Browsing PBH By Articles

The U.S. Needs A Constitutional Right To Vote

The Article: The U.S. Needs a Constitutional Right to Vote by Norm Ornstein in The Atlantic.

The Text: It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, is leading to a new era of voter suppression that parallels the pre-1960s era—this time affecting not just African-Americans but also Hispanic-Americans, women, and students, among others.

The reasoning employed by Chief Justice John Roberts in Shelby County—that Section 5 of the act was such a spectacular success that it is no longer necessary—was the equivalent of taking down speed cameras and traffic lights and removing speed limits from a dangerous intersection because they had combined to reduce accidents and traffic deaths.

In North Carolina, a post-Shelby County law not only includes one of the most restrictive and punitive voter-ID laws anywhere but also restricts early voting, eliminates same-day voting registration, ends pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, and bans many provisional ballots. Whatever flimsy voter-fraud excuse exists for requiring voter ID disappears when it comes to these other obstacles to voting.

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Gay Marriage Once Incredibly Common In North America

The Article: The ‘two-spirit’ people of indigenous North Americans by Walter Williams in The Guardian.

The Text: Native Americans have often held intersex, androgynous people, feminine males and masculine females in high respect. The most common term to define such persons today is to refer to them as “two-spirit” people, but in the past feminine males were sometimes referred to as “berdache” by early French explorers in North America, who adapted a Persian word “bardaj”, meaning an intimate male friend. Because these androgynous males were commonly married to a masculine man, or had sex with men, and the masculine females had feminine women as wives, the term berdache had a clear homosexual connotation. Both the Spanish settlers in Latin America and the English colonists in North America condemned them as “sodomites”.

Rather than emphasising the homosexuality of these persons, however, many Native Americans focused on their spiritual gifts. American Indian traditionalists, even today, tend to see a person’s basic character as a reflection of their spirit. Since everything that exists is thought to come from the spirit world, androgynous or transgender persons are seen as doubly blessed, having both the spirit of a man and the spirit of a woman. Thus, they are honoured for having two spirits, and are seen as more spiritually gifted than the typical masculine male or feminine female.

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Thanks To “Citizens United”, Judicial Races Now Political Campaigns Too

The Article: Judicial Races Now Look Like Regular Old Political Campaigns. Thanks, Citizens United! by Erika Eichelberger in Mother Jones.

The Text: Justice is blind, except when it’s backed by millions in political spending. In the wake of Citizens United, the Supreme Court case allowing unlimited spending on elections by outside groups, judicial races in the thirty-eight states that conduct elections for their high courts have become indistinguishable from ordinary political campaigns, according to a new report released Thursday by the Brennan Center for Justice and Justice at Stake, which analyzed the 2011-2012 judicial election cycle. Check it out:

The last election cycle saw record spending: Special interest groups and political parties spent an unprecedented $24.1 million on state court races in the last election period, a jump of more than $11 million since 2007-08. The most expensive high court elections were in the four states where courts most closely divided by either judicial philosophy or political party: Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, and North Carolina.

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No, Obamacare Hasn’t Led To An Increase In Part-Time Jobs

The Article: One Of The Great Anti-Obamacare Lies Exposed — Data Proves ACA Not Responsible For Growth In Part-Time Jobs by Rick Ungar in Forbes.

The Text: One of the more popular economic myths spun by the anti-Obamacare forces is the suggestion that employers are avoiding the law by moving to an employee model based on part-time workers rather than full-time employees.

For those committed to destroying the Affordable Care act by any means possible, who can blame them for seeking to misdirect based on using only a small part of the data as it pertains to employment when telling the full story blows up the entire meme? Such a claim is, after all, ear candy for an audience looking for any reason to hate the law, even if they don’t quite know why they so are so displeased.

The problem, however, is that this popular line of attack comes with a rather significant flaw—the claim is provably false.

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Why Mainstream Economics Is In Denial

The Article: Mainstream economics is in denial: the world has changed by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian.

The Text: Rebellions aren’t meant to kick off in lecture theatres – but I saw one last Thursday night. It was small and well-read and it minded its Ps & Qs, and I think I shall remember it for some time.

We’d gathered at Downing College, Cambridge, to discuss the economic crisis, although the quotidian misery of that topic seemed a world away from the honeyed quads and endowment plush of this place.

Equally incongruous were the speakers. The Cambridge economist Victoria Bateman looked as if saturated fat wouldn’t melt in her mouth, yet demolished her colleagues. They’d been stupidly cocky before the crash – remember the 2003 boast from Nobel prizewinner Robert Lucas that the “central problem of depression-prevention has been solved”? – and had learned no lessons since. Yet they remained the seers of choice for prime ministers and presidents. She ended: “If you want to hang anyone for the crisis, hang me – and my fellow economists.”

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