The lynching and disbarring of civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart, who because she has terminal cancer was recently released from prison after serving four years of a 10-year sentence, is a window into the collapse of the American legal system. Stewart-who has stood up to state power for more than three decades in order to give a voice to those whom authorities seek to crush, who has spent her life defending the poor and the marginalized, who wept in court when one of her clients was barred from presenting a credible defense-is everything a lawyer should be in an open society. But we no longer live in an open society. The persecution of Stewart is the persecution of us all.

Stewart, 74, is living with her husband in her son's house in New York City after being released from a Texas prison a month ago. Because she is disbarred she cannot perform any legal work. "Can't even work in a law office," she said softly last week when I interviewed her at the Brooklyn home. "I miss it so terribly. I liked it. I liked the work."

Her career as one of the country's most renowned civil rights lawyers coincided with the fall of our legal system. She said that when she started practicing law in the 1970s it was a "golden era" in which a series of legal decisions-including rulings affecting police lineups and what information and evidence the government had to turn over to defendants on trial-created a chance for a fair defense. But these legal advances were reversed in a string of court decisions that, especially after 9/11, made the state omnipotent. As citizens were stripped of power, she said, "a death of the spirit of the bar" occurred. Lawyers gave up, she said. They no longer saw defending people accused of crime as "a calling, something that you did because you were answering a higher voice."

"I don't want to make anything a kind of religious thing, it wasn't that, but you know, you defended people because they were up against the mightiest organism in the universe: the government of United States, whether they were state or federal," she said Thursday evening as we sat with her husband, Ralph Poynter, at her son's dining room table.

Stewart, working with former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark and lawyer Abdeen Jabara in 1995, was the lead trial counsel for Omar Abdel Rahman, an Egyptian Muslim known as "the Blind Sheikh," who was convicted in October of that year for alleged involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. He received life in prison plus 65 years, a sentence Stewart called "outlandish." She said Abdel Rahman was put on trial not for any crimes he committed but because the Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak, as well as Washington, was frightened of his influence over the Egyptian masses. The United States, along with Egypt, wanted to "take him off the scene" and "get him put away where he would no longer exert the influence he had." The cleric, now 75 and in poor health, is imprisoned in the medical wing of the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina.

The court, through numerous rulings, refused to let Stewart mount her defense, ensuring that the government prosecutors would not be challenged. The proceedings were a tawdry show trial, a harbinger of the many judicial assaults against Muslims in the United States after the events of Sept. 11, 2001. I was based in Egypt at the time of the trial as the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I remember being stunned at the repeated mendacity of the government prosecutors, who blamed Abdel Rahman for terrorist attacks he had, in fact, publicly denounced. The prosecutors, for example, accused him of orchestrating the killing of 62 people in 1997 in Luxor, Egypt, although the sheikh at the time condemned the attack and had no connection with the Egyptian group that carried out the massacre. When the guilty verdict was read, Stewart burst into tears, "the only time I ever cried in the courtroom."

Stewart continued to visit the sheikh after the sentencing. Three years after the trial the government severely curtailed his ability to communicate with the outside world, even through his lawyers, under special administrative measures known as SAMs.

Abdel Rahman asked Stewart during a prison visit in 2000 to release a statement from him to the press concerning a negotiated cease-fire between the Egyptian government and militants. The Clinton administration did not prosecute Stewart for conveying the press release, although she was admonished and prohibited from seeing her client for several months. The Bush administration, however, in April 2002, with the country baying for blood after the attacks of 9/11, decided to prosecute her for the two-year-old press release. Stewart says she never expected to be charged for releasing the press statement.

Minutes before her arrest on April 9, 2002, her husband, who later would organize the successful fight to win her a compassionate release from prison after she diagnosed with breast cancer, was outside on the stoop of their house, which, she said, "in New York is where you go sit on the steps in the summertime when you can't afford to go to East Hampton." She heard him in a heated conversation.

"I go to the door and I hear him saying 'I don't see any badge, I don't see any warrant, what are you doing here, anyway?'" she said.

Assuming Ralph was being arrested, she told him to take it easy, she would have him home by lunchtime.

"I come around the door and the guy looks and says-and he was clearly a cop, you know, the cheap shoes-and he says, 'We're not here for you. We're here for her,' pointing to me," she said. "I was flabbergasted."

