 |
  |
 |
||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
||||||||||
|
Nuts The day that the Democrats run a perfect campaign, with great message and great mechanics, with our values and a compelling, hopeful vision of American community truly on the line, and then we lose to cultural class warfare and gay-baiting, that's the day I'll be depressed and stop fighting and working. The day that we can't win a living wage campaign in a red state (we won one in Florida with 72 percent of the vote last week and another in Nevada) or reap the rewards of hard work by groups like The Oregon Bus Project and Progressive Majority (hello Democratic state senate take-backs in Oregon and Washington), that's the day I will stop working. That day is far off. Right now, I want my country back from the folks who tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and the narcissistic culture that taught the soldiers there to take pictures and then gloat about it. Thumbs down to all that. We used to be the good guys. Forget about moving to Canada. The Canadians need us to fix the mess down here and stop Bush from literally digging up half of Alberta looking for oil among the old dinosaur bones up there. Look it up — it's next to ANWR drilling in the Cheney energy plan. Learning from our mistakes? I am up for that. But let's not panic and call 55 million votes and 252 electoral votes a disaster. This was not 1984, although it sure feels like it. This was also not a mandate for radical policy change, but it will be if Democrats lie down and moan in the weeks ahead rather than fight hard for our core beliefs. The Republicans won the "values" game and played the gay marriage card. Like, duh. But does this mean we must abandon our pro-choice platform — or simply prove the old adage that "you can't fight something with nothing." I'll argue the latter: that the Kerry campaign failed to articulate a national call to action in the post 9/11 era, and instead offered vague "plans" under the theme of "Not Bush," is not a moral crisis for the Democrats — it's just weak message. Boy, do I wish they had listened to me about the Apollo energy independence project, or had acted on my mother's well-wishing, ranting e-mails each week about what Kerry should be saying — which were spot on. As were yours, no doubt. Why our candidates don't trust their instincts and run from their hearts is one of the reasons I've drifted away from Washington, D.C., politicos and their poll-tested pablum. It made me nuts. But I stopped being mad a while ago. Because across the country, from re-energized groups like ACORN to newly-formed groups like the League of Independent Voters to even the salons of Hollywood, I see serious progress and commitment to building a new, serious and sustainable, grassroots network for change. A network that demands both great mechanics — and bold messages. It won't help, in my view, to get mad at red state voters who found Bush's optimistic, confident style ("we're gonna win") preferable to Kerry, who unfortunately stumbled over some easy opportunities to explain himself on the war. It also won't help getting mad at the mayor of San Francisco or gay rights activists for maybe pushing too fast on an issue that our puritan-settled nation isn't all ready for, just yet. For years, the only thing I have been saying that we really need to mimic about the right is not their policies, but their patience. People are starting to get that Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed and company have been WORKING at this for a while. And they don't stop and rest on their laurels just because we point that out in articles, studies and reports. They keep going like Energizer bunnies. So … so should we. Because we actually know what to do if we could connect grassroots politics to money, message and sustained effort. We know how — and we are — winning states from the ground up while building a real farm team of leaders and candidates. We can offer voters hopeful, compelling, strategic initiatives for change (they're out there! they are not a mystery! ). We can wage a smart battle for tolerance and true family values to combat Falwell fundamentalism — as long as we are willing to be honest about our own orthodoxies and how to honor them without shooting ourselves in the foot. Yes, the Democratic Party will go through months if not years of whining and hand-wringing, cowering and compromising — but trust me that this is no different than times before. If you have the energy, it is critical to demand that our leaders stand tall for our long-standing values (fairness, opportunity, tolerance — the reason folks settled here in the first place!) rather than try and go the me-too, DLC route. For education and fortification, perhaps read that ground-breaking book by Thomas frank, What's Wrong With Kansas, and then start thinking about how you will articulate and stand up for what's right in your heart and your town. We should listen to that Kansas dude: Now is not the time to lay down on economic populism, as we did in 1980, 1984, 1989 and 1994. If we focus on winning states, rather than crafting one just-add-water, uber-message that will save our bacon overnight, we could avoid another round of dysfunctional path of in-fighting over how liberal or moderate the national party should be. Because the Democratic agenda in states (living wage, workforce training, public education) keeps us all together — be it the DLC-wing or the Wellstone-wing of the Party. But I am not going to try and talk you out of being mad or sad or whatever it is that you feel right now. Hell, you may even be mad at me for getting your hopes up in this space that we could win — but I thought we could and would, and we almost did, even with a weak candidate and a sickening gay-baiting, Swift-boating campaign run by the best in the business. Most importantly for the long view, we did rise up and get six million more voters, and train and energize thousands of new leaders and activists for the first time. We need them, and you, to get back up again. If you are sick of the Democratic Party and want to build a third party, at least talk to Dan Cantor of the Working Families Party (www.workingfamiliesparty.org)in New York about how to do it right. But if you know the challenge in building back our country isn't even really about party-building, but about community-building, I'll see you back here sometime soon. Dan Carol is a Democratic political strategist and a founding partner of CTSG (www.ctsg.com),a progressive consulting firm based in Eugene and Washington, D.C.
