BBV, Global Eye -- Vanishing Act, Moscow Times....OMG!!!

[ParanoidPat]

.....From the Moscow Times :evilgrin:

Global Eye -- Vanishing Act

Friday, Sep. 19, 2003. Page XII
By Chris Floyd

It's a shell game, with money, companies and corporate brands switching in a blur of buyouts and bogus fronts. It's a sinkhole, where mobbed-up operators, paid-off public servants, crazed Christian fascists, CIA shadow-jobbers, war-pimping arms dealers -- and presidential family members -- lie down together in the slime. It's a hacker's dream, with pork-funded, half-finished, secretly programmed computer systems installed without basic security standards by politically partisan private firms, and protected by law from public scrutiny. It's how the United States, the "world's greatest democracy," casts its votes. And it's why George W. Bush will almost certainly be the next president of the United States -- no matter what the people of the United States might want.

<snip>

Who's behind these private companies? It's hard to tell: The corporate lines -- even the bloodlines -- of these "competitors" are so intricately mixed. For example, at Diebold -- whose corporate chief, Wally O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser, has publicly committed himself to "delivering" his home state's votes to Bush next year -- the election division is run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked in the vote-count business by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the Council for National Policy, a right-wing "steering group" stacked with Bushist faithful.

Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind the extremist "Christian Reconstructionist" movement, which openly advocates a theocratic takeover of American democracy, placing the entire society under the "dominion" of "Christ the King." This "dominion" includes the death penalty for homosexuals, exclusion of citizenship for non-Christians, stoning of sinners and -- we kid you not -- slavery, "one of the most beneficent of Biblical laws."

<TONS MORE!>

Someone gets it! :)

[DWright]

1. Excellent!

I love Chris Floyd. Too bad no one in OUR COUNTRY will report this stuff (well, I guess a few have, but not NEARLY enough)...

[ParanoidPat]

5. I've said it before, Oh to have a free press......

......like they have in Russia! :evilgrin:

:kick:

[DWright]

8. Yep

"Oh to have a free press......
......like they have in Russia!"

So sad. So true.

Kick!

[dmr]

2. WOW! What an article!

Shell game indeed! Thanks Pat for posting this! :)

[xchrom]

3. wally promises his state to the bush column?

is anybody playing taps for this country?

[ParanoidPat]

14. Voting Machine Controversy, from the Cleveland Plain Dealer....

Published on Thursday, August 28, 2003 by the Cleveland Plain Dealer:evilgrin:

Voting Machine Controversy

by Julie Carr Smyth

COLUMBUS - The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."

The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.

O'Dell attended a strategy pow-wow with wealthy Bush benefactors - known as Rangers and Pioneers - at the president's Crawford, Texas, ranch earlier this month. The next week, he penned invitations to a $1,000-a-plate fund-raiser to benefit the Ohio Republican Party's federal campaign fund - partially benefiting Bush - at his mansion in the Columbus suburb of Upper Arlington.

The letter went out the day before Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, also a Republican, was set to qualify Diebold as one of three firms eligible to sell upgraded electronic voting machines to Ohio counties in time for the 2004 election.

<MORE> at

[protect freedom impeach bush now]

4. he who counts the votes decides.....

crooked Bush Family cant win elections,
so the BFEE has to steal them.

[TeeYiYi]

6. READ THIS. . . Global Eye from last Friday . . . Excellent! . . .

Friday, Sep. 12, 2003. Page XII

Global Eye — Last Rights
By Chris Floyd

Once again, the dispiriting spectacle of the American
media in full campaign cry is upon us, as coverage of the
2004 presidential race begins in earnest. But this time around,
the usual inanities, inaccuracies and insipidities have a more
melancholy flavor, an almost elegiac feel. It's like watching
priests of a dead cult, vacantly enacting their rituals in a ruined
temple whose gods have been broken, desecrated and cast down.

The difference from past campaigns lies in the media mandarins' sad
belief that there will actually be a genuine, open, presidential election in
November 2004. This childlike faith stems, of course, from their equally
fallacious conviction that the United States did not suffer a coup d'etat in
December 2000 at the hands of an extremist faction of elites.

Although the installation of second-place finisher George W. Bush was
engineered in a wholly unprecedented and unconstitutional manner --
from the illegal purging of more than 90,000 eligible, predominantly
black voters from the Florida rolls by Jeb Bush to the violent mobs of
Republican congressional staffers paid by George Bush to break up the
vote recounts in Miami to the threats of military insurrection muttered
by Bush Family factotum General Norman Schwarzkopf to the use of
Republican-paid ex-CIA operatives to "correct" 15,000 Florida
absentee ballots to the Supreme Court ruling that unlawfully halted the
Florida recount by citing a totally fictitious deadline for final tallies,
down to the congressional session that officially "ratified" the election
result, held in an half-empty chamber lacking the legally required
quorum -- America's media leaders insist there was no coup because
power was transferred "without tanks in the streets."

