The NAACP exposes voter suppression schemes | Kay Dilday. A woman votes in Miami Shores during the Florida primary in 2008. Photograph: Marc Serota/Getty Images The NAACP will be sending a delegation to the United Nations Commissioner of Human Rights alleging a concerted effort to deny voting rights to black and hispanic Americans. Given how rarely anyone in the United States looks to the United Nations for justice, and how often the United States ignores the UN, this is both a significant and futile effort. But what's at issue is so egregious that the NAACP has chosen to shout it from a global stage. In 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president, the United States had one of the highest turnouts ever of black and Latino voters. It does not seem like coincidence, then, that since 2008, many of these states have introduced laws that make it much more difficult to register to vote and to actually vote.
The Bush administration launched an initiative to combat voter fraud. Forget welfare, the poorest people must now rely on 'charity' | Society. For all the talk of helping the most troubled families among us, the 120,000 households that make up the so-called underclass are going to be facing tough love from the coalition government. David Cameron's post-riot response is to revive a Blairite notion of social obligation. In New Labour's view, welfare failed the very poorest people because it obliged them to take but not give back. This indulgence rendered those people at the bottom incapable of coping with mainstream social demands. The result? Listless children, parents lacking qualifications – often with serious mental health problems – and generations caught in a dependency on alcohol or, even worse, drugs. Work was an ancestral memory. But Tony Blair's social exclusion unit sounded alarm bells in 2007 when it baldly stated that for all the extended maternity and paternity leave, free nursery places, child tax credits and rising benefits over the previous decade, the bottom 2% of British families were going backwards.
Files Note Close C.I.A. Ties to Qaddafi Spy Unit. Sol Sanders | Follow the money No. 81 | The Great American Heresy. Latest from Uncle Sol. A version of this column is scheduled for publication in The Washington Times, Monday, August 28, 2011. -- Chris Follow the money No. 81 -- The Great American Heresy Sol Sanders solsanders@cox.net More than a hundred years ago, the brilliant philosopher and father of modern psychology, William James, warned his American compatriots against “scientism”. James saw an increasing tendency to extend the then budding scientific method of controlled experiments in the physical sciences into intractable social and political problems. He warned it would not work, perhaps as much based on his psychological understanding as his philosophical logic, that is, as the old saying goes, people will be people.
Not too many listened to James then -- or since. Nowhere has the disease taken root more than in the business schools, pickled there by management experts, often practitioners of what has been termed “the dismal science” but more accurately, the pseudoscience. 25 Profound Motivational Quotes. Below are 25 of the most profound motivational quotes ever spoken: 1. The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.
–Paul Valery 2. The question for each man to settle is not what he would do if he had means, time, influence and educational advantages; the question is what he will do with the things he has. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. List your own profound quote below. Facts_50. After the riots: tough tactics to uproot London's gangs | UK news. "Police! Stand still! Police! " Shortly after 6.30am on Friday, the dawn quiet of a cul-de-sac in Walthamstow was shattered by the arrival of Operation Connect officers at a nondescript terraced house with net curtains at the windows.
With the might of a hardened steel enforcer ram, they broke open the door and piled into the house. The muffled tones of an angry man's voice could be heard through the open door, and a neighbour looked on with world-weary indifference. "It's not the first time," said Dave, a 58-year-old who did not want to give his surname. "They've been here before. " Officers eventually emerged from the house with a 25-year-old man in handcuffs and a sweatshirt with the words "Smoke Homegrown" emblazoned beneath a large cannabis plant.
Detective sergeant Andy Chandler, who was leading the raid, said the man had been arrested on suspicion of being involved in the supply of drugs and in money-laundering offences. "Were there gang members involved [in the riots]? Shiv Malik. A Poll Tax by Another Name. AS we celebrate the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, we reflect on the life and legacy of this great man. But recent legislation on voting reminds us that there is still work to do. Since January, a majority of state legislatures have passed or considered election-law changes that, taken together, constitute the most concerted effort to restrict the right to vote since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Growing up as the son of an Alabama sharecropper, I experienced Jim Crow firsthand. It was enforced by the slander of “separate but equal,” willful blindness to acts of racially motivated violence and the threat of economic retaliation. The pernicious effect of those strategies was to institutionalize second-class citizenship and restrict political participation to the majority alone.
We have come a long way since the 1960s. Having fought for voting rights as a student, I am especially troubled that these laws disproportionately affect young voters. Martin Luther King Jr. Would Want a Revolution, Not a Memorial. THE Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial was to be dedicated on the National Mall on Sunday — exactly 56 years after the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi and 48 years after the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. (Because of Hurricane Irene, the ceremony has been postponed.) These events constitute major milestones in the turbulent history of race and democracy in America, and the undeniable success of the civil rights movement — culminating in the election of Barack Obama in 2008 — warrants our attention and elation. Yet the prophetic words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel still haunt us: “The whole future of America depends on the impact and influence of Dr.
King.” Rabbi Heschel spoke those words during the last years of King’s life, when 72 percent of whites and 55 percent of blacks disapproved of King’s opposition to the Vietnam War and his efforts to eradicate poverty in America. The age of Obama has fallen tragically short of fulfilling King’s prophetic legacy. NATO nations set to reap spoils of Libya war. It looks like the more telling news on Libya has migrated to the business pages. With jubilant reporting of Gaddafi's imminent downfall seizing headlines, it's the financial pages that have the clinical analysis. So, for instance, it is in this section that the Independent reports a "dash for profit in the post-war Libya carve up". Similarly, Reuters, under the headline, "Investors eye promise, pitfalls in post-Gaddafi Libya" noted that a new government in that country could "herald a bonanza for Western companies and investors". Before Tripoli has completely fallen, before Gaddafi and his supporters have stepped down and before the blood dries on the bodies that have yet to be counted, Western powers are already eyeing up what they view us just rewards for the intervention.
There are no more illusions over how far NATO forces exceeded the UN security resolution that mandated its campaign. Oil for regime change And there's a reason for this sudden rush of honesty over its involvement. Some of WikiLeaks' Bank of America data destroyed. Giving up liberty in the pursuit of security. Hosting a reception for members of New York City's Muslim communities in his mansion on Tuesday night, Mayor Michael Bloomberg eloquently described Muslims as an inalienable part of our great city's fabric. By Wednesday morning, however, many of us who attended that reception would have been forgiven for thinking that we actually lived in a nightmarish American avatar of Kim Jong-Il's Korea. Indeed, an extensive investigation by the Associated Press raises alarming questions about the NYPD and CIA, hand in hand, breaching some of the most important bulwarks of an open and free society. While "mosque crawlers" monitored religious sermons, so-called "rakers" engaged in "human mapping" of minority communities, neighbourhoods, cafes, bars, nightclubs, and bookstores.
Police indiscriminately scrutinised taxi drivers and food cart vendors, because Muslims are well represented in these professions. The limits our laws place on our government are there for a reason. TomDispatch. What Would Hillary Clinton Have Done?