“Voter ID laws disadvantaging older persons place a burden on the voting rights of those most likely to participate in the electoral process,” said Daniel Kohrman, a senior attorney with the AARP Foundation Litigation office in Washington, D.C. That’s because older citizens vote at greater percentages than younger people. A total of 33 states have laws requesting or requiring voters to show some form of identification at the polls this year. (West Virginia's new law goes into effect in 2018). 

The Festival takes place at a critical and turbulent time in modern American history. In a society increasingly marked by division and conflict, due initially to the struggle for Civil Rights and then to the slowly gathering campaign to stop the War, the US Administration is keen to ensure that alternative voices to the those on the radical Left can be heard. For although Lyndon Johnson, from taking office in 1963, has been  a reforming president, introducing large-scale social programs to alleviate poverty, end racial discrimination and improve educational opportunity, he is in danger, as a result of his military interventions in Vietnam.

Fifty years ago, on August 10, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed what is known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. It is a day that should live in infamy. On that day, the President gave himself the power “to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed forces,” to fight the spread of communism in Southeast Asia and assist our ally in South Vietnam “in defense of its freedom.” Or as former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put it decades later, it gave “complete authority to the president to take the nation to war.”

In the decade before he won the White House, Kennedy said almost nothing about civil rights. In 1957, as a senator he voted against the 1957 civil rights bill. His opposition has been spun two ways; one cynical, one charitable. The cynical spin is he opposed it to appease Southern Democrats because he had an eye on a presidential run in 1960. The charitable spin is that he thought the bill was too weak and ineffectual. Three years later though he ignored the angry shouts from Southern Democrats and lobbied for a forceful civil rights plank in the Democratic Party's 1960 platform.

The GOP’s hoped-for trump card to stave that off as long as possible is the Supreme Court. The conservatives on the court read the election tea leaves and three days after President Obama’s re-election announced that they would take up a challenge to the Act. They dropped strong hints that they may well vote to gut the Act. Justice Anthony Kennedy said he was troubled by the provisions. Chief Justice John Roberts bluntly said that things have changed in the South and that blacks supposedly vote everywhere in the South without any barriers or prohibitions. 

One report on an AP survey shows that the poor are not only getting poorer, they are also more numerous than any time in the last half-century. The other report from the Tax Justice Network finds that the super-rich are not only getting richer, they are also squirreling tens of trillions in offshore tax havens, far outside the reaches of the U.S. and other nation’s tax collectors. Wealthy Americans are amply represented among the offshore tax evaders. This money could bankroll business startups, expand businesses, fatten federal and state tax revenues, and create thousands of new jobs.