Civil Rights

A New Rush to Spy

nytimes.com — There is apparently no limit to the Bush administration’s desire to invade Americans’ privacy in the name of national security. According to members of Congress, Attorney General Michael Mukasey is preparing to give the F.B.I. broad new authority to investigate Americans — without any clear basis for suspicion that they are committing a crime.

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Alan Jenkins's picture

Summer School Assignment

Summer vacation began this week for millions of kids across the country,. But in many communities, school board members, principals, and administrators are still hard at work. Among their tasks for the summer is designing new ways of fulfilling the promise of equal educational opportunity and preparing students for a diverse, interconnected world. more »

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Alan Jenkins's picture

Brave New Laws

By an overwhelming bipartisan margin, Congress has passed what sponsors are calling the first civil rights act of the 21st century: the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. The Act, which President Bush is expected to sign, prohibits employers and insurance companies from denying people jobs, benefits, or health coverage because of their genetic make-up. more »

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Hurricane Katrina affected racial, partisan politics in Louisiana, study finds

louisianaweekly.com — The changes in voter demographics resulting from Hurricane Katrina have greatly affected the political landscape of both the metropolitan New Orleans area and the state, said University of New Orleans political scientist Edward E. Chervenak who compared and analyzed data from Louisiana's gubernatorial elections in 2003 and 2007.

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Cops and Former Secret Service Agents Ran Black Ops on Green Groups

motherjones.com — A private security company organized and managed by former Secret Service officers spied on Greenpeace and other environmental organizations from the late 1990s through at least 2000, pilfering documents from trash bins, attempting to plant undercover operatives within groups, casing offices, collecting phone records of activists, and penetrating

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Isaiah J. Poole's picture

Lessons from the 1960s for 21st-Century Change

The Rev. Jesse Jackson and Roger Wilkins embrace after speeches Tuesday at the Take Back America conference. Photo by Michael Temchine.The Rev. Jesse Jackson and Roger Wilkins — an activist outsider and a White House insider in the 1960s — say that today's progressive movement needs to lay claim to the successes of the 1960s in order to advance its agenda in 2008 and beyond. “The third rail is where the energy is, where the power is, where the fire is,” Jackson said. The focus of this year's Take Back America conference has been the need to build an independent progressive movement ready to hold accountable whoever controls the White House and Congress.

Check the conference home page for more of the action at Take Back America 2008.

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David Sirota's picture

Are We Ready to Rise Up Again?

I have spent much of the Martin Luther King holiday weekend in my car, traveling throughout southern and central Colorado to report on a working-class struggle that transcends the partisan divide (more on this in a few weeks). At one point during my journey, I stopped in Ludlow at the tiny memorial (pictured at right) for the massacre that occurred there at the beginning of the 20th century - the massacre when our government sent in troops to kill those striking for their basic rights.

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