Public buildings need public workers



To the Madison City Council:

White supremacy is alive and well in Madison, Wisconsin, but you just don't get it.

    Remember when those rich guys from the auto plants flew to Washington in private jets with their hands out for public money. It was too late but they promised to come to the next meeting in gas upped Pintos and collapsible Corvairs.  But the public kept saying they just don't get it. Then there were rumors of luxurious private parties and lavish Vegas gambling jaunts. Once again, the public said, they just don't get it.
    Well, it looks like you sitting there in your, made in china chairs, and  just don't get it. When you drive around town, who do you see working. When you drive past a street?  did you notice not one black man is on that crew? When you walk though a road construction site paid for with tax incremental financing of federal dollars, who do you see working? You do not see a black man working.  When you see a building construction paid for by federal tax dollars  at one of ten sites on campus, who do you see working? When you see a private company using tax dollars to buy land and build buildings, you don't see a black man working on the project or in the building working after its completed.

Update: Montana GOP drops registration challenges
via mal contends - Today's NYT has a piece by Ian Urbina with the not reassuring news that Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen has plenty of company in using the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) to try to suppress voters.

On Monday, the Ohio Republican Party filed a motion in federal court against the secretary of state to get the list of all names that have been flagged by the Social Security database since Jan. 1. The motion seeks to require that any voter who does not clear up a discrepancy be required to vote using a provisional ballot.

The attempted voter suppression by the Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen is interesting in that those encouraging voter participation in our democracy are on one side, and those with a sordid history of voter suppression are lining up on the other side of this case.

On the encouraging-voter-participation side we see the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, the Democratic Party, teachers, unions, and civil rights groups including the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, The Brennan Center for Justice, the Campaign Legal Center, and Fair Elections Wisconsin.

On the other side: McCain's co-chair and the Republican Party.

I guess today's GOP is a traditional values party; the problem is that the values being promoted are the southern strategy, and naked voter obstruction ridiculing civil rights.

It has brought to our attention that "(s)enior Justice Department officials told civil-rights organizations they plan to deploy hundreds of poll monitors in November to prevent voting-rights violations and deter fraud (Perez, Wall Street Journal, September 9. 2008).

In light of the Wisconsin DOJ/GOP's efforts at voter suppression (that now looks to fail) and the McCain Campaign project sending misleading absentee ballots to voters, the presence of U.S. DOJ officials at polling places has civil rights groups nervous, though it's not confirmed that the DOJ officials will be in Wisconsin at this point.

As Evan Perez writes in the Wall Street Journal:

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