Eleven states have enacted new laws that require a citizen to show a government-issued identification in order to vote in the coming election, and similar laws have been instituted in five other states. On its face, it may seem perfectly reasonable to require that we prove who we say we are, and most states are cleared to do so by the Supreme Court deciding in 2008 that Indiana’s ID statute to prove identity with a photograph is not unconstitutional.

But, astonishingly, in this closely orchestrated campaign that followed in the wake of the 2008 election, 180 bills have been introduced in 41 states to make it more difficult to vote. Before 2006 not one state required a photo iD.

Undeniably, the many restrictions are most likely to ensnare African Americans, Latinos and the young — groups more likely to not have such IDs. Targeting them is no accident. These groups tend to vote Democratic and were key to Barack Obama’s election in 2008. We try to avoid picking sides, but inescapably, this is a Republican campaign to skew the vote. All states with the photo ID law are Republican-controlled. Mike Turzai, the Pennsylvania GOP House majority leader let slip what’s behind the campaign, citing accomplishments: “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania: done”.

A study just published by the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and public policy think tank, estimated that 500,000 people in the states requiring photo IDs are likely to have difficulties obtaining them. “These voters live in households without vehicles and reside at least 10 miles from an ID-issuing office open more than two days a week” or “live in rural areas with dwindling public transportation options”. The Center’s widely-quoted studies have thorough debunked the professed rationale for the sudden need for photo IDs — voter fraud — as being rare to the vanishing point and absurdly ineffectual at influencing elections even if widespread. Ridiculing the threat to our elections, Stephen Colbert warned, “Folks, our democracy is under siege by an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere”.

Many of the states adopted legislation drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — a conservative advocacy organization (more here) that has quietly worked for years to re-cast state laws more to its liking. The group earned unwanted publicity when it was exposed as the author of the stand-your-ground laws adopted by half the states. As for voting laws, its founder has admitted, “Our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down”.

Whether or not you agree that voters should be more formally identified — and the movement is popular with some 70% favoring the laws in an April Fox News poll — it should be realized that the statutes are impeding voting by several million Americans who are in fact U.S. citizens. Nationwide, 11% of Americans have no government-issued photo ID, according to a 2006 study by the Brennan Center. Not everyone drives, states do not typically issue other forms of ID, and a decided minority has a passport.

What stops them from getting a photo ID in order to vote? Technically, nothing. Except in the usual case, obtaining a state issued photo ID takes time. It means standing in lines — just think motor vehicle bureau — and legislatures know that those lower on the economic scale cannot afford to take time off from work. And states enacting new requirements to hinder voting are motivated to do nothing to facilitate applicants, such as opening more driver license offices, increasing staffing or extending hours.

And if a citizen must pay to get an ID or a copy of a birth certificate in order to vote, this amounts to the return of the poll tax, which was banned by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Texas charges $22 for a copy of a birth certificate.

hands tied

The Court’s ruling made the new photo ID laws untouchable. But the Justice Department can take action in certain states under the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Its Section 5 prohibits nine states, most of them across the South, from changing voting laws without “preclearance” by Justice, owing to a history of discriminatory practices of similar intent as those being turned into law today. The law was extended in 2006 by a Republican-majority Congress and George W. Bush, yet it is Republican-controlled states that are now adopting laws to restrict voting rights.

Florida is one of those states and has imposed several encumbrances to voting, such as no registering voters on Sundays, which is a custom at black churches. The state compiled a list of 182,000 voters in the belief they were not citizens; it shrank to 2,800 upon checking. The Justice Department has sued to prevent their removal from voting roles, but Florida has not backed down, giving those individuals 90 days to prove their citizenship, even though county officials assigned to check have found that most are in fact naturalized citizens.

If the number seems inconsequential, recall Bush taking Florida in 2000 by 537 votes when the Supreme Court stopped the re-count and handed the presidency to George W. Bush.

The law signed by Republican Governor Rick Scott in May, 2011, also shortened the early voting period and required that canvassers must turn in new voter registrations within 48 hours or be fined. Faced with that threat, many groups quit registering. Then a federal judge overturned the rule as unconstitutional, but only on the last day of May of this year, by which time much damage was done. A New York Times analysis found that 81,471 fewer Floridians had registered than by the same date in 2008.

Texas is another of the states that introduced a photo ID requirement. Texas and three other states do not even accept student IDs issued by state institutions as proof of identity for voting. Students are targeted because young voters gave Obama a 34 point margin in the 2008 election.

