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informed than anyone gives them credit for. Look at the POLLS, for chrissakes! (--and look at them from way back before the war--56% opposed to the war Feb. '03--fast-forward to 2004, 63% opposed to torture "under any circumstances" --in fact 60%-70% opposed to every Bush policy, foreign and domestic, over the last several years--70% opposed to the war today, and a whopping 84% (!) opposed to any US participation in a widened Mideast war!). The problem is NOT that the American people are uninformed, uncaring "sheeple." The problem is that they are disempowered, demoralized, and, above all, DISENFRANCHISED. The disenfranchisement was swift, dramatic and thorough, accomplished by the "Help America Vote for Bush Act" of 2002: engineered by the biggest crooks in the Anthrax Congress, Tom Delay and Bob Ney (abetted by corporate 'Democrats' Christopher Dodd and Terry McAuliffe); $3.9 billion to bribe and corrupt election officials and legislators across the land, into purchasing electronic voting systems, run on TRADE SECRET, PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by Bushite corporations. And they are
DIEBOLD: Until recently, headed by Wally O'Dell, a Bush-Cheney campaign chair and major fundraiser (a Bush "Pioneer," right up there with Ken Lay), who promised in writing to "deliver Ohio's electoral votes to Bush-Cheney in 2004"; and
ES&S: A spinoff of Diebold (similar computer architecture), initially funded 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). Diebold and ES&S have an incestuous relationship; they are run by two brothers, Bob and Todd Urosevich.
These are the people who "counted" 80% of the nation's votes in 2004, under a veil of corporate secrecy.
This WAS the coup. And it is still possible to overturn it, at the state/local level, where the power over voting systems still resides, and where ordinary people still have some influence. Not any easy task--the corruption got entrenched very swiftly--but still doable. These corporations are putting a 5% to 10% "thumb on the scales" for Bushites, warmongers and corporatists, wherever they can get away with it. In the '06 elections, the voters--who are increasingly aware of what's going on (50% voted by Absentee Ballot in many places--trying to find a way around the rigged electronics)--overwhelmed the machines to a certain degree, and managed to give the Democrats a majority in the House and even in the Senate (only 1/3 of which was up for reelection), but Congress is still not fully representative of the American people, which should be quite obvious by now. (It's become pretty clear, too, that the machines have to be pre-programmed, and are not so easy to change on election day--which may have been the reason for the outright, visible felony vote suppression in Ohio in '04--the peoples' vote for Kerry was actually a landslide and Rove and Co. had to pull out all the stops to overturn it.) Diebold and ES&S are still in place, and still "count" the votes with code so secret that not even our secretaries of state are permitted to review it. (Did y'all see where ES&S refused to give up its source code in FL-13, where 18,000 Democratic votes for Congress were 'disappeared' and where our candidate Christine Jennings and her supporters have taken the matter to the courts and to Congress? Contested election, boffo evidence of fraud, and ES&S claims "trade secret" rights to their secret vote counting formula--outrageous!)
Anyway, calling Americans "sheeple" is an easy way out of the task before us: restoring transparent elections, and restoring our democracy; re-empowering and re-enfranchising the people. Many still don't know, although awareness is growing fast, thanks to a fired up, awesome, and incredibly brilliant election reform movement.
One other thought: The antiwar and civil rights movements of the 1960s, and all the many peoples' movements before it, occurred in a context of relatively transparent elections and a relatively free press. The 1960s antiwar movement, for instance, drove LBJ out of the presidential race of 1968, because he saw that voter retribution was coming, for the Vietnam War. In all previous circumstances, people could "take to the streets" and expect that they would have an impact on the political process in a democratic country. They might get hosed or shot or beaten up. But then those things, too, would become an issue. Street protests ALWAYS have an impact--even if it's just one lonely person holding a sign. There is absolutely nothing so potent as public witness of government wrong-doing. However, what we have seen since Seattle '99, is an unfree press ignoring or marginalizing even very big protests, and an ILLEGITIMATE government that is deaf to the American people. Bush/Cheney are doing what they are doing because they were NOT elected. In addition, the war profiteering corporate news monopolies have been giving a Big Trumpet to a nutball rightwing minority, way out of proportion to their numbers, so that the members of the progressive and peace-minded majority feel isolated and alone, and demoralized and disempowered. Why go to a street protest if no one is listening, and it has no hope of influencing policy?
We are living in a fascist dictatorship. It is disguised and clever in some ways, and in other ways quite blatant. It has been tailored to us--specifically, to the American people, and our somewhat fractured lives, lack of community and dependence on corporate news monopolies for our sense of reality and our sense of belonging to a nation. We have no experience of fascist dictatorship. We have some LOCAL experience of it (segregation in the south, the railroad barons in California at the turn of the last century, various labor fights), and we have some experience of brutal repression in living memory (Miami '03, Seattle '99, Kent State '70, Chicago '68, Alabama '65, Mississippi '64). But still, we as a population--everybody included--are not used to this current circumstance of the deafness of government and an absolutely out-of-control executive, which has asserted powers of indefinite detention without trial, torture, domestic spying by the military (!), secret prisons, lawless "signing statements" and utter contempt for the Constitution and for the people of this country. This is NEW.
You wonder why people are not taking "torches and pitchforks" to the White House? It's because we've never been a "banana republic" before. Many people only half-way understand--if they realize it at all--that the Old Republic is gone. It happened so fast--between 2002 and 2004--with non-transparent vote counting. About half the country, I'd say, is still depending on elections and other democratic institutions to handle whatever has gone wrong. (Also, the White House is very far away for most people--it's not like we can walk down the street to the Bastille. Bigness, the vastness of the country, is an obstacle to direct democratic change at the national level.) (--it is also, however, a constraint on the Junta.)
So give people a break, is all I'm saying. Give Americans a break. Give them some credit. UNDERSTAND what they are going through. REALLY understand it. And work to re-enfranchise them. Our fellow and sister Americans are a good and generous and progressive people who are in a state of bewilderment about what has happened to our democracy. Many truly don't know what to do about it. We have to find new ways to communicate and activate. And, most important of all, we must restore the fundamental mechanism of progressive change: transparent elections.
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