Red Commissar
15th July 2013, 19:20
I'm sorry if there's a thread already for this, but I was prompted to ask this when I came across several articles relating to North Carolina and its protests. I remember it coming up then about the large amount of protestors arrested protesting some decisions by the Republican-controlled legislature to significantly cut into unemployment benefits and other programs. Later on it also involved activists fighting against attempts by the legislature to hammer through restrictions on abortion (including an attempt to toss it in with an unrelated bill on motorcycle safety and paradoxically another to tack it on to a bill outlawing sharia in the state :rolleyes:), which I came across while posting my Texas thread on the matter.
Some articles about this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/us/weekly-protests-in-north-carolina-challenge-conservative-shift-in-state-politics.html
June 11, 2013
Protests in North Carolina Challenge Conservative Shift in State Politics
By KIM SEVERSON
RALEIGH, N.C. — By now, the sixth week that the police and protesters have faced off in a series of political rallies called Moral Mondays, everyone knew what to do.
The singing stopped. Hands went behind backs. While hundreds of people watched from the rotunda that separates the House from the Senate chambers here, officers slipped plastic cuffs onto Duke University professors, ministers, teachers and union members, who were charged with trespassing and other minor crimes. Even a Charlotte newspaper reporter was arrested as he took notes.
At the end, 89 people went to jail. They were out by morning.
Week by week, Monday by Monday, since April 29, a growing coalition assembled by the N.A.A.C.P. has challenged the newly conservative Republican leadership in North Carolina, raising its voice against the loss of the state’s centrist government and what they see as diminished recognition of the poor and minorities.
“These folks have lost their constitutional minds and their moral minds,” said the Rev. William J. Barber II, the president of the North Carolina N.A.A.C.P. and the force behind the protests. “We can no longer allow the ultraconservatives to have the moral megaphone.”
N.A.A.C.P. leaders and an increasing number of labor, immigration and civil rights groups are bent on turning the protests in North Carolina into a national movement to stop a hard swing right that they say has sprung from the election of President Obama and the rise of Tea Party-style politics.
“If you are going to change the nation, you have to change the South,” Mr. Barber said. “And if you are going to change the South, you have to focus on these legislatures.”
As the protests have grown, so has the list of causes. At the center is a package of changes to voting rules and a tax reform plan working its way through the legislature that would reduce individual and corporate income taxes and expand the sales tax.
Protesters have also rallied against the expansion of school vouchers, cuts to unemployment benefits, the repeal of the Racial Justice Act, efforts to allow hydraulic fracturing and the state’s refusal to expand Medicaid benefits as part of President Obama’s health care plan.
But the protests are quickly turning into a platform for all kinds of causes. A woman holding a sign that read “Just Say No to GMOs” — genetically modified organisms — wandered through the crowd on Monday.
Many at the rallies are individuals who work with the poor.
Sylvia Ray, 72, works for a small social services agency in Fayetteville that helps people find jobs. A $50,000 program for displaced homemakers was recently cut.
“That’s just one small example of what’s happening everywhere,” she said. “This state is hurting the people who are struggling for every penny.”
Other states in the South have been advancing equally conservative social and fiscal agendas, but in North Carolina, long considered one of the least conservative Southern states, the shift right has seemed sudden, stark and well-executed.
“I want the American people to watch the conservative playbook unfold in North Carolina,” Representative G. K. Butterfield, a Democrat in Congress who represents one of the poorest districts in the country, said Monday to the crowd. “It’s meanspirited, and it’s wrong.”
The powerful Republican revolution in North Carolina began in earnest in 2010, when for the first time in more than 100 years Republicans took control of both the House and the Senate. Helped by a round of redistricting, the Republicans increased their majority in 2012 and put Pat McCrory, the former mayor of Charlotte, in the governor’s office.
He began an agenda aimed at reducing spending and stimulating business that has been well received by many in the state.
Whether the protests are having much effect on the governor and legislators is difficult to discern. At first, they ignored Moral Mondays. But as the arrest totals crept over 300 and crowds topped a thousand, politicians began to respond.
Some pulled no punches. Thom Goolsby, a Republican and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, renamed the protests “Moron Mondays” in an opinion column and called the protesters “mostly white, angry, aged former hippies.”
Governor McCrory, who declined a request for an interview, told reporters last week that outsiders were stirring things up and that he would not meet with Moral Monday leaders. He called for an end to what he said were illegal assemblies.
Thom Tillis, the speaker of the House and a board member of the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that proposes legislation based on limited government and individual liberty, was more measured.
Mr. Tillis, who is running for the United States Senate, suggested both sides find a way to talk.
