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lives forever, and thus accumulate vast wealth, lands and power, and, in turn, have used that power to write our laws, to gobble up all news/opinion media into monopolies to drive the corporate bullshit line into our brains, 24/7, and, recently, to even grab control of our election system with electronic voting machines run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations.
I hope all who heard about it were as appalled as I was, when the FL-13 Congressional election revealed 18,000 'disappeared' Democratic votes (in an election decided by about 300 votes), and, when the lawyers for the losing candidate (a Democrat, of course--these "anomalies" never hurt Republicans) took the matter to court, and asked to review ES&S's secret code, ES&S refused, and claimed that its right to profit from our elections trumps the right of the voters to know how their votes were counted. And the judge agreed!
'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY code in our election system! Can you believe it? So completely outrageous and mind-boggling. How this happened is a long story involving both Republican and Democratic corruption. But let me just say this: It is the heart of our problem now. Two rightwing Bushite corporations--Diebold and ES&S--control almost all vote counting in the country, and my guestimate is that they are placing a 5% to 10% "thumb on the scales" for Bushites, warmongers and corporatists. They have the capability to do this without detection. Why wouldn't they? They are scumbag Bushites. And there is plenty of evidence that this is exactly what they are doing.
And changing this has to be Priority No. 1, for American Revolution II: The defeat of our Corporate Rulers.
We have 75% of the American people opposing the Iraq War and wanting it ended, and yet we could only achieve a 50/50 Congress. Part of the problem is that only 1/3 of the Senate was up for reelection this time, so it's still full of Bushite dinosaurs. But if our votes had been properly counted--in the primaries and in the general election--I believe that the House would have many more antiwar votes than it does, and that the Democrats won 50 seats, not just 30. The bigger House landslide would have given the House more clout on both ending the war and impeaching Bush/Cheney. I can't fault Pelosi and others for how they have proceeded, given this handicap, but I CAN fault them for not burning the capitol down to get the "Help America Vote for Bush Act" of 2002 thrown out, and a mandated return to hand-counted paper ballots. This failure is utterly bewildering to me. Now's there chance. Why don't they do it? How can they tolerate rightwing Bushite corporations "counting" all our votes under a veil of corporate secrecy?
But they are NOT doing it--they are only going to put a bandaid on it (if that) and give more billions of our hard-earned taxpayer dollars to Diebold and ES&S to "fix" the election system that they deliberately broke. This is perhaps a measure of what we are really up against with the corruption in our own party. In any case, if we, the people, want transparent vote counting--vote counting that we can all see and understand--we are going to have to get it done at the state/local level.
It is perhaps ALSO a measure of the level of corporate bullshit brainwashing in all news media (except the internet) that the utter outrageousness of Bushite corporate control of our elections, with PRIVATE, SECRET programming code, has not occurred to more people, and is not on everyone's lips. That WAS the fascist coup. October 2003, almost simultaneous with the Iraq War Resolution, and most certainly related to it.
You can't have an unjust war, in a democracy--especially one with the Vietnam War in living memory--without fixing the elections. That's what they did.
Nobody else may have been paying attention to the polls in Feb. 2003--or remember them now--but the Corporate Rulers damned sure were. FIFTY-SIX PERCENT of the American people opposed the Iraq war before it ever started, and before all the lies that Colin Powell told at the UN were fully exposed. 56%! That would be a landslide in a presidential election, and the thing is, it more than likely was. Bush lost. The American people rejected this unjust war, that was based on a pack of lies, and all the associated lawlessness (torture, for instance--63% opposed to torture "under any circumstances"--May '04).
The Corporate Rulers and war profiteers saw this coming. And they put a completely non-transparent vote counting system in place (fast-tracked between 2002 and 2004, with $3.9 billion in boondoggle funding) to take care of it--to reverse the will of the people. And they're still doing it.
Until we restore transparent vote counting, we CAN'T make progress on any other reform. It is blockaded by 40 "Blue Dog" (traitor) Democrats in the House, and by the Bushite dinosaurs and War Democrats in the Senate.
The very MECHANISM of change--citizen voting--has been gravely compromised, leaving us with what is barely recognizable as a democracy. We simply MUST change this. How--when the same forces that want endless war, and corporate looting, are also preventing election reform in Congress? At the state/local level, is my suggestion. And we may have to engage in a states' rights fight to fend off what Congress may well do, which is to cement Diebold and ES&S, and their secret vote counting code, in place, with a federal power grab over election systems. Right now, we have a temporary federal power grab. The bill that Russ Holt is proposing--in addition to being a lame bandaid on this system--makes federal control over election systems permanent, with the President having yet more power--the secret code will be "reviewed" by a commission appointed by the President. WE can't review it. Nor can our secretaries of state or local officials. Just the President's appointees.
I understand why election activists in states with a ZERO audit of these machines want the 2% audit that the Holt bill proposes. But, on a scale of 1 to 100, for transparency, 2% is just what it looks like--a 2. It is almost no transparency. 98% of the ballots will never be counted by human eyes. Yes, it's an improvement just to have ballots to count. Many places don't. They have to rely on Diebold/ES&S's WORD as to who won. But these machines are extremely insecure and insider hackable, and are run on secret code. They never should have been put in place without a ONE HUNDRED PERCENT audit, at least for the first several election cycles. In Venezuela, they handcount FIFTY-FIVE PERCENT of the ballots, as a check on the machines, and they have an OPEN SOURCE system (anyone may review the code by which the votes are counted). You wonder why Chavez is given such a bad rap by the Bushites, the corporate press and many Democrats as well? Here is one reason: They don't want you to know this--that they have "checks and balances" in Venezuela's elections, and we don't have them here. Our election system is wide open to fraud.
So, once again, if we want to end Corporate Rule, we have to find a way to change Corporate control of vote counting. We may have to be wily, and, say, let local/state election officials keep their crapass, EXPENSIVE machines (corruption is our chief problem), but demand that they handcount the Absentee Ballot votes, and post the results BEFORE any electronics are involved. There was a huge rebellion against the electronic voting machines in '06, by Absentee Ballot voting--people trying to get around the rigged electronics. The trouble is that they just "scan" the AB voters right into the rigged system. They don't really count them. They are no more secure than an optiscan vote. But AB voters are nevertheless a big constituency for transparent vote counting. And if we can get those votes counted and posted, then we are on our way to transparent system. AB voting is up to 50% of the vote in some places. That's a big check on electronic fraud. And the thing will snowball. Everyone will want their vote to be handcounted and posted. The machines will become obsolete--or merely used for data storage and reporting.
We have to be clever. We have to be wily. We have to be insistent. And we have to get it done.
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