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Where almost every word of news isn't what it seems
by John Chuckman / May 13th, 2014
I think a description of the political space in which we live as a kind of twilight reality is not an exaggeration. Not only is a great deal of the news about the world we read and hear manipulated and even manufactured, but a great deal of genuine news is simply missing. People often do not know what is happening in the world, although they generally believe they do know after reading their newspapers or listening to news broadcasts. People receive the lulling sounds or words of most of this kind of news almost unconsciously just as they do to the strains of piped-in “elevator music” in stores and offices.
There are several reasons why this is so. The consolidation of news media creates huge corporate industries whose interests are no different to those of other huge corporate industries. The ownership and control of these industries is not in the hands of people interested in finding out about things and helping others to understand: they are in the hands of people with political connections and goals. At the government level, those in power over the great agencies of the military and security also are not motivated by helping others to understand; indeed, they often are very much interested in hiding what they do.
With a large, complex, and powerful state like the United States these motivations become overwhelming in importance. The more the establishment’s national ambitions become interference in, and manipulation of, the world’s affairs – in effect, controlling the global environment in which it lives – the more it finds itself mired in acts and policies which cannot stand the light of day. Secrecy becomes a paramount goal of government, and all corporate news organizations – understanding their dependency upon government agencies for leaks and information to make them look good, for permissions and licences which allow them to survive and grow, and for advertising revenue from other great corporations involved with government – understand implicitly the permissible limits of investigation and news. And when they do forget, they are promptly reminded. Some of these giants – CNN and Fox News come to mind – make little pretence of genuine news or investigation, existing almost entirely as outlets for points of view, attitudes, and the odd tantalizing morsel of disinformation. They keep an audience because they offer what is best understood as either infotainment or soft propaganda which is expertly tuned to listeners’ and readers’ assumptions and preconceived ideas.
Size matters in all enterprises, economies of scale contributing to build powerful corporations with global influence. Size also matters to create what economists call “barriers to entry” in any industry, something which plays a major role in the evolution of many industries over time from fairly competitive ones to quasi-monopolistic ones. It is virtually impossible for a newcomer to enter an industry evolved to this latter state, including the news industry. It would be about as difficult to enter the American news industry as it would be to enter its soda pop, car manufacturing, household products, or hamburger restaurant industries. It is always possible to start a small niche, or boutique, operation, but it literally is not possible to compete with oligopolistic giants. So, necessarily, American news is under the control of a very few people, extremely wealthy people, who attend the same cocktail parties as senior people in government agencies and other great corporations.
The more powerful the great military-security-policing agencies in a society become, the more independent of public approval and scrutiny they grow. This is unavoidable without a sustained popular demand for public accountability and reasonable transparency, but such popular movements are difficult to start and even harder to maintain, and they are pretty much absent in America. Every once in a while we do get a movement in America popping up like spring dandelions on the lawn, almost always of the “back to basics” type, the Tea Party being the most recent manifestation, financed by some wealthy persons with their own goals and serving to titillate people for a short while that the dark monstrosity in Washington can be made to go away, but, as with the Tea Party, they always dry up and blow away.
The politicians who ostensibly oversee dark matters in special committees do not want public credit for what they approve. And I believe a point is reached, as it has been reached in the United States, where a great deal of the planning and decision-making in dirty affairs is left entirely in the hands of the great security agencies themselves, politicians not being in a position to interfere even if they wanted to do so. The sheer volume and complexity of such operations argues for this view, and the truth is most people and most politicians are comfortable with inertia.
If we go back about fifty years we have a complex and fascinating example of these forces and tendencies at work, and we can only be sure that matters have gone a great deal further since that time with the immense swelling of security budgets, open contempt for privacy and rights, and the dramatic advance of technological capabilities. On the matter of technology from the citizens’ point of view, the blithe pop notion of “social media,” so often talked up in the press as now working against concentrated power, ignores that “social media” too are just great corporations intimately linked to government. They not only send the security agencies a detailed flow of information about their subscribers, but they are all engineered to be switched off when government desires it. The Internet in general has provided an outlet for critical views, but the total exposure to the public is small in the scheme of things – a few channels, as it were, in a multi-trillion channel universe – and can mostly be ignored by authorities, and, in any event, the Internet is evolving quickly into something else far more dominated by commercial interests. The Golden Age of the Internet, so far as ideas are concerned, may well soon be over. To return to our example, if we go back to America’s many attempts to topple or assassinate the leader of Cuba in the early 1960s, we have perhaps our best understood example of elaborate dark operations, unaccountable officials, murder, mayhem, and an utterly compliant press – all freely continuing for years. Although histories of the Kennedy presidency contain more than one version of some details of America’s vast, long-lasting terrorist plot, still, much of it is understood, at least better than is the case for many such matters.
John Kennedy may not have been quite the idealist some sentimentally view him today, but he was more thoughtful, independent, and tough-minded than many American Presidents of the 20th century. He learned nearly immediately after becoming President that the previous Eisenhower government had established a vast operation to eliminate Castro and his government. It was a terror operation whose size and complexity and resources made the later mountain redoubt of Osama bin Laden resemble a Boy Scout camp. Despite its size, this was an operation unknown to the press and public at the time, although there is an anecdote that The New York Times tripped over the plot and, in traditional Times’ fashion, suppressed it at the CIA’s request. The plans took many routes, including, as we learned later from the Church Committee in 1975 (an examination of some intelligence practices in the wake of the Watergate scandal), CIA representatives going to the bizarre lengths of approaching senior Mafia figures to discuss commissioning them for Castro’s assassination.
