensure that officials like Supreme Court justices were independent of moneyed interests.

But even though Justice Thomas appears to have violated the EIGA, there is no direct mechanism to hold him accountable short of Congress starting impeachment proceedings against him—a move that has almost no precedent short of a House impeachment more than 200 years ago of a justice who was ultimately acquitted by the Senate.

No other democratically run nation on the planet gives its highest court justices lifetime tenure. Now, some legal experts have suggested term limits, and numerous Democratic senators have introduced the TERM Act, which would introduce 18-year terms for Supreme Court justices.  

Now, some legal experts have suggested term limits, and numerous Democratic senators have introduced the TERM Act, which would introduce 18-year terms for Supreme Court justices. This would mean that a new justice would replace one who was termed out every two years, and presidents would have two opportunities during each four-year tenure to appoint new justices.

In passing the TERM Act, the U.S. would join the rest of the world’s democratic nations in upholding an impartial judiciary, the Thomases could carry out their dystopian vision of the nation free from accusations of corruption—and billionaire Harlan Crow could even save himself some money.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author:  Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

One of the things that new visitors to the United States learn—but often don’t understand—is that they are expected to tip nearly every service worker they encounter. The most obvious tipping expectation is at restaurants and bars, where they must gift an additional 18-25 percent of their total bill to their waitstaff or bartender.

Taxi and rideshare drivers also expect tips, as do hotel bellhops and cleaning staff, as well as hair stylists, and even babysitters. Delivery drivers, in the age of online shopping, expect tips—but only those delivering food via such services as DoorDash, and not, say, your Amazon package deliverer, and certainly not your local postal worker bringing you your daily dose of junk mail.

Forget those who are new to the U.S.—the expectations about when to tip and how much to tip are bewildering even for those of us who have lived here our whole lives. There are detailed guides now for the confused consumer, such as New York magazine’s explaining-and-shaming approach to tipping etiquette after the COVID-19 pandemic changed the rules of “polite society,” while exhorting readers to accept the status quo: “It’s just the rules; don’t complain.” Real Simple magazine recently issued a primer that billed itself as the “Ultimate Guide” for the confused tipper. “Tipping used to be about showing appreciation for good service,” lifestyle writer Julie Vadnal says in the Real Simple article. “[B]ut as the minimum wage has plateaued (the federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009), workers have come to depend on it.” The federal government’s baseline wage for tipped workers is an unimaginably low $2.13 an hour.

What we need is an “Ultimate Guide” on how to make our economy fairer so that ordinary people are not subsidizing the salaries of low-wage workers—because that’s ultimately what tipping is. How—and why—do we tolerate it?

Think about the explicit requests for tips that are cropping up at walk-up cafes where the cashier taking your coffee order offers you a digital tablet to complete your cashless transaction and where you must choose a tip amount of anything between 10 and 22 percent in view of the worker. Sometimes the machine suggests even explicit dollar amounts—a $2 tip on a $4 coffee?—that obscures the tip percentage. If the worker you interacted with has been rude or cold, you can choose a low tip or no tip at all in retaliation. If they have been kind and you still tip frugally, you are the rude, cold one.

This quick interaction between customer and server is a veritable minefield of values, placing the onus of paying a worker directly on the person being served rather than on the worker’s employer.

It’s a sly calculation on the part of business owners to ensure compliant workers while gouging customers: A worker’s take-home pay could be diminished simply if they had a bad day and didn’t feel like smiling, while at the same time, the customer feels obligated to pay for their product, and then some. Tipping is just another way for businesses to pass their costs on to customers.

Worse, it encourages sexism and sexual harassment, especially for women workers who often lose out on tips if they snub sexual advances by male customers. According to One Fair Wage, nearly 7 out of 10 tipped workers are women.

The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) lays the blame for our national tipping culture on the 1966 amendments creating a so-called “tip credit” to the Fair Labor Standards Act. According to EPI, “The creation of the tip credit—the difference, paid for by customers’ tips, between the regular minimum wage and the sub-wage for tipped workers—fundamentally changed the practice of tipping.”

The National Restaurant Association, which is the major lobbying arm of an industry that disproportionately relies on tipped workers, has for years pressured lawmakers to keep the tip credit in place and enable the continued underpaying of workers. In a press release in November 2022, it denounced the successful Washington, D.C., vote to eliminate the tipped wage, claiming bizarrely that tipping is good for both workers and customers. The subtitle of the press release reads: “Current tipping system increases earning potential for tipped workers and allows operators to staff at levels needed for exceptional hospitality.”

According to a National Restaurant Association executive, the vote to eliminate tipped wages means that “some operators will reduce their workforce.” It’s the same logic that fiscal conservatives use use to counter an increase in the federal minimum wage: raising salaries will mean people will be fired because employers won’t be able to afford to pay the higher wages. But EPI points out that “[p]aying tipped workers the regular minimum wage has had no discernable effect on leisure and hospitality employment growth in the seven states where tipped workers receive the full regular minimum wage.”

