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One week before a Pennsylvania court judge upheld that state’s controversial Voter ID law by concluding the measure’s impact was “neutral and nondiscriminatory,” critics of that law released a disturbing study documenting the law’s discriminatory impact on voters in Philadelphia.

Today’s ruling by PA Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson rejecting a request for an injunction blocking implementation of the Voter ID law in November’s presidential election casually dismissed evidence that the measure would adversely impact the elderly, infirmed, college students and racial minorities.

Yet, a geographic analysis of voter data in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s largest city, concluded that the state’s “new strict photo ID requirement may be in effect a racially discriminatory voting procedure…African-American and Latino communities are disproportionately affected by the Voter ID law…”

That analysis, prepared for Stephanie Singer, chair of Philadelphia’s three elections supervising City Commissioners, detailed how areas around Philadelphia’s major universities, like the University of Pennsylvania and in heavily low-income/minority neighborhoods, contained the largest percentages of persons now rendered ineligible to vote under the Voter ID law.

“This law has a racial impact,” Singer said about the ID law formally known as Act 18.

Judge Robert Simpson: The smiley white face of Jim Crow and legalized voter suppression in Pennsylvania

We’ve all heard it said by our teachers when we were in school, we’ve all heard it said by politicians, including presidents: “Democracies don’t start wars.”

And yet we have had the decades-long American war on Vietnam, the Reagan invasion of Grenada, the LBJ invasion of the Dominican Republic, the George H.W. Bush invasion of Panama, the G.W. Bush back-to-back invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and now we have President Obama talking about launching an unprovoked war on Iran.

Is the much touted axiom wrong?

I don’t think so. I believe that in a democracy, where the will of the people is paramount, it would be very unlikely to have a country start a war. People generally don’t like war. They need to feel truly threatened or even under attack before they will accept the idea of their or anyone’s fathers, husbands, brothers and sons (and now mothers, wives, daughters and sisters) being marched off to face the horrors of war.

Clearly the reason we have seen the US starting so many wars is that the US is and has not for a very long time been anything approaching a democracy.

Founder James Madison: 'Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded'
 

Democracy in the US is a purely formalistic thing. People get to vote once every two and four years to chose from a narrow list of pre-selected candidates approved by the real rulers of the country, who are the wealthy owners of the large business interests, many of which prosper when there’s a war on, and many more of which are happy to have periodic wars, or the threat of wars, to keep people in line and willing to tolerate the kind of abuse that is typically heaped on the average working person: financially starved school districts, starvation-level welfare grants, no public health system, rusting bridges, pot-holed roads, almost no public transit, and falling real wages, etc.

This article first appeared on the website of PressTV.
 

The Obama re-election campaign and the Democratic Party and their backers, like the organization MoveOn, are bitterly decrying the flood of corporate money going to his opponent, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who is out-fund-raising the president by an ever-increasing amount.

But there is a hollow sound to the president’s whining. Back in 2008, Obama, who had earlier said he opposed corporate funding and had promised to run his campaign using public funds only, in an agreement with his then opponent, Republican Sen. John McCain, broke that agreement and went on to accept what still remains at this point a record sum of corporate money.

By the time the 2008 election was held, Obama’s campaign had collected and spent a staggering $745 million. McCain, who had been a leader in the effort to limit corporate campaign spending, stuck with government funding and thus spent “only” $126 million on his losing general election campaign — the amount that Obama would have also been limited to had he not “opted out” of his earlier promise to use only government funds to run for the nation’s top office.

It's not just Romney. Both Obama and Romney are deeply in hock to Corporate America

This article was originally written for the website of PressTV
 

We Americans are taught it in school. The propaganda put out by Voice of America repeats the idea ad nauseum around the globe. Politicians refer to it in every campaign speech with the same fervor that they claim to be running for office in response to God’s call: America is a model of democracy for the whole world.

But what kind of democracy is it really that we have here?

Forget that only half of eligible voters typically vote in quadrennial presidential elections (less than 30% in so-called “off-year” elections for members of the House and a third of the Senate, and less than 25% in municipal and state elections). Forget that the government is increasingly trampling on the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, with a burgeoning surveillance program and a growing militarization of the police.

The US government doesn’t even do what the majority of the citizens want. In fact, these days it flat out ignores what we the people want.

Consider the polls, and what they show public sentiment to be on key issues, and then look at what the government, composed of supposedly elected representatives and an elected president, actually does:

Darkness is falling for American democracy as a passive electorate lets elected leaders simply ignore them and their wishes, in favor of huge moneyed interests.