FBI agents took her from her home, and she was released later on a $500,000 bond signed by her three children.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft came to New York in April 2002 to announce that the Justice Department had indicted Stewart, along with a paralegal and an interpreter, on grounds of materially aiding a terrorist organization. Ashcroft that night went on "Late Show With David Letterman" to tell the nation of the indictment as part of the Bush administration's "war on terror."

In Stewart's trial the government again endlessly spewed myths about Islamic terrorism. It demanded a staggering 30-year sentence. U.S. District Judge John Koeltl instructed the jury more than 750 times that the photos of Osama bin Laden and the 2001 World Trade Center attacks shown to the jury by the government on a 10-by-12-foot screen were not relevant to the case. Stewart was sentenced, to most people's astonishment, to 28 months.

After the sentencing, Stewart publicly declared that passing along the information from Abdel Rahman had been "based on my understanding of what the client needed, what a lawyer was expected to do" and "was necessary" and that, in the same circumstances, she would "do it again." Subsequently, a federal appeals court under the Barack Obama administration demanded that the district judge reconsider her sentence. She was handed a new sentence by Koeltl-10 years.

The federal government's orchestration of fear, Stewart said, has made the country increasingly deferential to authority-especially white, male authority. In the Carswell maximum-security prison, the women's facility where she was incarcerated, she heard numerous accounts of gross injustices endured by poor women. She frequently asked some of these women why they had not demanded a trial rather than submit to a plea deal, or why they had not stood up and proclaimed their innocence. The answer, she said, was always the same: "I was afraid. I was afraid."

She blames the wrecking of the legal system, in part, on the skyrocketing costs of law school. Law graduates, she said, have to "mortgage their souls in order to go to law school." When she applied to Rutgers Law School in 1971 the school's commitment to making sure half the class was women allowed her to get a scholarship. The financial aid, along with the low state tuition, made it possible for her to attend.

In later years she operated a law practice in Greenwich Village for poor clients. Her office was above her husband's motorcycle shop on the ground floor. "I could take whatever pay stub I wanted," she said.

The rise of corporate-backed organizations and think tanks designed to veer every public institution away from traditional liberal democratic values has dismantled our civil society, she said. The right-wing Federalist Society, after its founding in 1982, mounted a frontal assault on the legal system. Stewart, after Stanford University asked her to speak there in 2002, arrived on campus to find that the Federalist Society had pressured the university to rescind the invitation. Sympathetic students found her a place to talk, and Federalist Society members peppered her with hostile questions at the event. She was able to knock back their verbal harassment because, she said, she was "a trained trial attorney who had been in the business for almost 30 years" at that time.

The federal government by the 1980s, she said, was "mopping up" the remnants of radical activists, many of whom had been underground for years. She and other civil rights attorneys were able to battle on behalf of these political radicals, but by the end of the 1980s the state had finished its hunts for underground activists. And lawyers, Stewart said, "were no longer part of the game."

Stewart, who spent a decade in the Harlem school system as a librarian before going to law school, said working with those considered by society to be "throwaway kids" meant that she knew the injustices of the system. The system, she said, has "failed them [poor children] from beginning to end." This failure to provide elemental justice, spawned by the so-called war on drugs and massive rates of incarceration, especially for poor people of color, was soon replicated within the courts in the name of the war on terror. And this corrosion has spread. Basic legal protections, stripped first from the poor and then from Muslims, have been stripped from us all.

I asked Stewart if there had been a specific moment when she lost hope in the judicial system.

"I always believed, Chris, that I could do it," she said. "You know, it's like, you're the last man. You're like the kicker [when the opposing team is] running the ball back. You're the only one between the goal post and everything. But I was there. They had to get by me. If they couldn't get by me, then they couldn't win. I have enough ego and belief in myself to say I didn't believe they could do that every time, that I could win, that I could make a difference. I think I did make a difference for a lot of people, even people who got convicted."

The climate in the nation's courtrooms charged irrevocably after 9/11, she said. The occasional victories she and other civil rights lawyers were able to win before then became nearly impossible to replicate.

"The playing field suddenly changed and everything favored the prosecution, certainly in federal cases," she said. "There was no level playing field anymore. It was like if you were the last guy standing and you had to keep them from making the goal you were at the six-inch line trying to do it. It was impossible to stop them. They controlled it. They controlled what the charges were. They controlled whether an adjournment would be given. They determined whether the cooperation is worthy, and everybody must cooperate, and it changed into a very different system, certainly on the federal level."