But of course, a classic coup is "not necessarily assisted by either the
intervention of the masses or, to any significant degree, by
military-type force." It's an inside job, carried out by factions within the
elite. Who says? The man who literally wrote the book on the subject:
right-wing guru -- and Pentagon advisor -- Edward Luttwak.

More: http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2003/09/12/120.html

TYY

[TeeYiYi]

7. I love Global Eye. Chris Floyd is on a roll! ......n/t

TYY

[ParanoidPat]

9. Does anyone wonder why SAIC will 'whitewash' the Diebold.....

.....security report? :shrug:

From...

Defense spending soars in county

Post-9/11 buildup's effects seen in military payrolls, procurement contracts

By David Washburn
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

September 18, 2003

Defense spending in San Diego County jumped 30 percent last year to $13.6 billion, the largest one-year increase in the county's history, according to a report released yesterday by the San Diego Regional Chamber of Commerce.

<snip>

Benefiting the most were local defense contractors who garnered almost $2 billion more in government contracts in 2002 than 2001 – a 60 percent increase, according to the report. Only companies in Los Angeles County and Fairfax County, Va., received more in defense contracts than San Diego. Manufacturing contracts for things like ships, aircraft and guided missile systems jumped to $2.5 billion, more than double the 2001 total.

<snip>

SAIC, the county's largest defense contractor, signed contracts totaling $1.4 billion last year – a $500 million increase over 2001, said Tom Dillon, an SAIC senior vice president.

"We've never had that kind of increase before," Dillon said.

<MORE> :(

[seemslikeadream]

10. My favorite phrase of the day to google

behemoth military contractor.

[ParanoidPat]

11. Try, "behemoth military contractor", "media mess".....

.....From

Massive military contractor's media mess

By Katrin Dauenhauer and Jim Lobe

Firms whose directors held membership in Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board (DPB) or in the "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq" (CLI) did not appear to suffer any handicap, either.

Two big winners, of course, were Halliburton, whose last CEO was Vice President Dick Cheney, and engineering giant Bechtel, whose senior vice president, Jack Sheehan, serves on the DPB. Former Secretary of State George Shultz, a Bechtel board member and former top executive, also chaired CLI, a supposedly non-governmental body that helped lead the march to war and dissolved itself late last month.

Less well known is San Diego-based Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC), one of the Pentagon's largest, most lucrative and politically connected contractors. Of the six billion dollars it earned in revenue last year, about two thirds came from the US Treasury, mostly from the defense budget.

SAIC is among the most mysterious and feared of the big 10 defense giants - feared because of its ruthlessness in procuring contracts, says the Washington Post; mysterious, in part because, as an employee-owned company, it does not have to file with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), and because its press officers are notorious for not providing information. Indeed, for this article, SAIC press officers referred all questions to the Pentagon's general press office.

<snip>

"Its role was envisioned to be an information conduit," he said, "and not just rubberstamp flacking for the CPA", the initials of the occupation authority run by L Paul Bremer.

The Pentagon itself has kept the project stumbling along on short-term contracts with SAIC, but, according to Jayasekera, is actively looking for an alternative. The fact that that SAIC was hired in the first place, however, "appears to have been a serious mistake".

<MORE> :(

[hang a left]

12. kicking ya to the first page.

[ParanoidPat]

13. Thanks!

Kick for the evening crowd. :evilgrin:

:kick:

[Generic Other]

15. Wow!

:kick:

[ParanoidPat]

17. You can say that again!

When will we read anything remotely like that in the American press? :evilgrin:

:kick:

[xxqqqzme]

16. gotta tell ya

this is why I come 2 DU. Out of all the candidate crap going on..here is a gem...something 2 engage the mind...and quite frankly scare the piss out of me! Will we take 2 the steets in '04 when the election is stolen under cover of 'votes'? Does anyone here really believe there will B a free election in '04? Do U think your vote will B counted? We should start discussing this now cuz the '04 election is a done deal. The phony recall out here is to annoint a rethug governor. There will then B a rethug veneer and rove can claim the CA electors.

[ElsewheresDaughter]

18. an ABCT BUMP

ABCT = anything but clark thread ..i'm on a mission this evening...i am so sick of clark threads i'm kicking good threads to the front!