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Alyssa Apilado

Article I (Olivia) - 19 views

Article I qUESTIONS 11,12, 14 -16, 19 11. Explain the provisions for impeachment. The Senate has the sole power to try impeachments. The President of the United States and the Chief Justic...

Constitution Article I

started by Alyssa Apilado on 11 Nov 10 no follow-up yet
Kay Bradley

What Is Obstruction of Justice? An Often Murky Crime, Explained - The New York Times - 0 views

  • national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn,
  • he was thinking about the F.B.I.’s investigation into contacts between his campaign associates and Russia, which he has derided as fake news, when he did so.
  • After a report that Mr. Trump had asked Mr. Comey whether he was loyal to him, the president
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  • better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations.”
  • “The president has never asked Mr. Comey or anyone else to end any investigation, including any investigation involving General Flynn.”
  • Several federal statutes criminalize actions that impede official investigations.
  • the law also includes broad, catchall prohibitions. For example, Sections 1503, 1505 and 1512 of Title 18 have variants of language making it a crime if someone corruptly “obstructs, influences or impedes any official proceeding.”
  • Could that cover asking the F.B.I. director to drop part of an investigation, and later firing him?
  • In theory, yes.
  • the power relationship
  • Did Trump have lawful authority to fire Comey?
  • But courts have ruled that otherwise lawful acts can constitute obstruction of justice if done with corrupt
  • example
  • intentions
  • ad filed legal complaints and related motions against a government agent who was investigating an illegal gambling operation
  • What would such a case entail, in theory?
  • prove defendants’ mental state
  • chieving that obstruction has to have been the specific intention.
  • Samuel Buell,
  • But he said on Tuesday that subsequent revelations have made the evidence much more robust.
  • “The evidence of improper purpose has gotten much stronger since the day of Comey’s firing,”
  • What impediments would there be to charging Mr. Trump?
  • it was not realistic to expect the Trump administration’s Justice Department to charge the sitting president.
  • to appoint a special counsel to handle it.
  • What about impeachment?
  • Bill Clinton in 1998 and Richard M. Nixon in 1974 — were accused of obstruction of justice.
Chelsea Wirth

Article 1- Congress as a Whole 17,18,20,21 - 17 views

17. Once a bill has passed through the House and Senate, it goes to the president where he signs it to make it official. However, if he doesn't agree with the law, he can exercise his power of Veto...

started by Chelsea Wirth on 11 Nov 10 no follow-up yet
Kay Bradley

Rooted in Reconstruction: The First Wave of Black Congressmen | The Nation - 0 views