In her own trial the government presented audio recordings of her meetings with Abdel Rahman in the prison in Rochester, Minn. The taping of her conversations, which before the federal Patriot Act would have violated attorney-client privilege, is now legal.

She said of the 9/11 attacks, "We've never explored why. Why does this happen? Why, what compelled 21 young men to give up their lives to do this thing? No, we've never, we don't want to look at that. We don't want to know why."

"We continue the facade that we are fair," she said, "that we have this Constitution we respect, and we can rely on, and that we can embrace. You can't do that, that's my constitutional rights, etc. When really they're [our constitutional rights] a puff of smoke. They don't really exist."

I asked her what she had learned from being incarcerated.

"I don't think I ever appreciated the unrelenting stress" of being in prison, she said. "That you're always waiting for something to come down. That there's such arbitrary authority. Guard A says, 'Go down those stairs, use the stairs.' Guard B says, 'You can't use the stairs, you're not permitted on the stairs.' And you say, 'But Guard A just said. ...' 'I don't care what he said, this is my rule!' That kind of arbitrary thing, you're always guessing. What does this guy, what does this woman, want me to do? Where am I? Where is this? And that's 24/7."

"You're always on the cusp of doing the wrong thing, or getting in trouble for something," she said. "I wrote a letter for a woman, and in order to make a copy I emailed it to Ralph." She went on: "It was basically asking a judge to stay any decision because they were going to take all of her pension as payment for what she had done. And she wanted to get this letter in right away. So I emailed it to [Ralph] and for that I lost, I think, about three months of commissary, and email."

She said, "It's almost impossible to organize prisoners in this day and age to stand up, to become a unit, to say no to certain things."

"I found it virtually impossible to convince the women at Carswell that they should not be always thinking that what happened to them was personal," she said. "They should be looking at political answers, that where they ended up was not because of some personal lack or weakness but because the political system has designated them to be there as one of the kick-arounds, as one of the not-for-consumption."

"Why do you think that is?" I asked.

"I think ... television has a lot to do with it," she said. "There's a certain idealized life. People that are in trouble get there because they have done it to themselves." She said that many of the women incarcerated with her lacked self-esteem.

"The women I've left behind" are "the one real shadow on my tremendous joy at being home," she said. "I can no longer even communicate with [them] because the conditions of my probation are that I may not associate with any felons. So I can't even write to dear Mara, what happened with your case? Someone who got 20 years because she sold some heroin and then a guy died a week later, and they used that murder to enhance her sentence, completely contrary to everything we ever learned."

One of the saddest moments in prison, she said, was mail call. The names of those who had letters would be read. Some women "waited for their name to be called and it never happened." Those who did not get mail or visits, she said, "become more and more institutionalized."

"The world of the prison is the only world; the outside world does not exist for them anymore," she said.

"I'm not waiting for the working class to make the revolution," she said. "I think that's a day long gone by. That might have happened in the '30s. It didn't. We have to look at a new way, some new force."

She said that although she is disbarred she will continue to be a catalyst for change. She quoted Rosa Luxemburg, who said that radicals should at once alleviate human misery and do political work. Stewart said she will continue to fight for the some 150 political prisoners, mostly African-Americans, who have been in prison for decades because they belonged to radical groups such as the Black Panthers or the Black Liberation Army.

"My other goal is not to turn my back on the women in prison," she said.

She stressed the importance of community.

"The most important thing is don't let yourself get isolated," she said. "Don't feel that you're the only one in the room that thinks this way and you must be crazy or something, and they're going to get you because you're the only one. Find the other people who think like you. They're out there. There are people out there. There are groups. There's everyone from the raging grannies right up to the very serious lefties, but there's somebody out there, make sure you're not all alone. That's the worst part of what we face these days. As long as you're with other people you have a fighting chance, and you can organize more people."

If ever there was a perfect example of how discrimination against gay people operates in the 21st century American economy, and why the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) is so necessary, the National Football League just provided it.

In a Sports Illustrated story about SEC Defensive Player of the Year Michael Sam's decision to publicly say he is gay, NFL officials declared that Sam will now face retribution from employers (read: teams) in the professional football industry:

"I don't think football is ready for [an openly gay player] just yet," said an NFL player personnel assistant. "In the coming decade or two, it's going to be acceptable, but at this point in time it's still a man's-man game. To call somebody a [gay slur] is still so commonplace. It'd chemically imbalance an NFL locker room and meeting room."...

