PHOTO/MATTHEW LENARD
ATLANTA— We are all aware that throughout the country the corporations and the wealthy have taken over government and continue to enact a program that serves their interests at the expense of the majority, who are being pushed more and more into joblessness and poverty. Nowhere is this more the case than in the South. Now, the people of North Carolina are rising up and challenging this mean-spirited agenda.
For the first time in more than 100 years Republicans have gained a majority in both houses of the state legislature, and in 2012 they increased their majority and added a Republican governor. They have been pursuing an agenda of a tax plan that would cut income taxes on the rich and the corporations and drastically increase the sales tax, cut unemployment benefits, expand school vouchers for private schools, refuse Medicaid expansion and pass a package of voting changes that would restrict the votes of minorities and the poor.
A broad coalition of representatives of the poor, civil rights leaders, ministers, educators and union members are standing up to resist what they see as a moral atrocity. “These people have lost their constitutional minds and their moral minds,” says NAACP president Rev. William Barber. For the past 6 weeks a series of “Moral Monday” demonstrations have been conducted, when crowds of up to a thousand file onto the floor of the state legislature and remain until they are arrested. Over 800 have been arrested so far, and the number continues to grow. Says Rev. Barber, “If you are going to change the nation you have to change the South, and if you are going to change the South, you are going to have to focus on these legislatures.”
“The states are the new front line in politics,” says professor Jedediah Purdy. The fight to turn around the political trends in this country that are designed to strengthen the hold that the corporations and the wealthy have over our lives, and to maintain control over a growing restive mass of those who are being excluded and left out of the main stream of society, proceeds on many fronts. North Carolina is one of those fronts, and all of us can take inspiration from their courageous action. It gives us hope that if we can stay the course we can win not only the battles but the war.
