Friday, September 7, 2012

A democracy requires its citizens to participate in the process. When people see there is no point, they stop. That, of course, leaves a vacuum that is eagerly filled by the ruthless and unprincipled, who caused the problem in the first place

When Israel is Concerned,
Half = Two-Thirds

The Democrats’ Jerusalem Arithmetic

by ALISON WEIR

Not often is a political fix so public.


The Democratic committee that develops the party’s campaign platform recently failed to include the apparently obligatory “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel” pronouncement.


This statement, which is largely untrue and has a number of problems, had been part of previous platforms. Its omission caused an immense brouhaha, and party bigwigs decided that the ongoing Democratic National Convention needed to reinsert it.


The means was to be an amendment introduced on the convention floor, which required a two-thirds affirmative vote by delegates.


The bizarre sequence of events that followed was and remains in public view, thanks to C-span and YouTube videos (e.g. http://youtu.be/bjdj6K3yoR8 ). These clips are hilarious to view – if one likes tragicomedy.


The videos begin with Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, the handpicked chairman of the convention, standing at the podium.


Villaraigosa calls on the Chair of the Platform Drafting Committee, former Ohio governor Ted Strickland. Strickland moves that the rules be suspended to permit an amendment to the platform.


This passes quickly, as many people clearly have no idea what’s going on. Strickland then introduces the required amendment, and it is immediately seconded.


Villaraigosa then says, in the normal Roberts Rules of Order rite: “Is there any further discussion. Hearing none, the matter requires a two-thirds vote in the affirmative. All those delegates in favor say “aye.”


There is a large “aye” vote.



He then says, “All those delegates opposed say no.”


There is a “no” vote that is at least as loud, perhaps a touch louder.


Villaraigosa then says, “In the opinion of the…” He suddenly stops, then says, “Let me do that again.”


Things are going wrong and Villaraigosa has no idea what to do. The motion has just been defeated, since it requires a two-thirds vote and it has clearly failed to get this. Nevertheless, Villaraigosa soldiers on.


“All of those delegates,” he begins, in the tones of a school master admonishing recalcitrant students, “in favor say ‘aye.”


There is a large “aye” vote.


Villaraigosa then says, “All those opposed say ‘no.’”


There is an equally large “no” vote.


Villaraigosa looks like a deer caught in the headlights. He gazes straight ahead and then from side to side, a foolish half smile fleetingly on his face. He starts to say, “I, um… I guess…” He gives his head a slight shake and looks behind him.


A woman official can be heard quietly telling him, “You’ve got to let them do what they’re gonna do.”


Villaraigosa announces, “I’ll do that one more time.”


Keep in mind that the amendment has already twice failed the two-thirds test. According to all rules of procedure the amendment has been rejected. Nevertheless, Villaraigosa says again, “All those delegates in favor say ‘aye.’”


There is a large “aye” vote.


Villaraigosa says: “All those delegates opposed say ‘no.’”


There is an equally large (in fact, it may be a slightly larger) “no” vote. The amendment has now been defeated three times. At minimum, half the delegates have rejected it.


Is Villaraigosa going to repeat this vote a fourth time… possibly all night until they finally get it right?


No. Perhaps someone has finally signaled to him to ignore the vote and simply read his lines. Or maybe he has figured this out for himself. By now, he has probably realized that his chances of being the next Obama have slipped through his fingers, thanks to uppity delegates who won’t get with the program.


He decrees: “In the opinion of the Chair, two thirds have voted in the affirmative [boos can be heard] and the platform has been amended as shown on the screen.” He thanks Strickland for his service.


Meanwhile, the boos increase in volume and begin to sweep the convention, while those in favor of the fix that just went through on national TV cheer loudly – apparently unconcerned that clear principles of fairness and proper procedure have just been flushed, in full public view, down the Democratic toilet, the alleged “people’s” party.


Some people might wonder why so many delegates went against their leaders’ wishes, creating what Republican spinmeisters are now casting as an “embarrassing” spectacle, suggesting that the Democratic Party contains numerous political extremists.