Sparsely populated areas have no offices at which to acquire such documents. The Dallas Morning News made the point that some people would need to make a 200-mile round trip drive simply to be authorized to do what they may have been doing all their lives: vote. Attorney General Eric Holder says the cost of such effort is the equivalent of a poll tax.

In March, the Justice Department, invoking Section 5, disapproved of Texas’s government ID requirement as disproportionally affecting Latinos, who are 50% more likely to lack a driver’s license or a gun permit than are white voters. Justice estimated that 1,500,000 lack photo IDs. Texas has sued. It hopes the Supreme Court will overturn Section 5.

South Carolina’s nonwhite voters are about 20% more likely to lack motor-vehicle-department identification. Governor Nikki Haley cited their new law as one of her “signature accomplishments”. The Justice Department has denied preclearance and the state is suing Justice claiming there is not enough time to unwind their law before the election.

But elsewhere, where Justice cannot set the rules owing to the Supreme Court decision, the question is how many Americans get a photo ID. Pennsylvania, for example, reports that 758,000 lack photo cards. In Wisconsin the ACLU has filed suit and says that “blacks and Latinos are 182% and 206% more likely to lack accepted photo ID than whites”. An extremely tight election is forecast. Which way these numbers go will decide who is the next president.

The uproar over the leaks confirming the Stuxnet worm, computer malware called “Flame” and the President’s “kill list” (preceded by the WikiLeaks outpouring of State Department traffic in 2010) has given us the metaphor of the Obama government as a giant sieve. But the opposite is true. It is the most secret government in American history.

That characterization has now intensified. Out to get those who brought these reports to the American public, the Obama administration has turned loose the FBI, which The New York Times reports, is combing through the Pentagon, the National Security Agency, the CIA and the White House itself in what it calls “the most sweeping inquiries into intelligence disclosures in years”. The result has chilled the willingness of people at various agencies to meet with the press, blocking still further the public’s knowledge of what our government is up to.

Mr. Obama campaigned for the presidency denouncing the secret prisons and torture policies of his predecessor, and immediately upon taking office issued a memorandum to all departments and agencies stressing that “a democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency”. Instead, he quickly continued the covert practices of the Bush years. He may have banned torture and ordered the CIA to shut down its black sites, but he shied from his promise to close Guantanamo and left in place the CIA’s practice of secret rendition — the transfer without trial of abducted persons to other countries (viz. Leon Panetta saying, “If we render someone, it will be to a country with jurisdiction over that individual”).

Rendition begets the question of whether torture may simply have been transferred elsewhere for deniability’s sake, else why render? The administration asks for assurances from the destination country promising that a detainee will not be tortured, but the practice is entirely secret. It is significant that, according to ProPublica, “the Obama White House has invoked the states secrets privilege to block evidence that could reveal details about past renditions under Bush”. If it is hiding the malefactions of the Bush years, why should we assume the Obama administration is being truthful about its own?

Generally, under Obama, the lid of secrecy is clamped down ever more tightly. Despite the President in 2009 promoting declassification across the executive branch, some 77 million documents were stamped classified in 2010, a staggering 40% increase over the previous year. That count was hard for us to come by, as is the count of all government classified documents, because that number is — well, of course — classified.

That is the inevitable result of approximately 4.2 million Americans holding security clearances, each with some degree of authority to decide what should be made secret, and all of them, probably fearful of getting it wrong, operating under the caveat of when in doubt, classify. In 2005, the 9/11 Commission had access to thousands of classified documents. Co-chair Thomas Kean came away saying three quarters of the information they had seen should not have been classified in the first place.

Of the 4.2 million — a tally as of October 2010 compiled by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in response to a Congressional request — some 1 million have top secret clearance. Belief that this many people can be relied on to keep secrets makes obvious the absurdity of the classification system as well as any outrage over leaks. Leaks are guaranteed by such a bloated system.

But the result of everything being secret is filled with contradictions. We are not supposed to know about drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen, would you believe. That CIA program is one of the government’s most protected “secrets”, although we hear of it constantly, even to the degree of a national debate about the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American citizen in Yemen who advocated jihad. In an eerie echo of the memo in which John Yoo contrived justifications for torture when he was in the Office of Legal Counsel under George W. Bush, that same office produced a legal opinion that sanitized the al-Awlaki assassination. The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the Obama Justice Department for a copy, so far without success.

In court, the administration will not confirm or deny the existence of the program of “targeted killing” by drones. At least there is some comedy in secrecy. Is the administration worried that al Qaeda might find out that they are in the crosshairs?

