Monday, February 10, 2014

Hey, Media, What's Going On in North Carolina?


Moral Mondays Protest in North Carolina getting pretty big...

The mainstream media, notwithstanding Sarah Palin's cruel hits, does often do a crappy job of covering important stories. At some point someone's going to have to cover North Carolina, where Moral Mondays have built and built. How lazy can our press be, that they miss 80,000 to 100,000 people in the streets of Raleigh, N.C.?

Dahlia Lithwick does a good job of explaining it in Slate, so I won't:
If you haven’t heard of “Moral Mondays” or North Carolina NAACP President Rev. William Barber II or the amazing HKonJ coalition, which stands for Historic Thousands on Jones Street, well, check it out: For the past eight years, a diverse group of North Carolinians under the HKonJ umbrella have been protesting state government policies at monthly rallies. Then last spring Moral Mondays became a thing. When the GOP won both the state House and Senate and then elected Republican Pat McCrory as governor in 2012, the party gained complete control of state government for the first time in more than 100 years. GOP-controlled redistricting and a truly nasty voter suppression bill attempt to ensure that this remains the permanent state of affairs in North Carolina. The legislature promptly raised taxes on the bottom 80 percent, eliminated the earned-income tax credit for 900,000 people, slashed education spending, passed radical gun legislation, declined the Medicaid expansion (leaving 500,000 of its poorest citizens without health insurance), and passed a draconian abortion bill that was tacked onto a motorcycle safety law. The state, in short, turned on its own workers, its own minorities, its own teachers, its own doctors, its poor, its women, and its prisoners, with what has looked like unbridled glee. As Deborah Gerhardt explained recently in Slate, the effect of the school cuts on the state’s teachers has been nothing short of devastating.
Read the article and read the links. At some point, this affront to democracy will break into the national press. When it does, let's hope the media gets it right.

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