In point of fact, however, presidents from both parties, including George W. Bush, have sensibly opposed locating the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, which Israel fanatics have long pushed.


There are a number of problems with the statement.


First of all, it’s inaccurate.


Despite the fact that Israel claims Jerusalem as its capital and has continued its decades-long expulsion of the Christians and Muslims who inhabited it for centuries, international law decrees that much of Jerusalem is occupied Palestinian land. (And many people, with substantial justification, consider that all of it is). Virtually all countries, including the U.S., locate their embassies in Tel Aviv.


Even the original 1947 UN partition recommendation, which Israel claims (fraudulently) as the legal foundation for its creation as a nation-state, called for Jerusalem to be an international city.


Second, it is widely understood that the wrong move concerning Jerusalem by the U.S. government would significantly reduce the chances of a peaceful settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, thus costing even more lives, while substantially increasing hostility toward the United States, causing considerable damage to both America’s security and economy.


Yet, all this seems to matter little to political operatives from both parties, who are either Israel partisans themselves or are focused on taking positions that will not alienate campaign donors.


Despite this omission on Jerusalem, many observers would have expected Israel partisans to have been extremely pleased with the Democratic platform. According to one of its Israel-partisan drafters, Robert Wexler, the platform was “100 percent pro-Israel.”


The platform writers, Wexler explained, simply wanted to especially focus on Israel’s (alleged) security needs concerning Iran.


In fact, a comparison with the Republican platform’s statements on Israel by the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs shows the Democratic platform to be for all intents and purposes identical. This is not surprising, given that Israelists dominate both parties.


This was not, however, good enough. According to the UK Guardian, there was “a mounting clamour from Jewish donors and pro-Israel groups [who] objected to the dropping of a line supporting Jerusalem as the capital of Israel from the Democratic policy platform.”


Accordingly, those who control the Democratic Party decided that an amendment would be added with the prescribed wording. They set about getting it, by hook or by crook. It turned out to be by the latter.


Is the Democratic convention debacle completely bad news?


It’s hard to say.


On the one hand, it’s deeply unpleasant to watch manipulation unfold, and obvious lies win the day. For anyone who believes that votes should be fair and processes honest, it’s disturbing to see the opposite take place in one of our country’s major institutions.


Considerably worse is the fact that it’s this kind of political corruption that contributes to the extraordinarily small voter turnout of our citizens.


A democracy requires its citizens to participate in the process. When people see there is no point, they stop. That, of course, leaves a vacuum that is eagerly filled by the ruthless and unprincipled, who caused the problem in the first place.


In 1787, following the Constitutional Convention, Benjamin Franklin said that the months-long, hard-fought convention had given us “a republic, if you can keep it.” Villaraigosa and those who tell him what to do – and the rest who go along – are grinding this under foot.


But it’s not all bad news.


The reality is that at least half the delegates at this extremely mainstream convention – full of party loyalists who usually toe the party line – did not go along with the Israel Lobby agenda.


And while videos of the event focused almost entirely on close-ups of dissenters of Arab ethnicity, suggesting that this was an ethnic position, the vast majority of those opposed to the amendment had no such ethnic connection and were from all over the United States.


While the media, both liberal and conservative, consistently give us Israel-centric coverage, and while party bosses make it clear that favoring Israel uber alles is the way to get ahead, at least half the delegates rebelled.


Of course, this was a small, ultimately unsuccessful uprising. Nevertheless, I think it is an indication that the tide has slowed and may start to turn.


In fact, I believe an uprising in the United States may be coming.


People are tired of wars and killing, and of being sold a pack of goods by both parties using lies, deception, and manipulation.


We’re tired of power brokers running roughshod over what we want.


We’re tired of “alternative” institutions such as MoveOn that enable the charade, and of candidate puppets of “change” who continue cruel policies while spouting high-minded words that they hope will hide their unconscionable actions.


