|
...I DO think it's extremely important to understand what has happened to our country, such that the man who was elected president specifically to oust the Bush Cartel did not and could not take office.
Leading up to the election, Zogby predicted a Kerry win, saying that no president in modern times has been re-elected with such low approval ratings as Bush had. Bush's approval ratings have continued to be dismal--hovering at about 50%--and falling to 48% on his Inauguration Day (!), an unprecedented "vote of no confidence" by the American people in a recently "elected," second term president.
Nearly 60% of Americans STILL oppose the Iraq War, now, today. 63% of Americans oppose torture under any circumstances. And that's after three years of relentless lies and propaganda and fear-mongering, and a virtual Iron Curtain over the country's news apparatus screening out criticism of Bush and his war policy.
The vast majority of Americans OPPOSE Bush's two major war policies: pre-emptive war and torture. Today.
The grass roots democracy movement that arose to oust the Bush Cartel--the most magnificent thing that I've ever seen happen in this country--produced a remarkable voter registration drive--a blowout for the Democrats in new registration (Dems 57%, Repubs 41%). The exit polls of new voters on election day almost exactly paralleled those numbers, showing that 59% of new voters voted for Kerry, as opposed to 39% for Bush.
When you add all the numbers up, here's what you get as a predicted vote for Kerry (study by Dr. Steven Freeman): Gore 2000 repeat voters + huge new voter registration of Democrats + big jump of Nader voters to Kerry = a 4 to 8 million vote margin for Kerry that somehow evaporated on election day.
Were new voters flocking to the Democratic Party to vote for Bush? If you live in Wonderland they do. It's not reasonable to think that. And what about all those repeat Democratic voters? Were they dragging their co-workers, friends and family members to get registered and vote, so that they could all go vote for George Bush? Come on.
Kerry had a rock solid majority going in--that inexplicably disappeared, and ended up in Bush's column. That majority involved a huge population of new voters--hard to poll prior to an election. The pollsters thought it would be close. The evidence is that it wasn't close. Kerry won handily.
The exit polls on election day confirmed a Kerry win, by 3%. This was after massive vote suppression by Republican election officials and operatives in Florida, Ohio and other places. The exit polls talk to people who have just voted. They can't talk to people who never got to vote. So Kerry's margin was probably 4% to 5% or greater--in votes that were suppressed, or possibly some of it in actual votes. The recent UScountvotes report by nine Ph.D.'s from leading universities suggests that Kerry's margin was even greater than the exit poll 3%--they found bias toward Republican voters in the exit poll data (indicating a bigger margin for Kerry)--and further found a skew to Bush in electronic voting vs. other methods of voting at the precinct level (a skew that has been confirmed by several other studies, one by an entirely separate group of top statistics experts, at UC Berkeley, studying Florida's three largest Democratic counties).
Every expert who looks at the election numbers--exit polls vs. official tally, paper or other voting method vs. electronic, top of the ticket vs. lower ticket, or the number of touchscreens changing Kerry votes to Bush votes (at least 90 reported incidents) vs. the number of touchscreens favoring Kerry (0)--has found astronomical odds against a Bush win. The UScountvotes report puts the odds against the Bush win at 1 in 10 million.
The Democratic Party leadership, including the Kerry campaign leaders, knew much of this on election night, and certainly knew it soon afterward. They have their own internal polls, and gauges of new voter registration, etc. The puzzle is, why are they acting like they don't know it?
And here's something else I think they knew: that the election system was a set up for fraud. These are people whose JOB it is to get votes. While ordinary Americans might not have known that Wally O'Dell and H. Ahmanson (big Bush partisans) would be counting all our votes behind their "Wizard of Oz" curtain of SECRET, proprietary source code--because the lapdog media didn't report it--the Democratic leaders certainly knew it. Why didn't they cry foul long before the election? Why didn't they warn voters?