So it is somewhat comic that Congress was in an uproar over leaks when New York Times correspondent David Sanger’s new book, “Confront and Conceal”, revealed the “kill list”. It wasn’t so much a leak as the vault door left wide open. If you think of a leak as the lone figure of “Deep Throat” meeting in a parking garage to spill secrets about Nixon’s Watergate, how do you square categorizing Sanger’s reporting as “leaks” when he tells us he had interviewed “three dozen of [Obama’s] current and former advisers” over a period — as he separately said in a radio interview — of 18 months. Three dozen people who thought nothing of leaking to a reporter?

Democrats have to overcome a dovish reputation, which is why Obama is suspected of selective leaking to burnish his portrait on campaign posters as decisive and ruthless when it comes to combating terrorists. Thus we are inclined to assume that Sanger had license to tell all, and we are given the ghoulish picture of no less than the President of the United States acting as judge, jury and chief executioner, sitting in the Oval Office thumbing through baseball cards to decide whom to assassinate next.

This is of a piece with Maureen Dowd reporting in her column last August that moviemakers Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal had been given high-level access to the most top-secret mission in history for a film about the killing of bin Laden, to be released — my, what coincidental timing — on October 12th of this year. This will no doubt still further reveal the methodology of the SEALs commando tactics for the benefit of our enemies worldwide (more here), but in this case, secrecy be damned: the President’s priorities are to be re-elected. As Dowd wrote, this “from an administration that has tried to throw more people in jail for leaking classified information than the Bush administration”. Actually, to correct Ms Dowd, trying to throw in jail twice the number than by all prior presidents in history combined as we’ve already documented.

So while the suspicion is rampant that the President served up classified material that stood to benefit him politically, there in prison sits the example of what happens to the rest of us: Pfc. Bradley Manning. Most of the material Manning was accused of releasing to WikiLeaks was an enormous stash of military and diplomatic traffic (the latter having the ironic and salutary effect of revealing that our diplomats are impressively savvy and of putting other countries on notice that we’ve got their number). But what probably “embarrassed” the government most was exposure of the suppressed cockpit film of a strike by helicopter “Crazyhorse 1/8” over Baghdad in 2007 that killed eight men on the ground thought to be militants, except two were reporters from Reuters. That and another film of what is referred to as the “Granai massacre” — a 2009 airstrike that killed variously 86 to 145 Afghan civilians, mostly women and children. A Reuters Freedom of Information request in 2007 for footage of the killing of their own people was denied. This is just what a secret government never wants us to know.

And this accountability and transparency is what a disaffected Bradley Manning apparently sought to correct. Whatever your view of him — traitor or hero — note that, even though not proven guilty, he was placed in solitary confinement for almost a year, a form of detention that can result in insanity, and which caused 295 academics — among them prominent American legal scholars — to sign a letter arguing that the detention conditions violated the United States Constitution. He was transferred to a medium-security jail at Fort Leavenworth.

And as this is being written comes notice that he has been barred from citing evidence at his trial intended to make his case that no serious harm was done to the United States by the release of the government documents.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com asked why the government would subject Manning to such barbaric and punishing treatment before the young private was even tried. His belief is that this is the method of the secret state. Like throwing people into Guantanamo, stripping them of habeas corpus rights and access to trial, it tells the rest of us, we should think twice before challenging what the government does, or this is what will happen to us.

Chief Justice John Roberts was against the Affordable Care Act before he was for it — its most disputed component, anyway — reported longtime court-watcher Jan Crawford of CBS. She says that not only was there another 5-4 decision in the offing, poised to strike down the health care mandate had Roberts not made his deft pirouette, but that the other three conservative justices plus Kennedy — especially Kennedy, who was “relentless” — wanted to throw out the entire law.

So what made Roberts switch (and there is evidence that he did; see sidebar later)? He clearly angered the dissenting justices — Scalia, Alito, Thomas and Kennedy — whose view of Roberts’ twists and turns were unusually insulting, saying he carried “verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists”.

The most persuasive speculation for why Roberts switched sides is that he was worried that too many 5-4 splits, with the same predictable groupings of justices, had won the Court a reputation for advancing a right-leaning political agenda, and that the Court had lost too much stature in the eyes of the public as a result. Roberts had to worry that his Court would be tarred as one of the worst ever, but more important, the Court, which has neither police force nor army to enforce its decisions, would lose the most important power it does have — its legitimacy in the eyes of the people.

line in the sand

But what he gave with one hand — allowing the government to go forward with the mandate under its 16th Amendment’s taxing power — he took with the other.