Kennedy came under great pressure from the CIA to approve the project for invading Cuba, a difficult position in which to put a young, inexperienced President. He decided to support the plan with important provisos. The Bay of Pigs invasion, by a CIA-trained, supplied, and paid private army of Cuban refugees, was directed by CIA personnel and supported by a huge propaganda apparatus, including a radio station, in Florida. There were also CIA assassination teams prepared to enter Cuba and kill certain people once the refugees were established. Many elements of the plan and the people running it had been involved in 1954 with the successful overthrow of the elected government of Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán in Guatemala. But Cuba was not Guatemala, and their plans proved a colossal and embarrassing failure which served only to increase Castro’s heroic, legendary stature in Cuba, a classic result of poorly-conceived black operations called “blowback” in the security establishment, and the reverberations of these events continued for more than a decade, claiming many lives and careers.
Following the failed invasion, CIA leaders, much resembling some “old boys” at an expensive men’s club where outsiders are resented, blamed the President for his scepticism and failure to extend what they regarded as adequate support, especially in the form of disguised American air support for the invading forces. The new President himself was furious at having been pressured into the fiasco at the start of his term. The truth is that the CIA’s plan was almost laughable, including the key assumption that great numbers of ordinary Cubans would rise against Castro, an extremely popular leader, once the invasion force appeared. It was a delusional sand castle built on a foundation of blind hatred for anything to do with communism, especially for a man as charismatic as Castro. The blindness extended to the CIA’s having selected a poor geographical location for forces to land.
It was all a tremendous example of the arrogance of power, secret men with unlimited resources making secret plans that reflected little reality. Kennedy fired some top CIA officials, including Director Allen Dulles, and is said to have privately sworn to tear the CIA apart. We can only imagine the self-righteous fury of the CIA’s Cold Warrior Mujahedeen at the time, their words, when recorded here or there, resembling tent preachers speaking about casting out devils. Kennedy, however, did not tear the CIA apart. Realistically, that would have been impossible with the men at the CIA knowing better than anyone how to capitalize on an attempt – blackmail, threats, ugly frat-boy jokes, and criminal activity being everyday tools they used. To be labelled “soft on communism” in the early 1960s was the political Mark of Beast, Richard Nixon having built an entire political career on it, and Kennedy’s personal life was subject to then-unpalatable revelations of extensive marital infidelity. So Kennedy continued to work with the CIA on a series of sabotage operations against Cuba and attempts on Castro’s life. Indeed, it is said that Kennedy put his brother, Robert, a sufficiently tough and ruthless man by all accounts, in charge of the plans, making senior CIA personnel answerable to the young Attorney General, itself the kind of act which would not endear him to the CIA’s old boys.
The secret matters around Cuba dominated events for years, again almost without any hard public information, leading to the Cuban Missile Crisis which President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev peacefully settled, a settlement importantly including an American pledge not to invade Cuba again. Ultimately this writer is convinced that it was events around Cuba that led directly to the assassination of John Kennedy, much evidence suggesting a false trail to Cuba being planted before the fateful day in Dallas, the very kind of trail that could be used by the Cold Warrior Mujahedeen to justify an invasion after all. With everything from a faked visit to Mexico City by someone posing as Lee Harvey Oswald (the poor man working in New Orleans as a paid FBI informer at the time – likely a low level part of a Kennedy-initiated FBI program to track and suppress the worst anti-Cuba excesses of the refugees and their handlers in keeping with the spirit of the Missile Crisis settlement – totally unaware he was being set up by those he fell in with), the one-man creation of a Fair Play to Cuba chapter in New Orleans, handing out Fair Play pamphlets (some of which were stamped with the address of an ex-senior FBI anti-communist fanatic, Guy Bannister, who ran a mysterious front operation in New Orleans with some very unsavory associates) at places including near a naval facility, the night visit to Sylvia Odio, daughter of a noted Cuban political figure, by a group of unidentified men who referred to a Leon Oswald, and many other such carefully placed little piles of breadcrumbs.
Kennedy offended his Pentagon Joint Chiefs by not letting them immediately bomb and invade Cuba when offensive missiles were discovered there by U-2 photography, and of course anything of that nature offending the Pentagon offended also the CIA and those dependent upon it. With his pledge not to invade Cuba again, Kennedy offended the violent Cuban refugee community, people who were armed to the teeth by the CIA and had killed and crippled opponents in Florida as well as in Cuba. And through the entire sequence of events from the Bay of Pigs to the Missile Crisis, Kennedy consistently offended the Cold Warrior Mujahedeen at the CIA. He added to that offence with acts like establishing secret backchannel communications with Khrushchev and preliminary efforts to establish the same communications with Castro. Such efforts were most unlikely to remain secret from the CIA when they involved such a high level and weighty matters. Remember, hatreds in the United States around Cuba remained so intense in the intelligence and refugee communities that as late as 1976, a CIA operative named Luis Posada Carriles planted two bombs on Cubana Airlines Flight 455, killing all 78 people aboard, and he was protected by the American government.
