Prisons, an ALEC forte
If you build it, they will come. ~Justice Policy Institute on prisons
What’s happening to the prison system at the state and federal level is completely over the top and being questioned on both sides of the aisle as seen in the Florida senate last week.
Is it possible that members of the Republican Party are rethinking their extreme neoliberal aims, or are they concerned about re-election as the public becomes more aware of their preference for all things “profit” over the needs and concerns of the American people? Maybe it’s a little of both. But the Florida Senate President sent a clear message to their dissenters when he removed Mike Fasano from the budget panel, took him off the main budget committee, and stripped him of his Senate Budget Committee Chairmanship. All that for opposing the party plans to privatize 27 Florida prisons.
It’s not about housing violent criminals anymore, or saving or creating jobs either. It’s about corporate money and the influence it has in Washington and elsewhere. While the state prison population is in decline, there’s been a 1,700 percent increase in the federal prison budget since 1980.
President Obama’s 2013 budget request cuts Medicare and Medicaid but it adds an additional 4.2 percent increase to the already ridiculous federal prison budget. At this time, that is a gross misuse of scarce federal dollars, especially as they know they’re cutting back on every program and service known to ease the problem. This is another example of the neoliberal mantra: First break it, then get paid to rebuild it in your own image, and funnel the money up to the top.
It’s a clear indication that something is haywire when 6 out of 10 federal prisoners are non-violent drug offenders. Cutting diversion programs that keep kids from entering the corrections system, along with community-based substance abuse and mental health services is a sure-fire way to increase the population prisons are concerned with, and that’s what they’re doing. Evidence-based programs for youth violence prevention, employment, job skills, and education resources for underserved communities have all been on the chopping block. What they’re doing is building more places to put more problems – after they create them. So … why are they doing that? Well, a lot of it has to do with ALEC – the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Pragmatic men of power have no time or inclination to deal with . . . social morality. ~ Kenneth B. Clark
At the state level, privatization of prisons has spread across the country as ALEC’s secret corporate writers promote “templets” as model legislation for our now seemingly inept legislators. Of course, that process funnels money into political and corporate coffers with no regard for the people at all. To the contrary, the aim appears to be to fill all the prison cells they can build, since many of the laws involve new and innovative ways to do just that.
NCR did a good two-part expose’ last year on the effects of the GEO Group in Texas and Mississippi – the same company that was voted down in the Florida Senate last week. It’s a great account of where we’re headed with ALEC at the helm:
Part one: Town Relies On Troubled Youth Prison For Profits
Part two: Private Prison Promises Leave Texas Towns In Trouble
ALEC Exposed is an August 2011 series by The Nation, something I’m sure everybody will eventually get around to reading as ALEC continues to gain strength and influence. It’s an excellent series of articles – I think it’s in 5 parts. The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor is one part of it and explains, I think, why we have all this conservative focus on prison building and privatization and the subsequent need to fill those prison cells with able bodies. See what you think.
Also, on February 29, Occupy Portland has a call to action targeting corporations that are known leaders and funders of ALEC.
#F29 Shut Down the Corporations
Here’s the official page, and Common Dreams did a good piece on it yesterday:
DCKennedy
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The Invisible Hand Pummeling Public Schools
I can’t think of a more despicable or far-reaching example of ideology being forced on Americans than the money-grabbing obsession with dismantling our time-honored public school system. School choice, vouchers, corporate scholarships, educational freedom – call it what you like – the privatization of public schools is a movement on steroids. Every day the states are hit with new bills to aid neoliberals in their goal to educate Americans “their” way. The means to that end vary for different blocs of support, but all roads meet where powerful people control and market information.
A generation or two down this widening road to schools with selective entry and exit for students, religious indoctrination and poorly regulated online learning for the masses, the real people of America, our strength, will rely on the free market crumbs that fall from the learning opportunities available to the elite. Trickledown education is in the making.
Bit by bit, new interpretations change the meanings of our laws. Remember how that happened in Orwell’s Animal Farm?
No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets.
No animal shall drink alcohol to excess.
No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.
~~~~~
No public school shall proselytize except by students.
Remember when public schools were not missionary fields? Just yesterday, the Florida Senate advanced a bill to allow prayer led by students. Proponents of religion in schools call this one “a God-given loophole” – peer evangelism. And of course, as religion gains ground in public schools to appease the religious right (a targeted voting bloc), separation of church and state, a main and valid objection to privatization is being overcome. As the separation objection loses its punch, vouchers allowing taxpayer money to be funneled into private schools become six of one, half-dozen of the other.