Another
Stolen Election On Election Day, I asked to see Lane County's new ballot scanning machines, made by Sequoia corporation of England. While watching the ballots being fed into the machines, a Democratic Party poll watcher told me the exit polls did not match the election results in the "swing states" using paperless ballot machines. There is now ample evidence to confirm this discrepancy — and that Sen. Kerry won the 2004 presidential election in both the popular vote and Electoral College. Exit polls in Ohio, Florida, Iowa, New Mexico and Nevada predicted a Kerry win, yet Bush was declared the winner. In several other states, the point spread was significantly different between the polls and the results, helping ensure that Bush was given the popular vote. (The 2000 election fraud was embarrassing for Bush, and claiming that millions more voted for him than for Kerry, despite a stronger Democratic voter registration drive, provides a veneer of legitimacy for what was about to happen.) The Democratic Party let this theft happen. There was ample warning from computer experts, investigative journalists and leaked documents that showed how paperless voting is an invitation to vote fraud. The head of the Diebold corporation, the most famous "touch screen" manufacturer, had pledged to ensure that the state of Ohio would go for Bush — and paperless machines were used in some of their counties. In 2002, the Georgia governor and Senate races were predicted to favor the incumbent Democrats, yet the touch screen ballot machines determined that they lost (the first election in that state with this technology). Bev Harris, author of Black Box Voting, found numerous problems that strongly suggest these outcomes were rigged. Despite this evidence, on Oct. 25, NPR ran a story on touch screen machines quoting a Georgia elections official who claimed there were no problems in their initial use. In the last congressional session, a few brave leaders introduced a bill to require paper trails for all voting systems, but it was ignored by the Democratic leadership. Why did the Democratic Party allow the Republicans to install insecure computer ballots in key states — the Republicans wouldn't allow the Democrats to do this. There have been numerous stories of voters using touch screen machines who pushed Kerry but the machine tallied Bush. Some of these voters were able to get the machine to acknowledge their choice, others were not. There is no way to verify that the final totals reflect the voters' choices (no recounts are possible). Diebold makes automated teller machines (ATMs) for banks — if their ATMs confused withdrawals for deposits, no bank would dare purchase their products. How can Diebold accurately count our financial transactions, yet is unable to accurately count votes for Democrats? Your vote may have been ignored, but your dollars are counted. If everyone votes with their money to support media institutions that investigate scandals, not those that parrot propaganda, democracy could have a chance. Many states had voter intimidation problems, some subtle, others blatant. Some of these tactics are intentional incompetence, such as absentee ballots mailed out too late to be received. In some Democratic strongholds in Ohio, potential voters had to wait all day in the rain to be able to vote, yet nearby Republican districts had short lines since they had enough voting machines. Republicans tried to disenfranchise African-American voters in Kansas City through fake change of address cards sent to the Elections Department. A precinct in Ohio was caught having more votes for Bush than voters. Similar "more votes than voters" problems were also found in other states. A gambling referendum "passed" in a Florida county when a bunch of votes magically appeared at the last minute. A friend in Boulder, Colo., told me about a church in a Democratic area that pretended to be a polling station the day before the Election — voters who believed the claims of "early voting" were not counted. These manipulations, coupled with the fact that Kerry ran such a lousy campaign that many Bush-haters agonized about voting for him, ensured that the results could be fixed in advance. If Kerry's campaign had been better, it would have been harder to change the results. The Democratic Party has thousands of lawyers and $45 million in funds to challenge vote fraud and Senator Edwards wanted to contest the outcome. Kerry rushed to concede before all the votes were counted and the flood of complaints of vote fraud and disenfranchisement were noticed. Perhaps a future historian will uncover why Kerry surrendered. Was he threatened with a "Wellstone plane crash"? Bribed? Or was the election a farce to create an illusion of democracy, since Kerry and Bush are both members of the occult Order of Skull and Bones, and Kerry, Bush and Cheney are distant cousins? Most industrial democracies use paper ballots, counted by hand. This might not appeal to those with a naive fetish for technology, but it is the most accurate vote counting method, and the hardest to tamper with. (Optical scanning of paper ballots can also be tampered with, since the software is a proprietary trade secret not subject to public scrutiny.) A deeper problem was the Democrats' "Bush Light" strategy — trying to replace Bush without discussing the deeper scandals. Many Democrats proclaimed that "Bush Lied" about Iraq, but few said why the U.S. seized Iraq, even though the whole world knows it was about oil. Two thirds of the Earth's remaining oil supply is in the Persian Gulf area and it would be nice to have public discussion of whether we will use it for renewable energy systems and relocalizing production, or to have World War IV to control what is left. The vote fraud story risks becoming like the evidence of U.S. government complicity in 9/11 — explained in detail on the Internet, yet totally ignored by the media. However, the evidence is being assembled even faster than documentation of the 9/11 scandal, and is becoming the greatest constitutional crisis in our country's history. The congressional Government Accounting Office has been asked to investigate. Some media voices are daring to question the outcome — such as actress Susan Sarandon on Bill Maher's HBO show last Friday. Protests are happening all over the country, and the documentation of fraud is piling up all over the web. Cheating in the Electoral College should be grounds for expulsion. Under the Constitution, questions of legitimacy of a state's electors can be debated by Congress when they ratify the outcome. The film Fahrenheit 9/11 shows the effort by the Congressional Black Caucus to have a debate on Jan. 6, 2001, when Bush was confirmed as president despite the fraud in Florida. It takes a senator and a representative to allow this debate, but no senator dared to support the right of all citizens to vote. Shortly after this coup, Sen. Ron Wyden was asked at a town hall meeting in Cottage Grove why he ignored the election fraud — he refused to answer. Please urge him to support his colleagues' efforts to investigate the systemic manipulation of our "election." Mark Robinowitz of Eugene is publisher of www.oilempire.us — stolen elections, 9/11, fascism, World War IV, media and Peak Oil.
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