The effect on the general public of accurate knowledge about dark matters in the rare instances when they become known can be glimpsed here or there. One of the best examples is the disappearance from politics, including credible presidential ambitions, of a seemingly attractive Vietnam veteran holding the Medal of Honor, former-Senator Bob Kerrey. When the public learned of a secret operation called Project Phoenix and later learned that Kerrey earned his medal through such work, his political career simply dissolved. Project Phoenix was a dark operation in Vietnam in which American Special Forces crept out, night after night, to assassinate villagers the CIA identified as targets. It is estimated that twenty thousand innocent villagers had their throats slashed in the night by Americans creeping into their homes. It would be hard to conceive of a more cowardly and grisly form of war, but it went on for a long time in complete secrecy. The operation burst upon public awareness only after a titanic internal struggle at the CIA over the authenticity of a Soviet defector named Yuri Nosenko ended with the dismissal of James Angleton in 1974, the paranoid Chief of CIA Counterintelligence (a man, incidentally, who unquestionably had special knowledge of the Kennedy assassination) by new CIA Director William Colby. Colby also revealed the Phoenix program for reasons not well understood and stated he had run it. (A retired Colby later had a mysterious fatal boating accident near his home.)
People who want to discredit critics and sceptics of government today often use the term “conspiracy theorist,” almost as though there were ipso facto no such things as conspiracy or dishonesty in government. It is of course intended as a pejorative description. But the entire history of affairs around Cuba puts the lie to those using the term, and we know from many bits of information that Cuba is only one example of scores of genuine conspiracies.
Those with some history will know that secrecy and dishonesty have long served the interests of power. Why doesn’t the United States claim credit for overthrowing the democratic government of Guatemala, the democratic government of Iran which unleashed the filthy work of the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK, afterward, or the democratic government of Chile and the fifteen thousand or so state murders that followed? Why doesn’t it claim credit for the State Department’s teletyping lists of desired victims to a new government of Indonesia, after the fall of Sukarno in 1965, as its savage followers conducted a genocidal slaughter of suspected communists which saw half a million people thrown into rivers with their throats slashed? Why did it hide acts like the machine-gunning of hundreds of fleeing Korean civilians, including women and children, at the early stages of the Korean War? Or the hideous murder by suffocation in sealed trucks of about three thousand Taliban prisoners in the early stages of the Afghanistan War undertaken by one of America’s key Afghan allies shortly after Donald Rumsfeld publicly said they should be killed or walled away forever? Why doesn’t Israel just tell people it terrorized Palestinians, killing and raping, in 1948 to make as many as possible flee their homes? Or that it machine-gunned masses of Egyptian prisoners of war in the Sinai in a war that it engineered only for conquering more of Palestine?
Could it be that there are acts of which governments are ashamed? That there is reason to be ashamed of acts which they nevertheless continue to repeat? It does seem that government values its reputation enough to avoid taking credit for its ugliest acts. The terrible dilemma is that in a supposedly democratic state, these horrible acts are committed without either the knowledge or consent of the people and despite the fact that the results affect the public’s welfare and often international reputation. Now at just what point could the consent of the people in a democratic state be more important than committing organized murder on their behalf? I cannot imagine any. Yet that is a point at which states like America feel free to act, covering up what they do with masses of secrecy and lies.
Why would anyone deny the existence of conspiracies by America’s government? Regrettably, the only reason that some government behavior becomes known is the existence of whistleblowers. But how does government treat whistleblowers? Just ask Mordechai Vanunu or Daniel Ellsberg or Private Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning or Edward Snowden – truly brave and ethically-motivated individuals, treated like criminals by their governments.
Pervasive secrecy and truly democratic government are simply incompatible, and I think it fair to say that where we see monumental levels of secrecy, as we do in the United States with billions of classified documents and hundreds of past controversies dimly understood, it provides prima facie proof of a society tarted-up to resemble democracy but having few if any of the required internal organs functioning. A culture of secrecy and violence is the culture of a police state, full stop.
Right now we have partial information about some recent American, or American-sponsored, terrorist programs. One such is the induced “civil war” in Syria which receives arms and assistance via Turkey, the same route used to inject a rag-tag army of extremists into Syria and to allow them to retreat periodically in escaping Syria’s army. The extremists even used some of the deadly nerve gas, Sarin, to kill masses of civilians in hopes of pushing the United States openly into the conflict, making the rebels surely the kind of people no sane person wants running a country. And who supplied them with Sarin, a manufactured substance available from only a few sources? A related dark program occurred in Benghazi, Libya, where an American ambassador was killed in another instance of blowback: he had been running an operation to collect from Libya and export to Syria weapons and thugs when some the thugs turned and attacked him instead. Yet another dark operation has been the destabilization of Ukraine through a huge secret flow of money to right wing forces who shot hundreds of innocent people down on the streets of Kiev to instill general fear and terror to support a coup.
