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“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.”
–Frederick Douglass, July 4, 1852.
This morning’s New York Times story on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape investigation declared that the case was collapsing due to “major holes in the credibility of the housekeeper who charged that he attacked her.” That article, however, contained no allegations that the complainant had lied about the attack itself. Instead, the paper claimed that prosecutors had found inconsistencies in her asylum application and evidence that she had engaged in (and attempted to cover up) shady financial dealings prior to the incident. In the wake of the publication of the Times piece, many — myself included — have argued that such alleged misrepresentations had no bearing on the question of whether she had given an accurate account of her encounter with Strauss-Kahn.
Now, however, in a letter to DSK’s lawyers, the District Attorney’s office contends that the accuser lied to them about the immediate aftermath of the incident itself.
In conversations with detectives and prosecutors, they say, as well as in her grand jury testimony, DSK’s accuser repeatedly declared that she fled to a nearby hallway after leaving his suite (Suite 2806), remaining there until she encountered her supervisor, to whom she reported the assault. “The complainant has since admitted,” the DA’s office says, “that this account was false and that after the incident in Suite 2806, she proceeded to clean a nearby room and then returned to Suite 2806 and began to clean that suite before she reported the incident.”
Such misrepresentations do not themselves prove that DSK’s accuser was not attacked. As I’ve noted before, a woman who has been “raped in circumstances in which her judgment may be called into question … can expect to be disbelieved, shamed, and attacked, and that expectation may lead a rape survivor to alter her story to make it more palatable to police, or to a jury, or even to her friends and family.”
That said, though, this latest allegation is of a very different character than those the paper reported earlier. The Times bungled the story, and in doing so seriously misrepresented the state of the case.
Throughout the student movement of the 1960s, most American college students were denied the right to vote.
From the birth of the American republic the voting age had stood at 21. Pressure for earlier voting had been building since 18-year-olds were first drafted in the Second World War, but despite the baby boom, the student movements of the sixties, and the deaths of thousands of Americans under 21 in Korea and Vietnam, reform went nowhere for decades. It was only in May 1970, after National Guard troops shot and killed four students during a protest at Kent State University, that Congress finally took action.
In the aftermath of Kent State, with the nation reeling from the spectacle of its own troops gunning down its own students, the 18-year-old vote was introduced as an amendment to the Voting Rights Act. One senator threatened to filibuster the renewal of the Act if that amendment was not incorporated into it.
The Voting Rights Act, as amended, was signed into law by President Nixon that June. The Supreme Court declared the provision unconstitutional that winter, ruling that Congress didn’t have the power to enfranchise youth in state and local elections, but the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress the following spring and ratified by the states in record time, gave 18-to-20-year-olds the vote for good.
That ratification came forty years ago today.
With the lowering of the voting age, college students became a significant voting bloc in American politics. In the 1970s, for the first time, students could exercise political power not just in the streets, but in the voting booth as well.
A new kind of student politics demanded a new kind of organizing, and so 1971 also saw the creation of the National Student Lobby, America’s first national student-funded, student-directed lobbying organization. State Student Associations (SSAs) and state student lobbies soon followed, making the 1970s an unprecedented boom-time for student electoral organizing.
The SSAs of the 1970s transformed American politics and higher education forever, altering the balance of power between students and educational institutions while giving students a voice in state and national politics that reached far beyond the campus.
Happy birthday, youth voting!
Students at the University of California and the California State University are already facing tuition increases for the fall semester. But new state budget cuts passed this week could mean an additional mid-year hike — and that’s if everything goes according to plan with the budget from here on out.
Tuition has more than tripled in California in the last decade, and fees are slated to rise another 8% at CSU and 10% at UC in the fall semester. State legislators just cut an additional $150 million each from UC and CSU, compounding a combined cut of $1 billion planned this spring. In total, the reductions amount to a more than 20% cut from just least year.
The just-passed budget assumes new revenues of $4 billion for the state which have not yet been approved. If those funds fail to materialize, UC and CSU stand to lose another $100 million each.
Yesterday the Supreme Court struck down a California law banning the sale of certain video games to children without their parents’ consent, and Justice Clarence Thomas disagreed. In a long and history-heavy dissent, he argued that minors properly have no First Amendment rights to read or view anything that their parents have not consented to let them access.
Strikingly, though, his dissent went even further, arguing that in early America — and thus, by his reading of the constitution, still today — “parents had a right to the child’s labor and services until the child reached majority,” and in fact to “complete authority” over their kids. That authority, he argues, remains in effect until the child reaches his or her 18th birthday.
Oh, and he also finds room to express doubt that video games are “speech” at all.
It’s worth noting that although three other justices disagreed with either the majority’s finding (Breyer) or its reasoning (Alito and Roberts), none co-signed Thomas’s wacky reading of the First Amendment.
studentactivism.net 
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