“There are so many positive things we can do if we can lower the volume and sit down and talk and show some mutual respect,” he said.
But the protesters are realists.
“We don’t think this is going to change the legislature’s mind right now, but it highlights what’s at stake in the next election,” said Jedediah Purdy, 38, a law professor at Duke who was arrested Monday evening.
He said the battle mirrored the issues that divided the country in the 2012 presidential election. “The states are the new front line in politics,” he said.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/175160/sixty-four-arrested-moral-monday-abortion-access-protest-north-carolina
A woman is arrested as protesters rally during “Moral Monday” demonstrations at the General Assembly in Raleigh, North Carolina, Monday, July 8, 2013. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)
For the past two months, activists in North Carolina have been protesting a bill that could limit abortion access, and more than 700 people have been arrested in the weekly “Moral Monday” protests against the state’s first Republican-led government in more than a century. This Monday, 2,000 people flooded the state capitol in Raleigh, and sixty-four protesters were arrested after refusing to leave the legislative chambers. Those arrested included Janet Colm, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina.
The bill passed last week by the State Senate required abortion clinics to conform to the same safety standards as ambulatory survey centers, a requirement currently met by only one of the state’s clinics. Opponents say this will limit access to safe abortions.
Moral Monday participants come from all backgrounds and walks of life.
Megan Katsaounis was born and raised in North Carolina, and while she’s always been highly critical of mainstream Democratic officials, she’s grown concerned watching “horrible bills” pass through the Republican-controlled Senate.
“Every week, there’s something new to be outraged about. They repealed the Racial Justice Act. We’re now the first state to be disqualified from receiving federal funds for the long-term unemployed. The list of grievances goes on and on,” she said.
Katsaounis wanted to participate in Moral Monday since she first heard about the protests, but as a mom, “childcare is always a hurdle.” Finally, when the infamous anti–Sharia Law omni-bill was being debated in the senate, Katsaounis got so angry she skipped work to go witness it.
Last week, North Carolina lawmakers voted to add a series of sweeping anti-abortion regulations to a measure to ban the “application of foreign law” in family courts, an “anti-Sharia Law” bill that many opponents say is a thinly veiled attempt at stoking anti-Muslim sentiment in the state.
“I think that was a rallying point for a lot of people,” Katsaounis said. “That night, my parents asked what I wanted for my birthday and I said, ‘I want you to babysit so I can go to Moral Monday.’”
“I wish I was in a position to be arrested. A lot of us are angry at the direction our state is going and we’re feeling very helpless right now. Being hauled away in handcuffs seems like a very tangible way of taking a stand, and I love how volunteers support the arrestees, providing meals for everyone upon release. It’s inspiring,” she added.
Amy McKee joined the protests for the first time on Monday.
“I’m very concerned about the laws that are being presented that limit women’s rights and access to birth control and abortion,” McKee said. “I have daughters. I’m really concerned about their future.”
The last time Rev. Frederick Battle was arrested was in 1962’s historic Woolworth’s department store sit-in in Greensboro, a pivotal moment in the US civil rights movement. He was among those arrested on Monday.
“What scares me about today is that I see similarities that we are going back to those days, back to the ’60’s,” Battle told WRAL.
Self-proclaimed “soccer mom” Christine Lang also joined the protests.
“When we start to restrict these rights, we’re going back hundreds of years in this country and it scares me for my daughter and myself, actually.”
Rev. William Barber II, head of the state branch of the NAACP, leads the Moral Monday protests.
“We see what we are doing here in North Carolina as a model for other Southern states,” Barber said. “History tells us you only win, particularly in the South, when you find a way to bring people together around common constitutional values and common moral values.”
GOP-controlled state legislatures have attempted to depict concerned citizens as unruly mobs in need of arrest and jailing. In Texas, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst warned that protesters who caused a disruption in the gallery while lawmakers considered that state’s abortion bill would be removed and may face forty-eight hours in prison.
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Observers in North Carolina say some of those handcuffed and charged with misdemeanours in recent weeks were simply exercising their First Amendment rights.
House Democratic Leader Larry Hall said last week that many were handcuffed for “petty citations” and shouldn’t have been sent to jail.
“I believe we have a great police force here,” said Rep. Hall, a lawyer from Durham. “Now, who do they work for? They work for whoever is in the majority in the House and the Senate, who are responsible for the messages sent to them from the top.”
Squashing democratic dissent is in keeping with lawmakers’ recent behavior. For example, the State Senate quickly voted on Tuesday night to pass a package of anti-abortion amendments attached to a bill that would ban Sharia law even though Republican Governor Pat McCrory had raised concerns that the Senate had unfairly rushed the amendments through.