Now, you will not read one word from an American official acknowledging any of this grotesque behavior. Indeed, John Kerry has the unenviable job of publicly lying about it, puffing and pontificating and self-righteously proclaiming America’s revulsion over others behaving like that. And in all this storm of murder and dishonesty, you will only find American journalism, that noble guardian of the public’s right to know, keeping its readers and listeners in complete ignorance.
This is how it is possible in what is often regarded a free and democratic state, the national government commits itself to murder and mayhem, using its people’s resources without informing them and without their consent, all the while vigorously lying to them. Can you really have democracy that way? I don’t think so. The power and resources that are in the hands of America’s great secret agencies are greater than those enjoyed by many of the world’s dictators. And the distortions of the American press surely are in keeping with the practices of places where the press is never regarded as free. Many Americans know that at the local town or city level, they do have democratic institutions and attitudes, a fact which reassures them against criticisms of their national system, but then so does China today, and no one calls China a democracy.
A local resident casts her vote at a polling station in Sandy Springs, Ga., on March 6, 2012. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
by Suevon Lee ProPublica, Nov. 5, 2012, 5:50 p.m.
This post is being kept up-to-date. It was first published on July 23.
Voter IDs laws have become a political flashpoint in what's gearing up to be another close election year. Supporters say the laws 2014 which 30 states have now enacted in some form 2014 are needed to combat voter fraud, while critics see them as a tactic to disenfranchise voters.
We've taken a step back to look at the facts behind the laws and break down the issues at the heart of the debate.
So what are these laws?
They are measures intended to ensure that a registered voter is who he says he is and not an impersonator trying to cast a ballot in someone else's name. The laws, most of which have been passed in the last several years, require that registered voters show ID before they're allowed to vote. Exactly what they need to show varies. Some states require a government-issued photo, while in others a current utility bill or bank statement is sufficient.
As a registered voter, I thought I always had to supply some form of ID during an election.
Not quite. Per federal law, first-time voters who registered by mail must present a photo ID or copy of a current bill or bank statement. Some states generally advise voters bring some form of photo ID. But prior to the 2006 election, no state ever required a voter to produce a government-issued photo ID as a condition to voting. Indiana in 2006 became the first state to enact a strict photo ID law, a law that was upheld two years later by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Why are these voter ID laws so strongly opposed?
Voting law opponents contend these laws disproportionately affect elderly, minority and low-income groups that tend to vote Democratic. Obtaining photo ID can be costly and burdensome, with even free state ID requiring documents like a birth certificate that can cost up to $25 in some places. According to a study from NYU's Brennan Center, 11 percent of voting-age citizens lack necessary photo ID while many people in rural areas have trouble accessing ID offices. During closing arguments in a recent case over Texas's voter ID law, a lawyer for the state brushed aside these obstacles as the "reality to life of choosing to live in that part of Texas."
Attorney General Eric Holder and others have compared the laws to a poll tax, in which Southern states during the Jim Crow era imposed voting fees, which discouraged blacks, and even some poor whites -- until the passage of grandfather clauses -- from voting.
Given the sometimes costly steps required to obtain needed documents today, legal scholars argue that photo ID laws create a new "financial barrier to the ballot box."
Just how well-founded are fears of voter fraud?
There have been only a small number of fraud cases resulting in a conviction. A New York Times analysis from 2007 identified 120 cases filed by the Justice Department over five years. These cases, many of which stemmed from mistakenly filled registration forms or misunderstanding over voter eligibility, resulted in 86 convictions.
There are "very few documented cases," said UC-Irvine professor and election law specialist Rick Hasen. "When you do see election fraud, it invariably involves election officials taking steps to change election results or it involves absentee ballots which voter ID laws can't prevent," he said.
An analysis by News21, a national investigative reporting project, identified 10 voter impersonation cases out of 2,068 alleged election fraud cases since 2000 2013 or one out of every 15 million prospective voters.
One of the most vocal supporters of strict voter ID laws, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, told the Houston Chronicle earlier this month that his office has prosecuted about 50 cases of voter fraud in recent years. "I know for a fact that voter fraud is real, that it must be stopped, and that voter id is one way to prevent cheating at the ballot box and ensure integrity in the electoral system," he told the paper. Abbott's office did not immediately respond to ProPublica's request for comment.
How many voters might be turned away or dissuaded by the laws, and could they really affect the election?
It's not clear.
According to the Brennan Center, about 11 percent of U.S. citizens, or roughly 21 million citizens, don't have government-issued photo ID. This figure doesn't represent all voters likely to vote, just those eligible to vote.
In late September, an analysis by Reuters and research firm Ipsos of data culled from 20,000 voter interviews found that those lacking proper ID were less likely to vote anyway, "regardless of state law changes."
Among those who said they were "certain to vote," only 1 percent said they did not have proper ID while another 1 percent said they were uncertain whether they had the proper ID.
The analysis also found that those who lack valid photo ID tended to be young people, those without college educations, Hispanics and the poor.
State figures also can be hard to nail down. In Pennsylvania, nearly 760,000 registered voters, or 9.2 percent of the state's 8.2 million voter base, don't own state-issued ID cards, according to an analysis of state records by the Philadelphia Inquirer. State officials, on the other hand, place this number at between 80,000 and 90,000.
