MAL Contends . . .: Happy Memorial Day

May 27, 2013

Happy Memorial Day

A talk by Robert F. Kennedy given on April 5, 1968 at the City Club of Cleveland, the day after the assassination of King. Remember the fallen.

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Golden Sands Dairy LLC v. Town of Saratoga case before Wisconsin Suprme Court

In the Golden Sands Dairy LLC v. Town of Saratoga case, the Wisconsin Supreme Court will decide whether some 1.7 million Wisconsin citizen, some 30 percent of the state living in towns, can act locally to protect local conditions, property values, families, drinking water quality, and local character.

The Golden Sands factory farm is seeking a new and novel interpretation of the property rights doctrine to render a town's capacity to protect itself virtually non-existant. [For legal updates on the case before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, enter 15ap1258 in the Appeal Number field.]

Case was argued Jan 11, 2018, and is awaiting decision.

Federal Voting Rights Court Cases

- Gill v. Whitford, (District Court (Case 3:15-cv-00421)) (2015 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 155022 (W.D. Wis., Nov. 17, 2015)), is a federal case challenging the constitutionality of Wisconsin's Republican-drawn legislative-redistricting scheme
- One Wisconsin Institute v. Thomsen (U.S. District Court of the Western District of Wisconsin (Case 15-cv-324))
- Frank v. Walker
- Since 2011 Wisconsin Republicans have made some 34 changes to Wisconsin election law to keep Republicans in political power (Katelyn Ferral, The Capital Times)

Social Security and Medicare Targeted by Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping Colleagues

"I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and 'shareholder value' the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one. If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté. They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be 'forced' to make 'hard choices' - and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked."

- Mike Lofgren, who retired on June 17, 2011 after 28 years as a Republican Congressional staffer. TruthOut, Saturday September 3, 2011

Trump's ongoing message to white supremacists: White is right; black and brown are wrong.

Trump's dog whistles to racists including white municipal police continue. From August 2016 in West Bend, Wisconsin, as reported by Yamiche Alcindor in the New York Times:

Jack Beck, 65, a retired bricklayer who lives in West Bend, said he planned to vote for Mr. Trump.

"Every night in Milwaukee, there is someone being shot, and they make nothing of that until a cop is involved, and then all of a sudden it’s always blamed on the cop," said Mr. Beck, who added that he hoped West Bend’s black population would not increase. He tied much of the unrest in Milwaukee to his belief that black residents do not want to work hard and instead want to use police killings to get handouts from the government.
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"You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe."
— Ralph McGill
Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 13, 1958
A Church, A School

Class-action, civil rights suit against Milwaukee

Collins, et al v. City of Milwaukee, et al

"For almost a decade, the Milwaukee Police Department has pursued an aggressive and unconstitutional policing strategy promoting large numbers of stops and frisks citywide. Between 2007 and 2015, the department almost tripled their traffic and pedestrian stops, from around 66,000 to around 196,000, following the launch of the program in 2008."

Milwaukee residents have long protested that police officers are conducting stops and frisks of innocent people, and particularly treating people of color as suspects for no good reason, stopping innocent men, women, and children as they try to go about their daily lives. The department conducts far more stops and frisks in the parts of Milwaukee that are predominantly Black or Latino than in other areas."
- From the ACLU

Reward - $10,000 for info leading to the arrest and conviction in 1994 killing of Sarah Gonstead

Scott Walker—Frontman for Rightwingers

RNC Chair Reince Priebus on the Koch brothers and radical righwingers rallying behind Scott Walker in 2007:

"The simplest way I can tell you is we had total and complete unity between the state party, quite frankly, Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party groups, the Grandsons of Liberty. The [Glenn Beck-instigated] 9/12ers were involved. It was a total and complete agreement that nobody cared who got the credit, that everyone was going to run down the tracks together..." ...

Koch-backed group’s Wisconsin efforts, [propelling Walker's] victory 'started back in 2007' on the shores of Lake Michigan.
- Eidelson, Salon

Bertrand Russell

"Those whose lives are fruitful to themselves, to their friends, or to the world are inspired by hope and sustained by joy: they see in imagination the things that might be and the way in which they are to be brought into existence. In their private relations they are not pre-occupied with anxiety lest they should lose such affection and respect as they receive: they are engaged in giving affection and respect freely, and the reward comes of itself without their seeking. In their work they are not haunted by jealousy of competitors, but concerned with the actual matter that has to be done. In politics, they do not spend time and passion defending unjust privileges of their class or nation, but they aim at making the world as a whole happier, less cruel, less full of conflict between rival creeds, and more full of human beings whose growth has not been dwarfed and stunted by oppression."

- Bertrand Russell
Proposed Roads To Freedom
(1918, Cornwall Press, Inc, Cornwall NY)

May 27, 2013

Happy Memorial Day

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