"I just know with this going on this is going to drop him down," said a veteran NFL scout. "There's no question about it. It's human nature. Do you want to be the team to quote-unquote 'break that barrier?'"...

An NFL assistant coach called Sam's decision "not a smart move," as he said it "legitimately affects [his] potential earnings."...

"There are guys in locker rooms that maturity-wise cannot handle it or deal with the thought of that," the assistant coach said. "There's nothing more sensitive than the heartbeat of the locker room. If you knowingly bring someone in there with that sexual orientation, how are the other guys going to deal with it? It's going to be a big distraction. That's the reality. It shouldn't be, but it will be."

Whether or not Sam was ultimately going to end up a top draft pick based purely on his skill is not the point. What's important here is that NFL executives are openly admitting that regardless of his skill, Sam will suffer consequences specifically because he's gay and because he publicly says he is gay (for context, it is important to note that NFL's comments to this effect follow earlier accusations by former Vikings punter Chris Kluwe that he was fired for supporting marriage equality).

At a moral level, it is obviously sad to see NFL officials so openly rationalizing, justifying or otherwise tacitly condoning discrimination against someone on the basis of his sexual orientation.

At a legal level, it is downright infuriating because if the quality cited as reason to discriminate was something else - say, race - such comments would likely open the NFL up to a serious lawsuit. After all, current civil rights law (thankfully!) bars employment discrimination on the basis of race. However, until Congress finally passes ENDA, federal law doesn't explicitly bar such discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

But wait, you're saying. How do these quotes in the Sports Illustrated piece represent not just ugly homophobia, but also employment discrimination?

Go back and re-read the NFL's comments, but remove all the stuff about football and simply remember that the NFL is an employer, meaning that these quotes are potential employers talking about a potential employee.

Now ask yourself: should it be OK for an official at a $9-billion-a-year company to say that a potential future employee will be paid less (it "legitimately affects [his] potential earnings") because he is gay? Should it be OK for an official at that company to say the future employee will not get a particular position within the company ("it's going to drop him down") because he is gay?

Back in 1987 my Princeton colleague Alan Blinder published a very good book titled "Hard Heads, Soft Hearts." It was, as you might guess, a call for tough-minded but compassionate economic policy. Unfortunately, what we actually got - especially, although not only, from Republicans - was the opposite. And it's difficult to find a better example of the hardhearted, softheaded nature of today's G.O.P. than what happened last week, as Senate Republicans once again used the filibuster to block aid to the long-term unemployed.

What do we know about long-term unemployment in America?

First, it's still at near-record levels. Historically, the long-term unemployed - those out of work for 27 weeks or more - have usually been between 10 and 20 percent of total unemployment. Today the number is 35.8 percent. Yet extended unemployment benefits, which went into effect in 2008, have now been allowed to lapse. As a result, few of the long-term unemployed are receiving any kind of support.

Second, if you think the typical long-term unemployed American is one of Those People - nonwhite, poorly educated, etc. - you're wrong, according to research by the Urban Institute's Josh Mitchell. Half of the long-term unemployed are non-Hispanic whites. College graduates are less likely to lose their jobs than workers with less education, but once they do they are actually a bit more likely than others to join the ranks of the long-term unemployed. And workers over 45 are especially likely to spend a long time unemployed.

Third, in a weak job market long-term unemployment tends to be self-perpetuating, because employers in effect discriminate against the jobless. Many people have suspected that this was the case, and last year Rand Ghayad of Northeastern University provided a dramatic confirmation. He sent out thousands of fictitious resumes in response to job ads, and found that potential employers were drastically less likely to respond if the fictitious applicant had been out of work more than six months, even if he or she was better qualified than other applicants.

What all of this suggests is that the long-term unemployed are mainly victims of circumstances - ordinary American workers who had the bad luck to lose their jobs (which can happen to anyone) at a time of extraordinary labor market weakness, with three times as many people seeking jobs as there are job openings. Once that happened, the very fact of their unemployment made it very hard to find a new job.

So how can politicians justify cutting off modest financial aid to their unlucky fellow citizens?

Some Republicans justified last week's filibuster with the tired old argument that we can't afford to increase the deficit. Actually, Democrats paired the benefits extension with measures to increase tax receipts. But in any case this is a bizarre objection at a time when federal deficits are not just falling, but clearly falling too fast, holding back economic recovery.