“When the Democrats were in power, this is the way they did business,” McCrory said in a statement on House Bill 695. “It was not right then and it is not right now. Regardless of what party is in charge or what important issue is being discussed, the process must be appropriate and thorough.”
All of this raises the question: What’s the point of living in a democracy with a First Amendment if lawmakers are going to sneak legislation through in the middle of the night and have concerned citizens arrested when they try to object?
http://www.popularresistance.org/mega-moral-monday-over-150-arrests-in-nc/
RALEIGH, N.C. — A growing group of protesters converged on the state legislature Monday, in what some are calling “Mega Moral Monday,” to protest the agenda of the Republican-led General Assembly.
It was the fifth and largest demonstration planned by the state chapter of the NAACP and other civil rights groups to protest GOP policies on social programs, education, criminal justice and taxes.
Police estimated that roughly 1,000 people attended a rally late Monday afternoon behind the Legislative Building on Halifax Mall. Hundreds then entered the building. Activist groups estimated the crowd at about 1,600.
Upwards of 150 people were arrested outside the doors to the state Senate chambers, where demonstrators chanted, sang and delivered speeches decrying what they called a regressive agenda that neglects the poor. All of the protesters were released by 5 a.m. Tuesday.
The NAACP has been holding weekly protests in Raleigh since mid-April, and what started with 17 arrests and tens of supporters back then has grown every week, bringing the total number of arrests to nearly 300 after five weeks of protests.
“The people are awake now, and we have decided to stand up,” state NAACP chapter president Rev. William Barber told the crowd Monday. “We are a movement. This is not a moment.”
Groups ranging from abortion-rights supporters to environmentalists and public educators have joined the rallies, which have attracted people from Greensboro to Rocky Mount.
Protesters have been seeking to call attention to the rightward shift of the state legislature, which was dominated for decades by moderate Democrats.
Thus far, Republican lawmakers say those groups have a right to protest but are not swaying lawmakers.
“We are keeping our promises to voters, and that is what we are doing,” said state Sen. Thom Goolsby, a Republican from Wilmington. “The Democrats totally bankrupted our state and we were trying to fix it.”
Copyright 2013 by WRAL.com and the Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Video below by dukewf
More recent one
uzIbKQDPrcU
What concerns me from looking at a lot of these sites is that a lot of pro-Democrat groups are likely taking advantage of these events to try and cynically encourage a "lesser of two evils" approach by highlighting what the Republicans are doing. That being said I'm definitely keeping an eye out here as challenges to conservatives down here in the south is hard to come by at times.
Some articles about this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/us/weekly-protests-in-north-carolina-challenge-conservative-shift-in-state-politics.html
June 11, 2013
Protests in North Carolina Challenge Conservative Shift in State Politics
By KIM SEVERSON
RALEIGH, N.C. — By now, the sixth week that the police and protesters have faced off in a series of political rallies called Moral Mondays, everyone knew what to do.
The singing stopped. Hands went behind backs. While hundreds of people watched from the rotunda that separates the House from the Senate chambers here, officers slipped plastic cuffs onto Duke University professors, ministers, teachers and union members, who were charged with trespassing and other minor crimes. Even a Charlotte newspaper reporter was arrested as he took notes.
At the end, 89 people went to jail. They were out by morning.
Week by week, Monday by Monday, since April 29, a growing coalition assembled by the N.A.A.C.P. has challenged the newly conservative Republican leadership in North Carolina, raising its voice against the loss of the state’s centrist government and what they see as diminished recognition of the poor and minorities.
“These folks have lost their constitutional minds and their moral minds,” said the Rev. William J. Barber II, the president of the North Carolina N.A.A.C.P. and the force behind the protests. “We can no longer allow the ultraconservatives to have the moral megaphone.”
N.A.A.C.P. leaders and an increasing number of labor, immigration and civil rights groups are bent on turning the protests in North Carolina into a national movement to stop a hard swing right that they say has sprung from the election of President Obama and the rise of Tea Party-style politics.
“If you are going to change the nation, you have to change the South,” Mr. Barber said. “And if you are going to change the South, you have to focus on these legislatures.”
As the protests have grown, so has the list of causes. At the center is a package of changes to voting rules and a tax reform plan working its way through the legislature that would reduce individual and corporate income taxes and expand the sales tax.
Protesters have also rallied against the expansion of school vouchers, cuts to unemployment benefits, the repeal of the Racial Justice Act, efforts to allow hydraulic fracturing and the state’s refusal to expand Medicaid benefits as part of President Obama’s health care plan.