In How religion is infiltrating public schools, Katherine Stewart highlights this Animal Farm type “modification” made by the Supreme Court differentiating school-sponsored speech from student speech, allowing students to proselytize on federal property.
In New Heights Middle School in Jefferson, South Carolina:
School-sponsored prayers routinely opened and closed assemblies and performances. Religious messages made their way into lesson plans, and religious iconography decorated the walls. Students were punished for minor infractions by being told to write out sentences proclaiming their faith in God.
A number of these activities … appear to be violations of the clause in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution intended to maintain separation between church and state. And the school board admits as much in its proposed settlement of the ACLU case. Yet an even greater number of religious activities in public schools have recently become legal as a result of novel interpretations of the Constitution handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court. Ironically, had the administration of New Heights been a little smarter, it could have achieved its apparent goal of using the school’s position of authority to spread the word of God among its captive students without running the risk of being sued. Thousands of other schools across the country do just that.
All taxpayers shall contribute to public education unless they don’t.
Diverting funds away from the public schools through vouchers and other means will exacerbate every problem in the system, effectively breaking it. Defunding, attacking teachers and unions, etc., is the means. The golden rule in the neoliberal sweep to privatize the public good is: First, break it. Second, get paid to rebuild it in your own image. Third, funnel the money and benefits up to the top.
Money talks, regulation walks – The Cash Cow for Now
How Online Learning Companies Bought America’s Schools by investigative journalist Lee Fang, points out the astonishing amount of investment capital flowing into online education. The rush to privatize in this way by businesses and “philanthropists” like the Koch brothers, is pretty transparent. Rupert Murdoch called it “a $500 billion sector in the US alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed.”
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the State Policy Network (SPN) have been the pivotal organizations aiding in the campaign for virtual schools.
Since 2005, ALEC has offered a template law called “The Virtual Public Schools Act” to introduce online education. (…)
SPN has faced accusations before that it is little more than a coin-operated front for corporations. For instance, SPN and its affiliates receive money from polluters, including infamous petrochemical giant Koch Industries, allegedly in exchange for aggressive promotion of climate denial theories.
It’s not a leap to assume that when corporations are in control of education, so will be information.
Typical of neoliberal fancy, virtual schools lack regulation and public debate. And without sufficient oversight or quality control, most online learning companies receive the same amount of taxpayer funding per-pupil as brick and mortar schools. Saving on the teacher-to-student ratio, costs for classrooms, transportation, meals, security, equipment, maintenance and other building support staff – and many other expenses associated with traditional learning, the profit margin for virtual education companies is so seductive that obscene amounts of their money is spent to lobby our lawmakers.
“Moe has worked for almost fifteen years at converting the K-12 education system into a cash cow for Wall Street. A veteran of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch, he now leads an investment group that specializes in raising money for businesses looking to tap into more than $1 trillion in taxpayer money spent annually on primary education.” (…)
“In March, while busting the teachers unions in his state, Walker lifted the cap on virtual schools and removed the program’s income requirements.
State Representative Robin Vos, the Wisconsin state chair for ALEC, sponsored the bill codifying Walker’s radical expansion of online, for-profit schools. Vos’s bill not only lifts the cap but also makes new, for-profit virtual charters easier to establish.
Online learning in K-12 schools is still growing explosively, and public support for this arm of privatization is just baffling. Early on, it was promoted for computer literacy and otherwise unavailable courses, but that’s a distant memory. In 2006, Michigan stepped forward to become the 1st state requiring online learning for high school graduation, regardless of need.
If the public has been reticent in its opposition to online education, it may be because information on its success or failure to actually educate is hard to come by and often skewed. Its promotion has been framed to cover the bases, appealing to the voting blocs of rural communities, urban communities, home schoolers, the parents of children with special learning needs, and a myriad of “bully” and other social issues, including student acne. But the bottom line is profit for the few, poor education for the many.
While different issues continue to plague the most basic requirements for virtual schools to actually educate, they are not without some easily understood merit in the cases of some students. But one-third of our high school students drop out, and truancy issues usually precede throwing in the towel. Obama would like for the states to enforce education requirements to age 18. I think that would force many students into online study (a boon for business) where truancy is already a problem for students who have left traditional schools in favor of virtual classes, and where there’s no viable way to track online attendance.
