Supreme Court Hearts Big Brother

Perhaps John Paul Stevens, 88 years old, just signaled that perhaps he is ready to retire, providing yet another reason why this is an incredibly important presidential election.

The Supreme Court just announced its decision (6-3) on Tuesday in the Voter ID case in Indiana, which promises to create some confusion in next Tuesday’s primary voting there. The Case focused on the state’s right to impose voter ID requirements on a voter’s constitutional right to vote. Unlike the literacy test and poll tax, which the Court has deemed to be unconstitutional, the Court this time sanctioned the states to suppress voting (disenfranchising voters) by requiring a government issue photo ID before casting a vote.

Problem here is that 18% do not have such photo identifications; 16% elderly voters do not have the required photo ID and 16% of voters without a college education do not have such a photo ID. Related problems include cost of the ID and cost of the secondary documents needed to get the ID.

In addition to suppressing votes, the photo ID requirement plays into a larger condition exacerbated by Bush’s America: namely a national ID narrative, and Orwellian surveillance state. The Real ID Act, enacted in 2005, requires a “national” drivers’ license that private corporations– like Accenture, Unysis– input personal biographical information into a national database, sells the data to other companies and advertisers as well as shares it with insurance companies and potential employers.

Important firewalls protecting private data are circumvented as individual voters and drivers lose control over their own personal info. In addition, persons and groups of people (like the poor, black and elderly) who are not included in the data base, even more insidiously become the excluded other in society.

The bottom line is that you ain’t nobody in this new world, if Acenture or Unisyss don’t know your bio and medical condition, and if they don’t have your information, you can’t vote, and are not considered a citizen. Is this what Jefferson wanted?

Jeremiah Wright doing Obama a Favor

By acting like the cartoon he has accused YouTubers of making him, Jeremiah Wright may have done Barack Obama a huge favor, if the Obama campaign plays it right.

Before this week, Obama knew that the Jeremiah Wright issue, right or wrong, was going to plague him all the way to the presidency. Wright appeared on Bill Moyers Friday and sounded thoughtful, insightful and reassuring. he underplayed his relationship with Obama and this appearance made it difficult for Obama and others to discount some of Wright’s more outrageous snippets about AIDS. Quite the opposite, Wright’s comments on Moyers challenged America to have the sort of race dialogue that Obama proposed last month in his Philadelphia race speech. Problem is, while Wright sounded pastoral and philosophical, the sniping against Obama for having a relationship with Wright continued.

Well, no more.

The mainstream media does not do well with subtleties. Nor does it do well with meta narratives that fail to play well in sound bites.

It couldn’t handle the possibility that Wright and Obama for that matter were making truth claims that might really challenge the hegemonic master race narrative in 2008 America. This is the narrative that has little institutional memory and almost no recognition of racism as an institutional or structural concept. Since race in america is more prevalently represented as an individualistic concept, the idea of the renogade Wright is something more manageable. The press can deal with Obama shunning his former pastor. Just look at this mornings headlines. Okay, thank you Mr. Wright, you have helped Obama to brush off some some increasingly heavy and distracting baggage.