But the protests are quickly turning into a platform for all kinds of causes. A woman holding a sign that read “Just Say No to GMOs” — genetically modified organisms — wandered through the crowd on Monday.
Many at the rallies are individuals who work with the poor.
Sylvia Ray, 72, works for a small social services agency in Fayetteville that helps people find jobs. A $50,000 program for displaced homemakers was recently cut.
“That’s just one small example of what’s happening everywhere,” she said. “This state is hurting the people who are struggling for every penny.”
Other states in the South have been advancing equally conservative social and fiscal agendas, but in North Carolina, long considered one of the least conservative Southern states, the shift right has seemed sudden, stark and well-executed.
“I want the American people to watch the conservative playbook unfold in North Carolina,” Representative G. K. Butterfield, a Democrat in Congress who represents one of the poorest districts in the country, said Monday to the crowd. “It’s meanspirited, and it’s wrong.”
The powerful Republican revolution in North Carolina began in earnest in 2010, when for the first time in more than 100 years Republicans took control of both the House and the Senate. Helped by a round of redistricting, the Republicans increased their majority in 2012 and put Pat McCrory, the former mayor of Charlotte, in the governor’s office.
He began an agenda aimed at reducing spending and stimulating business that has been well received by many in the state.
Whether the protests are having much effect on the governor and legislators is difficult to discern. At first, they ignored Moral Mondays. But as the arrest totals crept over 300 and crowds topped a thousand, politicians began to respond.
Some pulled no punches. Thom Goolsby, a Republican and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, renamed the protests “Moron Mondays” in an opinion column and called the protesters “mostly white, angry, aged former hippies.”
Governor McCrory, who declined a request for an interview, told reporters last week that outsiders were stirring things up and that he would not meet with Moral Monday leaders. He called for an end to what he said were illegal assemblies.
Thom Tillis, the speaker of the House and a board member of the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization that proposes legislation based on limited government and individual liberty, was more measured.
Mr. Tillis, who is running for the United States Senate, suggested both sides find a way to talk.
“There are so many positive things we can do if we can lower the volume and sit down and talk and show some mutual respect,” he said.
But the protesters are realists.
“We don’t think this is going to change the legislature’s mind right now, but it highlights what’s at stake in the next election,” said Jedediah Purdy, 38, a law professor at Duke who was arrested Monday evening.
He said the battle mirrored the issues that divided the country in the 2012 presidential election. “The states are the new front line in politics,” he said.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/175160/sixty-four-arrested-moral-monday-abortion-access-protest-north-carolina
A woman is arrested as protesters rally during “Moral Monday” demonstrations at the General Assembly in Raleigh, North Carolina, Monday, July 8, 2013. (AP Photo/Gerry Broome)
For the past two months, activists in North Carolina have been protesting a bill that could limit abortion access, and more than 700 people have been arrested in the weekly “Moral Monday” protests against the state’s first Republican-led government in more than a century. This Monday, 2,000 people flooded the state capitol in Raleigh, and sixty-four protesters were arrested after refusing to leave the legislative chambers. Those arrested included Janet Colm, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Central North Carolina.
The bill passed last week by the State Senate required abortion clinics to conform to the same safety standards as ambulatory survey centers, a requirement currently met by only one of the state’s clinics. Opponents say this will limit access to safe abortions.
Moral Monday participants come from all backgrounds and walks of life.
Megan Katsaounis was born and raised in North Carolina, and while she’s always been highly critical of mainstream Democratic officials, she’s grown concerned watching “horrible bills” pass through the Republican-controlled Senate.
“Every week, there’s something new to be outraged about. They repealed the Racial Justice Act. We’re now the first state to be disqualified from receiving federal funds for the long-term unemployed. The list of grievances goes on and on,” she said.
Katsaounis wanted to participate in Moral Monday since she first heard about the protests, but as a mom, “childcare is always a hurdle.” Finally, when the infamous anti–Sharia Law omni-bill was being debated in the senate, Katsaounis got so angry she skipped work to go witness it.
Last week, North Carolina lawmakers voted to add a series of sweeping anti-abortion regulations to a measure to ban the “application of foreign law” in family courts, an “anti-Sharia Law” bill that many opponents say is a thinly veiled attempt at stoking anti-Muslim sentiment in the state.
“I think that was a rallying point for a lot of people,” Katsaounis said. “That night, my parents asked what I wanted for my birthday and I said, ‘I want you to babysit so I can go to Moral Monday.’”
“I wish I was in a position to be arrested. A lot of us are angry at the direction our state is going and we’re feeling very helpless right now. Being hauled away in handcuffs seems like a very tangible way of taking a stand, and I love how volunteers support the arrestees, providing meals for everyone upon release. It’s inspiring,” she added.