  • Well over a century ago, during the turbulent era of Reconstruction, they were preceded by another three: Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, both senators from Mississippi, and P.B.S. Pinchback, briefly the governor of Louisiana.
  • It also underscores how remarkable, if temporary, a transformation in American life was wrought by Reconstruction. Revels, Bruce and Pinchback were only the tip of a large iceberg--an estimated 2,000 black men served in some kind of elective office during that era.
  • For many decades, historians viewed Reconstruction as the lowest point in the American experience, a time of corruption and misgovernment presided over by unscrupulous carpetbaggers from the North, ignorant former slaves and traitorous scalawags (white Southerners who supported the new governments in the South). Mythologies about black officeholders formed a central pillar of this outlook. Their alleged incompetence and venality illustrated the larger "crime" of Reconstruction--placing power in the hands of a race incapable of participating in American democracy. D.W. Griffith's 1915 film Birth of a Nation included a scene in which South Carolina's black legislators downed alcohol and propped their bare feet on their desks while enacting laws. Claude Bowers, in The Tragic Era, a bestseller of the 1920s that did much to form popular consciousness about Reconstruction, offered a similar portrait. To Griffith and Bowers, the incapacity of black officials justified the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and the eventual disenfranchisement of Southern black voters.
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  • Capitol Men
  • Dray's
  • It does not really offer an assessment of Reconstruction's successes and failings
  • Twelve years earlier, Smalls had piloted the Planter, on which he worked as a slave crewman, out of Charleston harbor and delivered it to the Union navy, a deed that made him a national hero. In 1864, while the ship was undergoing repairs in Philadelphia, a conductor evicted Smalls from a streetcar when he refused to give up his seat to a white passenger. Ninety years before a similar incident involving Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Smalls's ordeal inspired a movement of black and white reformers to persuade the Pennsylvania legislature to ban discrimination in public transportation.
  • Stephens offered a long argument based on states' rights as to why the bill was unconstitutional.
  • The subject of their exchange was a civil rights bill banning racial discrimination in places of public accommodation.
  • Elliott launched into a learned and impassioned address explaining why the recently enacted Fourteenth Amendment justified the measure (which was signed into law by President Grant the following year), then reminded Congress of an infamous speech Stephens had delivered on the eve of the Civil War: "It is scarcely twelve years since that gentleman shocked the civilized world by announcing the birth of a government which rested on human slavery as its cornerstone." Elliott already had proved that he refused to be intimidated by whites: in 1869 he whipped a white man in the streets of Columbia for writing inappropriate notes to his wife. A black man assaulting a white man in defense of his wife's good name was not a common occurrence in nineteenth-century South Carolina.
  • Robert Elliott
  • Many of the black Congressmen spoke of the abuse they suffered while traveling to the Capitol. Joseph Rainey
  • Robert Elliott was refused service at a restaurant in a railroad station
  • In the House, one Virginia Democrat announced that he was addressing only "the white men," the "gentlemen," not his black colleagues
  • Congressmen Dray profiles came from diverse origins and differed in their approach to public policies. Some had been free before the Civil War, others enslaved
  • Some favored government action to distribute land to former slaves; others insisted that in a market society the only way to acquire land was to purchase it. Some ran for office as representatives of their race, others as exemplars of the ideal that, with the end of slavery and the advent of legal equality, race no longer mattered. Reconstruction's black Congressmen did not see themselves simply as spokesmen for the black community
  • was one of the more conservative black leaders; yet in the Senate he spoke out for more humane treatment of Native Americans and opposed legislation banning immigration from China
  • Blanche Bruce
  • sixteen black members of Congress
  • had enjoyed opportunities and advantages unknown to most African-Americans
  • Revels
  • had been born free in North Carolina
  • Bruce
  • was the slave son of his owner and was educated by the same tutor who taught his white half-siblings.
  • Some Congressmen had enjoyed unique privileges as slaves.
  • enjamin Turner's
  • wner allowed him to learn to read and write and to run a hotel and livery stable in Selma
  • Others, however, had experienced slavery in all its brutality.
  • Jeremiah Haralson
  • John Hyman
  • None of these men fit the old stereotype of Reconstruction officials as ignorant, incompetent and corrupt.
  • All were literate, most were seasoned political organizers by the time of their election and nearly all were honest.
  • Governor Pinchback
  • ne who does fit the image of venality wa
  • of Louisiana, whose career combined staunch advocacy of civil rights with a sharp eye for opportunities to line his pockets
  • Pinchback grew up and attended school in Cincinnati. In the 1850s he worked as a cabin boy on an Ohio River steamboat. He fell in with a group of riverboat gamblers and learned their trade. He turned up in New Orleans in 1862 and expertly navigated the byzantine world of Louisiana's Reconstruction politics. Pinchback was undoubtedly corrupt (he accumulated a small fortune while in office) but also an accomplished politician.
  • Reconstruction ended in 1877, when President Rutherford B. Hayes abandoned the idea of federal intervention to protect the rights of black citizens in the South, essentially leaving their fate in the hands of local whites.
  • black political power, while substantially diminished, did not vanish until around 1900, when the Southern states disenfranchised black voters. Six more African-Americans served in Congress before the end of the nineteenth century. Some of their Reconstruction predecessors remained active in politics
  • Robert Smalls
  • of Planter fame, served as customs collector at Beaufort until 1913, when he was removed as part of a purge of blacks from the federal bureaucracy by Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern-born president since Reconstruction.
  • Pinchback and Bruce moved to Washington, where they became leaders of the city's black elite and arbiters of federal patronage appointments for African-Americans. Bruce worked tirelessly but unsuccessfully to persuade Congress to reimburse blacks who had deposited money in the Freedman's Savings Bank, which failed during the Panic of 1873. Like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in our own time, the bank was a private corporation chartered by Congress that enjoyed the implicit but not statutory backing of the federal government. Its counterparts today are being bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars, as they have been deemed too big to fail. The Freedman's Savings Bank was too black to rescue.
  • George White
  • The last black Congressman of the post-Reconstruction era wa
  • of North Carolina, whose term ended in 1901. From then until 1929, when
  • Oscar DePriest
  • took his seat representing Chicago, Congress remained lily-white. Not until 1972, with
  • Andrew Young's
  • election in Georgia and
  • Barbara Jordan's
  • in Texas, did black representation resume from states that had experienced Reconstruction. Today the Congressional Black Caucus numbers forty-two members, seventeen of them from the states of the old Confederacy.
  • Robert Smalls
  • One such episode involves
  • who in 1874 was elected to Congress from Beaufort County, South Carolina.
  • Alexander Stephens
  • Equally riveting is the 1874 confrontation between
  • he former vice president of the Confederacy, then representing Georgia in the House of Representatives, and another black South Carolinian,
  • Robert Brown Elliott (1842-1884) was an African American member of the United States House of Representatives from South Carolina. Robert Brown Elliott's early life is a mystery. Although he claimed to have been born in Liverpool, England to West Indian immigrants, and to have graduated from Eton College, biographers have been unable to corroborate these facts. He moved to South Carolina in 1867 and established a law practice. Elliott helped organize the local Republican Party and served in the state constitutional convention. In 1868 he was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives. The next year he was appointed assistant adjutant-general; he was the first African American commanding general of the South Carolina National Guard. As part of his job, he helped form a state militia to fight the Ku Klux Klan. Elliott was elected as a Republican to the Forty-second and Forty-third United States Congress. He "delivered a celebrated speech" in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1875.[1] He resigned on November 1, 1874, to fight political corruption in South Carolina. He served again in the South Carolina House of Representatives, where he was elected as Speaker of the House. He ran unsuccessfully for South Carolina Attorney General in 1876. Reconstruction ended that year and he was forced out of office.[] He set up a private law practice in New Orleans.
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    "Rooted in Reconstruction: The First Wave of Black Congressmen Eric Foner"
Kay Bradley

