Portside

The South, where 55 percent of America's black population lives, is increasingly looking like a different country. Fewer children can read; more adults have HIV; its residents suffer from the shortest life expectancies of any in the United States. Six of the eleven states that made up the former Confederacy are at the bottom. That deprivation tends to be concentrated in the parts of these states with disproportionately large African American populations.(long article)

The worst states are all in the Old South.

Reader Comments- Undocumented Student Leaders and Mississippi Freedom Summer; Scott Walker's Scandals; Protect Voting Rights; U S Created Child Migrant Crisis; Egypt Jails Al Jazeera Staff; Precariat and Global Erosion of Job Security; Freedom Summer Legacies; Gabriel Kolko; Doonesbury on Climate Change; Correction to earlier posting Cecily McMillan to be Released next week; Memorial Concert for Pete and Toshi Seeger-July 20; MEDICC's Educational Exchange to Havana

NSA vs USA. George Takei: How It Got Better. Professor Louie: The Cockroach. Orange Is The New Black: Monsanto. Moral Mondays Are Back in Business.

50 years after the murder of my brother, Andrew Goodman, voter rights still threatened.

Hamer’s inclusion of sterilization in a hearing primarily organized to ensure the protection of Mississippi Freedom Summer volunteers and lay the groundwork for the 1965 Voting Rights Act highlighted how both the right to vote and reproductive freedom were necessary for justice for Black women in Mississippi.

The same day weekly mass protests began again at the North Carolina legislature, civil rights groups filed a legal motion to block a restrictive new voting law from being enforced for this year's election.

The way most of us “participate in electing our political leaders” is by voting. A tiny minority also “participates” by contributing more than $123,200 to federal political campaigns. In 2012, just 591 donors reached that limit on giving to federal candidates. For some perspective, that represents a little more than 0.000002 percent of the U.S. voting age population.

The vast middle class and poor don't have enough purchasing power, as 95 percent of the economy's gains go to the top 1 percent. Some wealthy people and big corporations have a strangle-hold on our politics. "McCutcheon" makes that strangle-hold even tighter. Connect the dots and you see how the big-money takeover of our democracy has lead to an economy that's barely functioning for most Americans.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states and local governments with a history of discrimination no longer needed to submit new voting laws for federal approval. Now, voting rights advocates are trying to put them back under oversight using the courts and Congress.