The complete text of one of the most important speeches in American history, delivered by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln arrived at the battlefield near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to remember not only the grim bloodshed that had just occurred there, but also to remember the American ideals that were being put to the ultimate test by the Civil War. A rousing appeal to the nation’s better angels, The Gettysburg Address remains an inspiring vision of the United States as a country “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Thanks to a series of recent US Supreme Court decisions, corporations can now spend unlimited sums to influence elections, Super PACs and dark money groups are flourishing, and wealthy individuals and special interests increasingly dominate American politics. Despite the overwhelming support of Americans to fix this broken system, serious efforts at reform have languished. Campaign finance is a highly intricate and complex area of the law, and the current system favors the incumbent politicians who oversee it. This illuminating book takes these hard realities as a starting point and offers realistic solutions to reform campaign finance. With contributions from more than a dozen leading scholars of election law, it should be read by anyone interested in reclaiming the promise of American democracy.
Unless the economy is of the people and by the people it will never be for the people. This book is for people who want to know what a desirable alternative to capitalism might look like. It is for people who want more than rosy rhetoric and Pollyannaish descriptions of people working in harmony. It is for people want to dig into what economic justice and economic democracy mean. It is a book for optimists-who believe the human species must be capable of something better than succumbing to competition and greed or authoritarianism, and would like to know how we can do it. It is also a book for skeptics-who demand to be shown, explicitly and concretely, how a modern economy can dispense with markets and authoritarian planning, and how hundreds of millions of people can manage their own division of labor efficiently and equitably.
Originally published in 1980, state and local governments handle a lot of the systems that are used and we come into contact with on a daily basis. This text contains a wide range of essays that define the important questions in the field, critically evaluate where we are in answering them, and set the direction and terms of discourse for future work
This study is part of a research program undertaken by the Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales concerning the access to justice and legal needs of disadvantaged people in New South Wales. The specific aims were to investigate: (1) how law reform in New South Wales occurs; (2) what opportunities and constraints there are for public participation in law reform, directly and through representative bodies; (3) what particular constraints there are for the participation of disadvantaged people in law reform and; (4) the implications of these findings for law reform in New South Wales. Particular attention is paid throughout the report to the participation needs of disadvantaged people and civil society organisations (CSOs).
What vision for our political life does Christian faith affirm and how might its principles be applied to specific political issues? In speaking to these questions, this book defends a third alternative to the liberal and conservative ideals so influential in American public life, and in the process, criticizes the so-called Christian Political Right for misunderstanding what Christian faith means for politics. Christians worship the God of all-embracing love who wills that all people flourish here in this world through a beloved community. Because this God is ever-present in the deepest experience of all people, the true vision for our common life can be discerned and applied through politics by way of full and free discussion and debate. Democracy is, then, the political form of the beloved community, and justice means empowering all to achieve in ways that enhance human mutuality. This theological account is articulated in relation to diverse contemporary issues: abortion, same-sex marriage, affirmative action, campaign finance reform, economic inequality, and our nation's responsibilities within the wider world. The writings herein represent the author's engagement with Protestants for the Common Good, a Chicago-based organization that seeks to educate and mobilize Christians for democratic politics, and contains some of the official political statements of that organization. "Running through this book is a critical and endangered notion of the `common good.' Gamwell dares to propose that there is such a thing and that Christian faith' has a vision for the human community at odds with alternate visions in the culture.'It is a vision ofinclusivity that is contrary to the ideological divide that polarizes everything and erupts in culture wars. It is a vision that rests not on what divides us but the possibility of common ground on which we might actually stand together."---from the Foreword by John M. Buchanan Pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, Illiois
