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fighting back against this shoddy, unreliable, insecure, HACKABLE election theft technology! They join a growing list of list of states and election officials around the country who are realizing that Diebold and ES&S have NO INTEREST in honest, transparent, reliable elections, and who are furthermore realizing that the American people have finally gotten on to this disaster and are demanding change.
Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia are in it for the power that "trade secret," proprietary vote tabulation gives them (the power to elect whomever their rightwing owners want in office), AND, as private corporations, for the short-term, boondoggle, taxpayer-funded "profits" provided by Tom Delay and Bob Ney in their corrupt $4 billion "Hack America's Vote Act."
Yes, ES&S has deep pockets. They were initially funded (as a spinoff of Diebold) by rightwing billionaire Howard Ahmanson, who also gave one million dollars to the extremist 'christian" Chalcedon Foundation (which touts the death penalty for homosexuals, among other things). And, if rightwing billionaires like Ahmanson decide to, they will keep them afloat. But I'm inclined to think that they will move onto some other dirty game, now that they've looted us blind (an $8 trillion deficit--and that's just the part we know!), and have dragged the government so far to the right, as to be outright fascist, so that it will take us decades, maybe the whole century, before we can recover progressive momentum. The U.S.-based global corporate predators who have seized our government have a bit more to squeeze out of us--our pensions, the last gasps of our medical system, yet higher energy prices, and on-going, no-bid military contracts and tax cuts for the rich. But they are already moving on to new rape victims in China, India and elsewhere. And we might get our democracy back sooner than we think, when they've wrung us dry of every last penny.
What I'm saying is that, why would they bother to continue rigging our elections? They've gotten most of what they wanted. Our answer must be, first of all, to seize whatever opportunity we have to restore transparent elections, and then to fight for a bi-i-i-i-i-i-ig leftist snapback, aimed at fully RECOVERING from this disaster, for instance:
1. Pull the corporate charters of the oil giants, dismantle them, and seize their assets for the public good. (Charles Schumer of NY said something akin to this just the other day.)
2. Do the same to any corporation that outsources jobs.
3. Reduce the military budget by 90%, down to genuine "defense" levels (no more wars of choice, no more boondoggle contracts).
4. Combine the dismantling of the oil giants with a major Mideast peace initiative, in the context of a major world disarmament and "save the planet" initiative.
5. A five year plan for complete conversion to alternative energy sources. Galvanize American ingenuity. We can do it!
6. Put a cap on the wealth of all Senators, House members, the President, the VP and other public servants. Ban private money in political campaigns. Devote a percentage of the federal budget--say 1%--to political campaigns. Reclaim some of our public airwaves to provide candidate access to the voters. Bust up the war profiteering corporate news monopolies, seize their assets for the public good, and open up the airwaves to competition and to real political debate. These measures will, in and of themselves solve the huge problems of corporate lobbying and corruption that plague our system now, and that have prevented decent government policy on environmental regulation, social programs and everything else.
7. Universal health care. Free college education. Social Security retirement benefits should rise to the cost of living. Paid family leave. And all the other decencies of a truly progressive society--which will be more than affordable once we get the corporate/military albatross off our backs.
8. Launch a thousand investigations of Bush junta thievery, aimed not so much at jailing people, as at RECOVERING our money. The Bush junta and its corporate puppetmasters are dirty beyond belief. A thousand investigations may not be nearly enough. Go get 'em!
9. Declare the 2004 invalid, and rescind all Bush junta court appointments. Or, alternatively, put term limits on federal judges/Supreme Court, make them electable, add new progressive justices to the Supreme Court, and/or create a special prosecutor to ride herd on them and impeach them where appropriate.
10. Declare the 2004 election invalid, and rescind all laws that Bush signed and all executive orders that he issued. This will take care of a lot of crap in one fell swoop, rather than having to rescind each item, one by one.
11. Overturn the 19th legal footnote by which corporations became "persons" with the rights of individual citizens. It never should have happened.
A REAL Democratic Party platform! And every one of these items--and more--will be possible with TRANSPARENT elections. The American people want this kind of leadership and these kinds of bold, progressive ideas. With TRANSPARENT elections, we will be able to elect true representatives of the people who can get these things done. This is WHY we don't HAVE transparent elections, currently. The destruction of our election system was quite deliberately done to prevent the will of the people from being implemented. We CAN recover from this junta--and act to prevent such a thing ever happening again. It will take time, but it CAN be done. Transparent elections are the first step. Howard Ahmanson and his billionaire fascist brethren may resist--are resisting--in regard to their Diebold/ES&S scams, but I don't think that their financial support of these corporations can stem the tide of revulsion against them. Money can't buy everything. It can't buy integrity. More likely they will re-group, spin off new companies with new names--companies that don't balk at a paper trail--and try to hang onto the "trade secret" programming (since a paper trail doesn't much matter if it is almost never counted), and, if that doesn't fly, they will get into some other rotten dirty game. Billions do buy you flexibility and mobility. (That's one of my fears--that the global corporate predators are already bailing--getting corporate charters in places like Singapore--and we will have to find a more cunning route to dismantling the vicious sharks that were spawned on these shores, and that used us, our money, our good society, our infrastructure, and our laws, to create corporate behemoths that rape, rob and kill us all.)
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