Ben Manski is an attorney with Manski Law & Communications, LLC, and the editor of the Liberty Tree Journal. He is also a member of the Speak Out! speakers bureau: http://www.speakoutnow.org/
"In the 21st century countries that out educate us today will out-compete us tomorrow.” Thus spake President Obama in announcing that his administration would award a total of $4 billion to states demonstrating seriousness of commitment to education reform. Imagine that that tired mantra, some fifteen years after NAFTA and the outsourcing of the U.S. manufacturing, service, and information economies, is a proclamation still being rolled out as a constructive commentary on the state of education and pretext, in the name of reform, for ending its public character.
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Todd Alan Price is Associate Professor of Educational Foundations and Inquiry at National-Louis University in Chicago, Illinois. He teaches in Illinois and in Wisconsin. In 2009 he was the Wisconsin Green Party candidate for State Superintendent of Public Instruction. He is a Liberty Tree Associate.
Liberty Tree Fellow Ben Manski is a regular guest on, "The Week in Review," Wisconsin Public Radio's Friday morning weekly news debate show. Every week, policy-makers and politicos field questions from host Joy Cardin and her callers on a wide array of timely state, national and international topics.
Legal scholar and civil rights advocate Erwin Chemerinsky says there is. “There has to be a right to education in the Constitution,” he declares, “and equal protection is a Constitutional imperative.”
But according to Chemerinsky, this right has been fundamentally undermined by the Supreme Court. With the retirement of Justice David Souter, and the posible retirement in the next few years of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens, the role of the court in defending the right to education will be thrust into the national spotlight. What role might their replacements play in guaranteeing education to American children, and reversing the conservative momentum of the last three decades?
"Judicial Review" is not a term familiar to most Americans, but it should be. The concept is a profoundly important operational underpinning of the United States legal system. Anyone working to make this country a more peaceful, just, ecologically sustainable, and democratic place should be eager to examine this basic doctrine.
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David Cobb is a Liberty Tree Fellow and a member of the POCLAD Board.
Provisional ballots are not counted on election night, but must first go through a qualification process to determine whether or not the voter was eligible 1) to vote at all, and 2) to vote in all races on the ballot that was cast. . . . Observing this process can increase the chances that it is conducted fairly, in part by providing a deterrent to biased decision-making.
Michael H. Shuman is author of "The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition" and a keynote speaker at the Future Cities 2009 Conference this weekend in Madison. For more information on the conference, visit www.FutureCities2009.org.
October 16, 2009 will mark exactly 150 years since 21 brave revolutionaries launched an attempt to seize the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, and spark a slave uprising in the United States.
After 36 hours of hard fighting, most of the raiders were killed or captured. The raid failed – in the military and tactical sense. In the moral and strategic sense, it was ultimately a resounding success.
The raid and the subsequent execution of John Brown and six of his comrades deepened the split between the North and the South, a situation which led directly to the Civil War. Given this, it is important that we ponder the lessons of Harpers Ferry for today.
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Chris Mahin wrote this article for Rally Comrades!, the newspaper of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America.
"Bring the Guard Home - It's the Law!" is a national campaign, now active in more than 20 states, that is raising a legal challenge to the Federal Government's use of our National Guard troops for deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Wisconsin, the campaign is promoting AB 203, a bill in the Wisconsin state assembly which would give the Governor the authority to examine the legality of any federal order for deployment of the Wisconsin National Guard and to challenge in court any orders determined to be unlawful.
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Steve Burns, Outreach Director
Wisconsin Network for Peace and Justice
In places where we are not already protected, or where we have been shown to be vulnerable over the last eight years or before, legislation and amendments can be used to expand our existing rights and establish entirely new ones. All of our rights, new and old, should be properly protected by placing violations of them in the criminal code.
What Can an Election Integrity Activist Do On Election Night?
Bev Harris of Blackbox Voting has put out a brief educational video about what citizens who want to ensure election integrity can do. She tells you exactly what to look for and video on Election Night to protect the count. You can take some easy steps to minimize election machine voter fraud.
Your help is needed. Thousands of citizens can ensure a fair election if they get active and involved in working for election integrity.
Who actually does: the media, weapons companies, the permanent government, presidents (including simply by decreeing a "war on terror", through misspending, lying, simply acting, signing treaties), political parties, culture (the one Biden lives in, in which Israel's sovereign right to attack Iran is uncontroversial), soldiers who obey illegal orders and the culture that leads kids to that place.
Who should decide: we the people of the world, through democratically created and enforced international and national and state laws.
You don't have to wait any longer: The initial video is in from Who Decides About War?, the National Conference on War Powers, Law, and Democracy. This exciting conference took place on October 2nd and 3rd at the Georgetown School of Law, and featured over one hundred participants from 18 states.
Participants included veterans, military family members, journalists, lawyers, law students, professors, and other advocates of a more democratic, peaceful system of national defense.
Argentina www.linesofflight.net/work/rosario_pb_columbia.pdf
Learning Citizenship and Democracy Through Participatory Budgeting: The Case of Rosario, Argentina, by Josh Lerner and Daniel Schugurensky. Analysis of the pedagogical dimension and educational effects of participatory budgeting.
Australia
Active Democracy: Citizen Participation in Decision Making www.activedemocracy.net
Description: Run by Lyn Carson at University of Sydney, this is an interesting collection of mostly Australian case studies and links.
Description: A nonprofit organization that develops tools and provides consulting on achieving greater citizen input into public decision making.
Chicago Area Participatory Economics Society
www.chicagoparecon.org
Description: The Chicago organization dedicated to public education on democratic economic models. Based on "parecon" or participatory economics.
Inter Press Service News Agency -- The Word From the Street: City Voices http://ipsnews.net/new_focus/cityvoices/index.aspDescription: Stories from around the world about local struggles against neoliberalism.
The International Budget Project http://www.internationalbudget.org/
Newsletter with lots of updates on participatory budgeting and other participatory democracy programs.
February 8, 2006: Council Ordered To Address Iraq Issue
Description: A judge orders city council of Watertown, Wisconsin to decide whether it will vote on a resolution to withdraw US troops from Iraq or let it proceed to referendum. The judge found it a legislative matter and proper for the council to consider. Advisory referenda are proper subjects for direct legislation.