In Indiana and Georgia, states with the earliest versions of photo ID laws, about 1,300 provisional votes were discarded in the 2008 general election, later analysis has revealed.
As for the potential effect on the election, one analysis by Nate Silver at the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog estimates they could decrease voter turnout anywhere between 0.8 and 2.4 percent. It doesn't sound like a very wide margin, but it all depends on the electoral landscape.
"We don't know exactly how much these news laws will affect turnout or skew turnout in favor of Republicans," said Hasen, author of the recently released The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown. "But there's no question that in a very close election, they could be enough to make a difference in the outcome."
When did voter ID laws get passed 2014 and which states have the strictest ones?
The first such law was passed as early as 2003, but momentum has picked up in recent years. In 2011 alone, legislators in 34 states introduced bills requiring voters show photo ID 2014 14 of those states already had existing voter ID laws but lawmakers sought to toughen statutes, mainly to require proof of photo identification.
The National Conference of State Legislatures has a helpful breakdown of states' voter ID laws and how they vary.
Indiana, Georgia, Tennessee, Kansas and Pennsylvania have the toughest versions. These states won't allow voters to cast a regular ballot without first showing valid photo ID. Other states with photo ID laws offer some more flexibility by providing voters with several alternatives.
What happens if a voter can't show valid photo ID in these states?
These voters are entitled to a provisional ballot. To ensure their votes count, however, they must produce the mandatory ID within a certain time frame and affirm in person or writing they are the same individual who filled out a temporary ballot on Election Day. The time limits vary: They range anywhere from up to three days after the election (Georgia) to noon the Monday after the election (Indiana).
Ohio is now embroiled in a last-minute legal scuffle over provisional ballot procedures. Since 2006, if Ohio voters don't show some kind of ID at the polls, they fill out a provisional ballot and have 10 days to bring ID, in person, to the board of elections. The law states that an election official fills out the provisional ballot affirmation indicating what kind of ID, if any, a voter shows. On Friday, Nov. 2, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted issued a directive to election boards saying voters themselves 2014 and not election officials 2014 must record the ID information.
Voting rights advocates have asked a federal district judge for a clarification on the procedure. The judge says he'll issue one before the 10-day period after the election elapses. Husted's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Are there any exceptions to the photo ID requirement?
Yes. Indigency or religious objections to being photographed. But these exceptions don't automatically grant a voter the ability to cast a regular ballot: In Pennsylvania and Indiana, voters will be given a provisional ballot and must sign an affidavit for their exemption within the given time frame. For a more specific breakdown of all exceptions, see this state-by-state summary.
Why is the Justice Department getting involved in some cases?
Because of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires that states with a history of discrimination receive preclearance before making changes to voting laws. Texas and South Carolina passed strict photo ID laws in 2011 but were refused preclearance by the DOJ, which argued that these laws could suppress turnout among minority voters. Texas went to court seeking judicial preclearance from a federal district court; in August, a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the law. South Carolina has presented arguments before the same court.
South Carolina also requested judicial preclearance. On Oct. 10, a separate three-judge panel cleared the law, stating that it satisfies Section 5 due largely to its "reasonable impediment provision," which permits voters with registration cards to cast a provisional ballot if they provide a reason for being unable to procure photo ID. However, the law cannot take effect until 2013, wrote Judge Brett Kavanaugh, since there's uncertainty as to whether it can be "properly implemented in time for the 2012 elections."
What about challenges to the laws?
On Aug. 15, a Pennsylvania judge shot down an attempt to attempt to block the state's voter ID law. The plaintiffs appealed. On Sept. 18, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, by a 4-2 vote, vacated the judge's order and returned the case for further review. The justices asked the trial judge to assess whether voters could obtain state-issued photo ID without difficulty in the short time remaining before the November general election. If the judge could not be convinced voters wouldn't be disenfranchised, the justices wrote, the law should be temporarily blocked.
In an Oct. 2 ruling, Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson did just that. He wrote that he was "not still convinced" that voters yet to obtain photo ID wouldn't be disenfranchised as a result of the new law. He blocked it from taking effect, but only for the upcoming November 6 election. Additionally, the judge's ruling still permits Pennsylvania election officials to request photo ID from registered voters this election, just not prevent anyone from casting a regular ballot if they're unable to produce one.
As we've reported, other judges have also ruled in favor of other states' voter ID laws. Here's a rundown of the rulings.
The DOJ is also investigating many of the states' laws, including Pennsylvania's photo ID law. As first reported by Talking Points Memo, the DOJ's Civil Rights Division sent the state's chief election official a letter Monday afternoon requesting 16 separate items, including the state's complete voter registration list, any documents supporting the governor's prior assurance that "99 percent" of the state's eligible voters already have acceptable photo ID, any papers to prove the state is prepared to provide registered voters with ID cards free of charge upon oath or affirmation, and any studies that inform state officials of the "demographic characteristics" of residents who lack valid voter ID.
The DOJ letter states it needs these documents within 30 days to evaluate the state's compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which forbids voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.
Tennessee saw a fight over whether library cards with photos were an acceptable form ID under the state's new law. Just last week, the Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed that voters can cast regular ballots using the free library cards.
Have any states attempted to enact strict voter ID laws but so far been unsuccessful?
