Assassination by ballot-box

[ngant17]

The art and science of a bloodless regime-change: Assassination by ballot-box.

With the increase in the complexity of organizing a coup, there may be a consensus among the would-be plotters that well-orchestrated executions of the public officers in the opposition are not absolutely necessary or desirable. Even the best of plans go awry. Sooner or later, a gaping hole of discrepancies and lies becomes exposed in the subsequent investigations, most of which are done is spite of the official conclusions. Thus, public confidence quickly erodes the facade of the democratic process, it weakens that bastion of stability in their maintenance of political power over the masses.

For a coup d'etat of convenience, one only needs to control the machinery which is used to count the votes.

For over a century, since the 1890's to our present day, mechanical tabulators have proven to be so consistently accurate and so resilient to error that no one would have dared to try and manipulate the democratic process this way. Yet with the great debacles of the Nov. 2000 elections and beyond, it yielded enough negative publicity in the operation of the tabulators, the punch-card machines and the paper chads, that the plotters now found a timely excuse to do away with them in most states. Rather than attempt to examine the real problems for the failure of the democratic process, the tabulators became the patsy and fall-guy, blamed by Congress, and those innocent machines were condemned as technologically obsolete and are now being consigned to the graveyard of nostalgia.

In their places arose a new and menacing dinosaur: the transistorized computer. The beast was omnipotent and its prey was completely helpless. It devoured all their apprehensions in one instant. No traces or evidence of its vicious gorging of votes would ever appear, the paper was all consumed electronically and nary a drop of blood would ever be left to attest to its rapacious gluttony of stolen votes.

The monster is conscious of any attempt to control it from afar. It allows no fetters to bound itself before public scrutiny. It roams freely in the jungles of corporate law, it sleeps in those comfortable lairs and the beast emerges only when its belly rumbles and becomes empty again, to feed once more off the teeming votes which the public innocently supplies for it every 2 years.

We can tackle this vote-dragon. No, it can't be slain outright but it must be driven from the villages of the public precinct. Why so? Because if its life in the public elections is ever going to be tolerated, because if it simply is going to be shackled for the sake of the public's amusement, to try and control it with open-source software and embedded hardware, to make it behave like it was only a penguin in a suit, then we will face its vengeance again. It will soon grow back into a King Kong, it will burst free from those little chains, no matter how strong the links are made. The reason is that the beast has a super-complex mind of its own. It operates only according to the laws of physics, which is not at all democratic. It continues to evolve every new day and no one person can grasp the whole of it. It does not want to be controlled, that is its inherent nature, whether it is in open-source or proprietary code, it matters little to the nature of this beast. Let it roam somewhere, but not in the domain of a democratic election.

[anamandujano]

1. wonderful essay

and I am in complete agreement.

[Magginkat]

2. Election Fraud

Yours is one of the best commentaries that I've read on this topic.

I live in a Florida County (one of 43 if I remember correctly) that featured the equivalent of 100% of all registered Republicans voting. Not only that but I understand that all of the registered independents voted republican as well as a number of Democrats!

We are supposed to accept these outrageous figures as being correct and showing the intent of the voters. This, is a state & county where I repeatedly heard people talk about their hatred of not only bu$h but his obscene policies.

The next question is how to get anyone to do anything about it? The people I talk to agree with what I say but just throw up their hands and say something to the effect that the government won't listen to us.

Excuse me people, but isn't the government supposed to be by the people, for the people?

[ngant17]

3. what is to be done?

I had a muse of inspiration yesterday, it came after reading on the FDR and Bush-Nazi attempted coup during the 1930's. The Press for Conversion! writes about this little-known fascist plot to overthrow the U.S. government in the 1930s. The conspiracy, and the corporate elite behind it, was under control of a Marine general, Smedley Butler. But like the Marine LH Oswald, he appears to have chicked-out at the last moment and turned on this would-be plotters. They never need to kill him to keep quiet, because the whole plot collapsed and FDR stayed in power.

Here’s a current link to it at the Coalition to End the Arms Trade:

http://coat.ncf.ca/

http://coat.ncf.ca/our_magazine/links/53/generalsources.html

Taken in that context, I'm beginning to see in the history on the US a consistent pattern of palace coup and counter-coup, operating under the semblance of a democratic process. Little compromise takes
place between the factions. It is all or nothing, at least since the time of Lincoln and likely before that. The attempted coup of FDR should have made us aware of the dangers of the US military-
industrial complex long before Eisenhower. The people who make the vote machines are part of that complex.

As most of us know, another coup, really a public execution planned with meticulous accuracy, occurred in late 1963 which the violent removal of JFK from office.

So now it’s become different, it's more bloodless, assassination by ballot-box.

I don't know, but maybe we can disable the computers once they are bolted to the election booths. Maybe a high-intensity magnetic field can be secretly introduced by each individual voters, to sabatoge the memory banks before the computers can do their dirty electoral work, and get the fascists re-elected to office. So we don't get these "correct and official" results that will never seem to jive with the exit polling.

We have not other choice, the politicials aren't listening because they are being selected by the software and they don't want to lose the power they gave already gained by fraud. If there are any who started to do something about it, I bet you would see them suddenly lose their next election in an upset or mysterious landslide or something really outlandish like that.

[Magginkat]

4. This is almost amusing..........Adjusting the Vote Results???

King George wants to dictate the results of the Iraqi election, just like he did in the U.S. So that's what the thieves are calling it...adjusting the voting results? I call it what it is, brazen fraud.

Iraq Rejects U.S. Talk of Adjusting Vote Result

By Luke Baker
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq's election body rejected a suggestion in Washington it adjust the results of next month's vote to benefit the Sunni minority if low turnout in Sunni areas means Shi'ites win an exaggerated majority in the new assembly.

Speaking of "unacceptable" interference, Electoral Commission spokesman Farid Ayar said: "Who wins, wins. That is the way it is. That is the way it will be in the election."

U.S. diplomats in Baghdad, at pains to keep their role in the election discreet, declined comment on a New York Times report from Washington which said Sunnis might be granted extra seats if the community's vote was judged to have been too low.

U.S. officials have expressed concern that if the ballot on Jan. 30 fails to reflect Iraq's sectarian and ethnic mix due to violence and boycotts in Sunni areas, then the assembly will lack legitimacy. But any attempt to fix the proportion of seats going to the main groups in advance could have the same effect.

"The Americans are expressing their views and those aren't always the same as the Commission's," Ayar told Reuters.

"But the Commission is absolutely independent. It is not acceptable for anyone to interfere in our business."

Some leaders among Sunni Arabs, a 20-percent minority who dominated the country under Saddam Hussein and before, have called for the election to be put off because violence in the north and west will make it hard for Sunnis to vote.

But Shi'ites, who account for 60 percent of the 26 million population, are keen to exercise their electoral weight.

The New York Times said Shi'ite leaders had been approached about the idea. Shi'ites would be reluctant to see the minority shut out of power if that means more violence, like the twin suicide car bombs that rocked their holy cities a week ago.

Next month's vote will elect 275 legislators who will appoint a president and government and oversee the drafting of a new constitution over the next year.

complete article at:

http://reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtmltype=worldNews&storyID=7179752