The lobbyist also condescendingly claims that “[t]he tipped income system often comes under fire because there is widespread misunderstanding about how it works.” Apparently, the rest of us ignoramuses don’t get that “[e]very tipped restaurant employee earns at least their state’s minimum wage” (emphasis in original) and that “[t]his amount is paid partly by the operator and partly by tips.”

In truth, employers, especially corporate chains, don’t always bother ensuring that their workers make at least the full minimum wage. Outback Steakhouse’s workers, for example, are suing their boss over this very issue. And, if it were true that tipped workers actually take home what is owed to them, there wouldn’t be a stark discrepancy in poverty levels between tipped workers and non-tipped workers. EPI points out that “in the states where tipped workers are paid the federal tipped minimum wage of $2.13 per hour… 18.5 percent of waiters, waitresses, and bartenders are in poverty.” But, “in the states where they are paid the regular minimum wage before tips… the poverty rate for waitstaff and bartenders is only 11.1 percent.”

Not only is the National Restaurant Association obscuring the fact that subminimum wages are beneficial to employer profit margins, but it has even deceived workers into subsidizing the cost of the lobbying that keeps wages suppressed. The New York Times recently revealed how the National Restaurant Association runs a company called ServSafe, widely used by new workers for mandatory training on things like food safety. But ServSafe is also the association’s fundraising arm.

In other words, workers are inadvertently paying to ensure their wages remain low. And the lobbying has been wildly successful.

For example, when Washington, D.C., voters passed Initiative 77 in 2018 to raise the tipped wage, the city council repealed it, instead passing a law raising awareness of the rights of tipped workers. But lawmakers never funded the law. Then, in November 2022, voters passed a similar measure, Initiative 82, with the support of nearly three-quarters of all voters (this was the vote that prompted the association’s aforementioned defensive press release). The D.C. city council has again tried to thwart the measure, delaying its implementation by a few months. Activists for 82 say they believe the restaurant industry’s lobbying has played a role.

Now, some New York lawmakers are getting ready to propose a similar bill that would phase out the subminimum wage for tipped workers in their state. And, there is strong public will to do so. A survey by Data for Progress found robust bipartisan support among likely voters to do away with a system requiring workers to depend on tips. The progressive organization One Fair Wage has several campaigns—including in New York, Washington, D.C., Michigan, Maine, Massachusetts, and Illinois—to eliminate the tipped wage system.

There are nations in the world where tipping is not only unusual, but considered downright rude. For example, according to one social media influencer of Japanese descent, tipping in Japan is frowned upon because it’s seen as “petty,” and akin to an insult. TikTok user Cyber Bunny compares a customer tipping a server in Japan to a parent giving a child an allowance.

Ouch.

Such a dynamic can develop here in the U.S. too, if we had a culture and set of laws that respected worker dignity. After all, money is power, and for a customer to wield power over a worker in such a direct manner ought to be considered unthinkable. Wages are not allowances, and workers are not children.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author Bio:

Lying on the smooth rocks that sit in the middle of the Yuba River, water streaming around her body, Renée Wilson’s eyes are closed. She nestles into the bed of boulders, serene. At first, the rush of the water is the only sound; then her voice begins to narrate over the imagery:

“I am a woman, a vessel. The Great Mother pours life into me, and I am here to do her will. Reborn, alive, here. I am a lover, an artist, a sister, a friend.”

The footage cuts to Wilson’s hand holding onto the fungi-laden bark of a tree beneath a green forest canopy.

“She holds my hand through it all as I revel in her light,” she says, as the scene cuts back to the river where now Wilson is smiling. “She washes me clean. Joy is here for us all, and I am grateful, every day.”

A large dragonfly passes over the spot where she lies.

This is the opening of the short art film “Ode to Joy,” which Wilson wrote, directed, and starred in. She said serendipitous moments, like the dragonfly’s cameo, happened often during the making of the film. “Ode to Joy” won the 2022 audience choice award for the category of “stunning short film” in the 2022 Maui Film Festival, earned third place for best short film in the Peachtree Village International Film Festival, and was a Jaro Shorts Competition finalist.

The film takes viewers through an experience of nature, poetry, and song. The narrative of the film is flowing rather than top-down. It winds open gently, much like the swirling pools of water or sea waves that make up many of its scenes. Wilson narrates via original poetry and creative prose, following broad themes of nature, life, the empowerment of women, and healing ways of being in the world.

“For a very long time now, the sacred feminine, divine feminine, the Great Mother, the Mother energy—however you want to name it—has been and continues to be on the back burner, repressed, shunned, and vilified,” she said during an interview with the Independent Media Institute. “We’re in a very patriarchal society with lots of misogyny, and many things that are damaging to us as humans. I personally believe we need a balance of healthy masculine, healthy feminine—and if you want to take all the labels off, just healthy people and healthy energy.”

This film, she said, intends to offer a counterbalance to the overtly masculine ways of being that prevail in a patriarchal society.

“This piece is about womanhood and femininity and whoever relates to that,” she said. “That’s not just women, but whoever can relate to the nurturing energy, the destroyer energy, the creator energy, the healing energy, the power of femininity. The fact of the matter is: no one would literally be alive on this planet without the body of a woman. To me, that is sacred and needs to be respected. I wanted to put my voice in the room.”