We’re tired of scripted conventions, of bullying special interests, of lying politicians, of manipulative media, and of partisan politics that set us against one another, in which both sides push falsehoods about the other, and about themselves.


We’re tired of pretend democracy.


More and more of us are demanding real change, not computer generated simulations. Instead of responding by refusing to vote, and thus forfeiting this life-and-death game, many of us are going to cast votes that will displease those used to running things.



And if in this election we choose to “throw our votes away,” as party cheerleaders scornfully call it, on candidates who would end our serial, suicidal wars and stop the killing of children – thus saving the lives of our own as well – then I feel we will have a shot at a future election in which we aren’t once again expected to choose between a proven war criminal and a competitor who might, astonishingly enough, be even worse.


Instead of throwing our votes away, I believe we will have started the process of throwing the bums out – this time for real. And of keeping our republic, or our democracy, whichever you choose to call it.



Alison Weir is President of the Council for the National Interest and Executive Director of If Americans Knew.

Anyone paying attention would know of the wholesale effort being carried out by Republicans to disenfranchise traditional Democratic constituencies– people of color, the poor and the elderly, from voting. The ‘anyone’ in the above sentence includes Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and the entirety of the Democratic establishment. So, where are they?

Right-Winging It in Charlotte

Bubba and Barack Go to
Bank of America Stadium

by ROB URIE

Ancient philosophical ideas lie behind more of modern discourse than many people imagine. Philosophical post-modernism arose partially from Martin Heidegger’s radical critique of Plato’s ontology (via Descartes) that itself lies behind Western economics and many of the modes of demonstration in science. From Heidegger’s critique philosopher Jacques Derrida drew his own idea of materialism—for present (limited) purposes a placing of imagination in this world rather than in the world of the imagined (Where does it reside otherwise?). But it was by placing imagination wholly in the world of the imagined that Democrats sold their pageant in Charlotte—as if the fact of the last four years were but one of an infinite number of equally plausible universes.

To trot out former President Bill Clinton as the incarnation of ‘elder statesman’ required an even grander imagination— one where the last twenty years either didn’t happen or didn’t matter. In fact, and despite the teary-eyed windbaggery of liberal nostalgia, Dot-com Bill and his financial deregulatin’ is nearly single handedly responsible for the economic plight that still grips the West. His promotion of right-wing talking points (‘The end of the era of big government,’ ‘the end of welfare as we know it’) attached to his right-wing policies begs the question of where Democrats think right-wing ‘crazies’ got their ideas about small government and economic self-reliance from? And with his welfare ‘reform’ Mr. Clinton began the job of gutting the social safety net that Barack Obama now welcomes as his own. Welcome back Mr. President.

The premise of the Democrats, that ‘facts’ don’t matter when it comes to what their actual policies are while in office, is made visible by the visions of the (Democratic) future being offered. The economy is ‘healing’ and therefore jobs will reappear, foreclosures will cease, incomes will rise and retirements will be secured. Nonsense. Median wealth and income continue to fall (link), banks are holding foreclosed houses off of the market to stabilize prices, but won’t do so forever, and the jobs that are appearing provide neither income nor employment security, or even in many cases a living wage. But the coup-de-grace is that the predatory financial system that crashed the economy has been wholly re-vivified by Mr. Obama and is using citizen-supplied funds to gut prudent re-regulation. Count on recurrent severe financial crises until this system is shut down. And did Mr. Obama mention his plans to cut Social Security and Medicare?



The economic frame that is Mr. Clinton’s legacy is a banker’s wet dream, in large measure because it was bankers (Robert Rubin) who created it. In the mythology, fiscal discipline led to the Clinton era economic boom that was in fact the result of the dot-com stock bubble (link) and the ‘freeing’ of money from the grip of prudent banking through bank deregulation. The housing bubble that eventually disappeared the entirety of black wealth began under Mr. Clinton (link). And Mr. Obama has used the Clinton frame to explain both his absence of adequate policies to respond to the economic crisis caused by rogue bankers and the need to further gut the social safety net.