Amy McKee joined the protests for the first time on Monday.
“I’m very concerned about the laws that are being presented that limit women’s rights and access to birth control and abortion,” McKee said. “I have daughters. I’m really concerned about their future.”
The last time Rev. Frederick Battle was arrested was in 1962’s historic Woolworth’s department store sit-in in Greensboro, a pivotal moment in the US civil rights movement. He was among those arrested on Monday.
“What scares me about today is that I see similarities that we are going back to those days, back to the ’60’s,” Battle told WRAL.
Self-proclaimed “soccer mom” Christine Lang also joined the protests.
“When we start to restrict these rights, we’re going back hundreds of years in this country and it scares me for my daughter and myself, actually.”
Rev. William Barber II, head of the state branch of the NAACP, leads the Moral Monday protests.
“We see what we are doing here in North Carolina as a model for other Southern states,” Barber said. “History tells us you only win, particularly in the South, when you find a way to bring people together around common constitutional values and common moral values.”
GOP-controlled state legislatures have attempted to depict concerned citizens as unruly mobs in need of arrest and jailing. In Texas, Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst warned that protesters who caused a disruption in the gallery while lawmakers considered that state’s abortion bill would be removed and may face forty-eight hours in prison.
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
Observers in North Carolina say some of those handcuffed and charged with misdemeanours in recent weeks were simply exercising their First Amendment rights.
House Democratic Leader Larry Hall said last week that many were handcuffed for “petty citations” and shouldn’t have been sent to jail.
“I believe we have a great police force here,” said Rep. Hall, a lawyer from Durham. “Now, who do they work for? They work for whoever is in the majority in the House and the Senate, who are responsible for the messages sent to them from the top.”
Squashing democratic dissent is in keeping with lawmakers’ recent behavior. For example, the State Senate quickly voted on Tuesday night to pass a package of anti-abortion amendments attached to a bill that would ban Sharia law even though Republican Governor Pat McCrory had raised concerns that the Senate had unfairly rushed the amendments through.
“When the Democrats were in power, this is the way they did business,” McCrory said in a statement on House Bill 695. “It was not right then and it is not right now. Regardless of what party is in charge or what important issue is being discussed, the process must be appropriate and thorough.”
All of this raises the question: What’s the point of living in a democracy with a First Amendment if lawmakers are going to sneak legislation through in the middle of the night and have concerned citizens arrested when they try to object?
http://www.popularresistance.org/mega-moral-monday-over-150-arrests-in-nc/
RALEIGH, N.C. — A growing group of protesters converged on the state legislature Monday, in what some are calling “Mega Moral Monday,” to protest the agenda of the Republican-led General Assembly.
It was the fifth and largest demonstration planned by the state chapter of the NAACP and other civil rights groups to protest GOP policies on social programs, education, criminal justice and taxes.
Police estimated that roughly 1,000 people attended a rally late Monday afternoon behind the Legislative Building on Halifax Mall. Hundreds then entered the building. Activist groups estimated the crowd at about 1,600.
Upwards of 150 people were arrested outside the doors to the state Senate chambers, where demonstrators chanted, sang and delivered speeches decrying what they called a regressive agenda that neglects the poor. All of the protesters were released by 5 a.m. Tuesday.
The NAACP has been holding weekly protests in Raleigh since mid-April, and what started with 17 arrests and tens of supporters back then has grown every week, bringing the total number of arrests to nearly 300 after five weeks of protests.
“The people are awake now, and we have decided to stand up,” state NAACP chapter president Rev. William Barber told the crowd Monday. “We are a movement. This is not a moment.”
Groups ranging from abortion-rights supporters to environmentalists and public educators have joined the rallies, which have attracted people from Greensboro to Rocky Mount.
Protesters have been seeking to call attention to the rightward shift of the state legislature, which was dominated for decades by moderate Democrats.
Thus far, Republican lawmakers say those groups have a right to protest but are not swaying lawmakers.
“We are keeping our promises to voters, and that is what we are doing,” said state Sen. Thom Goolsby, a Republican from Wilmington. “The Democrats totally bankrupted our state and we were trying to fix it.”
Copyright 2013 by WRAL.com and the Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Video below by dukewf
More recent one
uzIbKQDPrcU
What concerns me from looking at a lot of these sites is that a lot of pro-Democrat groups are likely taking advantage of these events to try and cynically encourage a "lesser of two evils" approach by highlighting what the Republicans are doing. That being said I'm definitely keeping an eye out here as challenges to conservatives down here in the south is hard to come by at times.