Yes. In Wisconsin, two judges have blocked enforcement of the state's photo ID law. The state attorney general has asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to intervene and reinstate the law before the November election. Meantime, Democratic governors in Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire and North Carolina have vetoed strict photo ID bills passed by their Republican-led legislatures last year.
In New Hampshire, however, the state legislature overrode the governor's veto. In September, the Justice Department cleared the law, required since parts of the state are covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Voters in New Hampshire who cannot produce a valid photo ID in the upcoming November election will still be permitted to vote after signing a challenged voter affidavit. But that's not all: these voters will be sent verification letters from the Secretary of State to confirm they voted. If they don't respond in writing within 90 days, the state attorney general will pursue an investigation into voter fraud.
Are there other voter ID laws in effect that ask for but don't necessarily require photo ID?
Yes. In these so-called "non-strict photo ID states" 2014 Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Idaho, South Dakota and Hawaii 2014 individuals are requested to show photo ID but can still vote if they don't have one. Instead, they may be asked to sign affidavits affirming their identity or provide a signature that will be compared with those in registration records.
Why has there been such a recent surge in voter ID legislation around the country? This report by NYU's Brennan Center for Justice cites primarily big Republican gains in the 2010 midterms which turned voter ID laws into a "major legislative priority." Aside from Rhode Island, all voter ID legislation has been introduced by Republican-majority legislatures.
News21 also has this report on the close affiliation between the bills' sponsors and the conservative nonprofit group, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
Republican figures have championed such laws. For instance, Mike Turzai, majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, recently praised the state's legislative accomplishments at a Republican State Committee meeting last month. "Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done," he said.
A spokesman for Turzai, Steve Miskin, told ProPublica that Turzai was "mischaracterized" by the press. "For the first time in many years, you're going to have a relatively level playing field in the presidential elections" as the result of these new laws," Miskin said. "With all things equal, a Republican presidential nominee in Pennsylvania has a chance."
Correction August 20, 2012: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated "voting law advocates contend these laws disproportionately affect elderly, minority and low-income groups that tend to vote Democratic." It's voting law opponents who make that contention.
Correction July 24, 2012: An earlier version of this story said Texas went to federal court to challenge the DOJ's denial of preclearance. In fact, Texas filed a lawsuit seeking preclearance from the federal district court two months before the DOJ announced its decision. Also, some states require a government-issued photo that does not have to come from the federal government as first detailed.
Clarification Sept. 25, 2012: This post has been clarified to reflect details about who was discouraged from voting under a poll tax.
Correction Oct. 4, 2012: An earlier version of this story stated that New Hampshire was unsuccessful in enacting a voter ID law. In fact, its legislature overrode the governor's veto and the law is now in place in the state. daily newsletter
At this nation’s founding, Thomas Jefferson was very specific that the reason for the Establishment Clause in the 1stAmendment was to prevent Christians from exerting their will on the young nation’s government, and to the Founding Fathers’ credit, their insistence on a secular government served this nation’s people well for 227 years. Over the past thirty years, since Republican demigod Ronald Reagan aligned himself with a Christian movement known as Dominionism and gave them the keys to government, the religious right plotted to impose theocracy on the people by demolishing the Constitution. Yesterday, Dominionists on the Supreme Court all but eliminated the last vestige of the separation and Establishment Clause and setup Christianity as a government institution the five conservatives on the Court justified as “tradition.” The only tradition remotely related to the High Court’s ruling was eradicating the tradition of America with a secular government set out by the Founding Fathers and Constitution’s Framers, and created the opening Christian Dominionists cheered as they prepare for their impending Christian government.
When Americans in the near future look back and wonder how, why, and when their democracy was lost to theocracy, and the Constitution replaced with the bible, they can look back at the Court’s ruling as a pivotal moment, not the deciding moment, in democracy’s demise but a very significant one all the same. The Court’s decision is another advancement of Dominionist theology that over the past five years took advantage of dirty racists’ hatred of Barack Obama to set about culminating a thirty-year crusade to establish a Christian nation. All the while, most on the left demurred and counseled those warning of government by religion to “find common ground and dialogue with the religious right and Dominionists” about how to move forward “together” to save America. There is no such thing as common ground with evangelical extremists or Dominionists, or any chance of saving America as a secular nation after the Supreme Court ruled in The Town of Greece v. Galloway. The Christian majority ruled that opening government meetings with blatantly sectarian (Christian) prayers is constitutional, and that separation between church and state is a myth.
Writing for the Supreme Court’s Christian majority, Anthony Kennedy said “since the framing of the Constitution, legislativeprayer lends gravity to public business, reminds lawmakers to transcend petty differences in pursuit of a higher purpose, and expresses a common aspiration to a just and peaceful society.” Kennedy’s pathetic ignorance of the Separation Clause was evidenced by his opinion that there were “traditional ties between religion and government that date back to the nation’s earliest days,” regardless of the Founders’ intent there were never to be any ties between religion and government. Kennedy also abandoned earlier rulings that prayers at government meetings were to be nonsectarian saying, “to hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force legislatures that ‘sponsor prayers’ to involve government in religious matters” to a far greater degree than the town’s current practice of scheduling exclusively Christian prayers in advance.
