The growing civil disobedience protests at the NC General Assembly [View all]

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http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2013/05/15/when-average-people-feel-they-have-no-other-choice/



When average people feel they have no other choice
Published on May 15th, 2013
Written by: Rob Schofield

The growing civil disobedience protests at the General Assembly

These are strange and difficult times in North Carolina. Despite its fast-growing, outward-looking, ever-more-diverse and globally-connected population, the state has taken a hard and destructive political turn backward and to the right. Thanks in large measure to a combination of the Great Recession, the largely uninspired performance it provoked in then-Governor Bev Perdue and the mid-term electoral meltdown it spurred for Democrats in 2010, an increasingly modern and progressive state has been transformed almost overnight into a Tea Party lab experiment run amok.

Ideas that would have been dismissed as literally crazy and hopelessly reactionary a few years ago — even by right-of-center, upper middle-income suburbanites – are now rushed through legislative committees like fast food orders. The list grows almost daily:

-Innocent low-income children: Punished,
-Fat cat millionaires: Lifted still higher,
-Decent and affordable health care for the uninsured: Denied,
-Health care providers: Threatened with prison for counseling and serving women in need,
-Control of our public schools: Taken from experts and handed over to religious frauds and corporate profiteers,
-Voting: Rigged to favor the powers that be and made more difficult for the poor and disabled,
-Modest environmental standards: Repealed,
-Worker rights: Eviscerated,
-Predatory consumer practices: Expanded and encouraged,
-The unemployment insurance system: Gutted,
-Science: Ignored,
-Utterly loony conspiracy theories: Accepted as the basis of public law, and
-The scourge of dangerous weapons: Encouraged to metastasize.

On Monday of this week, the conservative majority of a House Committee rebuked the state Homebuilders Association (a group that has long fought tooth and nail with state regulators to resist virtually every environmental protection initiative one can imagine) for being too supportive of energy efficiency regulations. The Committee voted to repeal a law the Association had long ago agreed to and which it defended in the meeting!

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