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This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media in election mode means lots of talk about strategy and tactics and who candidates would like to have a beer with. What it could use more of is attention to core electoral issues like who gets to vote. Joining us to discuss the first presidential race in 50 years without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act is Ari Berman, senior contributing writer for The Nation magazine and author of the new book Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.
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Also on the show: The New York Times has just run an eye-opening series on just what you sign away in those fine print contracts now necessary for everything from buying a cellphone to getting a job—namely, your right to justice in a court of law. We’ll talk about forced arbitration and what it means with Joanne Doroshow, founder and executive director of the Center for Justice and Democracy.
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First, as usual, we’ll take a look back at the week’s press, including Ahmed Chalabi’s death, Denmark-bashing and an Uber conflict of interest.
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LINKS:
- “Congressional Democrats Launch a New Strategy to Restore the Voting Rights Act,” by Ari Berman (The Nation, 11/3/15)
- Ari Berman
- “Arbitration Everywhere, Stacking the Deck of Justice,” by Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Robert Gebeloffoct (New York Times, 10/31/15)
- Center for Justice and Democracy
As half of voters in America never go to the polls, why is it that no one has ever made any kind of study to enlighten the public as to who are the non voters? But surely, it all centers on the fact that the upper half of society hoards all the wealth and the lower half is not so fool as to waste time voting for their next set of dictators.
For those with the most wealth are the most concerned about politicians taxing their wealth and the most eager to get involved in politics. Which is why the highest achievers, the 51% most wealthy, always vote to enslave by poverty the laboring-class lower half.
Problem is, life is not an unalienable right but a free gift from nature that no one deserves, which means that we own nothing and everything we have belongs to those who have less.