North Carolina’s Voter ID Law Could Block 218,000 Registered Voters From the Polls →

Ethelene Douglas, an 85-year-old African-American woman who grew up in the segregated South and first registered to vote in 1964, was one of them. Her struggle to obtain the necessary ID vividly illustrates the problems with the law.
In September 2012, Douglas’s niece, Clara Quick, took her to the DMV in Laurinburg, North Carolina, to get a state photo ID. Douglas was told she needed a copy of her birth certificate to get an ID. So they traveled across the state line to Dillon, South Carolina, where Douglas was born, to find her birth certificate. But the government office there said she needed a photo ID to get a birth certificate, and Douglas was caught in a seemingly unresolvable catch-22. (This account comes from an affidavit Quick filed in federal court.)
Her niece called the South Carolina’s Vital Records office, paid $17 for an expedited birth certificate, but still couldn’t get one. Instead, she was told to find her aunt’s marriage certificate, which was in Bennettsville, South Carolina. After getting that, they made a second trip to the North Carolina DMV, but were once again told Douglas couldn’t get a photo ID because she didn’t have a birth certificate.
They were so frustrated that they gave up trying for a time. In the fall of 2013, after North Carolina passed the voter ID law, they made a third trip to the DMV. An employee told Quick to get a census report to confirm her aunt’s identify, which she purchased for $69. Quick brought her aunt’s census report, marriage certificate, Social Security card, and utility bill during a fourth trip to the DMV in September 2014 and was finally able to get her the photo ID needed to vote.
It took two years, four trips to the DMV, two trips to South Carolina, and $86 in government documents for an 85-year-old woman to continue to vote. Quick called it “an absolute nightmare. There are other voters out there that do not have the money, time, access to transportation, and family assistance to obtain a NCDMV photo ID. It should not be this difficult to obtain an ID for voting.”

Revealed: the 30-year economic betrayal dragging down Generation Y’s income →

A combination of debt, joblessness, globalisation, demographics and rising house prices is depressing the incomes and prospects of millions of young people across the developed world, resulting in unprecedented inequality between generations.
A Guardian investigation into the prospects of millennials – those born between 1980 and the mid-90s, and often otherwise known as Generation Y – has found they are increasingly being cut out of the wealth generated in western societies.
Where 30 years ago young adults used to earn more than national averages, now in many countries they have slumped to earning as much as 20% below their average compatriot. Pensioners by comparison have seen income soar.
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In two of these countries – the US and Italy – disposable incomes for millennials are scarcely higher in real terms than they were 30 years ago, while the rest of the population has experienced handsome gains.

It is likely to be the first time in industrialised history, save for periods of war or natural disaster, that the incomes of young adults have fallen so far when compared with the rest of society.

More Workers and Less Work →

Every bit of this graph is quite troubling. The US greatly lags in workers during prime working years and fails to retire many of its old people, who are forced instead to work until death.
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If the US had Finnish employment rates, it would have 4.4 million additional workers (3.1% more workers). If it had Norwegian employment rates, it would have 17.8 million additional workers (12.4% more workers). There are multiple reasons why the US trails the Nordic countries by so much, but probably chief among them is that its lack of leave and child care benefits keeps many women out of the labor force.

Raúl Castro, Obama spar on human rights, Guantanamo, views of U.S. and Cuba →

Historic moment.

In an extraordinary news conference Monday afternoon, President Obama and Cuban President Raúl Castro sparred over human rights, the Guantanamo prison and their views of their own countries and the world, even as both hailed Obama’s historic visit here as a new step in normalizing relations.

Exporting Jihad →

Democracy didn’t turn Tunisian youths into jihadis, but it gave them the freedom to act on their unhappiness. By raising and then frustrating expectations, the revolution created conditions for radicalization to thrive. New liberties clashed with the old habits of a police state—young Tunisians were suddenly permitted to join civic and political groups, but the cops harassed them for expressing dissent. Educated Tunisians are twice as likely to be unemployed as uneducated ones, because the economy creates so few professional jobs. A third of recent college graduates can’t find work. Frustration led young people to take to the streets in 2011; a similar desperate impulse is now driving other young people toward jihad. “You have a lot of people who have aspirations and can’t meet them,” Monica Marks, an American doctoral candidate who studies Islamist movements in the Middle East, said.
Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have championed democracy as the best way to stop the Arab world’s destructive oscillation between secular dictatorship and Islamist radicalism. Tom Malinowski, the Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, said, “One of our articles of faith here—backed up by evidence, I hope—is that open societies are a bulwark against extremism, and that repression tends to make our task in fighting this menace harder.” There are almost no test cases in the Arab world other than Tunisia, and, at the very least, Tunisia complicates the idea. The country is not so much a model to be emulated as a problem to be solved.

Nixon official: real reason for the drug war was to criminalize black people and hippies →

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. "You want to know what this was really all about?" he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

How ‘ghost corporations’ are funding the 2016 election →

Two days before Christmas, a trust called DE First Holdings was quietly formed in Delaware, where corporations are required to reveal little about their workings. A day later, the entity dropped $1 million into a super PAC with ties to Jersey City, N.J., Mayor Steven Fulop, a Democrat considering a gubernatorial bid.
The trust, whose owner remains unknown, is part of a growing cadre of mystery outfits financing big-money super PACs. Many were formed just days or weeks before making six- or ­seven-figure contributions — an arrangement that election law experts say violates a long-standing federal ban on straw donors.
But the individuals behind the “ghost corporations” appear to face little risk of reprisal from a deeply polarized Federal Election Commission, which recently deadlocked on whether to even investigate such cases.

Why the Poor Get Trapped in Depressed Areas →

In modern America, it’s expensive to be poor. If you have a car, it’s old and habitually breaks down. Often, there aren’t banking services in your area and you must live with high-cost alternatives. And in white working-class towns decimated by years of outsourcing, the jobs available don’t provide the kind of wages to break the cycle of poverty.

That’s not to say the situation of the American poor hasn’t preoccupied policy-makers and the pundit class. Recently, there’s been a bipartisan grumbling among elite wonks that the poor should just rent a U-Haul and leave their depressed communities if they want a better life. (Their dismissive attitude is presumably because America is extremely economically segregated; rich and poor hardly need to associate with one another.)...

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While moving to where jobs are more plentiful would be a good strategy for those in high-unemployment areas, we know that the Americans have less mobility—economic and geographic—than they did in previous decades. Geographic migration data from the U.S. Census Bureau finds that the percentage of Americans who move to a different state or a different county within the same state has plummeted by nearly half since the 1980s. As Justin Fox points out at Bloomberg, it’s even worse for white Americans with no college education, a rough approximate of the working-class whites derided for their supposed lack of initiative. Poorer Americans are now more likely to stay put. To put it simply, they don’t have enough money to move.