The case only went to the High Court because the Town of Greece started its public meetings with a prayer from “a chaplain of the month” who was always a Christian and used distinctly Christian sectarian language such as “the saving sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross,” “your son Jesus Christ,” and “our lord and savior Jesus Christ” to note just a sampling of all prayers at public meetings. Justice Elena Kagan, in writing for the minority, said “No one can fairly read the prayers from Greece’s town meetings as anything other than explicitly Christian, constantly and exclusively so.” The Dominionist majority opinion said that is what makes the government meeting prayers so brilliantly constitutional; they are explicitly, constantly, and exclusively Christian as was Founders intent as an American tradition.
Kennedy also wrote that Christian prayers at government meetings “reflect the values long part of the nation’s heritage” putting the full force and weight of the nation’s highest court behind evangelical extremists’ assertions that America was founded, by design of the Constitution’s Framers, as a Christian nation governed by the Christian bible. It is highly probable that Kennedy subscribes to the David Barton revisionist history, and Republican evangelicals absurd assertion, that god founded America as a Christian nation at the precise moment he delivered his handwritten copy of the Constitution to the Founding Fathers. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the rest of the secularists who founded this nation would take exception to Kennedy’s opinion for the Christian majority. A constitutional law professor at the University of California at Irvine, Erwin Chemerinsky, said that the ruling “allows cities to be more visibly aligned with a particular (Christian) religion than ever before,” and that the Dominionist ruling “is a significant further erosion of the wall separating church and state;” a separation evangelical extremists claim, and the Dominionist court just confirmed, is non-existent. Thomas Jefferson would vehemently disagree.
This Court’s gift to Dominionists and the religious right is another direct assault on the Founders’ intent that America is a secular nation and that government cannot give special privileges, or establish any sectarian religious belief. Just three days ago it was reported here that an Alabama Supreme Court Justice stated the First Amendment only applies to Christians, and the High Court is set to rule on whether “exercise of religion” is the death knell of the 14th Amendment. Last week at a Republican candidate forum to represent Iowa in the U.S. Senate, the event hosted by the Family Leader enlisted four candidates who declared their unwavering support for America ruled by biblical law, including confirming only prospective jurists who would rule according to biblical principles.
In states, primarily southern bible-belt states, Republicans blatantly flaunt the Establishment and Separation Clause by stealing money for public schools and giving it to private Christian schools. In many of the same states, bible creationism is taught as established science and science is castigated as an assault on religion and a liberal plot to indoctrinate students. Every year across America Christian preachers video-tape themselves campaigning for Republicans from the pulpit and send the tapes to the Internal Revenue Service daring them to revoke their tax-exempt status with the express purpose of going before the Dominionist Court to sanction the IRS for violating church religious liberty. All of the Christian Dominionists, and many are not evangelical extremists, have the same intent of enticing the government to challenge their actions in court so the Dominionist Supreme Court will rule taxpayer money for private religious instruction, teaching the bible as science, holding teacher-led Christian prayers, and campaigning from the pulpit is constitutional.
When will Dominionists and evangelical extremists stop their crusade to completely shred the Constitution and replace it with a bible? If one listens to the chorus on the left cheering the religious right’s demise and claiming America as a secular nation has never been safer, evangelical extremists and Dominionists pose no threat whatsoever even as a constitutional law professor said yesterday’s ruling “is a significant further erosion of the wall separating church and state.” But what does a constitutional law professor know that pie-in-the-sky liberals do not because they seek “common ground with religious right extremists and Dominionists” about how to save America. Too late.
In Plato's Republic, Socrates tells the famous Allegory of the Cave in which enlightenment/knowledge of the truth is found by removal from society--leaving the cave. This begins a tradition in Western philosophy in which social criticism begins by distancing one's self from the society or group or practice being questioned. This method continues to this day: In the influential A Theory of Justice, John Rawls begins his famous defense liberal democracy (and a strong social welfare state) by a thought experiment in which a society is designed by imagining an "original position" in which one doesn't know what kind of life one will have. Likewise, Juergan Habermas posits an "ideal speech situation" in which one can hammer out norms for society.
But is this "critique through distance" the way to go?
With this kind of backround, is it any wonder Western philosophy and philosophers (including social and political philosophers) have acquired a reputation for being "out of touch?" In a parody of the Allegory of the Cave, Sophocles' [oops! Aristophanes!] play The Clouds depicts Socrates dropping "pearls of wisdom" from a basket suspended in mid-air.
In A Company of Critics, political philosopher Michael Walzer advances an alternative: connected critics, public intellectuals and other social critics who do not dwell in ivory towers, do not swing suspended from the clouds, do not inhabit ideal speech situations or original positions. They remain in the cave. They render critiques of their society, or reference group as fully committed members of said group. They are internal critics.