8 U.S. Code § 1152 - Numerical limitations on individual foreign states | US ... - 0 views

  •  
    Links to database of u.s. laws
Kristi Hong

Article 5 and Checks and Balances REVISED - 9 views

Articles of Confederation By Kristi Article V: What are the methods by which amendments may be proposed and ratified? Amendments to the Constitution proposed in two ways - a new delegate meeting...

started by Kristi Hong on 12 Nov 10 no follow-up yet
Kay Bradley

US History Films--Line 'em up on Netflix and have fun! - 6 views

U.S. History Films List: a collection of suggestions from other people-I have bold faced my top ten . . . The First List is from John Nesbit, of Phoenix, AZ. http://www.epinions.com/content_19656...

US History

started by Kay Bradley on 14 Feb 11 no follow-up yet
Kay Bradley

The Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts - 2 views

  •  
    Wow! Check out how closely regulated the bakers were! (Command=F Baker will get you there)
Kay Bradley

L. Frank Baum - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • In December 1890, Baum urged the wholesale extermination of all America's native peoples in a column he wrote on December 20, 1890, nine days before the Wounded Knee Massacre.[13] Later, on January 3, 1891, Baum reverted to the subject in an editorial response to the event: The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries, we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth.[14]
  • While Baum was in South Dakota, he sang in a quartet that included a man who would become one of the first Populist (People's Party) Senators in the U.S., James Kyle
  • In 1900, Baum and Denslow (with whom he shared the copyright) published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to much critical acclaim and financial success.[18] The book was the best-selling children's book for two years after its initial publication.[citation needed] Baum went on to write thirteen more novels based on the places and people of the Land of Oz.
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  • Jokes in the script, mostly written by Glen MacDonough, called for explicit references to President Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Mark Hanna, and oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. Although use of the script was rather free-form, the line about Hanna was ordered dropped as soon as Hamlin got word of his death in 1904.[citation needed]
  • On May 5, 1919, Baum suffered from a stroke.
  • Baum wrote two editorials about Native Americans for the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer which have provoked controversy in recent times because of his assertion that the safety of White settlers depended on the wholesale genocide of American Indians
  • The first piece was published on December 20, 1890, five days after the killing of the Lakota Sioux holy man, Sitting Bull (who was being held in custody at the time). Following is the complete text of the editorial: Sitting Bull, most renowned Sioux of modern history, is dead. He was not a Chief, but without Kingly lineage he arose from a lowly position to the greatest Medicine Man of his time, by virtue of his shrewdness and daring. He was an Indian with a white man's spirit of hatred and revenge for those who had wronged him and his. In his day he saw his son and his tribe gradually driven from their possessions: forced to give up their old hunting grounds and espouse the hard working and uncongenial avocations of the whites. And these, his conquerors, were marked in their dealings with his people by selfishness, falsehood and treachery. What wonder that his wild nature, untamed by years of subjection, should still revolt? What wonder that a fiery rage still burned within his breast and that he should seek every opportunity of obtaining vengeance upon his natural enemies.
  • The proud spirit of the original owners of these vast prairies inherited through centuries of fierce and bloody wars for their possession, lingered last in the bosom of Sitting Bull. With his fall the nobility of the Redskin is extinguished, and what few are left are a pack of whining curs who lick the hand that smites them. The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are. History would forget these latter despicable beings, and speak, in latter ages of the glory of these grand Kings of forest and plain that Cooper loved to heroize. We cannot honestly regret their extermination, but we at least do justice to the manly characteristics possessed, according to their lights and education, by the early Redskins of America.[32][33] Following the December 29, 1890, massacre, Baum wrote a second editorial, published on January 3, 1891: The peculiar policy of the government in employing so weak and vacillating a person as General Miles to look after the uneasy Indians, has resulted in a terrible loss of blood to our soldiers, and a battle which, at best, is a disgrace to the war department. There has been plenty of time for prompt and decisive measures, the employment of which would have prevented this disaster.
  • An eastern contemporary, with a grain of wisdom in its wit, says that "when the whites win a fight, it is a victory, and when the Indians win it, it is a massacre."[32][34]
  • The Pioneer has before declared that our only safety depends upon the total extirmination [sic] of the Indians. Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth. In this lies safety for our settlers and the soldiers who are under incompetent commands. Otherwise, we may expect future years to be as full of trouble with the redskins as those have been in the past.
  • These two short editorials continue to haunt his legacy. In 2006, two descendants of Baum apologized to the Sioux nation for any hurt their ancestor had
  • caused
  • Baum's mother-in-law, Woman's Suffrage leader Matilda Joslyn Gage, had great influence over Baum's views. Gage was initiated into the Wolf Clan and admitted into the Iroquois Council of Matrons for her outspoken respect and sympathy for Native American people; it would seem unlikely that Baum could have harbored animosity for them in his mature years.
  • Although numerous political references to the "Wizard" appeared early in the 20th century, it was in a scholarly article by Henry Littlefield,[36] an upstate New York high school history teacher, published in 1964 that there appeared the first full-fledged interpretation of the novel as an extended political allegory of the politics and characters of the 1890s. Special attention was paid to the Populist metaphors and debates over silver and gold.[37] As a Republican and avid supporter of Women's Suffrage, it is thought that Baum personally did not support the political ideals of either the Populist movement of 1890–92 or the Bryanite-silver crusade of 1896–1900. He published a poem in support of William McKinley.[38
  • Since 1964 many scholars, economists and historians have expanded on Littlefield's interpretation, pointing to multiple similarities between the characters (especially as depicted in Denslow's illustrations) and stock figures from editorial cartoons of the period. Littlefield himself wrote to The New York Times letters to the editor section spelling out that his theory had no basis in fact, but that his original point was, "not to label Baum, or to lessen any of his magic, but rather, as a history teacher at Mount Vernon High School, to invest turn-of-the-century America with the imagery and wonder I have always found in his stories."[39]
  • Baum's newspaper had addressed politics in the 1890s, and Denslow was an editorial cartoonist as well as an illustrator of children's books. A series of political references are included in the 1902 stage version, such as references by name to the President and a powerful senator, and to John D. Rockefeller for providing the oil needed by the Tin Woodman. Scholars have found few political references in Baum's Oz books after 1902.[citation needed] When Baum himself was asked whether his stories had hidden meanings, he always replied that they were written to please children and generate an income for his family
  • The Baums believed in God, but felt that religious decisions should be made by mature minds and not religious authorities. As a result, they sent their older sons to "Ethical Culture Sunday School" in Chicago, which taught morality, not religion.[41][42]
Kay Bradley