In the views of the convention Democrats interviewed the current conundrum seems a terrible accident, the result of a horrific set of circumstances handed Mr. Obama by ‘the previous administration.’ While this is true, the degrees of regress required to get back to the point where Democrats don’t share responsibility takes them back to the Johnson administration. The facts are that Barack Obama could have taken the liberal / progressive policies that these constituencies imagine he supports to the people. The practice is called ‘politics’ and involves rallying public support for programs that entrenched interests might not otherwise support. Instead, he took them to his people—the insurance industry, Wall Street, the oil and gas industry and the military. The result is that he handed those of us who he now petitions for support over to an increasingly predatory corporatocracy.



The liberal pundit class, which now includes the fully deluded Tom Hayden (link), is going all-out to convince the people whose interests Mr. Obama has spent the last four years working against that the fate of the Western world lies in their hands if he isn’t re-elected. Mr. Hayden’s specific points– that Republican governments have historically been more militaristic and less tolerant of civil dissent, should be addressed.



First, it is unfortunate that Barack Obama didn’t know this history as he was building out his domestic spying apparatus, expanding Presidential power to assassinate citizens without evidence or trial, executing secret drone wars on multiple continents, saber-rattling against Iran for the benefit of Israel and acceding to right-wing coups in Central America. As far as ‘voluntarily’ quitting Iraq, Mr. Obama tried unsuccessfully to gain agreement from the Iraqi government to continue the U.S. military presence in Iraq and failed—there was nothing voluntary about it. Mr. Obama ratcheted up the war in Afghanistan toward what end? And as an active participant in a domestic group engaged in political dissent called Occupy Wall Street, Barack Obama can rot in hell for eternity for the violence coordinated against us by the White House.



With a particularly nasty bit of deceit Mr. Hayden, former radical, puts forward a liberal canard when he alludes to poll results that show zero percent support for Mitt Romney among African Americans as evidence of stealth racism amongst Barack Obama’s former supporters turned critics. What this statement conflates, in true Nixonian fashion, is criticism of Barack Obama with support for Mitt Romney. A quick speculation is that support for Mitt Romney amongst Barack Obama’s former supporters turned critics is also zero percent. Those with whom I’ve spoken favor a more radical rethinking of the entire political economy.



But more remains to this charge that should be addressed. Anyone paying attention would know of the wholesale effort being carried out by Republicans to disenfranchise traditional Democratic constituencies– people of color, the poor and the elderly, from voting. The ‘anyone’ in the above sentence includes Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder and the entirety of the Democratic establishment. So, where are they? The answer is that they are busy soliciting campaign contributions from the bankers who stole the entirety of black wealth through the housing boom-bust. And the oil and gas companies that killed the indigenous economies in the Gulf Coast. And the hedge fund managers allied with the Peterson Institute who would gut the social safety net to keep more of their ill-gotten wealth.



Also deeply offensive and factually racist is the use of people as props in Democratic political theater. In the American social ontology the prism of race is one cut and economic class another. The promise of social inclusion that Democrats occasionally voice hasn’t been effectively codified since Lyndon B. Johnson was in the White House. While Mr. Obama’s tepid, three year late ‘personal’ endorsement of gay marriage in a challenging election cycle was better than a kick in the teeth, the benefit is limited when his economic policies fully support greater class stratification and a predatory financial system that uses America’s long history of race and gender domination as a pricing guide to extract additional economic rents.



By feigning large differences between the political parties what is hidden is the narrow set of interests that both parties serve. In polls liberals, progressives and even most conservatives favor ‘getting the money out of politics’ while continuing the fiction that singular economic interests result in oppositional politics. This finds faux-form in the alleged political differences between George Soros and the Koch Brothers. Both owe their economic existence to a single economic system. One is nominally ‘Democrat’ and the other ‘Republican,’ but both are capitalists. Make whatever excuses you care to for Barack Obama, the one area where he consistently delivered results was in keeping the ruling class out of prison and extremely well fed. His policies benefited both George Soros and the Koch Brothers.