For the most part, however, Republicans justify refusal to help the unemployed by asserting that we have so much long-term unemployment because people aren't trying hard enough to find jobs, and that extended benefits are part of the reason for that lack of effort.

People who say things like this - people like, for example, Senator Rand Paul - probably imagine that they're being tough-minded and realistic. In fact, however, they're peddling a fantasy at odds with all the evidence. For example: if unemployment is high because people are unwilling to work, reducing the supply of labor, why aren't wages going up?

But evidence has a well-known liberal bias. The more their economic doctrine fails - remember how the Fed's actions were supposed to produce runaway inflation? - the more fiercely conservatives cling to that doctrine. More than five years after a financial crisis plunged the Western world into what looks increasingly like a quasi-permanent slump, making nonsense of free-market orthodoxy, it's hard to find a leading Republican who has changed his or her mind on, well, anything.

And this imperviousness to evidence goes along with a stunning lack of compassion.

If you follow debates over unemployment, it's striking how hard it is to find anyone on the Republican side even hinting at sympathy for the long-term jobless. Being unemployed is always presented as a choice, as something that only happens to losers who don't really want to work. Indeed, one often gets the sense that contempt for the unemployed comes first, that the supposed justifications for tough policies are after-the-fact rationalizations.

The result is that millions of Americans have in effect been written off - rejected by potential employers, abandoned by politicians whose fuzzy-mindedness is matched only by the hardness of their hearts.
(c) 2014 Paul Krugman --- The New York Times

What you may already know: Freedom Industries, a coal-industry surrogate in West Virginia, dumped poison into the water supply known as the Elk River, waited 24 hours to tell anyone about it, waited even longer to mention that they had also dumped a second poison into the water supply, and then declared bankruptcy so as to make themselves judgment-proof in civil court against the hundreds of thousands of people who couldn't eat or work or bathe or cook for weeks...and this was all before the stuff they dumped into the river evaporated into formaldehyde, which it does, so everyone who couldn't eat or bathe or cook for weeks was suddenly eating and cooking and bathing in a whole different poison, this one being a known carcinogen...but they're bankrupt now, so screw you and your tumors.

What you may not yet know, but need to: Gary Southern, President of Freedom Industries, gave a press conference the day after the spill was announced, and did yeoman's work to ensure himself a first-ballot nomination into the Bastard's Hall Of Fame. Described afterward in various publications as "rude," "arrogant" and "dismissive," Southern tried several times to call the whole thing off - at one point complaining that he'd "had a long day" - before capping off his performance by taking a deep swig of bottled water right on camera, the very thing residents of the community were desperate for at that moment. Call it the 21st century version of "Let them eat cake."

That was the last we saw of Mr. Southern and his refreshingly unpolluted beverage. When members of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee traveled to West Virginia on Monday to try and ascertain just what the hell is going on down there, Gary Southern and Freedom Industries blew them off completely. Representatives from the US Chemical Safety Board went to the meeting, as did members of the state's Department of Environmental Protection. Even people from West Virginia American Water, the organization highly criticized for its handling of the situation, showed up.

The actual people who actually put poison into the water supply for hundreds of thousands of people?

Absent.

A month after the spill, tests revealed the chemical was still showing up in 40% of homes in the affected region.

Last week, Duke Energy in North Carolina dumped tens of thousands of tons of coal ash into the Dan River, turning it slate grey. According to Truthout's Mike Ludwig, "Coal ash can contain mercury, selenium, arsenic, chromium and other toxic and heavy metals, and at least 207 spills and contamination events have occurred in 37 states, according to data compiled by environmental groups."

On Tuesday, Patriot Coal dumped 100,000 gallons of coal slurry into yet another West Virginia waterway. The water turned black. According to Think Progress, "Coal slurry contains a range of toxic substances, including chemicals used to wash the coal and heavy metals, like iron, manganese, aluminum and selenium."

Also on Tuesday, some 2,000 gallons of oil-suffused bilge water was dumped into Puget Sound in Washington State at the Kitsap-Bangor Naval Base. It spread all the way to Hood Canal ten miles to the north. The Department of Health issued an advisory against eating shellfish from the affected area.

Patriot Coal...Freedom Industries...I am sensing a pattern here.

Are you?