Telling Americans to Vote, or Else - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • Thirty-one countries have some form of mandatory voting
  • Australia adopted mandatory voting in 1924, backed by small fines (roughly the size of traffic tickets) for nonvoting, rising with repeated acts of nonparticipation.
  • The results were remarkable. In the 1925 election, the first held under the new law, turnout soared to 91 percent. In recent elections, it has hovered around 95 percent. The law also changed civic norms. Australians are more likely than before to see voting as an obligation. The negative side effects many feared did not materialize. For example, the percentage of ballots intentionally spoiled or completed randomly as acts of resistance remained on the order of 2 to 3 percent.
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  • three reasons in favor of mandatory votin
  • A democracy can’t be strong if its citizenship is weak. And right now American citizenship is attenuated — strong on rights, weak on responsibilities
  • The second argument for mandatory voting is democratic
  • if some regularly vote while others don’t, officials are likely to give greater weight to participants
  • This might not matter much if nonparticipants were evenly distributed through the population. But political scientists have long known that they aren’t. People with lower levels of income and education are less likely to vote, as are young adults and recent first-generation immigrants
  • Changes in our political system have magnified these disparities.
  •  
    Mandatory voting proposal. Compares to Australia, which has had mandatory voting since 1924.
Kay Bradley

Compulsory Voting | Voter Turnout | International IDEA - 0 views

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    How do other countries enact mandatory voting laws?
Kay Bradley

Famous Trials - UMKC School of Law - Prof. Douglas Linder - 0 views

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    Starts with the Trial of Socrates
Kay Bradley

American Anti-miscegenation - 0 views

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    History of state anti-miscegenation laws
Kay Bradley

What Georgia's Voting Law Really Does - The New York Times - 0 views

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    Voter restrictions
Kay Bradley