And to put the question back, where have the intractable, obstructionist Republicans been when it came to intractable obstruction of Mr. Obama’s never ending sops to the ruling class? They could have revived the fortunes of their party with calls to jail the banking malefactors who Mr. Obama gave free passes to, to end the ‘too-big-to-fail’ guarantees that maintain the corrupt, dysfunctional banking system and with calls to end his Afghanistan adventure that funds military contractors and slaughters innocent civilians. The answer is that current Republicans are ideologically opposed to holding the ruling class responsible for their crimes and limiting how much they can loot and Democrat Barack Obama is factually opposed to holding the ruling class responsible for their crimes and limiting how much they can loot. How do we know this? Those are his policies.



Rob Urie is an artist and political
economist in New York.



The US government represents Israel and the one to ten percent. Everyone else is disposable. PAul Craig Roberts

Two Parties for the One-Percent

Disposable America

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS


If political conventions are ranked on a one to ten scale for intelligence, I give the Republican Convention zero and the Democrats one.

How can the United States be a superpower when both political parties are unaware of everything that is happening at home and abroad?

The Republicans are relying for victory on four years of anti-Obama propaganda and their proprietary programed electronic voting machines. For nearly four years Republican operatives have flooded the Internet with portraits of Obama as a non-US citizen, as a Muslim (even while Obama was murdering Muslims in seven countries), and as a Marxist (put in power by the Israel Lobby, Wall Street, and the military/security complex).

Most Republican voters will vote against Obama based on these charges despite the curious fact that no committee in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives held a hearing to determine if Obama is a citizen. If Obama were not a citizen, why would the very aggressive House Republicans not capitalize on it? It would be easy for a Congressional committee to determine if Obama were a citizen. Despite the propaganda, the Republicans in office have shown no interest in the propaganda charges spread by Republican operatives over the Internet.

Either Republicans have no confidence in the charges and do not want to end up proving with Congressional hearings that Obama is a citizen, or the Republicans, having destroyed every other aspect of the US Constitution, reducing it to “a scrap of paper,” feel that making an issue of the last remaining Constitutional provision other than the Second Amendment would be the height of hypocrisy and don’t want to risk opening the constitutional issues that Republicans have run roughshod over.

If the Republicans can destroy habeas corpus, due process, violate both US statutory and international law, ignore the separation of powers, and create a Caesar, why can’t the Democrats run a non-citizen?

Why didn’t the Republican convention raise the issue about the Obama regime’s claim that the executive branch has the power to assassinate US citizens without due process of law? No such power exists in the US Constitution or in US statutory law. This gestapo police state claim exists only as an assertion. Republicans ignored this most important of all issues, because they support it.

Why did not either party raise the question of how can the US economy recover when corporations have offshored millions of US middle class jobs, both manufacturing jobs and professional service jobs. For at least a decade, the US economy has been able to create only lowly paid domestic non-tradable (not exportable) service jobs, such as waitresses, bartenders, and hospital orderlies.

Both parties talk total nonsense about jobs. The Republicans say they can create jobs by not taxing the rich. The Democrats say they can create jobs by financing jobs programs. The Republicans say that the Democrats’ jobs programs simply take money from business investments and give it to those who patronize bars and the drug trade. The Democrats say that the low taxes of the Republicans just subsidize yachts, exotic cars, private aircraft, and $800,000 wrist watches for the one percent, most of which is produced abroad.

Neither political party will admit that when US corporations offshore their production for US markets, Americans are removed from the incomes associated with the production of the goods and services that they consume. Offshoring is defended by both moronic political parties as “free trade.” In fact, offshoring is the gift of what was US GDP to China, India, and the other countries to which US corporations locate their production that they sell to Americans. US GDP goes down, the GDP of the countries who make the American goods sold to Americans goes up. The idiot free market economists call the de-industrializing of America “free trade.”

As an intelligent economist–an oxymoron– would know, destroying consumer incomes by moving their jobs to other countries, leaves consumers without incomes to purchase the imported offshored goods.