To me, this doesn’t sound like an honest effort to educate; it sounds like a get-rich-quick scheme at the expense of education and the taxpayer:
“By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing.
Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll.By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.
(…)
The state audit of the Colorado Virtual Academy, which found that the state paid for students who were not attending the school, ordered the reimbursement of more than $800,000.With retention a problem, some teachers said they were under pressure to pass students with marginal performance and attendance.
Students need simply to log in to be marked present for the day, according to Agora teachers and administrators.” (emphasis mine)
Profits and Questions at Online Charter Schools
So, yes. Online learning would reduce class sizes in traditional schools. But as the public school system is being privatized, who is that intended to benefit? Corporations! And another neoliberal offering we hear a lot about these days would have the same effect: repealing child labor laws. I think it’s clear that the motive behind these efforts aligns less with the people of America caring for and educating our children, and more with washing our hands of the responsibility. Every relationship of ‘hegemony’ is necessarily an educational relationship. ~A. Gramsci
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~DCKennedy
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For Our Teacher Friends, Students, and Those Who Care about Education in America
A strategy of the policy-makers in favor of high stakes testing is to pit victim against victim, so that resistance appears as a punishment by the hands of those in our own communities. Make no mistake – this is intentional and it is vicious … and it is working. ~ United Opt Out
To update recent posts about the destruction of public education (here), yesterday I was delighted to see Stan Karp’s video and article, Challenging Corporate School Reform and 10 Hopeful Signs of Resistance. I was encouraged by the spreading national efforts by teachers, parents and academics who are working to save our American public school system. He offers background information, administration complicity, privatization schemes, and changes clearly imposed from curricula formulated by the private business sector.
Citing proposals that punish children and malign educators “currently being promoted by reams of foundation reports, well-funded think tanks, a proliferation of Astroturf political groups and canned legislation from the rightwing American Legislative Exchange Counsel (ALEC)”, he further exposes the ill-framed neoliberal plan to decentralize, destabilize, re-segregate and privatize our public schools to enrich and empower corporations to dominate and control education across America.
Alongside these efforts to change the way schools and classrooms function, a larger social/political goal is reflected in the attacks on collective bargaining rights, union rights, and the permanent crisis of school funding across the country. These policies replace with a market-based system that will do for schooling what the market has done for health care, housing, and the labor market, produce fabulous profits and give opportunities for a few and unequal outcomes and access for the many.
Stan Karp is an author and the director of the Secondary Reform Project for New Jersey’s Education Law Center. He taught English and Journalism for 30 years, and has written widely on school reform for Education Week, Educational Leadership, and other publications, as well as co-editing several books. His esteemed opinion in this article is linked with local and national organizations who are showing that with solidarity and the exposure of misinformation and pertinent data, we can push back the corporate education “reform” movement.
One such link is for United Opt Out, an organization understanding of the intimidation tactics used by those who wish to silence teachers and prevent collective resistance. “For those educators who wish to support our efforts but are concerned over being identified with the United Opt Out movement we extend our support by advocating for actions in many other forms.”
Their mission “is to use various methods of opting out as a means to end punitive high stakes testing in public education before the right to a meaningful and EQUITABLE public education is dismantled by policies that benefit textbook companies, testing companies, and private corporations more than the communities that submit to these abusive and unconstitutional demands.”
They also endorse Occupy Wall Street with ACTION, and will occupy the Department of Education in DC from March 30th to April 2nd, equipped with a list of independent demands! Please join in their effort to make big changes in education for all Americans.
Our Demands for Public Education
We, administrators of United Opt Out National (www.unitedoptout.com), wish to collaborate with the Occupy Wall Street Movement and offer our vision for CORPORATE-FREE PUBLIC SCHOOLS.
We believe that QUALITY PUBLIC EDUCATION is a democratic right for all persons. It is through vibrant and fully funded school communities that all children have the opportunity to develop and grow into happy, successful, free, and active citizens. High stakes testing functions in opposition to QUALITY PUBLIC EDUCATION, as it is used to punish children, to malign educators, and to provide financial gain for testing corporations and their political sponsors.