Angela Davis Still Believes America Can Change - The New York Times - 0 views

  • there’s no love lost between mainstream liberalism and the more so-called radical voices that arose in the ’70s
  • Angela Davis survived that dangerous time with her reputation intact, her spirit unbroken and her critical vision of the American free-enterprise system unchanged
  • she is to a piercing and radical tradition of struggle in the Black community that has never, as the kids say, “been given their flowers.”
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  • As a bridge between the past and present eras of protest, Davis can explain both what went right and wrong while also helping to shape the future.
  • she expresses a relaxed optimism about the country’s direction.
  • a professor who has taught history of consciousness, critical theory and feminist studies for five decades,
  • Stuart Hall,
  • Prudence Crandall
  • Anne Braden
  • For many contemporary African-American activists, race has been a blind spot for white feminists and for the feminist movement at large.
  • But the numerous issues of inequality facing working-class and poor Black women
  • had never been very vital to the mainstream feminist agenda
  • So how is it possible to develop the kinds of arguments that will allow people to recognize that one cannot effectively struggle for gender equality without racial equality?
  • She believes narrow definitions of any progressive movement feed a self-centeredness that limits its ability to unify with other groups. In other words, she understood the necessity of intersectionality before the term was even invented.
  • “Intersectionality” is a neologism introduced in 1989 by the Black law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who teaches at U.C.L.A.
  • and Columbia University.
  • that Black women are subject to discrimination based not just on race, class or sex but the interaction of all of them
  • this philosophy is easier to demand from a podium than to write into policy, where efforts have been stymied by self-interest and personal prejudices. But as we discuss her past, I detect no cynicism, no despair nor frustration —
  • Davis sees a chance for us to re-examine capitalism, which she views as irredeemably flawed
  • And yet in so much of what they did accomplish — with civil rights, women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, the environment and scores of other issues — they have radically shifted America’s expectations and norms.
  • Along with coalition building, Davis has long been passionate about radically changing the criminal justice system
  • a reimagining of policing and incarceration has been essential to her vision for decades.
  • )
  • It allows us to imagine other ways of addressing issues of safety and security. Most of us have assumed in the past that when it comes to public safety, the police are the ones who are in charge. When it comes to issues of harm in the community, prisons are the answer. But what if we imagined different modes of addressing harm, different modes of addressing security and safety?
  • I have thought often of Davis’s ideas on law enforcement, especially around issues involving the mentally il
  • but also their leadership models — and in particular, how they have avoided the pitfalls of their predecessors: primarily, a cultish fixation on a charismatic male leader
  • most left-of-center organizations opposed to the American status quo in the ’60s suffered from some version of the Great Man syndrome, where women were either relegated to support roles or their contributions to the organizations were minimized.
  • Fannie Lou Hamer
  • Huey P. Newton w
  • Mark Rudd
  • [Younger activists] know so much more than we did at their age,” she says. “They don’t take male supremacy for granted.
  • One aspect of this shift in leadership models has to do with a critique of patriarchy and a critique of male supremacy.
  • Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi
  • all of whom have prevented a cult of personality developing around themselves
  • E.D. Nixon,
  • Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
  • Yet “[the boycott] took place because Black women — domestic workers — had the collective imagination to believe that it was possible to change the world, and they were the ones who refused to ride the bus,”
  • Crucial to her intellectual development was her mother’s participation with the Southern Negro Youth Congress;
  • several of the organization’s leaders were members of the Communist Party.
  • the Communist Party supported the struggle against segregation from the 1930s until the Red Scare in the 1950s forced their participation underground. (It’s widely known, for example, that Bayard Rustin, a gay activist and former Communist, was a leading tactician of the 1963 March on Washington. What is less well remembered is how much the party supported the grass-roots organizing of the S.N.Y.C., along with many activist groups across the nation.)
  • Davis spent two of her high school years attending an integrated school in New York thanks to a Quaker-run program that placed promising Black Southerners in Northern schools
  • she studied under the philosopher Herbert Marcuse,