He begins his opinion (found here) with a magisterial excursion through two centuries of constitutional thought on the limits of federal power, citing the Framers of the Constitution and a number of landmark cases. “The Federal Government ‘is acknowledged by all to be one of of enumerated powers'” he quotes from 1819’s McCulloch v. Maryland and “can exercise only the powers granted to it”. He reminds us of the 10th Amendment which reads, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution…are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”. Roberts is zeroing in on Section 8 of Article I which lists the specific powers the federal government does have, one of which permits Congress only “To regulate Commerce…among the several states”, where “among” has commonly been viewed as meaning between rather than within the states.

He writes, “The Framers thus ensured that powers which ‘in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people’ were held by governments more local and more accountable than a distant federal bureaucracy” and that this arrangement “protects the liberty of the individual from arbitrary power”. And further, “Federalism secures to citizens the liberties that derive from the diffusion of sovereign power”. He even finds in the Alexandria Gazette of July 5, 1819 an article by Chief Justice John Marshall that applies to the unique and unprecedented as if he were writing about the health care mandate today: “The peculiar circumstances of the moment may render a measure more or less wise, but cannot render it more or less constitutional”.

Thus does Roberts set the stage for disallowing the mandate to slip past

the Commerce Clause, saying, “Our respect for Congress’s policy judgments thus can never extend so far as to disavow restraints on federal power that the Constitution carefully constructed.”

“Construing the Commerce Clause to permit Congress to regulate individuals precisely because they are doing nothing would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority”. It would “give Congress the same license to regulate what we do not do, fundamentally changing the relation between the citizen and the Federal government…The Framers gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it.”

overturning the past?

The question is what this tightening of the Commerce Clause will result in going forward and, even more seriously, whether it will invite a slew of challenges that seek to strike down even the most entrenched laws that took a more lenient interpretation of the statute.

A perennial bête noire for Republicans is the federal minimum wage law, which we’ll consider as an example. Republicans reliably wage war every time raising the minimum comes up in Congress. Their position is that raising the wage destroys jobs in small businesses unable to pay more, especially jobs for teenagers, who are usually hired at the minimum. The counter-argument is that any increase of low wages is immediately spent into the economy, giving it a boost, and that “wage ladders” that stratify employees typically cause businesses to raise wages of workers earning just above the minimum, improving further lives.

But it is not hard to imagine that, emboldened by the enforcement of the Commerce Clause by the Roberts court, the right of the federal government to impose a minimum wage on all 50 states will be an early challenge, calling it a violation of the 10th Amendment, quoted above. Never mind that the law has been on the books for almost 75 years (the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938). Never mind that 90% of other countries have such a law. Never mind that our minimum, at $7.25 an hour, is well below the poverty level. Never mind that, although states are free to pass their own minimum wage law — and 18 states have rates higher than the federal level out of concern for poverty — there are the rest of the states which might leave it at no law at all, giving employers the freedom to pay however little they want to those who would become increasingly desperate Americans.

Liberals may be jubilant about the Court’s allowing the key funding provision to go forward, but the Court’s strong decision in behalf of state sovereignty could lead to the dismantling of a number of federal laws of importance to the United States as a nation.

For why the economy remains becalmed in the doldrums, the answer is found in the Federal Reserve’s triennial “Survey of Consumer Finances” issued in mid-June. It covers the period 2007-2010, bridging the 2008 crash, and reports that the median family income for Americans fell 7.7% and the mean (or average) income 11%. Worse still, the median net worth of families fell a stunning 38.8%; the mean 14.7%.

Some interpretation is in order: The median is the midpoint of all families — half earned more, half earned less. That the average income loss was higher says that the upper income groups lost more income, and indeed the report says that the loss was “most pronounced in the top 10%”. But for net worth, the reverse is true, and to a much greater degree. Net worth of most Americans is primarily the value of their houses –far less so for the wealthy — and housing values collapsed.

Many economists insist that a lack of demand is what is holding the economy back and the Fed study backs up their claim. People have less to spend and are wary of spending what they have. What’s more, they can’t even borrow to take advantage of record low interest rates, because banks won’t lend. Worried that any day they might lose their job, with mortgages under water, Americans aren’t buying. With weak demand for their products, the major corporations are not using their trillions in accumulated profits to hire workers. In addition, a host of uncertainties — Europe, the year-end tax chaos, unsettled regulation — has them waiting on the sidelines.