THEREFORE, WE DEMAND AN END TO THE FOLLOWING:
ALL high stakes testing and punitive policies that label schools, punish students, and close public community schools
ALL high stakes testing that ties teacher evaluations, pay, and job security to high stakes test results
Corporate interventions in public education and education policy
The use of public education funds to enact school “choice” measures influenced and supported by the corporate agenda
Economically and racially segregated school communities
“Model” legislation that provides special rules to charter schools that are forced upon public schools
Corporate run for-profit charter schools that divert public funds away from public schools
Mandates requiring teachers to use corporate approved, scripted programs that sublimate and negate authentic
meaningful learning experiences imparted by varied and rich curriculaFURTHERMORE, WE DEMAND RESTORATION AND/OR IMPLEMENTATION OF THE FOLLOWING:
Libraries and librarians to all schools and communities
Teaching force educated through accredited college teacher education programs only
School buildings in ALL neighborhoods that meet health codes including clean drinking water, heat and air conditioning
Developmentally appropriate, problem-based, literacy-rich, play-based and student-centered learning, with the
return of nap, play, and snack time for kindergartenersSmaller student-to-teacher ratio (25 or fewer to one)
Wrap around services for schools that offset the effects of poverty and social inequality, including but not limited to:
school staff such as nurses and health providers, social workers, community organizers, family counselors; free
quality community daycare and preschool programs, healthy food availability, safe and healthy housing options,
community social facilities, and after school programs to enhance learning and provide safe recreational spaces for
all studentsFully funded arts and athletics programs
Recess and adequate time allotted for lunch
New national funding formulas that ensures EQUITY in funding to ALL public schools regardless of zip code
Requirement that a significant percentage of textbook or testing company PROFITS go BACK TO public education
Requirement that all DOE positions are filled with qualified and experienced educators
Requirement that Superintendents and school administrators have exceptional, extended teaching and
school-based experience
Bonus!
A friend just sent this gutsy Tourette’s Du Jour article from November. Killing Public Education names names and tell tales out of school. Thanks, Polly.
The Alliance for Progressive Values supports public education, our teachers, their right to collective bargaining, and the Occupy movement. Please use this information to help strengthen our schools by forwarding it to teachers, educators and friends. Thank you!
DCKennedy
Election Integrity ~ Gone to Spam?
Okay, this might have been funny at one time:
Critical election process and validity issues today are anything but humorous, and yet it seems to be getting worse. The bottom line is simple: If we want America to be the Grandest Banana Republic on earth, we’re on the way. But without a valid democratic election process in place, we can not be considered a Democratic Republic.
Absentee voting – 7 million and growing
No one disagrees that eligible American voters living abroad should be able to vote in our elections without undue complication, yet year after year, and war after war, they are the most disenfranchised group of voters since before the civil rights movement in the 1960s. While soldiers in the field, especially wounded and disabled soldiers, present obvious challenges, timely inclusion of their votes seems like a mission impossible. Any voting process that is problematic for an estimated seven million Americans needs an overhaul – but convenience should not trump election integrity. At this time, all forms of electronic voting equipment and cyber ballot returns are less than secure.
Trial and error attempts to make voting more convenient have been expensive in more ways than one.
A little background: Convenience results in compromise.
A 2001 congressional order for a “specific provision” by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2002, moved the ballot transit issue away from the mail and into cyberspace. “The project shall be carried out with participation of sufficient numbers of absent uniformed services voters so that the results are statistically relevant.”
“We find the report quite troubling.”
Security consultants at Johns Hopkins University went public with this news release. The same security experts who authored the 2004 report had to issue another statement three years later in response to a 2007 DOD report expressing their continued concerns over the lack of security for proposed Internet voting. And yet, the Development Guidelines for the program still clearly state (pdf):
“• Spring, 2013 – Lessons Learned Analysis: After the 2012 election, FVAP … will provide information to EAC and its advisory boards on the results of the pilot, including the success and shortcomings of the pilot and lessons learned.”
Public right to authenticate and public right to self-govern are basic and essential principles of a democratic election – and not possible with Internet voting.
Cyber attacks are part of our own routine military espionage, and blow-back from that continues to demonstrate that the Department of Defense cannot even insure the Pentagon’s classified information. If that’s the best we can do to protect military secrets at the Pentagon, so be it – but should we be throwing our elections into this cyber and electronic hacking madness that no one can control? No.