I've been known to read too much into the above facts. One of my speculations is that the Democratic leadership largely supported the Iraq War (most members of Congress voted FOR it); they were not interested in the 2004 presidential election until the grass roots and Dean got busy with an antiwar campaign, then jumped in with a PRO-war candidate (Kerry, who never opposed the war, just how it was conducted), and maybe it was that these Democratic leaders actually preferred that Bush win and that the Republicans take the full rap for all the deaths and cost of this war. (The Iraq War benefits Democratic leaders by pumping up our unsustainable military economy, by taking that cost out of our hides, not out of the hides of the rich--our leaders are all millionaires and dependent on millionaire donors--by securing the last reserves of oil on earth for U.S. use and profit, and by surrounding Israel with US military protection.)
An ugly picture of the Democratic leadership--who may have deliberately thwarted the will of the majority, by permitting an inherently, obviously, fraudulent election system to be put into place, by not crying foul, and then by just walking away from Stolen Election II, leaving the grass roots democracy movement, which had given the Democratic Party a blowout in new voter registration, in tears and misery, wondering what hit them.
It is a very harsh judgment. It may not be such an open and shut case of betrayal. Human beings--especially Democrats--are rarely of one mind, and generally have mixed motives, and, in the case of the Bush Cartel, FEAR may be a major factor. God knows what kinds of blackmail and threats they are using.
But there is enough truth to it (to the notion of corruption and fascism, or elitism, in the Democratic Party leadership) that we need to look at it, at the very least for strategic reasons. Who are the allies of democracy? Who are its enemies? To what degree are they allies or enemies? How are they likely to behave--and why?
In California, we just went through the DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP's inexplicable attack on the best Secretary of State in the country, Kevin Shelley--who had decertified and sued Diebold for their lies about the security of their voting machines, and had provided Californians with a paper ballot option for the 2004 election. He was THE national leader for demanding accountability from these companies, and in trying to protect the integrity of our vote. Democrats did this! Democrats! (Don Perata and Gloria Romero, of the CA Senate, and Connie McCormack, L.A. elections chief.) (Note: Shelley is a Democrat.) It looked for all the world like a Karl Rove operation.
So I'm not in a good mood about the political party that I've been a loyal member of for 44 years.
And I want to understand--and I want us all to understand--what's happened to this party, and what's happening to our country. We need to look at it with clear eyes and no delusions. We need to strategize for the restoration of democracy and majority rule, using the best information and insights we can get.
As to strategy, I think there are two things that we MUST do:
1. Recover our right to vote--a struggle that has to take place state by state. (Congress is NOT going to help, and may make things worse.) It's DOABLE at the state level, but it's still not going to be easy. What just happened in Calif. tells us that the BushCons (Dem or Repub) are way ahead of us. They already know this is a local fight, and are already trying to head it off.
2. After we restore our right to vote--which we MUST do--then we will need to get out a big broom and clean house.
As to the latter, the erosion of majority rule, and of all our rights, has occurred over several decades. It did not happen overnight. And some of the things that have most harmed us have been done by Democrats. (It wasn't the Bush Cartel that signed NAFTA et al into law, the so-called "free trade" agreements--the major cause of job outsourcing. It was Clinton and a Democratic Congress!).
Global corporations have moved from controlling politicians (including many Democrats) through our filthy campaign contribution system, to outright control over the counting of our votes (with some Democratic Party collusion or malfeasance). They have done this for a REASON--because our votes are a very powerful item, as to the regulation of US-based corporations, as they roam the globe in search of slave labor and seeking power and more profits from all of earth's remaining (and highly stressed) natural resources. They KNOW that we are actually a fairly well-informed population (despite all their efforts to the contrary), and that the majority of Americans favor peace, justice, fairness, true democracy, the rule of law, and strong environmental protection. They therefore had to inflict the coup de grace--direct disenfranchisement.