  • From 1965 to 1967, she studied in Europe, learning several languages, deepening her understanding of German philosophy and participating in rallies for the Socialist German Student Union.
  • t was during these expatriate years that Davis began to see the racism she’d experienced growing up as a byproduct of an economy predicated on cheap, exploited labor, identifying institutional racism as a systemic problem long before the phrase came into vogue.
  • After returning to the United States in 1967, Davis affirmed her commitment to Communism
  • a key reason that she became associated with the Marxist-influenced Black Panthers
  • Because of her training and time spent abroad, Davis offered a more international vision as she attempted to build connections between oppressed groups, choosing not to separate the African-American struggle from that of other marginalized peoples, such as the Hmong, caught in the violence of the Vietnam War, and the battle against apartheid in South Africa. It’s why, in part, her arrest so resonated across the world.
  • In 1991, she stepped away, along with a number of other members, because the party refused to engage in processes of democratization; they formed a new organization, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
  • NO MOVEMENT IS static. Contemporary Black activism has also largely been informed by the concurrent agitation surrounding trans and queer rights,
  • oth forces that have pushed back against the staunchly cis and heteronormative values that have dominated mainstream Black politics.
  • Though briefly married to a man in the early ’80s, Davis came out as a lesbian in 1997 and now openly lives with her partner, the academic Gina Dent.
  • There would have been no way to imagine that trans movements would effectively demonstrate to people that it is possible to effectively challenge what counts as normal in so many different areas of our lives.
  • A part of me is glad that we didn’t win the revolution we were fighting for back then, because there would still be male supremacy. There would still be hetero-patriarchy. There would be all of these things that we had not yet come to consciousness about.”
  • There’s a tendency to define racial progress in America by the upward mobility of various “minority groups” — to count and celebrate how many members have entered the middle class, have graduated from college or have multimillion-dollar deals with streaming services.
  • Davis, however, finds those signifiers meaningless. Racism, she believes, will continue to exist as long as capitalism remains our secular religion.
  • The elephant in the room is always capitalism,”
  • Capitalism has always been racial capitalism.
  • We do need free education. Why is it that people pay fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year to study in a university? Housing: That’s something sort of just basic. At a time when we need access to these services more than ever before, the wealth of the world has shifted into the hands of a very small number of people.”
  • It may be easy to be cynical about Communism and claim that America won the Cold War, but it’s also impossible to deny that this country’s financial system breeds income inequality, homelessness and divides us into warring camps separated by class, sex and race.
  • Does she think the Democratic Party could be a vehicle for transforming America? “To be frank, no,” she says, but then adds, “I think it’s important to push the Democrats further to the left,” expressing great enthusiasm for the four progressive female congresswomen — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — elected in 2018.
  • Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011
  • Black Lives Matter movement.
  • this is a moment many years in the making, based in grass-roots organizing that’s been happening outside the world of party politics and thus underrecognized by the mainstream media.
  • It’s also the kind of organizing that doesn’t always bear fruit quickly.
  • there are no guarantees, to use Stuart Hall’s phrase, that our work will have an immediate effect,” she says. “But we have to do it as if it were possible.”
  • She’s heartened, too, by the diversity of participants in Black Lives Matter marches and the willingness of white protesters to embrace the battle against white supremacy
  • As we looked at the damage that the pandemic was doing, people began to realize the extent to which Black communities, brown communities and Indigenous communities were sustaining the effect of a pandemic in ways that pointed to the existence of structural racism.
  • AMERICANS ARE TERRIBLE at understanding history.
  • We buy all too easily into the jingoism of Hollywood movies and our politicians’ pious platitudes. We possess an unjustified sense of self-regard. The effects of an inflated ego are pernicious; they stifle our ability to clearly see the world outside of ourselves, or our own role in it.
  • Davis, though, has never accepted the myth of American exceptionalism. Rather, she has consistently argued that our triumphant narrative of Manifest Destiny is simply a cover for an exploitive financial system that corrupts our public life and represses our humanity
Kay Bradley