A generation of industry deregulation, of government-is-the-problem, and of industries that quite simply and completely don't give a damn, have delivered us here. Of late, reports of poisons massively entering our water supply have been occurring with the same dreary regularity as reports of shootings at schools. It was happening before, but now it is happening all the time. It is entirely unsustainable, and must be stopped.

Ours are not the only communities being poisoned by runaway industry unfettered by even the most meager regulations. The village of Baha, in the Yunnan province of southwest China, was choking on factory smokestack filth and drinking factory polluted water for fourteen years, until they finally had enough. They called a meeting with the factory boss, but the boss blew them off. The residents of Baha responded by destroying the factory's offices, cars and dormitories, and wrecked the factory's equipment.

A meeting was called, the poisoners did not deign to show up, and all hell broke loose. Sounds a lot like Freedom Industries' absence on Monday, except, of course, for the hell breaking loose.

"We have been living with the factory for 14 years," said resident Huang Liangzheng in a UK Guardian report on the incident, "and we live in dust almost every day and can't sell our rice and other farm products. We need to live."

We need to live.

Think about that, you captains of industry.

Kick a dog enough times, and he will turn on you, tear out the seat of your pants, and come growling for more. "Enlightened self-interest" are your watchwords for this brave new century.

Quickly, now. Before it's too late.

"I found myself standing in front of railroad tracks in South Florida. I was waiting on the train to come so I could jump in front of it and end my life." So recounted Desmond Meade, describing his life nine years ago. He was homeless, unemployed, recently released from prison and addicted to drugs and alcohol. The train never came. He crossed the tracks and checked himself into a substance-abuse program. He went on to college, and now is just months away from receiving his law degree.

Meade, however, will not be able to practice law in Florida. As a former felon, he cannot join the bar. That is one of his rights that has been stripped, permanently, by Florida's draconian laws. In a democracy, if one wants to change a law, you vote for lawmakers who will represent your views. Yet, as an ex-felon in Florida, Meade also has lost the right to vote for the rest of his life.

It's called "felony disenfranchisement," and is permanent in 11 states: Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, Tennessee, Virginia and Wyoming. It's enforced in differing degrees, like a patchwork, across the U.S. In 13 states and the District of Columbia, you get your rights back upon release from prison. In others, you have to get through your probation or parole. In Maine and Vermont, prisoners retain the right to vote, even while incarcerated.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder addressed the issue this week at a legal symposium at Georgetown University:

"Across this country today, an estimated 5.8 million Americans-5.8 million of our fellow citizens-are prohibited from voting because of current or previous felony convictions. That's more than the individual populations of 31 U.S. states." Close to 6 million Americans, denied the basic right to vote. Because of the racial disparities in our penal system, African-American and Latino men are vastly disproportionately denied the right to vote. Holder continued, "The current scope of these policies is not only too significant to ignore-it is also too unjust to tolerate."

The Georgetown event was co-sponsored by The Leadership Conference, a coalition of civil-rights, legal and human-rights groups. Last September, the group released a report titled "Democracy Imprisoned." In it, the group writes, "Florida's disenfranchisement rate remains the highest and most racially disparate in the United States." It is no coincidence that this key swing state is home to more than 1 million of the nation's nearly 6 million disenfranchised.

Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist eased the laws, making the application for the reinstatement of rights automatic. But in 2011, his successor, Republican Gov. Rick Scott, imposed a waiting period of at least five years for anyone to apply to the clemency board. Meade told us on the "Democracy Now!" news hour: "Even after applying, the processing time for the application takes upwards of six years. So, in reality, an individual will have to wait anywhere between 11 to 13 years just to see if they have a chance, a shot, at getting their rights restored." Crist has switched parties to run for governor as a Democrat against Scott.

Law professor Michelle Alexander opens her groundbreaking book, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," with the story of Jarvious Cotton: "Cotton's great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. ... His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole."

At a national level, bills are being proposed that would guarantee voting rights for ex-felons, with both Democrat and Republican support. After Holder, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky spoke at Georgetown, advocating for full voting rights. But it is still an issue over which states exert enormous control.

Desmond Meade is not sitting around waiting for his rights to be handed back to him. He is organizing. He currently serves as the president of the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, with close to 70 groups pushing for reforms of the state's disenfranchisement laws:

"It's about humanity. It's an all-American issue. It's not about Democrat or Republican. It's about the common decency of letting an individual or helping an individual to reintegrate back into their community so they can become productive citizens and enjoy life."