Neither American political party recognizes this disconnect. Neither party can afford to recognize it, as both parties are dependent on corporate campaign financing, and offshoring boosts executive bonuses and share prices. A political party that opposes offshoring of US jobs simply does not get financed.

So, the great “superpower,” the “indispensable nation,” the world hegemon, is going into an election, and no one knows what are the stakes.

Why did not either political party ask: if Washington has demonized Iran, why did the 120 countries that comprise the non-aligned movement convene in Iran last week?

Is Washington’s propaganda failing? Can Washington no longer convince the world that the countries that Washington wants to destroy are evil and must be destroyed?

If Washington’s propaganda is failing, the world rule of the hegemonic power will not succeed. As world rule is Washington’s goal in keeping with the neoconservative ideology, then Washington is failing and is not the superpower it pretends to be.

Most credible foreign policy experts, none of which either political party has, believe that Washington has thrown away US “soft power” by its obvious lies and unjustified military attacks on seven Muslim countries, its encirclement of Russia with missile bases, and its encirclement of China with air, naval, and troop bases.

In other words, Washington’s moral force no longer exists. All that exists is financial and military force, and both will fail as they are insufficient.

Neither party asked why the US is at wars with Muslims for Israel. Why should Americans be losing lives and limbs for Israel while going broke and running up enormous war debts for our children and grandchildren? The answer from both parties is to blame the country’s bankruptcy on what Washington does for its own economically disenfranchised citizens. America’s financial problems are all the fault of Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, housing subsidies, Pell grants–any and every thing that gives a leg up to the non-one percent.

In short, the attitude of both parties is: if you are not the one percent, you are disposable.

Both Obamacare and the alternative Republican voucher program dispose of ill Americans who confront potentially terminable diseases. The American people and the ill no longer count; only the budget counts. Letting the elderly die sooner is cheaper. We can therefore afford more wars for hegemony and more tax cuts for the one percent.

Have any peoples in human history ever been less represented by their government and political parties than Americans?

The US government represents Israel and the one to ten percent. Everyone else is disposable.

Regardless of the political party whose lever is pulled in November, every American who votes will be voting for Israel and for their own demise.

Paul Craig Roberts is a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, Wirtschaft am Abgrund (Economies In Collapse) has just been published.



Pennsylvania Voter Suppression: It' always something!

By David A. Love JD
Executive Director
Black Commentator

The veterans card issued by the federal government is not acceptable under the Pennsylvania law.

A challenge to Pennsylvania’s infamous new voter ID law is headed to the state Supreme Court. Unless the courts block the new law before November 6, all voters in the Keystone state will have to present an acceptable, state-approved photo ID when they go to the polls on Election Day.

For those Pennsylvanians who do not have the necessary identification, obtaining one has its challenges and hurdles.

Based on the state’s own data, 758,000 Pennsylvanians lack the proper identification - 9.2 percent of the state’s voting population. In Philadelphia, 186,830 people - 18 percent of the city’s voting population - don’t have the ID.

According to the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PennDOT), to obtain a photo identification card, the person must go to a driver license center with a completed application and a social security card. The applicant also must either have a certificate of U.S. citizenship or naturalization, a U.S. passport or a birth certificate with a raised seal, and two proofs of residency such as a lease, mortgage, utility bill, W-2 or tax form. Once the application is processed, the person’s photo is taken and the ID card is issued.

Those who have no such proof may bring their roommate as one proof of residency. Students at least 18 years old may supply a dorm room assignment, credit card bill, pay stub or bank statement as proof of residency. The homeless can use their shelter address, but must visit the driver’s license center accompanied by an employee of the shelter. That employee must have a shelter-issued photo identification card and a letter on shelter letterhead stating that the homeless person is staying at the shelter.

However, if the voter does not drive, does not have a birth certificate with a raised seal and was born in Pennsylvania, he or she can apply for a special voter card.