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett, the same conservative Republican who recently cut 70,000 from receiving their meager welfare payments in order to cut government costs, is ready to spend millions of bucks to implement a voter suppression scheme that evidence indicates is a blatant partisan measure designed to help Mitt Romney gain a presidential election victory.

Earlier this year Corbett and his confederates in Pennsylvania’s Republican-controlled legislature approved one of the nation’s most restrictive photo Voter ID measures to squash what they claimed was frequent voter fraud particularly in Democratic strongholds like Philadelphia – the state’s largest city.

However, Corbett Administration officials now admit that the fraud their Voter ID measure seeks to corral – persons falsely impersonating someone else on Election Day – is virtually non-existent in the state.

Corbett Administration officials, during a state court hearing on a lawsuit to block implementation of this Voter ID law, acknowledged they had uncovered no evidence of past impersonation fraud and found no evidence that it will occur in the 2012 presidential election.

In fact during the eight years Corbett served as Pennsylvania’s attorney general before his election to governor in 2010 he never prosecuted a single voter fraud case.

Republican-led states are setting up new Jim Crow voting obstacles in a desperate effort to win in November

Wichita — One of four Wichita museums is facing a $100,000 cutback in funding which may force its closure.  It is called “Cowtown,” a tribute to the glory days of white settler expansion and of cattle.  A distant cry is heard from the editorial board of the city’s single daily newspaper, the Wichita Eagle, which ran an opinion piece by Peter Brownlee, titled: “Why pick on Cowtown?”

But let’s consider this particular cut more closely.

The public money slashed from the museum’s budget is less than that that was paid during this election cycle as seed money by the Koch billionaires to the state Chamber of Commerce to legally buy the Kansas state government.

Those little $500 to $1000 checks forwarded by the C of C to Kansas lawmakers’ campaigns, tossed to PACs and lobbyists, and sown each year as brome seed across the tiny Topeka state house, make a better “deal.”  

Common thinking in these parts goes that if after 50 years, a museum like Cowtown cannot “make a profit” — the motivation for all human culture and history here in Kansas, and probably everywhere in the US of A — then it must close, and culture and history be damned.

(courtesy Cowtown Museum collection)

Back in 1976, I co-founded, with some Los Angeles colleagues, a feisty little alternative weekly called the L.A. Vanguard. About two months after we launched it, I got tipped off about a program by the local phone companies, Pacific Telephone and GTE, in which they had so-called “Security Departments,” composed of banks of operators, whose sole job was to provide unlisted phone numbers to inquiring government agencies, all without a warrant. As I delved into this story I learned more: these special operators (led in each case by retired FBI officials) were also providing credit information on phone customers on request, and the agencies who had instant access to all this data ranged from local police to the public library.

When we broke the story, it exploded on the Los Angeles media scene. There was a banner headline across the whole top of the Los Angeles Times front page screaming “Unlisted Numbers Given Out.” We at the L.A. Vanguard, to promote our little paper and being guerrilla journalists, announced that we were holding a protest and press conference on the sidewalk in front of the main entrance of the Pacific Telephone building in L.A., at which we’d be handing out copies of our newspaper. We were mobbed by reporters and camera crews from every media organization in the city. It was huge. Pacific Tel’s PR people realized they had to respond and invited everyone inside for an impromptu news conference at which they tried to quell the furor, but they only made it worse by having to admit the scale of the program.

Now I understand that Los Angeles, which is home to more celebrities per square foot than any other place in the world, has a thing about privacy, but this story even went national. It was simply shocking at the time to learn that the phone company would provide police and other government agencies — even the over-due books department of the library! — information about a customer’s sacred unlisted number without even requiring that they first obtain a warrant from a judge.

My investigative exposé led to hearings by the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC), at which the various government agencies were compelled to explain how they used the information they were obtaining from the phone companies and to justify their need for it, and the phone companies were forced to explain why they were so casually releasing the information, and why they were using ratepayers’ money to pay for a special group of operators to provide it. In the end there were restrictions placed by the PUC on the companies and on the number of agencies able to get access to unlisted numbers.

Today, such a story would be seen as quaint. It probably would not even be published in a major newspaper, and I doubt it would even make the first page of the Hollywood Reporter, trade publication for the film industry. Certainly no regulatory agency like the state PUC would bother to hold hearings on it.

