Dear Congre$$man,
Plea$e accept our $incere and heartfelt thought$ and prayer$ in the$e difficult and troubling time$.
Your friend$ at the National Rifle A$$ociation.
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Agree or disagree, this essay is worthy of consideration. For the Love of Liberation: Let's Stop Belittling Others and Start Organizing by William C. Anderson at Truthout.
Our current political times are so regressive that human rights like guaranteed health care, housing and fair wages are considered "radical." Capitalism has infected minds across every section of this society. Even among those of us who it oppresses disproportionately, some may defend the abuse they're familiar with; they may even think attempting to utilize this abusive system is the solution to ending their abuse. This happens at the expense of their loved ones and the communities of which they are a part.
In turn, many on the left are understandably working to critique and confront the liberal idea that the political system and institutions working against us are reformable. While the criticisms of what liberalism has tolerated that led us up to now certainly ring true, the way these criticisms are levied is often counterproductive. Simply insulting and critiquing people is not organizing them.
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Recommended. Jason DeParle writes When Government Drew the Color Line, a review of The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
by Richard Rothstein in the New York Review of Books.
. . . But Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., representing a conservative plurality, called any weighing of race unconstitutional. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race,” he wrote. Crucial to his reasoning was the assertion that segregation in Seattle and Louisville was de facto, not de jure—a product of private choices, not state action. Since the state didn’t cause segregation, the state didn’t have to fix it—and couldn’t fix it by sorting students by race.
Richard Rothstein, an education analyst at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, thinks John Roberts is a bad historian. The Color of Law, his powerful history of governmental efforts to impose housing segregation, was written in part as a retort. “Residential segregation was created by state action,” he writes, not merely by amorphous “societal” influences. While private discrimination also deserves some share of the blame, Rothstein shows that “racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments…segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.” Government agencies used public housing to clear mixed neighborhoods and create segregated ones. Governments built highways as buffers to keep the races apart. They used federal mortgage insurance to usher in an era of suburbanization on the condition that developers keep blacks out. From New Dealers to county sheriffs, government agencies at every level helped impose segregation—not de facto but de jure.
Rothstein calls his story a “forgotten history,” not a hidden one. Indeed, part of the book’s shock is just how explicit the government’s racial engineering often was. . . .
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Visit our lovely neighbor to the north later this year? Who is cashing in on Canada's marijuana 'Green Rush'? by Blake Sifton at Al Jazeera.
This summer, Canada is expected to become the second country in the world, after Uruguay, to legalise the production, sale and consumption of recreational cannabis.
And as the expected legalisation date - July 1st - approaches, already licensed producers are moving to increase production capacity as new, sometimes controversial, players try to get their piece of the market.
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