Since Walzer is Jewish, it is not surprising that he finds the origin of the tradition of connected social critic, not in ancient Athens, but ancient Israel (and Judah). The Israelite prophets of the Bible are, in Jewish and Christian belief, more than social critics, but social criticism is much of what they do. And though they render critiques of Israel's ancient near eastern neighbors, the major focus of their critiques is Israel (and the divided kingdom of Israel and Judah) herself. The prophets make their criticisms not from outside, but as Israelites, as Jews! The prophets illustrate a major feature of connected social critics: the norms by which they judge are not drawn from abstract thought experiments, but from the shared norms of the tradition under judgment. The prophets reach behind current Israelite (or Judean) practice to the norms of Torah that all claim to honor and ask why they are NOT being honored.
Similarly, in Prague in 1968, during the "Prague Spring" of "Socialism with a Human Face," the reform movement within modern European Communism, a popular graffiti motto--especially after the Soviet tanks rolled in to crush the reform--was "Lenin, come back! Stalin has gone mad!" There is no appeal to capitalism or the West and no appeal to a thought experiment for norms alien to the tradition. The power, the leverage, of the anonymous critique comes from its appeal behind Stalin to Lenin.
Internal critics, connected social critics, revise and reshape shared norms by pointing out contradictions and tensions with other norms. Thus, abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrision or Frederick Douglass or the Grimke sisters, argued against slavery in two ways: with religious arguments drawn from the Christian faith that is given at least lip service by most of the USA (though in a very different fashion from the way their opponents defended slavery by use of the Bible), and with the ideals of democracy drawn from the Enlightenment--going behind the Constitution (which Garrison famously burned one 4th of July) to the Declaration of Independence. The suffragists did the same: Mary Wollenstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women models the kind of arguments made by Enlightenment philosophers Locke and Rousseau. Likewise, Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Declaration of Sentiments for women's rights deliberately echoed Jefferson's wording in The Declaration of Independence. 100 years later, at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't make his argument for racial equality by pointing out the flaws in American democracy, but by asking Americans to "live out their creed that all men[sic] are created equal."
The connected critic does not believe that any society is so far gone that there is nothing valid at all in its moral tradition. S/he begins in the middle of a conversation or an argument and pushes further. Think of the moral heroes of the 20th and 21st C: Gandhi (appealing to British legal tradition and to Christian theology in his arguments with the British, to shared experiences as Indians for his arguments against division between Hindu and Muslim, and to Hindu norms in criticizing the Hindu caste system and especially of having "untouchables"), Camus (criticizing the French conduct in Algeria as a Frenchman), Gloria Steinem, Harvey Milk, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, Barbara Jordan, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Cornel West. The amazing Malala Youfsazi would never have threatened the Taliban as a Western champion of the education of girls and women. She is a threat because she speaks and writes as a fellow Pakistani and Muslim!
Although Walzer mainly considers public intellectuals, I would argue that a much broader public can practice connected social criticism. Indeed, in my view, Daily Kos is a forum for such connected social criticism. The staff and the volunteer diarists give progressive critiques of U.S. politics and society speakingas Americans and criticize the Democratic Party as Democrats. Far from leading to a boring uniformity (Luntz-like talking points for progressive Dems?), there are fierce fights at DKos. Why? Because, as the Marxist-turned-conservative-Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues, traditions, including moral traditions, are "arguments over time" in part about what does or does not belong in the tradition. Yes, some of the fights are personality driven and some are over policy technicalities and approaches, but many are overprinciples and norms. What constitutes a "better Democrat?" What direction should the Democratic Party take? For what does the Party stand? What changes constitute tactical and strategic moves, adjustments to changing contexts, and what changes embody betrayals, instead? Those are arguments worth having and they are conducted not by fleeing the cave or finding an original position, but by remaining in the cave, i.e., by committed American citizens and Democratic partisans.
I end this diary of praise toward connected social critics with a question: Is Pope Francis a connected critic? Possibly. We usually think of someone on the margins of influence and power, not at the pinnacle of power in his/her world. If someone asked me to name Catholic connected critics, I'd think more readily of Dorothy Day, the Berrigan brothers, Thomas Merton, or the Nuns on the Bus. Usually, a critic who comes to power is tamed, but this needn't be the case. Francis seems more radical as pope than when he was a bishop in Argentina. Yet he also illustrates the fact that a connected critic may be liberal or even radical at some points and defend the conservative view of the tradition at others.
How is he able to get those of us who are not Catholic (including your diarist, a liberal, Anabaptist-type Baptist) to take notice? Why do we listen and read his words with interest--taking him seriously in both our agreements and dissents? In part, I suspect, it's because we realize that he may have more influence than any other religious or moral leader, because of the huge size and global reach of the Catholic Church. But it is also because Francis, in typical Catholic fashion, appeals also to "people of good will and reason," to shared norms NOT dependent on holding all (any?) Catholic doctrinal convictions.
And THAT illustrates the need, especially in our global society, of the connected critic to be cross-cultural, to know enough of views outside her or his own to be able to communicate beyond narrow borders--not by speaking a "moral Esperanto" but by finding shared common ground in overlapping traditions. It helps that, today as perhaps never before, most of us identify with more than one "community of reference" and have been exposed to and influenced by persons and ideas beyond our primary (religious--or a-religious, racial/ethnic/linguistic, national, professional, etc.) community of convictions.
Let the conversations--and arguments--continue.
ORIGINALLY POSTED TO SOUTHERNLEVELLER ON SUN DEC 01, 2013 AT 05:32 PM PST.