The Granger Revolution - 0 views

  • The Grangers, an organization of farmers formed in the late 1860s, were being oppressed by the dominance and ubiquitous influence of the railroads
  • Since there was no regulation of big business, and the nature of the economy necessitated high volume transportation of crops, these farmers had no choice but to give in to the whims of the railroad tycoons. When the burden became too great to endure, the Grangers organized a revolt, which eventually led to government regulation of the railroads and other monopolies.
  • The popularity of the Grangers was "less for its social and educational advantages than for the opportunity it presented for farmers to unite against the monopolistic practices of railroads and elevators and to institute for themselves cooperative methods of buying and selling.
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  • This meant that they had to rely on corporately owned railroads and grain elevators for the transport of their crops. To make matters worse, "elevators, often themselves owned by railroads, charged high prices for their services, weighed and graded grain without supervision, and used their influence with the railroads to ensure that cars were not available to farmers who sought to evade elevator service."
  • the Grangers read their Farmer's Declaration of Independence, which cited all of their grievances and in which they vowed to free themselves from the tyranny of monopoly
  • Munn v. Illinois
  • Following this ruling, several pieces of legislation,
  • were passed. Though they were soon repealed, they represented the first attempts at regulating a private monopoly
  • collectively known as the Granger
  • Laws,
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