Some Democrats no longer represent the interests of the majority, and those who are trying to are hamstrung by UNDESERVED minority status. It is ludicrous that Democrats now have to try to stop the destruction of the Social Security fund. We SHOULD BE talking about how to END POVERTY, how to reform our horrible, racist prison and court system, how better to share wealth and opportunity, and how to save this planet from its predicted demise 50 years from now (due to the impacts of global corporations!).
We can't even prevent a torture advocate and law breaker from becoming Attorney General! The effort to stop the nomination of Alberto Gonzales was killed by SIX DEMOCRATS who voted for Gonzales, and THREE DEMOCRATS who didn't bother to show up to vote. (They killed the filibuster!) True, the majority of Democrats TRIED to stop it. But they didn't, and couldn't.
63% of Americans oppose torture UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES.
How is it that the majority is not ruling?
This cannot happen without the collusion of at least part of the MAJORITY Party.
We might start with those 9 Democrats, when we get the big broom out. They are:
MARY LANDRIEU-LA, KEN SALAZAR-CO, MARK PRYOR-AR, BILL NELSON-FLA, JOSEPH LIEBERMAN-CT, BEN NELSON-NE, voting FOR Gonzales, and (not voting) Max Baucus-MT, Kent Conrad-MD, and Daniel Inouye-HI (the latter a shocking and inexplicable non-vote, need to find out if there was an innocent reason for it).
The most critical strategic question, to my mind, with regard to the national Dem leadership is: To what extent will they support, or--deliberately, or inadvertently--harm the necessarily local struggle for election integrity?
They don't have the votes in Congress to enact good legislation. And Congress could enact very bad legislation (for instance, a bill that does not require a solid voter verified paper ballot, and open source code, but which otherwise LOOKS GOOD, say, on minority voter rights). And ANY BILL that endorses, pushes or requires electronic voting is to be held in great suspicion. Re: minority voter rights. They can repeat the Voting Rights Act all they want, but who is going to enforce it? Alberto Gonzales--Bush's shill? And if BushCons can just tweak the source code and manufacture votes--as they did in 2004--what good are minority rights?
Beware of this--because we may see something get passed, with everybody including Bush crowing how they've done something--and it actually seriously undermines our rights, OR does nothing, but makes people think that things are now okay (and thus serves to defuse local movements for reform).
In so far as any Democratic Congress folk (or others, say Jeffords) are on the side of democracy, what they can do is, 1) prevent a really bad bill from being passed (or not be silent about it, if it is); and 2) jawbone election reform, to educate the public and get it in the news, and put pressure on the states.
I DO believe that Howard Dean (new DNC chair) is well informed on this matter, and will do all he can--nationally AND locally. That bodes well for the Democratic Party, and for our democracy. But the BushCons are not going to easily give up the control they've gained over vote counting--so look out for sabotage and worse against any genuine effort to regain true majority and public control--including stealth attacks like the one against Shelley.
As for John Kerry--and peoples' need to get over their anger at him, or forgive him, or whatever--I think he is a special case, in our evaluation of the Dem leadership. He was in one hell of a spot on 11/3. No matter that he might have helped put himself there--I think his choices at that time, from his point of view, were bad and terrible, and he chose bad (silence). "Terrible" was leading a revolution that might have turned bloody, or might simply have fizzled, due to BushCon control of Congress and the news media.
The TV networks had CHANGED the exit polls to fit the "official results," so very few people knew (on 11/3) that Kerry had won the exit polls. Also, the BushCon Congress would have endorsed Bush no matter what. Kerry could have presented them with a hundred "smoking guns"--including photos of Rove and O'Dell hacking the computers--and it would not have made ANY difference. They are crooks, liars and Bush Pod People--many of them "selected" by BushCon voting machines. No way they would have backed Kerry. They would have crucified him--possibly quite literally--had he tried to cry foul at that point (11/3, or thereafter). Lord knows what he went through. I don't think we can judge him any time soon.
Doesn't mean we can't assess and judge what's going on generally with the Dem Party, and with other Dem leaders, especially on the matter of the election system. We have to!
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