She said she also wanted to uplift a different creation story.

“I’m just not into the stories that keep getting shoved down our throats, whether that’s the Christian narrative or any other popular narrative that is not honoring the feminine.”

She said, to her, the feminine represents raw wisdom and power, like that of nature, when it’s allowed to be fully expressed.

Intermittently, while immersed in these wild and beautiful spaces in her film, Wilson sings slow and soulful a cappella covers of a range of well-known songs.

Songs she covers include John Newton’s “Amazing Grace,” John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” and “Bird on the Wire,” and Mickey Ioane’s “Hawai’i ’78.”

Wilson said she chose the songs she sang more or less on the spot, her choices informed by the energy of each location while shooting. Her cover of
“Hallelujah,” for example, moves to the flow of ocean waves crashing behind a rocky backdrop.

Creating Joy in Lockdown

Initially, the film was sparked during the days of COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, when Wilson, her family, and a couple of close friends would venture into beloved natural spaces—including the Yuba River near Nevada City, California. The rest of the film’s scenes were shot in various locations across the Hawaiian island of Kauai. The project became a portal for Wilson’s personal creative expression during the height of the pandemic. Only after she had captured various scenes with the inkling to share them as separate snapshots on YouTube did she decide to make the project into a more cohesive film.

“[At the start of the project] I was in Nevada City and just really vibing with the trees and the water and Goddess nature, and wanted to create something around that. So the first part of the film is shot in Nevada City, really around just being with nature. And then it evolved over time,” she said. “I left there and went to Kauai and I knew I wanted to continue this idea of honoring Mother Nature and our connections, and the feminine aspects of that… I also knew I wanted to add music. And then it evolved into becoming a fuller story. It felt like it needed more space and more room.”

Until the end of the project in December 2021, the film had no title. After watching an early screening of the film during postproduction, one of Wilson’s friends—who is credited as the inspirational muse for the film—called it an “ode to joy,” which was so befitting it stuck.

“I just think that being joyful is where it’s at, even in the hard times,” she said. “If you can still find something that’s deeper than what’s happening externally—the deeper current—then you can handle anything. It doesn’t matter what’s happening. Someone can die, and yes, it’s hard and I’m grieving and I’m sad, but I still have a deeper current that is connected to the universal wholeness of things.”

Wilson said initially her inspiration was simply to create a cathartic project that encompassed that vibe of joy for herself—especially through the difficult year that was 2020—but also for others who may be going through challenging times and may need a reminder “of where they 

came from, or who they are, or nature itself, whatever that means for them.”

“The idea was just to feel a deep reflection of love and joy—I feel like you can handle your life when coming from that expression,” she said. “[The project] didn’t start off as an ‘ode to joy.’ It was a very organic process. We’d say, ‘Okay, the weather’s amazing today—let’s go shoot at such and such place.’ And we really just went with the vibe and the momentum of the piece.”

‘We Deserve to Exist Here’

She said though it was not at the forefront of the film’s conceptualization, racism played a part in the making of the film.

“[Racism] wasn’t at the forefront of my mind in the film’s creation process, but definitely was present in the process because of everything happening with the [presidential] election, Black Lives Matter, killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, many named and unnamed Black women, and more,” Wilson said. “But inherent in the film is a Black woman in serene settings. These are settings we do not often see ourselves in—resting in, luxuriating in, feeling in, connecting in, etc.—and yet we do. In real life we do exist here, and we deserve to exist here, and in any space in the world we feel like we want to be in.”

She pointed out that the media does not often amplify this narrative for women of color, but instead “does quite the opposite.”

“The narrative we’re fed wants us to work our asses off until we die,” she said. “So yes, a Black woman/woman of color/spirit represented by me in the film gives an inspirational and visual representation of us all, but in particular—and very specifically—a visual representation to those of us who are Black and Brown in the United States and beyond. Rest into that. We’re here, and we will not be pushed out of our divine birthright to enjoy life.”

Inspiration to Enjoy Life

Wilson has an extensive background as a singer, actor, model, and filmmaker, and is perhaps best known for playing Raelette Pat Lyle in the Academy Award-winning film “Ray.” Originally from New Orleans, Wilson made the documentary “Crepe Covered Sidewalks,” which captured the devastating aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in her hometown.

She said that while growing up in New Orleans, she was “always surrounded by music, culture, and art,” which influenced her life path, exploring the arts across different mediums.

She said she hopes everyone who watches “Ode to Joy” comes away with their own inspiration. For her, she said, the process of making the film was always centered around the empowerment of women, healing, joy, and simply being and existing in the world.

If “Ode to Joy” were to leave viewers with one takeaway, Wilson said, it would be to enjoy yourself.

“Here we are on this Earth,” she said. “We get to live here, and breathe, and enjoy life, and be around people we care about, and love ourselves. From there, you can come from that place of helping other people and loving other people, and healing yourself if that’s what you need. Don’t be greedy and stingy, share your wealth, share your knowledge, embrace people, be compassionate, be kind. And I would say for the film, just allow it in, and see for yourself what resonates.”

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