Another bad trend is the diminishing right to a secret ballot. Whether secrecy is waived as a convenience for timely receipt of overseas ballots, or whether voter identification is covertly linked to voted ballots, it corrupts the democratic process and needs to be stopped.
When our government and the vendors it hires are concealing their ability to know and store our voting records, it should be headline news in every paper and news broadcast. That doesn’t happen with our media, but fortunately we have well-respected election and voting reform activists, like Bev Harris, executive director of Black Box Voting, Inc., an advocacy group committed to restoring citizen oversight to elections. She keeps us apprised of important developments like her recent post which begins, “Public officials now admit they can see how you voted and link it to your name. This issue affects Colorado, almost all of Washington State, as well as some locations in California, Hawaii, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia and likely other states as well.” 2/12 – CITIZENS SUE TO FORCE GOVERNMENT TO STOP LINKING VOTES TO VOTER –
PBS NEWSHOUR has also reported on some of the dangers we’re facing in this video- Internet Voting: Will Democracy or Hackers Win?
Electronic voting equipment is not a viable option for secure elections, a well-known fact for many years, though we continue to replace safer methods across the country with this vulnerable, hackable, corporately controlled equipment. Incredibly, we even allow the data “coding” that instructs the equipment, to be kept secret by the corporate owners as protected intellectual property.
GAO compliance analysis reviews (pdf) like the following from Ohio’s 2004 election are always disturbing, but the point is, the problems can’t be corrected to prevent future malfunctions. Where electronic equipment and hackers are concerned, it’s not a question of ‘if’ – the question is ‘when’ and the answer is ‘now’.
U.S. Government Accountability Office, Report to Congressional Committees, June 2006 ELECTIONS
The Nation’s Evolving Election System as Reflected in the November 2004 General Election:
“… in Ohio that allowed one DRE machine’s ballots to be added to the
canvas totals multiple times without being detected. In another instance,
our report notes that a malfunction in a DRE system in Ohio caused the
system to record approximately 3,900 votes too many for one presidential
candidate in the 2004 general election.”“Election officials in a large Ohio jurisdiction … told us that readiness
testing had been conducted by local officials. However, election
officials stated that certification and acceptance testing were not performed …. They also said that neither parallel testing nor audit testing of voting systems was performed.”
Election officials are a known vulnerability in every aspect of election integrity. Every facet of their jobs needs to be closely scrutinized; publicly witnessed, recorded and reported; videotaped whenever possible; and all records of their activity must remain accessible to the public and not allowed to be destroyed.
Those in a position to game our system are boldly imposing criminal activity on the election process as evidenced by the indictments, prosecutions and guilty pleas that are becoming more and more common.
There are numerous examples of these convictions, most recently including West Virginia, Indiana, and in Pennsylvania – Feese gets 4 to 12 years, where “A Dauphin County jury convicted Feese [Republican] of all 40 counts in a case that involved the misuse of millions of taxpayer dollars by hiring out-of-state consultants and diverting legislative employees to develop customized computer software to help elect more Republicans to the Legislature. (…) Twelve Democrats, including longtime House leader state Rep. Bill DeWeese, have been convicted or pleaded guilty in the investigation.”
Is it collusion when officials of both parties are indited and found guilty in an election fraud scheme? I don’t know, but another thing that comes to mind when “software” is mentioned with election fraud is Themis, the vast, nationwide database and voter file set up by the Koch brothers a while back. I’m not sure what that implies, but it gives me an icky feeling.
And the evidence just keeps on coming ….
This article in Salon exposing Diebold equipment vulnerability did not cause the outrage it should have. The reporting of this critical information was short-lived if the media reported on it at all. If our voting equipment is so easily hacked, and the media treats that like a flash in the pan story, moving quickly to report on some sensational, inane non-issue, what does that tell us … and what else matters if bogus voting equipment and the media work in tandem to silence the people’s voice?
For the sake of convenience, or possibly something more sinister, we have reinvented the nice round wheel that rolled through our election process with some confidence – and we’ve turned it into a no-go item. Secret paper ballots and well supervised hand counting with unlimited public transparency is the only way to go at this time – and maybe forever.