Between 1980 and 2007, the decades leading up to the Fed study, the real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) income of the median American family rose 22% (it rose sevenfold for the top .01%). David Cay Johnston, an investigative journalist specializing in taxes, found that, while the national economy more than doubled during those years, the average income for most Americans declined. The standard of living rose only because women entered the workforce in the millions. His stunning discovery is that the peak income year for the bottom 90% was 40 years ago, 1973, when the real income of the average taxpayer was $33,000, $4,000 more than in 2005.

Along came the crash of 2008 to make matters decidedly worse, as the Fed reports.

The causes are many. Since 1990 we have shipped 12 million manufacturing jobs overseas, and despite some resurgence, the great majority are not coming back, says former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, the consensus view. This past decade was the worst. Adam Davidson, writing in The Atlantic, notes that, “In the 10 years ending in 2009, [U.S.] factories shed workers so fast that they erased almost all the gains of the previous 70 years; roughly one out of every three manufacturing jobs — about 6 million in total — disappeared.”

Unions in the private sector have been in long decline, partly because of the manufacturing exodus. Gone from the rest of the economy are union jobs such as those for longtime workers at General Motors making $56 an hour, including benefits. Before moving overseas, industry long ago began a migration south to states with right to work laws and few union strongholds. Steven Rattner, who oversaw the auto industry bailout, cites the example of Volkswagen setting up in Chattanooga, TN, with 2,000 new hires — but at starting pay of $14.50 an hour.

In the two years after the Wall Street meltdown, large American corporations slashed U.S. payrolls by a net of 500,000 jobs while they hired 729,000 overseas, according to an article in The Week. Harold Meyerson, “in The American Prospect laments that…

Our corporations don’t need us anymore. Half their revenues come from abroad. Their products, increasingly, come from abroad as well…With each passing year, and even more so during the recession, America’s leading corporations grow more and more decoupled from the American economy. Their interests grow increasingly detached from those of our workers, our consumers — and our economic future.

An example is Apple. Time Magazine quoted an Apple executive saying early this year “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems”. Well, maybe not, but a New York Times exposé three months later documented how Apple — like Google, like G.E., like others — avoids paying taxes worldwide ($3.3 billion on income of $34.2 billion in 2011), even in its home state. In a Foreign Policy article, former trade negotiator Clyde Prestowitz (who remembers helping Steve Jobs back in the 80s when he was trying to break into Japan) wrote:

I’ll bet that the guy who says Apple has no obligation to help Uncle Sam does strongly believe that Uncle Sam has an obligation to stop foreign pirating of Apple’s intellectual property and to maintain the deployments of the U.S. Seventh Fleet and of the 100,000 U.S. troops in the Asia-Pacific region that make it safe for Apple to use supply chains that stretch through a number of countries [with] long standing and bitter animosities.

Nevertheless, these extra-national corporations make this downturn different from any other — the Great Depression included — because America’s highly automated multinationals that job out work to other countries can continue to profit without rehiring large numbers of American workers.

Waves of outsourcing of service jobs to foreign companies have eaten away another chunk of American jobs, first at low levels such as call centers, but with the Internet came the realization that anything that could be delivered via a wire could be done elsewhere where white collar workers were far cheaper, so accountants, paralegals, software developers, even radiologists saw their jobs exported. The Economist reminds us that “China and India between them have around 2.5 billion people, so the potential for further offshoring from the rich world is immense”.

Such have been and will be the ravages of globalization. It was inevitable and easily foreseen. Clearly trade between nations of vastly different living standards would drive all toward a common level. Free trade was extolled for improving life for millions, but millions here are paying a brutish price.

Making it worse, more and more jobs have been turned over to machines. They are accurate, do not require sleep, and, once the capital investment is recouped, more economical than even those $14.50 an hour auto plant workers. The president described it in his Kansas speech:

Steel mills that needed 1,000 employees are now able to do the same work with 100 employees, so layoffs too often became permanent, not just a temporary part of the business cycle.

The general case is that workers who are able to find jobs are returning to the workforce at pay much less than what they once earned. That fits what Gallup found a year ago — that in the preceding two years Americans earning more than $90,000 a year increased their household spending by 16%, but for all other Americans spending was flat. Moody’s Analytics reported last September that 37% of all spending was by the top 5% of earners. Turned around, that means that almost the entirety of the population accounted for only 63% of the spending. An economy will remain perpetually stalled if its recovery relies on the ability of only the affluent to spend. Reich said it clearly: “The economy cannot possibly get out of its current doldrums without a strategy to revive the purchasing power of America’s vast middle class”.