The May 29, 1976 front page of the LA Times, picking up a scoop from a local leftist weekly

This article originally appeared on the website of PressTV

Imagine for a moment what would happen if former President George W. Bush were to give an interview on television and declare that his invasion of Iraq, and the ensuing nine years of death and mayhem that resulted from that war, had been the wrong thing to do. Imagine if he were to say of that decision, “Mistakes were made.”

Well, something equally momentous happened yesterday when Sanford I. Weill, the former CEO of Citigroup back when it was the nation’s largest bank, announced in an interview on the cable network CNBC, that banks should never have been permitted to merge with insurance companies and investment banks. Discussing the financial crisis that continues to wreak havoc in the US and the global economy, he said, “What we should probably do is go and split up investment from banking. Have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not going to be too big to fail.”

Incredibly, this shocking comment, surely as big as Bush announcing that he was wrong to invade Iraq, was buried on the business page in the New York Times. Many other major newpapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, didn’t even run the story!

Sanford Weill, it must be recalled, was the Wall Street financier who pushed the government to the wall to get banks deregulated, and to end the Depression-era law, called Glass-Steagall, that since 1933 had barred them from engaging in investment banking and in dealing in insurance.

Leading bankster Sanford Weill, who led charge to convert banks into criminal syndicates, now says it was a 'mistake'

 
Stop feeding the beast.
– Julieta Castellanos*
 

William Brownfield is a major architect in the current linkage between the failed Drug War and the War On Terror. He may succeed in making it an even greater failure in the future.

Brownfield has been Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement since January 20 of last year. Before that, he was the US ambassador to Colombia; and before that, he was the US ambassador to Venezuela, where he was notorious for taunting President Hugo Chavez.

Mr. Brownfield attended the National War College, and he speaks Spanish with a pronounced Texas accent. He reportedly considers himself a Texan — though, like George W. Bush, he was not born in Texas and has lived much of his life elsewhere. It seems being a “Texan” is a state of mind, especially vis-à-vis Latin America which has been Brownfield’s area of interest. He’s now looking to expand his war-making efforts into Africa.

William Brownfield up close and speaking in Guatemala with Guatemalan military officials behind him

It’s clear that Mr. Brownfield isn’t one of those striped pants diplomats from foggy bottom determined to keep tempers from reaching the boiling point. He doesn’t seem burdened by doubt, and he seems comfortable strategizing for war.

Regardless of party affiliation, it’s people like Brownfield who have turned the 40-year-old War On Drugs and The Global War On Terror into one all-encompassing, global war against “bad guys,” a category to be defined as the war moves “downrange.” Like grand chefs, these strategists have put the two wars into a National Security State blender and come up with what is The War Without End. American citizens were never asked if they wanted this war. It wasn’t necessary to ask — since Americans are encouraged to get lost in themselves and all the available bread and circus around them. We haven’t kept our eye on the ball and we now find ourselves the unwitting sustainers of an Orwellian state of constant war.

ThisCantBeHappening! lost a valued friend Friday night with the death, from cancer, of Alexander Cockburn, 71. Alex and his comrade-in-arms Jeffrey St. Clair at Counterpunch magazine have helped our struggling little online left alternative newspaper mightily by running most of our articles on their site when other allegedly progressive news aggregator sites have rejected stories as being too radical, or in the case of Truthout, have simply barred us from their site.

I cannot call Alex a personal friend, as I never got to know him that well, but he was an important mentor of sorts, as well as a writing inspiration. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I began working as a freelance journalist, Alex and his writing colleague James Ridgeway encouraged me to contribute articles which they sometimes ran as part their own page in the Village Voice in New York, thus sparing me having to deal with the editor and the editorial cliques at the paper, which were not particularly open to newcomers like myself.

I appreciated that Alex, despite having a lot of writing projects of his own going all the time, was always available when I would visit the Voice to discuss a story idea or deliver my copy. He was quick with an incisive comment or a suggestion for a turn of phrase, and while I’ve never developed his rapier-sharp wit, it remains something to which I continually aspire.

Alex was a scourge of the capitalist elites and their fawning apologists in the corporate media, of course, but he also played an important role as a merciless critic of those so-called progressive journalists who lost their courage, sold out or were simply wrong on an issue. If it was just a matter of disagreeing about a specific issue — say climate change, where Alex remained a skeptic — he could be courteous and respectful in his dismissal of an argument, but woe to those, like the late Christopher Hitchens, or even his own editors at the Nation magazine, whom Alex concluded had sold out their own leftist principles.

Alexander Cockburn, No R.I.P. (1941-2012)