Here’s a good rundown of what we should be expecting from our states regarding election law, and why. Pertinent, too, in gauging progress, this article from OEN in 2009, also by Bev Harris, recognizes the state of Maine’s election processes as the best in our nation. Black Box Voting names Maine best in nation for voting rights
Time tested state and local chaos and corruption
Another major, overall and undisputed problem for voters is the myriad of state and local laws for voting and ballot deadlines that complicate our entire election process. These challenges are already overwhelming, but they’re being used and exacerbated by the effective, step by step, state by state interference by The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) whose templates for legislation aim to disenfranchise voters and suppress the people’s voice in an effort to promote corporate interests. This proposed legislation written by corporations is being passed; they are manipulating state politics and the 2012 presidential race in a big way.
Worse still is that states hire private companies to run their elections and tally the results.
We have a lions share of election problems already, and these issues will become more intense as the 2012 general election nears. Now is the time to stop it. Privatizing the responsibility to companies with political and monetary agendas invites corruption. In this Truthout article, Project Censored named the outsourcing of Ohio’s 2004 election votes “as one of the most censored stories in the world.” It is obviously too late seven years after the fact to investigate a possibly botched election, or recover from the damage that may have been done to our country as the result of one, which is why our corporatized media censors the information.
Seemingly, ALEC “urges legislators to fight the [federal takeover] of state election procedures, objecting in particular to universal standards for voting procedures.” However, as John Nichols explains further, “ALEC is not [really] opposed to uniformity in election procedures as such. It just wants the rules to be set by CEOs, campaign donors and conservative legislators. Restricting voting and direct democracy while ensuring that corporations can spend freely on campaigning makes advancing the conservative agenda a whole lot easier. “Once they set the rules for elections and campaigns, ALEC will pretty much call the shots.”
Secure voting is more a matter of national security than anything our military will ever do. Whether our election process is handled by the states, or even if they evolve into a consolidated Federal effort, convenience to voters will never be as important as a valid outcome controlled by the people.
We need a trustworthy, top-notch special committee investigating our failing election processes, and we need it now. The temptation to tamper with election results will always be irresistible to those who are so inclined, and competent hackers can be purchased around the world as easily as our lawmakers have been purchased by corporate America. Monied stakeholders with interest in the outcome of our elections are widespread in this global economy and they will spare no expense to gain advantage.
Fighting for legitimacy in our right to a meaningful vote, like many other critical safety issues, means that we have to change with the times. Regulatory changes to protect the people’s rights are necessary – whether that means more regulations, different regulations or a complete overhaul of the election process.
Recent history would suggest that we long consider the consequences of court decided elections, and to explore and debate our options including those congress has granted the federal government to override state privilege and consolidate the process. It’s highly debatable, and would be a big pill for states to swallow, but a big pill may be exactly what we need, IF it could be done in a way that secures and validates our secret ballot “one person, one vote” democratic process.
Such power has continually been reiterated by the Supreme Court. In 1932, the Court again reviewed the Election Clause‘s grant of power to Congress to regulate the time, place, and manner of federal elections and stated:
It cannot be doubted that these comprehensive words embrace
authority to provide a complete code for congressional elections,
not only as to times and places, but in relation to notices,
registration, supervision of voting, protection of voters,
prevention of fraud and corrupt practices, counting of votes,
duties of inspectors and canvassers, and making and publication of
election returns; in short, to enact the numerous requirements as
to procedure and safeguards which experience shows are necessary in
order to enforce the fundamental right involved. And these
requirements would be nugatory if they did not have appropriate
sanctions in the definition of offenses and punishments. All this
is comprised in the subject of “times, places and manner of holding
elections. (45)
Here’s the latest on the Maine caucus fiasco. They seem to have moved past the “dog ate my homework” excuse saying that the emails reporting their vote tallies had gone to spam – a priceless example of who and what we’re dealing with in the quest for process integrity.
The clock is ticking and the 2012 election is speeding toward us. Maybe it’s the Doppler effect giving the illusion that we have lots more time to think about all this. We don’t.
DCKennedy
Bend over
Go out and pick the switch I’m going to hit you with.
“The one class of voters that ALEC seeks to protect with resolutions and model legislation—overseas military voters—happens to be likely to vote Republican.”
“At the same time, ALEC urges legislators to fight the “federal takeover” of state election procedures, objecting in particular to universal standards for voting procedures.”
“Once they set the rules for elections and campaigns,” says Wisconsin State Representative Mark Pocan, a longtime ALEC critic, “ALEC will pretty much call the shots.”
Democracy, Voter Rights, and Federal Power
DCKennedy
Alliance for a Progressive Virginia 