Applicants must present their name, address, social security number and proof of residency, and complete and sign a form stating they are registered to vote but lack the required ID. The DMV office then verifies the applicant’s birth with the Department of Health, and issues an ID for $10. If the office cannot verify the applicant’s birth, it will issue the non-driver ID if the Department of State verifies the applicant is registered to vote. This process takes up to 10 business days.

Civil rights and civil liberties groups criticize the voter ID application process for the barriers it presents for some voters, and its discriminatory impact on certain groups who are more likely to vote Democratic. They claim the voter ID requirement resembles the poll tax, literacy test and other tactics employed in the Jim Crow South to suppress and disenfranchise the black vote.







Meanwhile, conservative Republicans who support the voter ID law point to the need to protect the integrity of elections and combat voter fraud, although Gov. Tom Corbett’s administration cannot identify a single case where someone voted by impersonating someone else. Further, Pennsylvania state Rep. Mike Turzai - the Republican leader in the Pennsylvania House - said the voter ID law will help Mitt Romney win the state on Election Day.



The ACLU of Pennsylvania - one of the organizations leading the challenge to the law in court - argues that an estimated 37 percent of Pennsylvania voters think there is no voter ID law or are unaware of it. Meanwhile, the vast majority of those who lack a valid ID card believe they have a valid form of ID. According to the ACLU, demographic groups such as women, Latinos, the elderly, the poor, and younger voters are less likely to possess an acceptable ID.



She would have to pay $100 to search census records, and hire an attorney to petition the court for a delayed birth certificate.

The law poses a catch-22 for voters who need an ID to get an ID. For elderly African-American voters, who perhaps were born with the aid of midwives in the Jim Crow South and later moved to Pennsylvania, a birth certificate never existed, was destroyed, or contained errors. A number of the Pennsylvanians who are challenging the law are elderly African Americans who live in Philadelphia, the largest city in the Keystone state.



Gloria Cuttino, 61, lives in Philadelphia and was born in Summerville, South Carolina. For over a year, Ms. Cuttino has attempted to secure a birth certificate from South Carolina, but was told the state has no record of her birth. She would have to pay $100 to search census records, and hire an attorney to petition the court for a delayed birth certificate.



Dorothy Barksdale, 86, was born with the aid of a midwife in rural Virginia. Virginia has no record of Ms. Barksdale’s birth, and while she has voted in Pennsylvania for years and worked as a poll worker, her voting rights are in danger because she does not have a driver’s license. Similarly, Grover Freeland, 72, has tried unsuccessfully to obtain his birth certificate from New York. He does not have a driver’s license and has not driven in years, but the veterans card issued by the federal government is not acceptable under the Pennsylvania law.



Viviette Applewhite, 93, the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit challenging the law, rode two buses to a DMV office to receive a temporary ID card, after years of being denied an ID. Applewhite’s Social Security card was stolen a number of years ago, and since she was adopted at a young age, the name on her birth certificate does not match the name on other documents.



Another barrier facing many Pennsylvanians is distance.



According to the Brennan Center for Justice, nearly 2.3 million voting age citizens in Pennsylvania - 24 percent of Pennsylvania voters - live 10 miles or more from the nearest government office issuing the ID.



The homeless can use their shelter address, but must visit the driver’s license center accompanied by an employee of the shelter.

In July, the Brennan Center issued a report highlighting the challenges facing hundreds of thousands of poor Americans in obtaining the proper voter identification. Pennsylvania is one of ten states with the most restrictive laws requiring citizens to produce a government issued ID in order to vote.



Further, of the 10 states highlighted in the study, Pennsylvania has the highest percentage of voting age people without access to a car - 10.4 percent, or 985,414 voters. Of those citizens without access to a vehicle, 135,544 - 13.8 percent of all voters - live over 10 miles from a state ID center.



The 10 states cited by Brennan make up 127 of the 270 electoral votes needed to capture the presidency. With 20 electoral votes, Pennsylvania favors President Obama in most polls. Yet, if thousands of legitimate voters are unable to obtain a valid photo ID in time for the election, this could influence the race in Pennsylvania and the national election.