Tag: Advocate

Steady advisor and advocate Shaquille O’Neal joins Morning Joe to talk about the app and its importance in the gig economy. » Subscribe to MSNBC: http://on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc MSNBC delivers breaking news, in-depth analysis of politics headlines, as well as commentary and…

A political reform advocacy group says it has grave concerns about the amount of big money in Illinois elections. Alisa Kaplan, policy director for Reform For Illinois, said Illinois’ gubernatorial candidates have raised $284.5 million. [Bruce] Rauner and J.B. Pritzker,” Kaplan said. Rauner has raised more than $79.4 million, also largely self-financed. It’s not just the candidates who are putting up big money, Kaplan said, it’s also mega donors shelling out tens of millions to political action committees and candidates. “People will start to feel disaffected and withdraw from the process because they’ll feel that if they're not wealthy, if they’re not particularly well connected politically, they just won’t have a voice in the process so why bother getting involved,” Kaplan said. “We worry about this system where it’s very top down and much of both of the Democratic and Republican parties might feel they might have to march in lockstep with the main funders,” Kaplan said. Kaplan said one number to analyze after the election is how much each candidate spent for each vote. In the March primary, Pritzker took the top Democratic spot with $119 per vote. Rauner’s primary win cost $102 per vote.

California’s Latino community has lost its greatest voting rights gladiator. Today, many of us in politics or those sitting as judges owe a tremendous debt to Joaquin Avila’s lifetime of trailblazing advocacy. He successfully won landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases challenging discriminatory electoral systems that diluted minority political power throughout California and the Southwest. He joined the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF) in 1974. His leadership quickly led him to MALDEF’s top position as president and general counsel in 1982. Three Latino plaintiffs and Avila claimed that the at-large elections system was unconstitutional and violated the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965. District elections, on the other hand, would divide Watsonville into geographic districts in which each would vote for its own representative. It stated that Latinos in California had been subjects of “ubiquitous historical and current racial discrimination.” Avila would use the Watsonville case to successfully challenge other electoral systems and redistricting plans, including the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in the early 1990s. But what is probably Avila’s most transformative work was designing the California Voting Rights Act of 2001, authored by then-state Sen. Richard Polanco. That law now has resulted in nearly 300 cities, school boards and other local governments switching to district elections, most without litigation, to allow more Latinos and other people of color to have more equitable representation.

In the aftermath of another school campus mass murder by a deranged individual, there were a myriad of reactions as people tried to come to grips with why this continues to happen. One reaction I don’t understand is why clergy are not calling for more religion instead of more gun control. Many who do not understand the first thing about guns or gun ownership think the only way to resolve this is to limit the ownership of long guns, which they like to characterize as “assault weapons.” This is despite the fact that long guns are a small percentage of guns used in murders. It is thus not an issue of people owning guns; it is the people. A study by the government determined there was no benefit from the banning of certain long guns. A Rabbi from my own synagogue wrote to our congregation in the aftermath of the mass murder in Parkland. Just about every religious denomination is guilty. There was a myriad of religious leaders after Las Vegas and Parkland calling for gun control and never mentioned the lack of religion in the killer’s life. If the clergy cannot use these times to advocate for greater observance, then when would they and who would? The reason may be that the leaders of the church spend far too much time advocating for social issues instead of saving souls.